It's all about Chuck
Ron Coleman
Chuck Hagel has it all figured out: He's gambling that there's enough anger on the right towards George Bush and the GOP parliament of fools to forgive him — no, reward him — for selling out the President and, essentially, the Republican Party on Iraq.
And, he figures — correctly, as I show here — there's enough love for him in the liberal media for his doing just that, that he will be rewarded with every Senator's obsession: That Pennsylvania Avenue address.
But Senator Hagel is, more than ever, contemptible to (and, I would say, probably contemptuous of) the people who volunteer, fund and vote in the primaries of his own party. And the road to the White House, for him, can only be through that party. And thank God, that's a road Chuck Hagel is going nowhere on.
There is a difference between being against liberating Iraq and liberating Iraq the way the Bush administration has conducted the "certainly no more than 6 months" war.
I have no idea what you and Dean and all the other Iraq war supporters (stay the coursers) are smoking. We need to seriously regroup, redeploy, and return with an all-out vengence to win this conflict, but it's going to take major sacrifices (read financial, taxes, rationing, retooling Ford, GM, etc...) from the American public....let's win this thing right! I don't want to PussyBush this thing anymore. I would definately say that leaving Iraq totally is better than what we are doing now, but not better than doing it right.
WWII.
The Civil War.
The Spanish-American War.
The Revolution.
The Korean War.
The Barbary Pirates war.
The Balkans.
The Cold War.
Panama.
I haven't heard a single metric that makes a bit of sense that can be applied across the board and show that every single one of the above conflicts was a victory (and I don't know anyone who seriously claims otherwise) and that Iraq is a failure. Not troop deaths, not deaths per time period, not battles lost, not costs, not duration, not economic rebuilding, not political rebuilding, nothing.
I'm willing to grant that you have more experience in this than me. So educate me. Tell me a measure or set of measures which clearly or at least marginally shows all of those past conflicts as victories and yet clearly shows Iraq as a defeat.
Otherwise, all you have is, "It would've been even better if..." Which we can never really know, so we can't use it as a metric.
Now, the problem with saying "oh yea, what would you do?" is that it's akin to sitting in the passenger side of a car with your friend driving like a maniac. Obviously you're going to complain, but it's his car right? Well, just as he's driving over a 5,000 foot cliff, he's fed up with your complaining and yells - "you think you can do better Mr. Jeff Gordon? Here, take the wheel!"
the iraq war is analogous to a fire in the bed in which the wife is screaming bloody hell and the husband is urinating to put it out.
And Ali, you have less than nothing. You would betray your fellow Muslims for the sake of French and German and Russian oil and arms profits, all in the name of an illusory international consensus; and that realization is starting to gnaw at you. So you'll reach for strained and bizarre analogies because you don't have any facts on your side.
And still you've got nothing but assertions. No facts, no data, no metrics, simply assertions.
No. That's not it. The Republican party hardly has a monopoly on poor leadership. This is a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld failure not a republican failure. Those individuals just happen to be republicans. I'll place blame where it belongs, and I'm not the only one. By now, most people have read retired Gen. Paul Eaton's work, so to say that I've got nothing is ridiculous.
Oh, I need a metric? Are thousands of Iraqi civilians being blown up on nearly every corner of Iraq a metric or is it just subjective? I've noticed that Michael Yon is not being linked to any longer. Hmmmm...could it be that he hasn't exactly painted the picture that Bush apologists want to see?
Here's what we've lost against a group of insurgents:
* 20 M1 Abrams tanks
* 55 Bradley fighting vehicles
* 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles
* 20 M113 armored personnel carriers
* 250 Humvees
* 500+ Mine clearing vehicles, heavy/medium trucks, and trailers
* 10 Amphibious Assault Vehicles
Not to mention how many Citizen Soldiers of the world have been killed nor the probably 200,000 plus Iraqi civilians killed. Now, Sadaam was a butchering bastard, but he didn't kill nearly that many. Oh, but he gassed his own people you say? Well, we didn't care about that back in 1988-89. In fact, we didn't really care until oil stability was in jeapardy and he invaded Kuwait.
Quick trivia: Who stood down Sadaam Huessein back in 1990? How about the man you fake patriots try to demonize: Joe Wilson - a lifelong republican.
I need data and metrics? No, it is YOU who need to supply evidence that things are going well. What have you got? Looks like 10 lbs of shit in a 5 lb bag to me. (Those aren't my words, those are the words of an intelligence officer returning from his 3rd tour in Iraq.)
Read General McCaffrey’s latest assessment. While I think everyone agrees that the new strategy is a big improvement over the old strategy, and there are some hopeful signs, the situation in Iraq is really serious. McCaffrey points out that we have captured 27,000 fighters and killed around 20,000 since the insurgency began. In spite of that, the insurgency is stronger now than it has ever been. The insurgency keeps taking very heavy battlefield casualties, and still gets stronger and more sophisticated. That is not a good trend.
I guess when you compare it to WWII it's not that bad. Certainly Russia, Poland, Germany, France lost a far greater % of people than Iraq. I just thought we had raised the bar a little over the past 50 or so years.
Mike, Hagel can be sincere -- but then he's really stupid. At least the Democrats are part of a movement to humiliate the President and can pretend they really think it is a serious strategic option to vote in favor of surrender in the middle of an ongoing conflict. Hagel can't claim that cynical but, in political terms, understandable justification.
I'm not debating the war here. I'm talking about the patent stupidity of a policy of voting to withdraw troops in the middle of an ongoing conflict. I am stunned that the transparent idiocy of this policy from a military, strategic and political point of view is not admitted by everyone. Certainly neither General McCaffrey would not endorse it. (Nor am I that impressed with the fact that he considers himself to have been dead wrong a year ago. Which General McCaffrey should we trust?)
Hagel is the story because his political excuse for it is entirely personal.
That's what I'm seeing. Is what I'm seeing wrong? How so?
True. All we had was a revolution against an overwhelmingly superior adversary who was distracted by larger concerns, multiple small rebellions roughly quivalent on scale to the current Iraq insurgency, duels, assassinations, and a little deal that started at Fort Sumter and kinda worked its way from there.
Can you imagine the Catholics and the Baptists waging violent conflict in the USA with the singular determination of the violent nutjobs in the Sunni and Shi'ite groups? Police would be overburdened. Martial law.
I don't think "determination" is the word you are looking for, but we've had plenty of homegrown groups and individuals willing to commit atrocities of similar scale to the insurgents attacks, and yet they have not yet instituted martial law.
The primary reason for the horrifying attacks against Iraqi civilians is not to convince anyone in Iraq, it is to break the will of the American public. Are we that easily broken, barely sixty years after we fought mass murderers on a much grander scale?
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.