For the first time in memory I shall vote straight Republican. I have two reasons for this departure from my standard voting practices
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Overall, I would agree with your action plan.. except for one problem I have:
The Republicans, while keeping their eyes focused on there being a threat to the US, have inflated the scope of and dealt with the threat in perhaps the stupidest fucking way possible. My hope for the coming election is that the Congress goes Democratic so that the White House and Congress spend all of their time bitching, and the armed forces can do their shit (which they do really well.[That's something that pisses me off to no end about a lot of non-conservative types I know {not that I am conservative. They can go suck a donkey cock and repent about it crying for all I care} think that we're not doing so hot in Afganistan and Iraq because the insurgents are somehow 'better' than our troops. Um... no. We kick the ever-living shit out of them in every pitched battle. It's the sneaky IED-type attacks that have eben doing the majority of the damage, not Super Terrorists. Same dumb idea about the enemy, diff party]) without interruption.
Hot DAMN it felt good to use that many nested parentheses!
I stil think invading Iraq was a distraction and the "Flys to honey" strategy was a retarded one... but if were going to do it, we should have really INVADED not just tried to do it on the cheap because they'd all want us there so damn badly.
Ah... fuck it. America's politicians are fucking fanatic morons. I'm writing myself in.
The initial invasion of Iraq went almost flawlessly. Think about it, we toppled a sovereign nation in two weeks, with negligible casualties.
The problem came with the whole lack of a rebuilding plan. They just expected the Iraqi people to stand up and be a self-ruling nation and somehow missed two very important points. The first is that anyone that stood up to take the reigns in the previous 500 years generally ended up in a pool of acid. That kinda puts a damper on the self-starters among the crowd. The second is that there is no "Iraqi People" per se. It's a number of warring tribes that only act in harmony when one has subjugated the others through fear and terror. That's the way it's been for centuries, and it's not going ot change overnight. Now that we've toppled the ruling faction, everyone is fighting for control. and really, 125,000 troops just isn't enough manpower to patrol a country of 12 million people.
I do think the Dems are wrong on Iraq in their desire to pull out. Yes, we fucked up. Big. The problem is that if we pull out it will be like Somalia where we prove to the Muslim world that if you just kill enough of us that we'll run away like scared children. It doesn't matter whether or not that's how we see it, because that's how they see it. If they can beat us in Iraq, they'll know that they can beat us anywhere. Eventually, the conflict will spill over into America, and then where will we run?
Are there serious Democrat candidates who want to pull out point blank? From what I've been reading (which admittedly isn't as much as I would be if I were back in the States) most candidates are calling for a change in strategy or, you know, maybe developing a real rebuilding strategy. There are a lot of people polled who want to pull out (I'm not one of them, btw, we're in there so we have to finish what we started) but the candidates seem to be a little smarter than that.
On one side you have Kerry and Pelosi screaming to get them out right away, and on the other you have a number that want an immediate implementation of "phased withdrawal." Now I don't really think we are ever going to "win" this war, mainly because we're entirely too civilized to fight it the way it needs to be fought. The best thing we can do is not lose, and that's only going to happen by kicking the Iraqi forces in the ass enough time to prompt them to get their stuff together and start with the good old oppression of the masses they enjoy so much.
I agree with your points - the invasion went off great - especially considering a lack of a second front and sandstorm-related weather issues fudging up communications and sat pics. We did (and do) really needed more troops and an actual plan for occupation and suppression of radical elemtns instead of wishful thinking and denial (the year plus of "Oh, there's no planned insurgency." "They're dead-enders." "Turnin' a corner now!" really pissed me off and got a lot of brave US soldiers and Iraqi civilians and cops killed needlessly). It was the overall arrogance and denial involved in everything outside of the three-week invasion that made a mess of the damn place, imo.
Pulling out now would be an utter disaster. Vietnam we could pull out of, the North Vietnamese had no interest in pursuit, nor any means to. The Islamic terrorists in Iraq (which, among those fighting us, is still a minority really. Most fighting us are Iraqis and consider themselves patriots of one sort or another) won't be happy with just chasing us out - they'll go after neighboring countries and Israel and any American targets in the area they can. I highly doubt they'd have the means to do anything to our homeland in a more than symbolic way... but it'd still be a mess. Plus, the poor fuckers we leave behind will be massacred. Powell was right: We break it, we bought it.
It'd have been cheaper to just bribe every Iraqi ten thousand to overthrow Saddam and kill the clerics, heh.
The Republicans, while keeping their eyes focused on there being a threat to the US, have inflated the scope of and dealt with the threat in perhaps the stupidest fucking way possible. My hope for the coming election is that the Congress goes Democratic so that the White House and Congress spend all of their time bitching, and the armed forces can do their shit (which they do really well.[That's something that pisses me off to no end about a lot of non-conservative types I know {not that I am conservative. They can go suck a donkey cock and repent about it crying for all I care} think that we're not doing so hot in Afganistan and Iraq because the insurgents are somehow 'better' than our troops. Um... no. We kick the ever-living shit out of them in every pitched battle. It's the sneaky IED-type attacks that have eben doing the majority of the damage, not Super Terrorists. Same dumb idea about the enemy, diff party]) without interruption.
Hot DAMN it felt good to use that many nested parentheses!
I stil think invading Iraq was a distraction and the "Flys to honey" strategy was a retarded one... but if were going to do it, we should have really INVADED not just tried to do it on the cheap because they'd all want us there so damn badly.
Ah... fuck it. America's politicians are fucking fanatic morons. I'm writing myself in.
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Typing > me
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The problem came with the whole lack of a rebuilding plan. They just expected the Iraqi people to stand up and be a self-ruling nation and somehow missed two very important points. The first is that anyone that stood up to take the reigns in the previous 500 years generally ended up in a pool of acid. That kinda puts a damper on the self-starters among the crowd. The second is that there is no "Iraqi People" per se. It's a number of warring tribes that only act in harmony when one has subjugated the others through fear and terror. That's the way it's been for centuries, and it's not going ot change overnight. Now that we've toppled the ruling faction, everyone is fighting for control. and really, 125,000 troops just isn't enough manpower to patrol a country of 12 million people.
I do think the Dems are wrong on Iraq in their desire to pull out. Yes, we fucked up. Big. The problem is that if we pull out it will be like Somalia where we prove to the Muslim world that if you just kill enough of us that we'll run away like scared children. It doesn't matter whether or not that's how we see it, because that's how they see it. If they can beat us in Iraq, they'll know that they can beat us anywhere. Eventually, the conflict will spill over into America, and then where will we run?
Reply
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Pulling out now would be an utter disaster. Vietnam we could pull out of, the North Vietnamese had no interest in pursuit, nor any means to. The Islamic terrorists in Iraq (which, among those fighting us, is still a minority really. Most fighting us are Iraqis and consider themselves patriots of one sort or another) won't be happy with just chasing us out - they'll go after neighboring countries and Israel and any American targets in the area they can. I highly doubt they'd have the means to do anything to our homeland in a more than symbolic way... but it'd still be a mess. Plus, the poor fuckers we leave behind will be massacred. Powell was right: We break it, we bought it.
It'd have been cheaper to just bribe every Iraqi ten thousand to overthrow Saddam and kill the clerics, heh.
Reply
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