I’m a little surprised nobody beat me to posting on yesterday’s big news. Now seems at least a somewhat more appropriate time to say “Mission Accomplished” than when the last President tried it. I wonder if this will at all boost enthusiasm on our side as we head toward the midterms.
Please share widely!
It is worth celebrating and I was thinking of putting up a celebratory War is Over post, but unfortunately its only the first and not the last phases of the pullout and 50,000 troops are still in harms way. I will celebrate when they are all home safely. But kudos to them for doing a great job under extraordinary circumstances for seven long and uncertain years.
We move out some soldiers called “combat troops” and now have 50K “security forces” as well as private armies, CIA forces, foreign forces, air assets. What’s next? Let’s rebrand the “war” to “police action”!
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p>”Mission Accomplished”? That happened when the foreign oil companies retook the Iraqi fields.
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p>No doubt this farce will be shamelessly sold by politicians in their quests for voter approval. Will it work?
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p>“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” –Abraham Lincoln
All “combat” troops removed, yet 50,000 remain? They may not be called combat troops, but they will be doing just about the same things as the troops that left.
George Bush’s withdrawal plan has finally begun.
It’s about time.
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p>What the US has done to destroy Iraq is evil.
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p>From the founding of Jamestown until today, IRAQ HAS NEVER ATTACKED US.
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p>You know why Iraq attacked Kuwait? Because Kuwait was slant drilling under Iraqi territory and not paying Iraq for what Iraq did in the Iraq-Iran war.
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p>Kuwait hired PR firm Hill & Knowlton to sell the war to the US, and it worked.
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p>After that war, Iraq was under sanctions. These sanctions prevented the repair of water cleaning facilities, so people had to drink filthy sewer-water, and people have been poisoned by the depleted uranium in our bombs.
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p>Then we went in and got rid of Saddam Hussein, a ruler who dipped the al-Qaeda types in acid baths while he smoked cigars and drank whiskey.
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p>Democrats have been slow as molasses in getting this done. These undeclared and unjustified wars drag on and on, year after deadly year, and the government will never wrap it up.
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p>The next step is to get the 50,000 people there in a support role out too.
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p>Americans have no business wasting lives and money to insure that the shia get their turn in Babylon.
I was a staunch war opponent and continue to be. But many of your assertions were wrong. Iraq violated international law by invading Kuwait and the UN’s credibility was on the line. The US acted as part of a broad international coalition to reverse the invasion and then set up a containment regime that succeeded in preventing the regime from obtaining WMD’s or threatening its neighbors in a serious way. Saddam was a butcher and I think anyone who says otherwise is just flat out wrong.
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p>Now this is the question conservatives should have asked, are our bleeding hearts enough justification to slay every demon in the world? Do we not have an obligation to pursue justice here at home before we dictate it abroad? Not to mention the destabilizing effects on the mideast balance of power, mark my words Iran would be contained right now if its largest and most powerful rival hadn’t been eliminated by US. We dropped a big fat Christmas gift right in their laps. Do you think Hezbollah would have attacked Israel had Iran not ordered it? Realpolitik used to be the province of the right, but neoconservatives made Wilsonian liberals out of the ‘conservative’ party. Sadly the scourge of Wilsonianism is all too clear in Obama’s white house, which is why Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to be quagmires for him as well.