ican wrote:The BA (i.e., Bushadmin) invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to improve what had already become a rotten situation.
First let me qualify that "rotten situation" statement. We invaded Afghanistan because the Teliban gave safe harbor to those who where responsible for 9/11. We invaded Iraq to depose Hussein and put in a government that would be friendly to us and Israel. WMD was a con, a lie. The Bush Administration said, before 9/11, that Saddam was not a threat. Suddenly, after 9/11, Iraq was a big threat. The Bush administration played on the anger and fear Americans had after 9/11 to carry out the neo-con agenda of removing Saddam and replacing him with a toady government.
They failed. This whole thing blew up in their faces and they don't know what to do about it. All they can say is," Stay the course". Well it's not working, the situation is getting worse and the broken record keeps playing.
ican wrote:However, the BA has given us cause to believe the Afghanistani and Iraqi people want democratic governments instead of totalitarian governents.
Some want democratic governments and some do not. Don't make a blanket statement that all do. What a democratic government is to us may be very different to them. We don't believe a government run by religious law is very free. I'm speaking of sharia. But a large number of Shiites seem to want this form of
government in Iraq.
In Afghanistan the Teliban don't believe in freedom. The Teliban is making a big comeback. It is widely supported in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In order to appeal to those who want sharia stronger in Afghanstan President Hamid Karzai said he would not object to the reintroduction of the Department of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a religious police force
the Teliban had.
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ican wrote:The question before all of us, not just the BA, is what must we do to improve the current rotten situation?
The rotten situation in Iraq will remain rotten as long as our troops are there. Our presence there makes terrorist. Our harsh treatment of the people and our indiscriminate killing makes new terrorist.
Quote:Osama Jadaan al Dulaimi, a tribal leader in the western town of Karabilah, a town near the Syrian border that was hit with bombs or missiles on at least 17 days between October 2005 and February 2006, said the bombings had created enemies.
"The people of Karabilah hate the foreigners who crossed the border and entered their areas and got into a fight with the Americans," al Dulaimi said. "The residents now also hate the American occupiers who demolished their houses with bombs and killed their families ... and now the people of Karabilah want to join the resistance against the Americans for what they did."
The U.S. military has said repeatedly that it uses precise munitions and targets insurgent locations that are verified by various intelligence sources.
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said that the airstrikes reflected U.S. soldiers' ability to target more sharply insurgents across Iraq.
"This is one more tool that they have pulled out ... as they have been able to better refine their tactics and procedures," Johnson said. "Airpower has always been available. I don't see a ramping-up; I see a refinement" of intelligence that allows for more airstrikes.
Johnson also disputed the idea that the bombings exact a political cost.
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This is a typical example where the military only listens to itself. It refuses to acknowledge what the residents say. If they ignores their needs and destroy their homes and families what do you expect them to do?
It will remain rotten as long as the Sunnis and Shiites choose to fight one another and not talk. There must be some negotiation, some compromise between the two parties. We need to find a way to get out and at the same time get the Shiites and Sunnis to come together, talk and compromise. Otherwise the killing will continue until both sides become tired of it.
The Bush administration did open talks with the insurgents but Bush's no compromise stance
led to the talk's collapse. Because we can't win I believe Bush will have to accept the Sunnis demand that we set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. I believe he will try to get this done before the fall elections in an effort to keep Republicans from getting defeated. We will see.
This war between the Sunnis and Shiites is Bush's doings. Ironically is it against the interest of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, with a large Shiite population but a Sunnis majority, does not want to see a stronger Shiite coalition to its north. But that's what Bush is creating. The Shiite Iraqi and Iranian governments are very close. Working together in the future they have the potential to create a lot of disruption
in the Gulf States.
ican wrote:Do you think the answer is simply to replace the BA? If so, then please say with whom/what shall we replace it and why you think that will help?
YES, that would be a good begining! They can't see what's happening. They see only what they want to see. What to replace them with? Anything, but preferably Democrats. Republicans are so desperate not to make themselves look bad that they will cover up any and every crime they can. There is no accountability in this administration. There is no oversight into this war or how it is being conducted. There is no "Truman Committee" looking for and dealing with the corruption this war has created.
Quote:The United States has spent more than a quarter of a trillion dollars during its three years in Iraq, and more than $50 billion of it has gone to private contractors hired to guard bases, drive trucks, feed and shelter the troops and rebuild the country.
It is dangerous work, but much of the $50 billion, which is more than the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security, has been handed out to companies in Iraq with little or no oversight.
Billions of dollars are unaccounted for, and there are widespread allegations of waste, fraud and war profiteering. As 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft first reported in February, only one case, the subject of a civil lawsuit, has been unsealed. It involves a company called Custer Battles, and provides a window into the chaos of those early days in Iraq.
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ican wrote:Do you think the US should do something else? If so, then please say what that something else is and why you think that will help.
As I said above we need to get together with the Sunnis and set a withdrawal timetable. If all we do is to act macho, denigrate those who want to get out then Americans will continue to die, billions of our dollars will be sucked up in the corruption that no one is allowed to oversee or investigate and the quality of our armed forces will continue to deteriorate.
Quote:As the cost of the war in Iraq climbs past $300 billion, and there are estimates that suggest the total financial cost will far exceed $1 trillion, there is another cost that is less measurable but no less significant: that is the stress on the military itself and the consequences for our fighting men and women, for innocent Iraqis, and the capacity of our Armed Forces far into the future.
The Pentagon has announced that the Army has met its recruiting goals for the 13th consecutive month, but we are seeing an erosion in the quality of recruits in our Armed Forces as more and more young Americans who disagree with what we are doing in Iraq have chosen to stay away. In order to meet recruiting targets, the Army has relaxed restrictions against high school dropouts and have started letting in more applicants who score in the lowest third on the Armed Forces aptitude test, a group known as category 4 recruits. Since the mid 1980s, category 4 recruits were kept, as a matter of policy, to less than 2 percent of all recruits. But by the end of 2005, the percentage of recruits who fell under this lowest category has reached double digits.
In my district, not only has the Army lowered its standards but recruiters have been pushed to violate the remaining standards in order to meet these recruiting targets. We have had two examples of where autistic young men have been recruited into the Army despite the regulations. As I have discussed on the floor of the House how outrageous this was, indeed, one of these young men did not even know that there was a war going on in Iraq. This all has terrible consequences for our efforts against the global war on terror.
This weekend's papers were full of articles and editorials about the role that our lowered recruiting standards may have played in the recent spate of reports of service members being accused of atrocities in Iraq. What does this tell us about our efforts to eliminate the insurgency and win the hearts and minds of people in the Middle East?
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Are things better in Iraq today. A big NO!
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If we can't make things better for the Iraqi people after spending billions of dollars and losing over 2,500 Americans killed in over a three year period how does anyone think that by continuing what we're doing is going to make things better?
In order to facilitate a real change we need to get new people and new ideas in the White House. And I don't mean replacing one Republican war hawk with another.
It would be nice if we could have the Iraqi security forces take over for us but there is one fly in this ointment; the Iraqi security forces are primarily Shiite.
Quote:Whereas the Vietnam War was a Maoist people's war, Iraq is a communal civil war. This can be seen in the pattern of violence in Iraq, which is strongly correlated with communal affiliation. The four provinces that make up the country's Sunni heartland account for fully 85 percent of all insurgent attacks; Iraq's other 14 provinces, where almost 60 percent of the Iraqi population lives, account for only 15 percent of the violence. The overwhelming majority of the insurgents in Iraq are indigenous Sunnis, and the small minority who are non-Iraqi members of al Qaeda or its affiliates are able to operate only because Iraqi Sunnis provide them with safe houses, intelligence, and supplies. Much of the violence is aimed at the Iraqi police and military, which recruit disproportionately from among Shiites and Kurds. And most suicide car bombings are directed at Shiite neighborhoods, especially in ethnically mixed areas such as Baghdad, Diyala, or northern Babil, where Sunni bombers have relatively easy access to non-Sunni targets.
If the war in Iraq were chiefly a class-based or nationalist war, the violence would run along national, class, or ideological lines. It does not. Many commentators consider the insurgents to be nationalists opposing the U.S. occupation. Yet there is almost no antioccupation violence in Shiite or Kurdish provinces; only in the Sunni Triangle are some Sunni "nationalists" raising arms against U.S. troops, whom they see as defenders of a Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government. Defense of sect and ethnic group, not resistance to foreign occupation, accounts for most of the anti-American violence. Class and ideology do not matter much either: little of the violence pits poor Shiites or poor Sunnis against their richer brethren, and there is little evidence that theocrats are killing secularists of their own ethnic group. Nor has the type of ideological battle typical of a nationalist war emerged in Iraq. This should come as no surprise: the insurgents are not competing for Shiite hearts and minds; they are fighting for Sunni self-interest, and hardly need a manifesto to rally supporters.
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This is the mess you get when you have an idiot in the White House who thinks sheer raw power can get you anything you want. It didn't work in Vietnam and it won't work in the Middle East.
