There's the rub, the nexus.

That is funny coming from someone who just posted:

Why would one even consider the "study" of a group of political operatives that was too scared to leave the green zone and have less combined military experience than Patsy. At least Coulter cites numbers and facts.

It was considered...but just who would have thought the American people had become such a bunch of weak pantywaists who would want to surrender after losing a few thousand troops. Based on that logic, we should have withdrawn from every war we ever fought...and "cut our losses" as soon as things got tough.

Fint says: "Why would one even consider the "study" of a group of political operatives that was too scared to leave the green zone and have less combined military experience than Patsy. At least Coulter cites numbers and facts."

What facts is she citeing? Last I checked, she has never been near either the green zone or anyplace in the middle east. Coulter is good for entertainment. She is catering to an audience that wants to beleive that we are actually winning this war. The fact is, Rumsfeld himself has made grim assesments of the situation. He has been quick to find ways to deflect responsibility for it. There is no question that it is going badly. It doesn't matter what metric you use to measure it with. I was against this action from the begining as founded on weak assumptions. So far every reason for going into Iraq has turned into a fiction. This isn't an issue of not having the guts to handle the troop losses, its just a stupid situation. We should never have gone in, the war was executed poorly (after the intial take over), and this administration has refused to even acknowledge the reality on the ground let alone adjust tactics to do anything about it. From wah I can see, we have polititions telling the military what the reality is instead of letting them do what makes sense. I am glad that Rumsfield is out, but I doubt that there is much we can do with this situation. We replaced a nasty dictator (which we proped up to counter the Irannian threat in the past) with a quagmire. The fact that Bush isn't interested in finding a new approach isn't surprising. Its not like he has any real credentials. Maybe the problem is that he listens to idiots like Coulter.

Loks like facts to me.
Coulter: "Have things changed on the ground in Iraq? Are our troops being routed? Hardly. The number of U.S. fatalities has gone from a high of 860 deaths in 2004 to 845 in 2005, to 695 through November of this year. If the Islamic fascists double their rate of killing Americans in the next month, there will still be fewer American fatalities in Iraq this year than in the previous two years. "

Good thing we did not have a "Study Group" after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

It is what rrpjr allowed: Bush is a "chestless" man. If he sells out the Iraqi's our future will be an endless stream of "chestless" men (my opinion, not rrpjr's).

All battles can be won, depends on leadership.

the neo-con's are winning in iraq [the islamo facists]
the cristo facist are loseing here at home

personal I would redeploy the troops to afgan and hunt the tali-ban and al-kiddies there, at least the guys who attacked us were there
maybe look in northern pack tooo as most feel thats where they went

never did see a real need to be in iraq, as they had minimal part in 9-11 if at all
now the saudi's did have a BIG PART IN 9-11 both in people and funding and attacking them is not a real bad idea except they are bushies buddies
winning the war is less important if it is the wrong war

The difference is the Afgan and Iraqi governments openly supported terrorists/terrorism. If we want to stop terrorism...that is as good a place as any. If we don't draw the line here...we never will.

The new refined look of the NY Times is anti-war without Bush hating.

The NYT is the best mass media machine/world. An isssue becomes an issue Only if the NYT acknowledges it. If not, it's not an issue. All newspaper groups subscribe to the NYT. It's political power is enormous. US newspapers profile their p1 on what the T writes on that day. Publishers and writers live off feeding on the T. Every day. All year.


Kinda similar to this profile of the current state of what journalism today is all about. Following the T is where the money is.
Remember it's played to music.


Obsessive Compulsive Disorder:
..... la la laaa
Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle,Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle


The Big Chief at the NYT was arrested 2x for anti-war protesting in the late 1960s.


The world consists of NYT followers and those who are not imo.


The NYT's position should be a pretext before making an opinion around here.

15 of 19 men in the 9-11 attack were saudi's
as was the leader mr ben forgotten
and the funding came from saudi tooo

now when the japs bombed pearl harbor
we didnot declare war on peru
we did declare war on them that did attack us

they were based in afgan and protected by the tali-ban
so that was a JUST war but under funded, never given the needed manpower or planing, to get the bad guys

but just why we attacked goddamm insane in iraq
AND NOT THE SAUDI's I still donot understand
except one bushie hated and the other he loves
that has not a thing to do with the supportors of terror or their backers who made the attack possable with funding
as the saudi's are a worse threat, with less freedom and more cash to back the terror

if we wanted to draw the terrorests into a fight
fine afgan was a good a places as any to do that
instead we under maned that effort,
let the bad guys get away,
with poor planing and rushed off to invade iraq
and still have not done the job in afgan
or done spit to the real backers of the 9-11 terror
the saudi

let the cults in iraq kill of eachother
and if and only if
another terrorest takes over
bomb them back into the stone age

Re: Surrender
 

Ann Coulter is nothing but a female chickenhawk; her day in the sun is over.

Unless Bill Clinton is elected president again.

Re: Re: Surrender
 

"Speak into the microphone"


Seriously though. All this talk of failure by those Democrat pantywaists, tsk, tsk.
It seems like everything is going just fine over there.

Heck, and now the max enlistment age has been raised (is it 46?) to accomidate those who really want to help the cause........

Would it be gauche of me to repeat the questions I asked upthread?

viz.,

So what would "success" in Iraq look like? How would you know when you have won?

I mean what is actually the objective?

duh, because the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan both openly supported terrorists (hence War Against Terror). The Saudi government did not and is our ally. That would be like attacking North Carolina because the fellow that planted a bomb at the 1996 Olympic Games was born there.

Re: Re: Re: Surrender
 

Yes, and if you have prior service, you add those years to age 46, so say if Joeaksa served 3 years in the army, he could still reenlist at age 49. Of course, you have to sign a paper stating that you understand that you won't be able to get a retirement since the retirement ages still apply.

I'll play. The answer is that Iraq needs to become a stable, peaceful democracy. After invading a sovereign nation and plunging it into the horror of civil war, the only honorable outcome is for us to leave Iraq significantly better than we found it. And that means we need to ensure that the Iraqi people are glad we invaded before we pull out our troops. If that seems like a steep order, then I agree. But it is way too late to worry about that. The time to evaluate the cost of bringing about that outcome was three years ago. Not today. As it stands, the only acceptable outcome is to leave Iraq stable, prosperous, and happy. Anything less is morally unacceptable.

Now as for Coulter, she is just an idiot. I generally take it as a matter of faith that most Americans debate the issues with the nation's interest at heart. But I don't feel the same way about Coulter. Every time she opens her mouth I am more convinced that she is only interested in her own fame and book sales. She reminds of the way Al Sharpton used to behave back when he was not-so-secretly lampooned in "Bonfires Of The Vanities." Just lowlifes using the nation's wounds to their own selfish advantage.

Nearly everyone agrees that Saddam was a bad guy who wanted to do as much harm to us as possible with whatever weapons he could get. So I doubt many Americans, left or right, would disagree with your military friends. The crux of the argument was whether or not Saddam could be contained. After all, containment is a tried and true method of dealing with America's adversaries - most notably the Soviet Union. America has a lot of experience dealing with and managing bad people. And lots of smart and patriotic people (like Colin Powell) argued in favor of using those tactics in dealing with Saddam.

But frankly, it doesn't matter how we got into Iraq. You and I can disagree whether Iraq could or should have been contained instead of invaded. But unless we suddenly become psychic, it is simply an unanswerable question. We will never know. We can never know. And arguing about it only distracts from the more pressing issues at hand. We are in Iraq now. And the course we take will determine what kind of nation we are.

The elephant in the room is the fact that our departure from Iraq will create a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions. We will have knowingly created the Darfur of the Middle East - except Darfur has just 7.4 million people and Iraq has 28 million. If America invades a sovereign nation without having been attacked and then allows the place to become a humanitarian catastrophe before walking away to "cut our losses", then how is that not a war crime? How is that not a crime against humanity? How is that so different from what Stalin did in the Ukraine? Frankly, it doesn't matter what the cost is in American lives and treasure. We have a moral obligation to make Iraq a peaceful and stable place to live. "We broke it, we bought it." If America decides it's okay to invade a country and then condemn a generation or more of that country's citizen's to a bloody civil war - just so we won't have to be inconvenienced by a draft and the loss of our own sons and daughters, then, honestly, America is no longer a country worth fighting for. We might as well return the keys to the "City on the Hill" back to Great Britain and admit that the great experiment in democracy was a failure. If we can condemn an entire nation to the abyss and then walk away without a hint of shame, then the only thing we will have accomplished in the last 230-odd years was to create a nation ruled by 300 million tyrants instead of just one.

key word is OPENLY
now what they say and what they do
are two very different things for the saudi

and while iraq and goddamm insane
paid the bombers familys after attacks in the holyland
there was no or very little ties to 9-11 or al-kiddies
and very little other open support

and are they our ally???
or stabbing us in the back
when they were under threat from iraq in the gulf war
they were on our side and did support the war
but the money given to ben forgotten
and the whole Wahhabism movement
is the root of the terrorest movement
it is very hard to see how the two are different

Revisionist history and not revisioniet current events.

Can ANYONE actually take someone like Ann seriously? Either as a source or anti-source. She is, in the end, like all lovers of publicity, irrelevant.

I too, ask the question of how we define success in understandable terms, not a etherial concept, but something with some meat on the bones. Are there those who STILL believe that the Administration has handled the situation brilliantly? If so, I would LOVE to hear specifics beginning from day one as to how the decisions made have resulted in a more secure America both at home or abroad. And, PLEASE....avoid the unprovable like "We haven't been attacked since...." That argument is a strawman argument since a negative cannot be proven. And just who was in charge when the attacks happened? And why is the fact that the attackers were Saudi dismissed with the comment that Saudi Arabia is our ally? THe Wahabi movement is bankrolled by the Royal Family. In their minds, it makes sense because otherwise there might be more internal acts of revolution against the absolutist regime of the Saudi family.

Nations are only allies when it is in their best interests to do so.

Surrender? I do not think so. Change tactics and become more like the enemy? Now there is a good idea....More actions to which the public is not privy. I am in favor of that if it gets results and emasculates the "terrorist" leadership. Call in the corporate internationals and get some industry in the more settled parts of Afghanistan and Iraq? Now there is an idea....If a man has a job, he may not be so interested in tying explosives around his waist.