Iraq wants to know when we are leaving

You probably enjoy pro wresting too.

So we wouldn't hear calls for impeachment today, if say, GWB threw all Arab Americans into a camp in Wyoming? Or are you saying an FDR today would be immune from impeachment hearings today if, say, the press today were able to say, "What did FDR know on Dec. 6, 1941?"

Don't see the correlation at all ... and no I never watch pro wresting, but someone once taught me how to put someone in a "very small package" or some maneuver like that. I use it on my kids all the time

People have already called for Bush's impeachment.

why am i not surprised

All of them.

A) They train(ed) in Afghanistan to blow up oil terminals in Saudi Arabia

B) They train(ed) in Afghanistan to blow up our embassies in Africa and elsewhere.

C) They train(ed) in Afghanistan for 9/11.

D) They train(ed) in Afghanistan for terrorist attacks on Israel.

You seriously don't understand this stuff? Or are you just testing me? Because if you can't get this stuff, it's time for some serious reading.

But for an offense nothing like what FDR did to the Japanese. Thanks for proving my point.

I'd like to think so, but I do not rule out the possibility of a terrorist attack scenario happening in which Arab Americans would be rounded up. But the rest of your post about FDR and WWII is bunk. You seemed to equate the errors and missteps of Bush in Iraq to the errors and missteps in WWII. But then again, I don't seem to remember FDR giving up his golf game during WWII. So you might have a point.

Mars, it's no big deal. I post because it's fun. I honestly don't care who reads or answers them. If someone wants to debate - I'm all for it. But if they just want to display their clouded view of the world, that's fine with me. It provides me a good perspective on the part of the world I usually don't spend a lot of time with - our beloved socialist elites. And I'm fully aware that in the world of Bruce fandom, even the mere mention of the GOP brings forth of calls of fascism(!), racism(!), and a general inability to understand the beauty of nuance. Meanwhile, it's the Democratic Party who adores guys like Robert Byrd. Go figure.

You're on a roll. Let's get ready to rumble. (That's for Marz.)

What I meant to say, but admittedly failed to say clearly, was did you include Afghanistan as an example of "leaving before the job is done."

So fire bombing cities, killing hundreds of thousands of children, is something that would be generally accepted if we used that tactic today? I'm not talking just about errors and missteps. But also about policy. It was policy to burn Tokyo. It was policy to burn Dresden. Is that a misstep or an error? How did FDR not see Pearl Harbor coming? How did FDR not see the Battle of the Bulge coming (roughly 80,000 casualties in 2 months)? Faulty intelligence? That can't happen. How did FDR fuck up so badly in giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets? Probably Harry Hopkins' advice. Go figure.

You're on a roll. Let's get ready to rumble. (That's for Marz.)

What I meant to say, but admittedly failed to say clearly, was did you include Afghanistan as an example of "leaving before the job is done."

[/quote]

We absolutely shouldn't leave Afghanistan before the job is done. And we haven't, if that's what you're implying. I'm hoping we stay there for a very long time. The Left loves to preach, "we took our eye off the ball" with Afghanistan, as if a victory in Afghanistan would solve the problem of ALQ in the first place. It's one of many battlefields...Iraq, the P.I, Horn of Africa and many other places where we've got low density operations happening. Afghanistan did not take our eye off the ball any more than the ETO took our eye off the war in the Pacific. After all, what did Germany ever do to the US? It was Japan who attacked us, right? Must have been that Jewish lobby. And look at all the resources we spent in Europe, when we could have taken care of Japan with far fewer casualties, and much quicker! Let's set some background with "war on terror" (a horrible name,btw). It didn't begin or end in Afghanistan. It's been going on since the early 1980s all over the middle east.

(I tried replying to your post, but it was in the process of being deleted).

I'm actually by the pool, and quite cool.

Fuckups, errors, and camps. All the same in my book. All impeachable offenses, by today's standards. But not by the standards of WWII. That was my point.

My point to Packman was that I fully expect there to be fuckups. The impeachment of FDR talk was to point out that Bush is hardly alone in screwing up warfare in our nation's history. War is ugly. FUBAR is common-place. I've lived it. You have to accept it. And am I going to rail against Bush for the fuckups of Abu Grahb etc.? No more so than I would rail against FDR for his fuckups.

Ask yourself this. How much good did it do John Murtha, Dick Durbin, and the Democratic Party when Murtha and Durbin called the Marines of Haditha murderers? For the record, all but one have been found innocent, or have had the charges dropped - one case pending. All the preaching in the world from the Left about "we love the troops" is flushed down the toilet when you continue to support this assholes. In an effort to throw dirt on the President, Murtha gave aid to the enemy through the use of his speech in propaganda. Granted, unintentionally. But he did nonetheless. And to what good?

I don't want to talk about Murtha and Durbin.

Sure. In war you expect mistakes and fuckups. You can't have a war without them. The question is, coud you have had this war without some of the fuckups that Bush and his team committed? You accept them. I don't.

You're on a roll. Let's get ready to rumble. (That's for Marz.)

What I meant to say, but admittedly failed to say clearly, was did you include Afghanistan as an example of "leaving before the job is done."

[/quote]

We absolutely shouldn't leave Afghanistan before the job is done. And we haven't, if that's what you're implying. I'm hoping we stay there for a very long time. The Left loves to preach, "we took our eye off the ball" with Afghanistan, as if a victory in Afghanistan would solve the problem of ALQ in the first place. It's one of many battlefields...Iraq, the P.I, Horn of Africa and many other places where we've got low density operations happening. Afghanistan did not take our eye off the ball any more than the ETO took our eye off the war in the Pacific. After all, what did Germany ever do to the US? It was Japan who attacked us, right? Must have been that Jewish lobby. And look at all the resources we spent in Europe, when we could have taken care of Japan with far fewer casualties, and much quicker! Let's set some background with "war on terror" (a horrible name,btw). It didn't begin or end in Afghanistan. It's been going on since the early 1980s all over the middle east.

[/quote]

Damn your good.

Could I have? No. Could it have been? Yes. But I expect them the same way I expect the sky to be blue. It's what it is. War without fuckups does not exist.

I brought up Durbin and Murtha specifically to talk about what Bush, and myself as a Soldier, have had to contend with from the Left during this war; a continual attack on the foreign policy of this country even to the point of accuses our troops of murder (or ignorance in the case of John Kerry...remember that brilliant quote?). Kerry's quote was just plain funny. But Murtha and Durbin have been outright treasonous. The Haditha Marines are innocent. And everyone knows it, even Murtha. But his own domestic propaganda machine has been feeding the overseas ALQ propaganda machine to no end. Watch al-Jazerra sometime.

I wonder how much faster this war could have been won if just had had support at home. I am thankful that Bush has had the fortitude he's had, as opposed to turning and running as Harry Reid suggested ("The war in Iraq is lost."). Bush will be long remembered as a strong leader. Reid and Murtha will be footnotes.

Stop being silly. The war is unpopular because Americans don't like long wars, particularly when it was sold as a low-cost cakewalk. If you want to fight a long war, prepare the public for a long war or else roll the dice that the war will be short and successful. Like it or not, that is how it works in a democracy.

Okay ... so then explain how pro wrestling relates ...
Lets get ready to rumble ... wtf?

Julius, can you help her out? She's on your team.

I'm sorry you weren't paying attention when Bush talked very early on after 9/11 about this war being a very very long war. Maybe he didn't emphasize the point well enough. But I assure you, as someone in uniform, I was paying attention. I understood the war on Islamic Fundamentalism (and all of its offshoots) to be a very long campaign. I certainly didn't expect it to be won by the time I retired.

She doesn't need my help. It's you guys who are doing the tag-teaming when I'm too much for ya.

OK. LOL.

I understand why you laugh. We expect quick results for very little cost. We are an instant-satisfaction society - at least the part of the society that is under 50. With little or no understanding of history, where we came from, what was sacrificed for our liberties, we go to the mall. And one day, we'll wonder what the hell happened to our freedom.

Stop. Please. You're putting words into my mouth. You seem to like to debate straw men. Fine. Go ahead.

But your claim that Bush prepared the nation for a long (and costly) sacrifice in Iraq is, IMHO, not true. So far, your only response to that claim is that Bush did so, right after 9/11, by saying that the "war on terror" -- and its offshoots, which I assume you mean to be the Iraq war that was in the planning stages -- will be a very, very long war. Fine. That is your contention. But I don't agree that the Iraq war was sold to the American people on that basis. I never said anything about "quick results for very little cost." In fact, it was this Administration, with its talk about the war being a cakewalk and how the Iraq oil revenue would pay for the cost of the war, that led Americans to "expect quick reults for very little cost."

So I laugh because your are being silly. Otherz on this board may enjoy reading such smug, condescending, know-it-all rebuttalz, but I am disappointed by them.

Making a connection between the acts of terrorists on 9/11 and Saddam Hussein and Iraq has already been debunked. Surprisingly, this is one thing President Bush has admitted.

I agree with you that Bush did a poor job of preparing the country for the long war. He made one speech about it - it was repeated a few times by his administration - but beyond that, he did a poor job of it. Bad leadership. He's far from perfect. But I was listening, and probably heard things differently since I was in uniform.

I'm sorry that I sound like a know it all. It's better than sounding like a don't know it all. We've got plenty of them. I'm sure I do sound that way (condescending) around these parts, because what I have to say is so foreign to so many liberals. I mean, look at TD's comment about Tony Snow. Pure hatred. Nothing more than that. So I don't expect intelligent debate from him. I'm sure that he gets his sermons from MSQVC and is content, like so many other working class north easterners, to live in his world of ignorance. I can't stop him. But I'm not going to stop speaking what I believe. If I think something is a fact, I'm going to say so.

And I never said there was a connection. 9/11 was a wake up to change the world. That's all. If you're content with a Iran/Syria status quo, vote that way. I'm not. It's good to see NK finally coming around. Maybe we'll see a united Korea in the first McCain administration.

Why are ya'll discussing events that you cannot change -- it's done with, nothing you can do about it. You can't change what's already happened. Start discussing and giving your opinions on the subject at hand - realistic and responsible withdrawal from Iraq. Or, if they, the Iraqi government want us out with a timetable (that shouldn't be made public), it's their country, so be it.

If only you could see the irony in your words.

We all make up our truths and what we believe to be true based on many factors. It doesn't mean we would sacrifice any less than others whose facts differ from ours if called upon.

Iraqi Prime Minister praises Obama pullout plan

There you have it, Obama won the war!

From ABC News:
When he lands in Baghdad, Obama will apparently hear some conflicting messages. As ABC News' Martha Raddatz has reported, U.S. commanders on the ground are quite skeptical of Obama's plan to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. As Raddatz reported, several commanders told ABC News, on background, that there was "no way" the Obama plan for withdrawal could work logistically.

Today in Der Spiegel, however, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says U.S. troops should leave Iraq "as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned." He then continued: "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months."

He added, "So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn't the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias."

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press today that there are indications al-Qaida's senior leaders are diverting fighters from the war in Iraq to the Afghan frontier.

And of course we have yesterday's news from the White House that the U.S. and Iraq have agreed to seek "a general time horizon" for deeper reductions in American combat troops in Iraq.

But a general departure horizon, or whatever, is not a hard and firm timeline, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown underscored for reporters in Baghdad today, per Bloomberg News.

?It is certainly our intention that we reduce our troops, but I am not going to set out an artificial timetable,? Brown said after a meeting with Maliki.

The sun now sets on the erstwhile British Empire; the UK has reduced its troop presence in Iraq from 40,000 to the 4,000 or so soldiers at an airbase in Basra where they support Iraqis.

Brown said "building blocks for the future" -- political progress, Iraqi security force training, economic reconstruction -- must be accomplished before troop withdrawal. "It's absolutely crucial we complete these tasks,'' Brown said.

Maliki is playing politics. He's got a lot of pressure on him to play the "we can handle it" routine. But the skepticism by the commanders on the ground shows something quite different.

All that said, another congratulations for the excellent victory our troops are putting the finishing touches on. Of course, the media completely missed the story over the past year, in their desire to only report bad news on Iraq.

?Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic...Artificially prolonging the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq would cause problems.?
-Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki

?If a government came to power in Iraq, freely elected, that said we want the Americans out, I would certainly respect that.?
-Senator John McCain

I have no doubt that he said that.

It's funny - the Left can't figure out if Maliki is God, or an incompetent boob implaced by the Bush administration. I wish they would get their stories straight.

And we'll leave. Geez, who said we're going to stay there forever. (and please, don't pull out the 100 year quote from McCain). But are you going to pull out the quote where the Maliki spokesman said he was misquoted, or misinterpreted, about supporting Obama's plan?

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_snd-imagination.html

He gets it.

Andrew Klavan
Braggistan in the America of the Imagination
Why the military loses the information war

Before my friend, Army major Rory Aylward, left for Afghanistan at the end of February, he invited me down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to watch the final stage of his training. The ?Capstone exercises? were to be a week of staged maneuvers set in ?FOB Patriot,? an imaginary Forward Operating Base in Central Asia. ?Theater immersion,? the Army calls it. The soldiers, sailors, and airmen involved refer to it mordantly as Braggistan.

I was eager to attend. I had just finished an essay for City Journal on the latest spate of Hollywood antiwar films (see ?The Lost Art of War,? Winter 2008). I was appalled by them and, as an occasional screenwriter myself, ashamed of the industry. The movie business has produced and is still producing a steady stream of petulant, we-are-the-enemy propaganda pieces?including Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and In the Valley of Elah?that portray those who wear the ?uniforms that guard you while you sleep? as brutal abusers, naive cannon fodder, or shell-shocked and murderous maniacs. I wanted to go to Braggistan to pay tribute to Rory and his colleagues and to let them know that there are still some people in the entertainment world grateful to them for keeping our artsy carcasses safe from the madcap slaves of Allah.

Plus, it sounded as though it might be fun?which it was, kind of.

Rory is part of a PRT, or Provincial Reconstruction Team, made up of about 90 active and reservist servicemen, as well as a few civilians. They?re being deployed in Afghanistan to try to help build a civil society there in the after-wreckage of the Taliban. This culminating week of training, under the auspices of the 189th Brigade of the First Army Division East, consisted of improvisational role playing: unscripted meetings between PRT officers and actors doing their best impersonations of local mullahs.

It was nothing if not amusing to watch the team?s leader, Commander George Perez?a highly intelligent but plainspoken Navy submariner who looked as though he?d be more comfortable solving his problems with a torpedo?try to master the art of sensitive intercultural negotiations (for which, it turned out, he had a genuine talent). More amusing still, training planners often interrupted the scenarios with unannounced ?injects??simulated sudden dangers meant to represent the perils of the real Afghanistan. Thus I found myself bouncing over muddy forest roads in Humvees with fake IEDs exploding on every side; dodging mock sniper fire in cinderblock-and-plywood villages; and running here and there in ?full battle rattle??some 40 pounds of body armor?which, for a man my age, had a certain hernial hilarity all its own.

But jolly as all this may be when the bullets aren?t real, I found something truly disconcerting about making the transition from Hollywood to FOB Patriot?I mean, from one exercise in make-believe to another. I couldn?t help noticing that we?we of the cultural classes?do make-believe better than the people who live and fight in the real world.

I kept thinking back to all those antimilitary movies I?d seen and to left-wing journals like the New York Times, which consistently highlight military abuses and failures while obscuring and downplaying military heroism and advances. The servicemen I was training with were clearly smart, expert, and committed to excellence in the defense of their country. They also seemed a lot more mentally stable than most of the screenwriters, journalists, and academics I know, though that?s not saying much. Yet Hollywood and our left-wing media, as well as our antimilitary professoriate, can be quite convincing when, say, they portray an isolated injustice like Abu Ghraib as evidence of systemic atrocity, or depict veterans as more likely to commit crimes than the rest of us, which statistically they?re not. Conversely, as spectacular as our armed forces are at the business of ousting real-life tyrants, they fall a little short when it comes to works of the imagination.

Take Braggistan itself. The trainees, especially those who?d actually been to the wars, complained bitterly about the lack of realism there, crowding around my Humvee at one point to tick off their grievances. The injects?IEDs and snipers?were more typical of Iraq than Afghanistan, they said, where you?re more likely to encounter rocket fire from a distance. The vehicles, equipment, and accommodations weren?t true to life. And a lot of the instructors had never been ?downrange? and so were teaching out of textbooks rather than from experience. This is not to suggest that the warriors were poorly trained. In fact, they?d been so well trained elsewhere that a fun-park ride like the Capstone exercises struck many of them as irrelevant. After one series of snafus turned a mock shura, or tribal consultation, into a gunfight, a passing sergeant shrugged deadpan and drawled to me, ?We?re better when it?s live.?

Okay, so the Army isn?t Universal Studios. But the failures here are symptomatic of a larger imaginative deficit. From its tongue-tied commander in chief to its ?information operations??which even the military admits are regularly outdone by al-Qaida propagandists?down to the public-affairs people who deal with the local press, the military has so far been incapable of putting its urgent mission into narrative form. An insulated culture of taciturn heroism may work against them here, but there?s also the usual governmental cluelessness about dealing with the public. Even at Fort Bragg, when a sympathetic journalist?namely me?tried to get permission to join the training, I was at first given the sort of stone-faced runaround you usually associate with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Now you may say that capturing the imagination isn?t the job of our fighting forces. But this is America, remember: we?re a country of the imagination, a living state of mind. We?re not connected to one another by bloodlines or any depth of native memory. We?re the descendants of an idea that every generation has to learn to hold in its collective consciousness. More than in any other country, it matters in America who we think we are and what we believe we?re doing.

Our academies, the news media that train in the academies, and the entertainment industry that?s informed by the news media have become, to my thinking, a sort of alternative state of the imagination, a kingdom of lies founded in the muck of hysterical guilt, historical distortion, and philosophical solipsism. In their fantastic and labyrinthine narrative, our fascist foes are Nemesis, the emanation of our own sins, and therefore our military can only be the mad or foolish servants of evil.

The real story is simpler, and it should be simple enough to tell: we?re up against another generation of the ever-present enemies of the American idea, and they have to be stopped by the sort of men and women who are training at Fort Bragg.

Andrew Klavan is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of such bestsellers as True Crime and Don?t Say a Word. His new novel, Empire of Lies, is just out in July.

Okay, I won't pull out the quote by McCain. If McCain has changed his mind since then, I can certainly respect that. I think it is better to adjust and make changes to flawed ideas or policy, as opposed to being stubborn and refusing to budge.

As for Maliki tempering his comments, I guess you were right--he's playing politics. However, I think most people see it is pretty clear where Maliki's sentiments lie.