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U.S. troops hope Afghanistan sacrifices not in vain

What do you think would have been the outcome for the Iraqi people, had Saddam Hussein, and his evil sons been allowed to continue to brutally dominate his own people, while at the same time continuing to develop WMD unchecked, under a corrupt UN system of inspection?

I think somewhere along the line I think you must have missed Gulf War 1 where we literally back a century. That is about how long it would have been before Saddam could have been a threat to anyone.

Revenge against whom? Are we not there trying to provide Afghanistan ample breathing room to get its governmental affairs in order so that we can leave the security of that country to itself without fear that the Taliban will again take over?

If that was our mission, then we have failed in it for the last 8 years. It is being determined now what our new mission will be.
 
When Stalin was at his worst, we were his ally. When al-Qaeda were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, we were supplying information and technology.

Historical perspective always helpful.

Thanks for reminding us we have always been morally weak.
 
I'll tell you why, because Saudi Arabia would hang any environazi that tried to stop oil drilling over there.


Take a look at at map showing the oil reserves on the planet if you are unaware that the Middle East holds the largest, most pure, and most easily retrievable oil reserves on the planet!
 
Take a look at at map showing the oil reserves on the planet if you are unaware that the Middle East holds the largest, most pure, and most easily retrievable oil reserves on the planet!
What does that have to do with environazis? Does that make a difference to them?
 
We do have it, but your buds in the enviro communist movement will not let us become truly independent. Why is that do you suppose?
j-mac

You are simply repeating a slogan only brought up during elections.

How did my buds in the enviro movement stop it between 1994 - 2006 when the Republicans were in charge of Congress???
 
I don't confirm anything, because I don't know what deals were struck. We certainly weren't going to support the Ayatollah who was supported by the Russians. Had we done so, you be questioning why we're against the Iranian regime now. So with you it's always a no win situation for the US, not unsurprisingly.


I just want us to learn to live on our resources without starting wars to control others. It is what the American spirit used to be!
 
I just want us to learn to live on our resources without starting wars to control others. It is what the American spirit used to be!
Then start a thread and speak out against the environazis.
 
Civilized:
1.having an advanced or humane culture, society, etc.
2.polite; well-bred; refined.
3.of or pertaining to civilized people: The civilized world must fight ignorance.
4.easy to manage or control; well organized or ordered: The car is quiet and civilized, even in sharp turns.

So, it depends on which definition you were considering ... truly, definition 4 certain fits: they subjugated their people so throughly they became easy to control (for them). Yet #2 does not apply to tyrants of their caliper.

Modern day Iraq was all of those compared to the most of the rest of the Middle Eastern countries.
 
You could have taken out Saddam's sons with your six-shooter there. When Saddam was at his murderous worst, we were his allies, (Rumsfeld was over there shaking his hand) so I do not believe that was the reason.

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2004 called, they want thier liberl propaganda back.
 
Then start a thread and speak out against the environazis.

The enviros are not the problem. Otherwise the Republicans would have drilled during 1994 - 2006 when they were in control of Congress.

Do yourself a favor and review the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves"]Summary of Reserve Data as of 2008[/ame]
 
Thanks for reminding us we have always been morally weak.

The British, French, Germans, and Japanese were once mortal enemies and killed many Americans, they are now our allies. Your erred guess here that we're morally weak lacks historical perspective.
 
The British, French, Germans, and Japanese were once mortal enemies and killed many Americans, they are now our allies. Your erred guess here that we're morally weak lacks historical perspective.

We have had our noble moments. We have also been as morally low as the terrorists. We have the distinction of being the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Twice!

Then we invaded countries that never attacked us, nor had the capacity to attack us - Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
The enviros are not the problem. Otherwise the Republicans would have drilled during 1994 - 2006 when they were in control of Congress.

Do yourself a favor and review the Summary of Reserve Data as of 2008
Do us all a favor and get a clue. Clinton wouldn't have allowed it, nor Bush. BTW, the states have a lot to say about where drilling can occur.
 
Yes, by Saudis mostly. The one country we did not attack.

No UN violations, no WMD program intelligence, not central to the geopolitical region, not officially sponsored by the government.

Yet still we killed more.

No we didn't.

No, all we have in Iraq, is a successful occupation. Until we remove our occupation forces that prop up our puppet government, and stop the American taxpayer payola to the bad guys, we cannot claim anything else.

I will have to meet you in the middle since this is not one-dimensional and there is no black and white.

We have a successful occupation. We have helped establish a real democracy, not a puppet government. Their government does things that are not in our interest, like setting a timetable for sending troops home and getting them out of the cities and attacking Basra and Moqtada al-Sadr.

I believe we are still paying the Sunnis to be security forces, and many of them used to be insurgents. The Shia government is not paying them, unless things have changed. They need jobs, either security, civilian or insurgency. We prefer them to have civilian jobs. Working the big problem here.

In conclusion, we can claim successes, tempered by reality. Please don't issue blanket statements that we cannot claim some degree of success. It isn't accurate.

If it is important to them it will be done by them. We have no right to enforce our way of government on others at the end of a gun.

They need the capacity to do so against an organized insurgency. We have to a) provide local security until the capability is in place with local forces and b) train them.

We most certainly have the right to enforce our way of government on others at the end of a gun. We have along history of doing so. It is in their interest.

It is the most authoritative report on the failure of our "war on terror."

I not that it is not necesarily the most authoritative report on the war on terror, but the most authoritative report on the failure of our war on terror. It shows the growth in terror since the Vietnam war showed that it was an effective strategy for underpowered forces against established armies. It is non-linear warfare.

We have successes that you are not interested in highlighting, since it undermines your position.

You are not being objective, you are being partisan and selective.
 
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Our "failure" in this war is exactly as OBL pointed out after Clinton pulled out and refused to stand up in Somalia, and that is that a significant portion of the population in the US does not have the stomach for what is needed to win in this type of war.


j-mac
 
reefedjib said:
did Bush know there were no WMDs? - I don't think he did.
It was his job to know. If he took us to war without knowing that is just as bad.

The reality as I understand it is that he had conflicting intelligence reports. He had a long history of reports, from the CIA, from Britain, from France, from Germany all stating the WMD programs were active in Iraq and he had weapons. He had additional reeports, less in number, that this was not the case. He took the benefit of the doubt, in a post 9-11 world and assumed Saddam had them. This is not as bad by a long shot.

reefedjib said:
Is being in the national interest sufficient to justify an invasion or does it have to be in national defense? - I think national interest is sufficient
I don't believe coveting another region's oil is adequate national interest.

We don't covet their oil, nor do we steal it. We buy oil on the open market.

I think oil made it geopolitically important. I don't think that made it in our interest.

I think it was in our interest to spread democracy. This is something that liberals should support.
 
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We overthrew their government and helped select those they would vote on under our military occupation, and we use our full-occupation force to prop them up and protect them from their own people.

You have a funny notion of freedom.

Most untrue!!
 
Do us all a favor and get a clue. Clinton wouldn't have allowed it, nor Bush. BTW, the states have a lot to say about where drilling can occur.

The Republican controlled congress never tried to eliminate foreign oil for very good reason. Because they are aware we are past peak oil. They turned their attention to the world's largest oil reserves, the Middle East.
 
We have had our noble moments. We have also been as morally low as the terrorists. We have the distinction of being the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Twice!

Then we invaded countries that never attacked us, nor had the capacity to attack us - Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nicaragua, Grenada, Mexico, Phillipines, ...
 
See Iraq Body Count.org


Let me tell you why IBC is so wrong to use in this debate.

The IBC has been the most often cited source on civilian deaths in Iraq,[13] but it has also received criticism from many sides. Some critics have focused on potential bias of sources. Others have raised concerns about the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from combatants. Others have criticized it for over or undercounting.

Some critics, often on the political right, claimed that the IBC numbers were an overcount, and that the numbers were suspect due to the antiwar bias of the IBC members. For example; the July 26, 2005 National Review article, "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media."[14]

Others, often on the political left, criticized media and government willingness to quote IBC figures more approvingly than the much higher estimate coming from the Lancet study[15] that came out in October 2004.


Iraq Body Count project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study
Brendan Montague

Sunday, January 13, 2008

A study that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the nearly $100,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology…

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset…

Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 of the approximate $100,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”

Soros Funded (Phony) Iraq ‘Body Count’ | Sweetness & Light

Shortly before the war in Iraq started, a small outfit named Iraq Body Count (IBC) coalesced in the ether of cyberspace with a singular goal: to tabulate the civilian deaths resulting from a U.S. invasion. The group predicted famines and plagues, citing U.N. surveys that said there would be “starvation and homelessness for millions,” and at least “two million refugees.” Within weeks IBC web counters, replete with the image of bombs dropping from a plane, peppered left-wing websites and noted the escalating civilian casualties, updated as soon as the now-massive IBC database was.



Two years later, those same counters are still omnipresent on the web, and they’ve just pushed past the 25,000 mark. But it’s a recently released IBC report parsing thousands of clips that’s getting all the mainstream media attention. Even though IBC is as partisan as they come, the media took the bait — hook, line, and sinker. And in the rush to publish the blaring headers of the report — U.S. forces killed four times as many civilians as “anti-occupation forces”! — hardly anyone examined the underlying data.

But they should. The report itself is premised on two years worth of newspaper and web data — well, “data” in a loose sense. IBC rests its laurels on numbers generated from newspaper reports of deaths and newspaper reports of mortuary and hospital logs. The methodology is flawed from the get-go, and though the citations are noted, there are no links to the articles. (That’s not exactly true; there are a couple links to particularly gory stories, like one with the headline, “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off.”) The lack of transparency, however, is only a small flaw in an ocean of methodological errors. Deaths only have to be verified by two of their accepted sources — which include (the non-fair and balanced) CommonDreams.org, Al Jazeera, and ReliefWeb — and often the second source is just a reprint of the first. A death count only has to be mentioned in passing in the article, like a doctor or bystander who gives a reporter casualty estimates.

IBC’s counters also give themselves wriggle room, by displaying a minimum and maximum body toll to account for situations where numbers may not be clear. These generally come from ambiguous interpretations of words like “probable” or “most”: For example, if a doctor says 50 people were killed in an air raid, and “most” were civilians, IBC will add 26 to its minimum, and 49 to its maximum. In other cases, they’ll invent percentages and play the same trick, by defining words as they see fit. Constant fiddling with numbers to generate minimums and maximums, and long-winded explanations of how this is done, provide the pseudo-scientific cover IBC relies on for its high-profile publicity.

Flaws like these are endemic, but specific machinations prove far more egregious. For the sake of a closer examination, the casualties can be divided into three roughly equal groups: deaths taken from mortuary records (the most outlandish), invasion-phase casualties, and then the rest.


Alston B. Ramsay on Iraq Body Count on National Review Online



Can we stop with the Kool Aid nonsense now?


j-mac
 
No UN violations, no WMD program intelligence, not central to the geopolitical region, not officially sponsored by the government.

The majority of all the terrorists that attacked us were Saudis. The majority of the suicide bombers in Iraq were Saudis and the majority of funding for the terrorists come from Saudis.



No we didn't.

I'd like to just take your word for it but the numbers at IraqBodyCount say different.

I will have to meet you in the middle since this is not one-dimensional and there is no black and white.

We have a successful occupation. We have helped establish a real democracy, not a puppet government. Their government does things that are not in our interest, like setting a timetable for sending troops home and getting them out of the cities and attacking Basra and Moqtada al-Sadr.

They made concession to the citizens to avoid being murdered. You won't know if we made in success in installing a pro-west government in Iraq until our all our occupation forces withdrawn and we stop paying the bad guys to behave.

I believe we are still paying the Sunnis to be security forces, and many of them used to be insurgents. The Shia government is not paying them, unless things have changed. They need jobs, either security, civilian or insurgency. We prefer them to have civilian jobs. Working the big problem here.

And what happens when we stop handing out stacks of hundred dollar bills to the bad guys?


In conclusion, we can claim successes, tempered by reality. Please don't issue blanket statements that we cannot claim some degree of success. It isn't accurate.

The only successes we can point to are dependent on our heavily armed full occupation forces being there to prop up the government from its own people, and the payola to the bad actors.

They need the capacity to do so against an organized insurgency. We have to a) provide local security until the capability is in place with local forces and b) train them.

Yeah, we have been saying that for 6 years and yet we still keep our full occupation force there to keep the peace. Saddam did that with just a bluff.

We most certainly have the right to enforce our way of government on others at the end of a gun. We have along history of doing so. It is in their interest.

Just because we have done it in the past doesn't make it right. We should have learned that from Vietnam.



I not that it is not necesarily the most authoritative report on the war on terror, but the most authoritative report on the failure of our war on terror. It shows the growth in terror since the Vietnam war showed that it was an effective strategy for underpowered forces against established armies. It is non-linear warfare.

We have successes that you are not interested in highlighting, since it undermines your position.

I have seen no successes that merited the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians and 3 trillion dollars of debt.

You are not being objective, you are being partisan and selective.

I blame the Democrats that supported our war with Iraq as much as I do the Republicans. How is that being biased?
 
Our "failure" in this war is exactly as OBL pointed out after Clinton pulled out and refused to stand up in Somalia, and that is that a significant portion of the population in the US does not have the stomach for what is needed to win in this type of war.
j-mac

You are right the US does not have the stomach for this type of war ~ the stupid and immoral type of war.
 
You are right the US does not have the stomach for this type of war ~ the stupid and immoral type of war.


What would be the moral response to watching 3,000 of our own citizens killed on 9/11?


j-mac
 
The reality as I understand it is that he had conflicting intelligence reports. He had a long history of reports, from the CIA, from Britain, from France, from Germany all stating the WMD programs were active in Iraq and he had weapons. He had additional reeports, less in number, that this was not the case. He took the benefit of the doubt, in a post 9-11 world and assumed Saddam had them. This is not as bad by a long shot.

Before he places our youth in harms way, the Commander-in-Chief has the responsibility to confirm and double confirm a threat. That was not done.
Either that or the intel was doctored, which seems to be the case as indicated by disclosures since then. Either way, it was wrong.




We don't covet their oil, nor do we steal it. We buy oil on the open market.

I think oil made it geopolitically important. I don't think that made it in our interest.

But Saddam had kicked out the US oil companies and had threatened to switch the Euro, and they had attacked our oil spigot in Kuwait.

I think it was in our interest to spread democracy. This is something that liberals should support.

That is a BS excuse for attacking and occupying a country that was of no threat to us. Democracy does not work when you force it on others at the end of a gun.
 
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