mysteryman wrote:I support the President,and I support the war.
I was also willing to and did fight in it.
Oops - thanks for clarifying: I'd thaught, you were a non-combattant.
Walter Hinteler wrote:mysteryman wrote:I support the President,and I support the war.
I was also willing to and did fight in it.
Oops - thanks for clarifying: I'd thaught, you were a non-combattant.
I carried a weapon,I served with a USMC rifle company,and while I was (according to the Geneva convention and the rules of war) technically a non-combatant,Because I served with a rifle company I can be classified as a combatant.
Brandon9000 wrote:au1929 wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:At the time that the president made the mission accomplished speech, we had conquered Iraq in a few weeks with almost no difficulty, and it was not yet clear that the country would be unmanageable afterwards, nor is there a lot of recent historical precedent for countries which are easy to conquer but impossible to briefly occupy even briefly during reconstruction. Under those circumstances, his mission accomplished speech was perfectly reasonable. You can't expect him to be clairvoyant.
Nor should we have expected him to be the bumbling fool he turned out to be. Or should we have?
Then you fear to address the content of my assertion?
There is no need to be clairvoyant to see the obvious.
Whether or not one has served should make no difference in the excercise of the brain.
Slim Whitman records. The non nookyaler solution The waves upon waves of infiltrators at the Eyeraq border met with "When I'm calling yo-o-o-o-ou-u-u-u-u-u a-o-o-o-u-u-u ooo ooo- -" They fall back, ears popping, until their heads explode. Democracy unfolds upon the land, flowers get strewn at the soldiers' feet. Case closed.
au1929 wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:au1929 wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:At the time that the president made the mission accomplished speech, we had conquered Iraq in a few weeks with almost no difficulty, and it was not yet clear that the country would be unmanageable afterwards, nor is there a lot of recent historical precedent for countries which are easy to conquer but impossible to briefly occupy even briefly during reconstruction. Under those circumstances, his mission accomplished speech was perfectly reasonable. You can't expect him to be clairvoyant.
Nor should we have expected him to be the bumbling fool he turned out to be. Or should we have?
Then you fear to address the content of my assertion?
There is no need to be clairvoyant to see the obvious.
You haven't given a particle of evidence that my interpretation is wrong. You've merely declared that the truth of your position is obvious, which proves less than nothing. Kind of a time saver for you, though.
Thomas wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:At the time that the president made the mission accomplished speech, we had conquered Iraq in a few weeks with almost no difficulty, and it was not yet clear that the country would be unmanageable afterwards.
That's overbroad. More correctly, it wans't yet clear
to the president. To Bush I and Scowcroft, it was was perfecly clear before the war even started. Need I dig up their quotes again, or do you know which ones I'm talking about?
Do you mean
these?
Then there was also Colin Powell's explanation of
the "Pottery Barn rule"
I wonder if Brandon thinks it was yet clear to the President in July when he made the "bring em on" challenge.
I'm interested in reading Brandon's answer to Thomas' question.
I don't see how any statement in your links is relevant to what I said. "You break it, you own it" is an obvious truth, but irrelevant. No one has denied that if you conquer a country, you have an obligation to restore it to some kind of health except the liberals who have always wanted to cut and run and leave the Iraqis in the lurch. The conservatives have been championing the Pottery Barn Rule by asserting that we ought to stay until some kind of stability is achieved. There are a lot of statements in those links and I don't see how any of them applies to anything I said. Certainly not the incorrect statement by Bush 1 that apprehending Saddam would probably be impossible. Give me an example of a sentence in those links that you want me to comment on.
My point is that in light of subsequent events, the president's "mission accomplished" speech is an easy target for people who simply don't like him and are looking for an excuse to mock him, but at the time he said it it was a perfectly reasonable statement. At the time the president made the speech, a lot of liberals who hate him criticized it, not because it was incorrect, but because it was a "photo op," something or other about wearing the flight suit, etc., etc.
For any politician I don't like, I could invent a pretext to criticize him, and then tell people who pointed out defects in my logic that they were "mouthing the party line," etc., if I were the sort of person who was willing to "prevail" using logic that I knew was incorrect. You can always find a way to mock someone if you feel like it and don't mind bending the truth. However, by any fair standard, the "mission accomplished" speech was reasonable at the time it was made.
Reasonable to an idiot that fully expected the Iraqis to throw flowers at the soldiers' feet and had no plan what to do after Sadam's army was out of the way.
@Brandon9000,
But, you could expect him to be less than of an idiot about it.
@Brandon9000,
Oh c'mon Brandon. Anyone that has ever managed a project knows you plan for the worst and hope for the best. Failure to do that leads to failure. Bush and this administration set themselves up to fail. The refused to listen to anything that contradicted their predicted rosy outcome.
Ignoring facts just because you don't like them also leads to failure. The news reports are filled with the Bush administration pooh poohing facts about what was going on in Iraq. Rumsfeld's claim of the "same vase" being stolen again and again is a perfect example. Fox "News" picked that up and claimed nothing was stolen from the museums. This was a boondoogle from the beginning and lots of people predicted what would happen and did happen. Frankly I am still steamed about the cost prediction by the administration. They couldn't plan a birthday party without screwing it up.
