Posted on 05/17/2007 6:47:18 PM PDT by jazusamo
Is Jonah volunteering, or is it just another case of you do the heavy lifting while I feel important?
He’s far too important for that. Send a 20 yr old girl in his place.
Being you brought up the subject of a thoughtful post, your original post seems to lack that.
It is reminiscent of the logic by many on the left that say being this is Bush’s war his daughters should be in Iraq.
Never have been able to understand the logic behind it.
Didn’t miss the point at all.
We are in Iraq the same as we were in Europe and the Pacific during WWII. Would you have not wanted us to eliminate those threats?
Are you not aware of the threat posed by radical Islam?
Are you not aware of the attempt to establish the next caliphate?
Do you recommend we wait until they have us surrounded?
Or should we make their front yard the front line?
Same thing Jefferson did only far more so.
We are on the side of the elected government.
Isn’t that pretty clear?
The country is not in a civil war.
Al qaeda is trying to foment one but only a few provences are having trouble. Most of the country is doing well.
Iraq was not in a civil war when we first went in was it?
We went in to eliminate a potential terrorist threat and to disrupt the formation of the caliphate. The current nature of the war is al qaeda attempting to start a civil war to try to drive us out.
You are the one that said Bush was trying to promote democracy by invading Iraq. I was making the analogy to WWII because the invasion of Iraq is part of WWIII and not an entangling adventure in the business of other countries.
If we had not been attacked numerous times and al qaeda had not delcared war on us and Hussein had not been shooting at our planes daily and other nasty things we would not have gone into Iraq.
We are not taking sides in the faux civil war. We are on the side of the elected government.
By being in Iraq and afghanistan we have Iran surrounded. That makes good strategic war sense. You don’t attack all your enemies at once.
Surely your point is little more than a tautology at it's core, since we set up (rightfully) the elected government. Saying we support them is merely saying that we support our own position.
As others have pointed out here, thre Sunni insurgency aligned with Al Qaeda are our real enemies here, as in Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda and the Sunni rebels, understanding that the Shia would control a democratic country, provoked them through terror into forming their own counter-insurgency.
Al Sadr saw an opportunity to gain power and moved into the vacuum. We PERMITTED, through our own political blunder, the vacuum to happen.
So now we ARE fighting two insurgencies, who are in turn fighting each other. THAT makes no sense -- the Shia should be our allies, but we've mishandled this so badly that they are killing our soldiers.
I'm not saying that, BECAUSE there is a civil war, that we should withdraw. But we've hopelessly muddled our role.
You are misusing "tautology"; it is not a "tautology" because it demonstrates we are not "fighting both sides". It means there is a "side" on whose side we are fighting. To say we are "fighting both sides" is to assert that (a) there are only two "sides" and (b) we fight against both of them, thus (c) are not fighting on anyone's "side". But as I have stated, and as you have conceded, we are fighting on the side of the elected government and by extension, law-abiding Iraqis. So it is simply incorrect to claim we are "fighting both sides". How and why we came to be on the "side" of the elected government (this is what you try to claim as "tautology") is irrelevant to that point.
So now we ARE fighting two insurgencies, who are in turn fighting each other. THAT makes no sense --
Hmm. Why not?
For one thing I don't see a huge amount of evidence that the two two groups you specifically mention (Al Qaeda & Sadrists) are "fighting each other" per se, but if they are, good! Isn't red-on-red fighting precisely what we would want, in any war?
Second, if there are two groups fighting against the interests/side we have chosen, there are two groups fighting against the interests/side we have chosen. Big deal. Not every war has a clean "single enemy" that you can point to all wearing the same uniform like the Stormtroopers Of the Empire in Star Wars or something. Even in our Civil War, the North had to fight against both the organized army of Lee from the South, as well as the guerrillas such as the Kansas jayhawkers. In other war eras Americans have had to fight against both, oh, Frenchmen, as well as Indian tribes loosely aligned with them. In the Russian civil war the "white" side was characterized by a loose coalition of semi-independent armies led by various individual generals, each having their own front and base of support and motivations.
What should those opposed to all these multiply-pronged enemies have said in these wars? "Oh heavens me, there are two groups opposed to us not just one, let's give up, because that makes no sense"?
the Shia should be our allies, but we've mishandled this so badly that they are killing our soldiers.
This is hopelessly vague-speak. "the Shia" should be our allies? "they" are killing our soldiers? What?
The Sadrists are, admittedly, working against us. "the Shia" as such are doing no such thing. As you know, the majority of the government are Shia, as well as the majority of the population of Iraq. And most of the population of Iraq is not engaged in any fighting whatsoever.
You have to really squint your eyes and look at Iraq as containing only two groups ("the Shia" and "the Sunnis"), and then you have to pretend that the Sadrists are "the Shia" (or at least speak for all of them) whereas the Hussein holdouts/Al Qaeda loose alliance are/speak for "the Sunnis", to even approach your point making sense.
In reality Iraq is more complicated than "the Shia" vs. "the Sunnis". It sounds like a failure to apprehend this point is the source of your problem.
We are not taking sides in the non civil war, we are supporting the elected government.
Imagine we had gone after Iran with Hussein in power with all his weapons. What do you think would have happened?
Do you think he would have just stood by and allow us to invade Iran knowing that he is next. Iran and Iraq together would have been a tremendous battle. Even though they were enemy’s we were a geater enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
We now have Iran surrounded.
Makes absolutely no sense to attack all of your enemy’s bases, countries, etc at once.
The only way to do that would be to nuke the entire middle east on afternoon. That is keyboard cowboy tactics.
We still have Arab allies because we didn’t use excessive force.
I would ask you where you are right now.
Your perceptions are a little too shallow to keep responding to.
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