I'm declaring victory

[Lil Black Car]

Dude, I am not trying to protect anyone. I believe everyone who does illegal stuff over here needs to be punished and I had no idea who he was. I am glad that he was punished and hope that there is a special place in hell for dirtbags like him and his ilk. However, it is too easy for a photograph to capture an instant in time that makes it seems as someone who is innocent of any crime look to be another Stalin. I still think that printing pictures of this sort espouses a sort of mentality that I cannot encourage.

Gotta go now and look for the report to moderator button. Ciao.

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by nostatic

you have to hit the "report to moderator" button (as someone else did). We don't read every thread...I never even clicked on this one as I figured I wouldn't be interested in discussing the topic.

I confess, I was the one of the ones who flagged it, but hope that there were as well others who found that photo not needed.

Wonder where my post went where I commented about it. The one right under "Lil black car's" comment about the photo?

[nostatic]

I didn't touch it. Evidently there was a db problem last night, and I've had random posts disappear before. But contrary to what you might think Joe, I don't follow you around deleting posts

On the *very* rare occasion that I delete/edit a post, I clearly indicate as such.

[kach22i]

UPDATE: May, 26 2008

We won, we won (see the chart)..............it's time for them to come home now.

http://www.infoimagination.org/ps/iraq/update.html


And all this progress for only a trillion dollars.
.................................................. .....................

EDIT:
A little more recent chart, leave while the gett'n is good I say.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/monthly/2008_03.php

[Nathans_Dad]

Wow, look at the sucessful surge. Quite a drop in that graph.

Sure would be a shame to pull out now and waste that progress.

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by Nathans_Dad

Wow, look at the sucessful surge. Quite a drop in that graph.

Sure would be a shame to pull out now and waste that progress.

Name the price it will take.

Put it in the budget..............would be a first.

[Mule]

Kach takes the "king of graphs" title from Algore!

[Nathans_Dad]

Originally Posted by kach22i

Name the price it will take.

Put it in the budget..............would be a first.

Since when has a war been a budget item??

Are you conceding then that the surge has been a success? If so, why would we pull out now and abandon the one strategy in the last 4 years that has actually worked?

[m21sniper]

Us leaving is what would work the best...

By any practical measure, we have completed every objective we started out to accomplish.

1) Saddam removed from power permanently.
2) Cleansing of Iraq of WMD (lol...)
3) Institution of an Iraqi Democratic Gov't.
4) The creation of a viable Iraqi Army.

Time to go.

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by m21sniper

Us leaving is what would work the best...

By any practical measure, we have completed every objective we started out to accomplish.

1) Saddam removed from power permanently.
2) Cleansing of Iraq of WMD (lol...)
3) Institution of an Iraqi Democratic Gov't.
4) The creation of a viable Iraqi Army.

Time to go.

Exactly, our guys and gals have done everything asked of them and succeeded.

The fact that the mixed neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed and walled off just means less chaos in the near future.

The worst of it surely must be over.

If a new Saddam rises to power, or Iran, Syria and Turkey carve it up, what the F-ck do I care?

The war without meaning is over.

Let's have a parade or something.

[ZOA NOM]

Originally Posted by kach22i

I think we can declare victory, time to come home troops.

...and do what, "train"?

They're soldiers, they fight, hopefully over there, rather than here.

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by ZOANAS

...and do what, "train"?

They're soldiers, they fight, hopefully over there, rather than here.

I don't have the time to profile who is serving over there, not even able to give you a hard number off the top of my head for all the Blackwater types and contractors....................but to guess they double the presence we have over there.

The National Guard units are hauling a lot of the burden over there, these people have lives, jobs, business...............or at least they used to.

Five tours? I read about a guy who died on his seventh tour, how unfair of a burden is that?

Think about this article, just for a few seconds.......................listen to it if you like [4 min 50 sec].


U.S. Troops in Iraq Include 10,000 Mothers
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10158519

Weekend Edition Sunday, May 13, 2007 · In Iraq, there will be no delivery of flowers or long lazy brunches on this Mother's Day. There are 10,000 American mothers serving in Iraq. A new congressional report says female soldiers are far more likely to be single parents or to be married to someone in the military than their male counterparts. Long, and repeated, deployments are taking their toll.

.................................................. two years ago, they said:

U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006

02/28/06 Zogby

* Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay “as long as they are needed”
* While 58% say mission is clear, 42% say U.S. role is hazy
* Plurality believes Iraqi insurgents are mostly homegrown
* Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11, most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks
* Majority of troops oppose use of harsh prisoner interrogation
* Plurality of troops pleased with their armor and equipment

[ZOA NOM]

So you think our problems end if we leave Iraq?

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by ZOANAS

So you think our problems end if we leave Iraq?

No, our country has been torn apart by this, and so have 35,000 bodies of the injured.

Stop the financial bleeding of our country and rampant spending?

I hope so.

[Nathans_Dad]

Originally Posted by kach22i

Stop the financial bleeding of our country and rampant spending?

I hope so.

Exactly! Let's start with the Farm Bill...

[ZOA NOM]

Originally Posted by kach22i

Stop the financial bleeding of our country and rampant spending?

And Al Qaeda, what about them?

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by ZOANAS

And Al Qaeda, what about them?

Prove to me that there are more Al Qaeda in Iraq than in any other country including the USA.

[ZOA NOM]

There are certainly more dead ones there than anywhere else.

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by Nathans_Dad

Exactly! Let's start with the Farm Bill...

300 billion..................I'm with you on this one.

For comparision, what we spend on armor is only a fraction, and armor can save American lives.

Armor Forecasted Expenditures
http://www.defensetech.org/

*

The DoD will spend $5.8 billion on armor of all types in 2008
*

Fiscal 2007 armor spending was $3.8 billion
*

Fiscal 2009 spending is estimated to be around $4.5 billion
*

The supplemental accounts for 86% of this year's spending

I heard it's booming business.

[m21sniper]

The situation in Iraq is something of a paradox. As long as the US is there, the insurgents won't stop fighting, and of course, as soon as the Insurgents stop fighting, the US will leave.

We are not serious about doing anything about Iran, nor could we if we even wanted to. The US wasted every scintilla of political capital it had in Iraq. What are we going to sell the war on? Especially when we know there is no chance at all of a quick victory, or a quick easy exit.

And how do we know Iran actually has any more WMD than Iraq did? We were 100% sure Iraq had them too, remember?

Seriously, it's time to take our ball and go home.

BTW, as soon as we do, the US is not going to want all these armored trucks and humvees any more. They are hideously uneconomical to run in peace time. We knew they were neccesary for an insurgency from the Vietnam war, yet we retired all those and didn't replace them as soon as we left there too. The US didn't even bother to maintain .50 cal gun shields on our APC's or other vehicles because of the extra weight and expense. We ditched it all.

We will do the same again this time. Wait and see. Armored Humvee's use much more fuel and due to the increased weight are harder on parts as opposed to regular ones. In peacetime, they're budget killers. Same with armored supply trucks. So all that money allocated for armor, will end up being totally wasted as i bet in the end tons of it ends up being sold for scrap. If we're lucky, the military will at least put some of it in long term storage.

And the truth is, had we conducted this invasion properly to begin with, and especially the relatively peaceful window after the invasion was concluded, we wouldn't have needed all this armor anyway, and the war would've been over 5 years ago.

"Wow, talk about unhinging ourselves."
~Gen McKiernan, CFLFC (Iraq), 2003.

History repeats itself once again.

PS: The most ironic part of all this mess, is that D. Rumsfeld (aka Dumnamara) pledged to "Transform" the US Military into a "lighter, more strategically mobile, more agile force".

Well, anything but has happened. Since OIF, we have replaced light Infantry units with much heavier Stryker units. We have replaced thousands and thousands of light, highly strategically and tactical mobile Humvee's and trucks with much heavier, far less mobile armored versions, and introduced an even heavier version of the M-1A2SEP Abrams called "TUSK" (Tank Urban Survival Kit).
Of course these are all good things individually IMO, but they sure didn't make the force lighter and more strategically mobile!
I cheered the day Rumsfeld finally stepped down. It was a great day for America. It was he, faaaaaaaaaaaaar more than any other single human being, that pushed for the stripped bare US invasion force, at every step of the planning. He is the one that cancelled the deployment of 2 full US heavy Divisions after the end of the Invasion, at a time when they were absolutely the most useful, right after the fall of Saddam, when the power vacuum was at it's greatest. I honestly believe that Rumsfeld has supplanted McNamara as the worst SecDef in US history.