[Wrecked944]

Originally posted by Dottore
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?

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.

Originally posted by Racerbvd
Janus, I got and get my info from people who have been there, have been involved from the start (you meet these types of people when you life in a military town) and one thing, these guys keep saying, is that this had to happen, Saddam was shopping for nukes...

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.

Originally posted by nostatic
It is great to talk about "national responsibility." It would have been nice if that had been considered *before* we entered. But at some point you have to cut your losses.

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.