Which one is he?
Posted on 06/25/2007 10:23:58 PM PDT by bnelson44
ABC News' Z. Byron Wolf Reports: Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, made a stunning speech on the Senate floor this evening after most people had gone home.
He said the president and Congress must start planning to redeploy American troops from Iraq now.
Waiting for September 2007, when Army General David Petraeus is set to report about the progress of Bush's recently ordered troop buildup is not smart, said Lugar.
Doing so would force the Iraq strategy debate into the presidential campaign, which would drag out at least through 2008, Lugar said.
"In 2003, we witnessed the costs that come with insufficient planning for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion," said Lugar.
"It is absolutely essential that we not repeat the same mistake. The longer we delay the planning for redeployment, the less likely it is to be successful."
Lugar continued, "Our focus on Iraq has diverted us from opportunities to change the world in directions that strengthen our national security. Our struggles in Iraq have placed United States foreign policy on a defensive footing and drawn resources from other national security endeavors, including Afghanistan."
Lugar expressed skepticism about the surge last winter, but he never officially opposed it. His call for redeployment now is a big move as most Republicans wait for September.
I agree 100%. Lugar should be redeployed immediately.
Lugar & Lott.....cave in Butt Buddies!
You beat me to it. :-)
it is called running scared my friend.
Straight to the RINO Funny Farm.
Doesn't go along with the headline. Start planning and start pulling out are two different things. Anyway shut up Mr. Luger.
I have to agree , we need to redeploy our forces immediately !
To Iran .....( and Syria)
Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, President Bush’s new choice as the top commander in Iraq, told senators on Tuesday that the new military strategy to secure Baghdad can work, and that he had asked that the additional troops the administration promised be deployed as quickly as possible.
* Senator John McCain asked Petraeus if approval of a Senate resolution assailing Mr. Bush’s new strategy could hurt the morale of American troops,
the general replied, “It would not be a beneficial effect, sir.”
* Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut asked if such a resolution would also “give the enemy some encouragement” by suggesting that the American people are divided,
General Petraeus replied, “That’s correct, sir.”
Iran should have been first. I think the original intent was to get Iraq first then the others like Iran and Syria would fall like dominoes. The only problem is that they have waited too long to implement invasions of those countries. It’s probably too late now to do so.
Lugar has already surrendered to Mexico. Surrendering to Al-Queda is the only logical step for these “fearless” leaders.
Tierra del Fuego? The Maldives? The Ross ice shelf? Novaya Zemlya?
I think Zimbabwe would be a fitting place for ol Luge : )
Lugar is Carter. Idiot, Useful of course.
I have no idea what he means. The imbecile won't speak normal English.
I can sympathize with you.
All he really means is "retreat". "Redeploy" is Democrat-invented Newspeak for "retreat".
Bump...
Is there something bad in the DC water supply?
stupid RINO.
Right in a Left World: Democrats, Redeploy and Refocus, But To Where?
Beat me to it.
Once again we are seeing how the politicians are not concern with doing what is right but taking a path that protects their positions- low lives POS
We must have term limits!!!
Senility is a terrible shame.
Being from Indy, I hang my head in shame.
Which one is he?
I’d say the red x, but don’t hold me to it.
Running scared?
He just got reelected to a sixth term, unopposed and with 87% of the vote.
My parents know Dick Lugar from when he was Mayor of Indianapolis. I think he is ill. He has a photographic memory but he seems to forget those 3,000 folks who died 9/11....not to mention all the mooooslim radical killings over the last 40 years. I suggest the terrorists start at Dicks house when they are activated.
Dear Byron Wolf: When you start your "news" article out with an intended deception, I just mentally shut your lying garbage out.
The rest of the article is probably filled with similar Clintonian tripe.
I'll bet that not one in 1,000 people in this country could give you the definition of "ranking member", but I know what it SOUNDS like...
Which one is he?
Why, the one with the small horn...looks like a penis only smaller....
What does it sound like?
Your parents may know Sen. Lugar, but I doubt they raised you to talk like that.
“Odd....”
Indeed.
I’ve heard the argument “If you don’t fight them ‘over there’ you will have to fight them ‘over here’.”
The problem with that argument is that ‘they’ are ALREADY over here (9/11, same venue in 1993, OK CITY bombing according to some accounts, etc.) and with a porous border, it is likely that more are arriving with every wave of new illegal immigration.
After 65 years, US forces remain deployed to South Korea. How many decades do the proponents of the current expedition to Mesopotamia have in mind, and what is the mission? Bush in 2000 ran on a platform that disdained Wilsonian “nation building” (the disasterous policy that helped to create the modern Middle Eastern mess in the first place). Now it is incoherently pursued in the M.E. while the ‘porous borders and amnesty for the illegal residents who violated the borders’ policy is pursued at home, a kind of “nation unbuilding” policy.
It definitely IS very odd!
Perhaps Lugar is just recovering his sense of proportion. Stranger things have happened, like the conversion of Bush to utopian Wilsonianism. With a little bit of providence, perhaps he will convert back. Rumor has it that Bush himself is planning some large ‘redeployments’.
After 72 years, we are also still deployed in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Japan. The mission is a stable, democratic Iraq able to provide for its own security and be an ally in the WOT, not a sanctuary for or state sponsor of terrorism. What's your point?
I’m sure there has already been planning for redeployment. Planning for redeployment does not mean packing up and leaving now.
I don’t completely disagree with you. Bush pissed away the initiative after Baghdad fell. What he should have done is essentially the same thing he needs to do here: Close the borders and make it clear though word and deed that trespassers will be dealt with harshly.
Appeals to reason and humanity don’t work on Muslims. A lesson we shold have learned years ago.
Oh, now the pic is showing up. Like all RINOs, they’re nearly impossible to tell apart. They all are rampaging monsters without a care as to what they trample on the way to the feeding trough.
Lugar should have been retired years ago.
You can thank him for the Law of the Sea treaty.
He isn’t in this picture, he’d be the one with his head up his...
“After 72 years, we are also still deployed in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Japan. The mission is a stable, democratic Iraq able to provide for its own security and be an ally in the WOT, not a sanctuary for or state sponsor of terrorism. What’s your point?”
Thank you. You’ve added some additional “points” to my point. Here’s a couple more: Afghanistan and (nuclear state) Pakistan. There are several dozen more where US forces are deployed in strength at great cost. For several years, the funds to pay for these forces have been borrowed from foreign investors, since the US is not generating enough income to fund its own government, although that government absorbs over $2 trillion of the annual $12 trillion + GDP. Meanwhile our domestic entitlement programs have an estimated $60 trillion+ UNFUNDED future obligations that are coming due at an accelerating pace as the boomer generation gets in line to get “its share” of the entitlements.
In short, you don’t have multiple additional decades to pursue this mission. Like the European powers through WWI, the US is being bled into fiscal impotence by an unsustainable interventionist foreign policy, while it can’t (or won’t) even secure its own borders. At the end of WWI, three empires collapsed and the two nominal “winners”, Britain and France, were well on their way to being the fourth rate powers you see on the map today. Perhaps Lugar, and now even Bush, are seeing a similar future emerging for the US, if we don’t change course.
We stopped bombing way too early in Iraq. Now, we're faced with getting pounded into the ground, losing approximately three soldiers a day, while a bunch of ragheads squabble around figuring out how to divide the oil money we will send them, when they'd really rather kill each other off.
Lugar's right, we don't need this during the election cycle. The eventual Republican nominee is going to need to run far, far away from President Bush next year, and I'm not just talking about shamnesty, either.
I saw this whole cycle during Vietnam. People who figured out early on that we were going nowhere were labeled chicken, or traitor, and the smart people all cooked up ways around going over there. Eventually, we all saw later on that it was a waste of money and lives, if we were NOT going to go all out to win.
There are two choices. Victory or defeat. Who ya got?
A "Lugar" is the same thing as a "boogar" is it not?
If the US is headed, like the British before us [no troops east of Suez], to becoming a regional power no longer capable of projecting power on a global basis, what should our future posture be? Who will fill that vacuum? What kind of world will emerge? Will we see further proliferation of nuclear weapons as countries can no longer depend upon the US to provide a nuclear umbrella?
I agree we need to get our entitlement programs under control. They are consuming more and more of the federal budget and that will squeeze defense expenditures, which are considered to be discretionary. We also need to control immigration, legal and illegal. To me, entitlement reform and immigration are the two biggest issues that threaten to bring down this nation and threaten our economic well being and ability to remain a global power.
I disagree that we have "an unsustainable interventionist foreign policy." We have important national interests around the globe that need to be protected and defended. We can't walk away from the Middle East, which is indispensable to the global economy and our own. Militant Islamic fundamentalism is a global threat and won't go away if we retreat to our shores. Tony Blair and others have called us the indispensable nation. We are. The world is safer and more at peace because of our presence around the globe. We stopped the Soviet Empire and the spread of communism after defeating nazism. We helped rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII. We have liberated hundreds of millions.
We are the only country today that can project its power globally. Whether it is a tsunami or the invasion of Kuwait, the US is a force for good in this world. We should figure out ways to maintain our strength, economic and military, rather than accept a declining, more isolationist role in global affairs. If we don't, we will become involved eventually at a much greater cost.
Pounded into the ground equates to losing three soldiers a day? You need to put this into some perspective. If a democratic, stable Iraq is in our national interests, and I think it is, why is this such a terrible price to pay to achieve our objectives? We lost twice as many people taking a small island called Iwo Jima than we have in four years in Iraq. Close to 17,000 a people a year are murdered in the US or about 46 people a day.
Those "ragheads," i.e., Iraqi security forces, military and police, have lost three times the number of KIAs we have since January 2005. At least 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by the terrorists. So exactly how would you fight this war without alienating the very people we are trying to help?
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