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| quote: | Originally posted by XaNaX
See thats the problem. The media is the ones creating the preception that the situation over there has gone to hell in a handbasket. Fuck, its a country full of people who hate each other and have scores to settle from back before Saddam took power. Its a country with more than its fair share of terrorists who have ready access to weapons (thanks Iran!). Its a miracle things are goin as well as they are. I'm not saying Bush is doing everything right, but we don't need the media making us think Iraq is a lost cause and we should pull out right now.
We have been in Iraq for four years. We have less than 4,000 US military dead and maybe 600,000 Iraqi casulties.
World War Two lasted a little over 5 years. We had over 400,000 US military dead and 72,000,000 military and civilian dead worldwide. By comparison the Iraq situation is hardly the complete disaster that the media is making it out to be. |
The problem with comparing this war to any other war is pretty difficult. I understand the perspective of a relative comparison of the dead and injured, but what on earth does that really bring us? Of course we had millions more killed in WWII - we had a genocidal maniac with free reign to attack anyone he damn well pleased and who almost wiped out an entire race of people. We had a WORLD WAR involving most of the countries worldwide going apeshit on each other for years on end. We had a country attack our primary naval base in the Pacific that thrusted us into war. We had the entire country of America involved with a draft, a workforce for food, equipment, ammunition, and other supplies helping our cause in the war.
None of these things by a remote shot could be related to what we have with Iraq. A hapless dictator who no doubt was certainly a genocidal nut was fully contained and had absolutely nothing to do with attacking us on 9/11. We have NO draft while our forces are being stretched further and further (now they're being deployed for 15 months, 3 months longer than previously promised by our military), little to no public citizen involvement like there was in WWII. The comparisons between our involvement then and now are a complete apples to oranges, and that includes our troop death numbers and wounded.
But it is a curious topic to bring up, because on the flip side it begs the question - what would get your attention to the situation going bad? Do you really need hundreds of thousands of our troops being dead, more than a million Iraqi citizens in order to get your attention then? Is it really that unreasonable for you to examine the situation NOW and what is occurring at present to make a reasonable assessment of the situation?
Forget the appeal to authority on what others say for a moment, just look at the situation for what it is:
1. I do not think anyone can disagree with the fact that our troops are caught in the middle of a civil war, fighting for one side who's installing a Shiite fundamentalist regime who's bestest buddy is none other than Iraq, who sends out death squads to kill the opposition.
2. On the one hand, we've funded money to the Saudis who've directly diverted that money to the Sunni insurgency.
3. On the other hand, we've helped install a Shiite government and continue to fight for them.
4. We've abandoned the idea of the priority of training the Iraqi troops, which was our primary goal all along so they can fight for themselves (and not us doing all the fighting for them).
5. Bush has fired/retired generals on the ground whom disagreed with his "surge" strategy, a strategy concocted by AEI's Fred Kagan back in August, DESPITE his rhetoric of supposedly listening to his generals on the ground, and replaced them with people who will agree with him.
6. We've abandoned, actually we've never addressed the priority of diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors despite the obvious necessity of getting more than just our own asses involved in this mess.
7. We never had a viable post-war plan to begin with, and Rummy deliberately went into battle without even bothering to create a plan of any sort.
8. Bush has never once defined his rhetoric of "victory" or "success", and we have absolutely no way to measure what on earth that means or how to obtain it. There has been no set measurable benchmarks to help define this claim.
9. We have the audacity to treat our troops with a lack of body and vehicle armour for years, as well as try to screw with the funding for combat veterans once they return.
10. And, oh how we got there in the first place - diverting our attention away from bin Laden who was on the run in Tora Bora so we could attack a hapless dictator that had nothing to do with 9/11, but we were all sold on being there because he supposedly had WMD stockpiles and operational ties to al Qaeda.
Compare these points to WWII. Compare them to the cause and rationale for WWII. I'm sorry but there's absolutely no comparison at all. There never was a reasonable comparison. Not to say that things went splendidly in WWII. I'm fully aware of the history involving the post-war difficulties, and I'm sure Occ who's a WWII historian in his own right could discuss that even further. But taken as a whole, and defining our position there in Iraq as a whole as well as the rationale for why we're there and why we remain, it just does not add up anymore. The neocon dream of democratization with force just simply does not work in Iraq. They don't want what the neocons want. They never did. Continuing further with such a cause and situation will do nothing but continue in a stalemate while our men and women get picked off, one by one. The majority Americans want us out. The world wants us out. The Iraqis by broad majority (71% last I checked) want us out. Now a majority in the Iraqi government want a timetable for us to get out as well.
Given this situation, given our current policy and the idiots that have created it, what on earth do you realistically hope to attain with our presence in Iraq?
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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