Pessimism Is Not A Policy...

[smeagol]

Actually, we are in those countries. Next question?

The US has invaded and liberated Iran, Indonesia, etc, etc?

Man, where have I been?

[SWC Bonfire]

That's a bunch of crap. You can support the troops, but not neccessarily agree with the premise that the administration put forth to get us into this war. You are chicken-hawks not because you support W or the war, but because there are millions of well-priveledged kids, probably just like yourself, who live in a unrealistic bubble of reality. It's ok to keep our troops in Iraq, fighting a dirty war that is getting progressively worse, as long as you don't have to be there or pay for it.

Do you not support removing an evil dictator who was financing terrorists? Do you not support rebuilding public facilities and all of the other good deeds that the US is doing for Iraq? I have good friends who have been to Iraq & one who is there now. Does he like it? No. Does he think that he is making a difference? Yes.

I did not join the service, so I guess I'm a chickenhawk. But the degree that I received in school has allowed me and my company to design and manufacture new equipment for the US Navy and Coast Guard. The products that I designed allows them to help rescue people, intercept and search illegal vessels, assist in training, and generally give the sailors & marines better equipment with which to do their job. But I guess I'm a shameless war profiteer, right?

[RandomGuy]

Oh gawd, here we go again with the conservative "party line". This is the best example of how bush apologists get their marching orders and parrot things they have heard ceaselessly and unwaveringly, in the hopes that people who read it, as so many conservatives do, will set aside their critical thinking skills and accept it all as unvarnished truth.

My disgust for the shameless spin in the first post said, I will wade into the bull and attempt to add a bit of perspective so that the half-truths that make up the Bush case are a little more clear. (fires up his beloved google window)

[RandomGuy]

Pelosi's claim that there is "no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq" is mind-numbingly obtuse. Let's itemize just the huge, obvious connections:

1) The people we are fighting in Iraq are Islamist terrorists, many of them associated with al Qaeda, the same organization that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

"the people we are fighting". Like the tens of thousands of "collateral" casualties? pfft. I am not under the illusion that fighting wars will be without such things, but if the reason one is in a country is to "save" them, it looks a bit hollow to the rest of the world who actually get to see the uncensored ground truth. When was the last time you saw an armless Iraqi child on Fox news?

The other thing that will not be addressed by any Bush apologist is the fact that Iraq has become a magnet for these nutjobs, and would not have been, had we simply not invaded in the first place. We gave them our soldiers to shoot at, and a convenient urban training ground, what a brilliant strategy.

Here is the million dollar question that puts the half-truth to light:

If the reasoning for invading Iraq was to fight al Qaeda, then how effective would it be to invade ONE country out of the dozens with al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers?

At the rate of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and thousands of military casualties, we will be a LONG time in defeating al Qaeda this way.

None of the planners of 9-11 were Iraqi. None of the participants were Iraqi. Al Qaeda is a rather diffuse organization that is in a lot of countries. Does this mean we need to invade all of them too?

(edited a grammatical error)

[RandomGuy]

2) The principal purpose of the Iraq war is to promote the spread of freedom and democracy throughout the Arab world, which remains the only long-term cure for the problem of Islamist terrorism that anyone has proposed. (If the Democrats have an alternative, they're keeping it a secret.)

And we have been so successful in "promoting the spread of freedom and democracy", that world opinion of us has gotten better, right?

Truth be told, most of the rest of the world views this as a cynical exercise in colonialism. You can't change THAT with all the attack ads on Democrats in the world, and you know it.

This image is what the rest of the world sees, and what al qaeda uses to recruit more people to shoot at american soldiers in Iraq.

The best ing thing we could have done was to put some serious muslce behind the sanctions that WERE working. This is where I depart from most on the left. I was always a firm believer in thoses sanctions, because they were cheaper than the alternative, wich is what we are paying now.

Think of the billions we could have spent MORE EFFECTIVELY (begin edit, accidentally hit the "send" button) on shoring up those sanctions. We could have contained this festering boil a of a lot cheaper by not wasting our monetary, political, and human capital in an invasion that has "lost a generation of middle easterners".

I knew exactly what was going to happen after we invaded, and not only did that happen, the piss-poor planning that this incompetant administration did gave our enemies more propaganda fodder than they could have dreamed of.

[RandomGuy]

3) After Sept. 11, knowing what terrorists could achieve with (relatively) conventional weapons, it was no longer acceptable to risk leaving in power a tyrant like Saddam, who a) had a decades-long fascination with weapons of mass destruction; b) had used weapons of mass destruction on many occasions; c) was a long-time supporter of terrorist groups; and d) had long been viewed as such a threat to America and its allies that since 1998, regime change in Iraq had been the official policy of the United States government, based on an act of Congress.

This line of reasoning means we will have to do quite a few more invasions. How many "tyrants like Saddam" are out there with a "fascination with weapons of mass destruction"?

You also presume here, with NO evidence at all, that he would have given weapons to terrorists.

He had no intention of doing so. Yes he used chemical weapons. So? I am not defending him, but we ignore a lot worse in the world, and actively support all sorts of regimes that have less than stellar records when it comes to human rights.

If you want to take out unethical regimes, that is ok with me, but let's get a truly moral foreign policy that doesn't make us hypocrites, and there are a lot of better candidates than Iraq that would have provided a better benefit for the cost we are paying.

[RandomGuy]

Oops. Gotta go, wife has handed me my marching orders for my day off. Sigh, (reads grocery/"to do" list) I will point out the shortcomings of the current administration a bit later, heh.

[RandomGuy]

Bump.

[JoeChalupa]

Good posts.