Good riddance Rummy

[jgoose71 0]

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First, and to steal Bill's metaphor, we have been poking them with a sharp stick for most of the 20th Century. Of course they don't want us there.

Second, how many of the incidents you cited were conducted by Iraqis?

Bad blood between Christianity and Islam goes back a lot further than that. I could spend all day talking about the crusades and the spanish conquestadors and how they fucked up the world but that is the past and now we have to fix the future.

None of the incidents I cited were conducted by Iraqi's, but the ones that we are fighting over there right now are driven by the same ideals. The shia are backed by iran and seria and the sunni's are in bed with Al Queda in Iraq. Yes, one group was there before we invaded and the other group imported itself afterwards. One thing Sadam did was create such fear that no one could organize. The only thing we really have going for our selves is that they hate each other as much as they hate us.

But now that he is gone the extremists now have one more place to rally to kill americans.

But we did remove him and created a shitstorm for ourselves. With globalization being what it is, and the area and forum that they now have free reign over, we can't just walk away. Especially from such a large group driven by such hate.

Do I think we should have gone into Iraq? No
Do I think Rummy needed to step down? Yes
Do I think that we should just pull out and hope for the best? No

Iraq started out as a war. We are good at war. Now we are trying to police the country and it is slowly turning into a Vietman. Terrorist's are not Vietnamese though and they know no borders. What do you do? How do kill an idea?

Fun fact: A Pakistani by the name of A. Q. Khan offered to sell Sadam plans and technology for a nuclear bomb but he didn't buy it because he thought that it was part of a U.S. sting.

"There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
Life, the Universe, and Everything

[warpedskydiver 0]

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Ok, I must have missed that.

That's OK, we still like you

Thats because you guys are kind to the kids that rode the short green bus.

[Andy9o8 2]

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slowly turning into a Vietman.

Disguised in black pajamas, mild-mannered Nguyen Klark Kent hears the sound of trouble. Ducking into a rice paddy, he emerges in blue tights and a red cape...faster than a speeding SAM-2 missile...more powerful than a B-52...able to leap the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a single bound...
"Look! Up in the sky! It's an RPG! It's a Phantom fighter! It's....VIETMAN!!"

[jgoose71 0]

Yea, yea, but I still don't think we can just walk out of there. What do we do?

By the way, after spending 6 months in Baghdad I can tell you that there is no way in hell you are going to be able to turn the whole town into a green zone. It would take years of going house to house, setting up new barrackades to protect what you just claimed while trying control the movement of 11 million people. It's what Rummy has been trying to do for the last 3 years, and failing.

See "Getting Iraqi's to take over their own county"

"There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
Life, the Universe, and Everything

[billvon 3,120]

>Terrorist's are not Vietnamese though and they know no borders.

The correct analogy would be "terrorists are not communists though and they know no borders" - which isn't quite accurate.

Don't forget, the Vietnam war was never billed as a war against the Vietnamese, just as the Iraq war has not been billed as a war against Iraqis (although it has become that.) Vietnam was a war against communism. If Vietnam fell, so would the rest of Asia. Remember the Domino Theory? And soon there would be communists all over the Pacific Rim, and the US would be their next target.

We see the same thing here. The scary threat now is "if Iraq falls to the terrorists, it will be us next!" Yet that thinking didn't hold in Vietnam, against an enemy far more dangerous than Al Qaeda. While Al Qaeda might (at best) detonate a dirty bomb or two in a US city, the communists had the power to destroy dozens of our largest cities and kill tens of millions.

What DID work in Vietnam? Getting out and letting the USSR collapse of its own weight. By merely keeping our military strong (i.e. not using them constantly, just building up our defenses) we forced them into an arms race that ultimately both bankrupted them and protected our country. We might take a lesson from that today. If we get out of Iraq and use all that military force to protect the US from attack, we will be far safer than we are today.

[kallend 2,151]

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>Terrorist's are not Vietnamese though and they know no borders.

The correct analogy would be "terrorists are not communists though and they know no borders" - which isn't quite accurate.

Don't forget, the Vietnam war was never billed as a war against the Vietnamese, just as the Iraq war has not been billed as a war against Iraqis (although it has become that.) Vietnam was a war against communism. If Vietnam fell, so would the rest of Asia. Remember the Domino Theory? And soon there would be communists all over the Pacific Rim, and the US would be their next target.

We see the same thing here. The scary threat now is "if Iraq falls to the terrorists, it will be us next!" Yet that thinking didn't hold in Vietnam, against an enemy far more dangerous than Al Qaeda. While Al Qaeda might (at best) detonate a dirty bomb or two in a US city, the communists had the power to destroy dozens of our largest cities and kill tens of millions.

What DID work in Vietnam? Getting out and letting the USSR collapse of its own weight. By merely keeping our military strong (i.e. not using them constantly, just building up our defenses) we forced them into an arms race that ultimately both bankrupted them and protected our country. We might take a lesson from that today. If we get out of Iraq and use all that military force to protect the US from attack, we will be far safer than we are today.

I'd add to that: by demonstrating that the world's best military can get bogged down against a rag-tag bunch of "insurgents", we have seriously degraded our diplomatic edge in dealing with Iran, N. Korea, etc. We are, in fact, diplomatically and militarily worse off than we were 4 years ago.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[jgoose71 0]

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What DID work in Vietnam? Getting out and letting the USSR collapse of its own weight. By merely keeping our military strong (i.e. not using them constantly, just building up our defenses) we forced them into an arms race that ultimately both bankrupted them and protected our country. We might take a lesson from that today. If we get out of Iraq and use all that military force to protect the US from attack, we will be far safer than we are today.

Yes and no. Yes we are at war in Iraq but no, we are not at war with the Iraqi's. There are Iraqi terrorist but a lot of who we are fighting over there is being imported from other counties.

Also, the rules are diffrent. With the communists they were trying to win, with the terrorists, they just want to see us loose. With communists, there were rules and no one wanted to see the world destroyed. With the terrorists, they don't care as long as they can take us out with them.

Old saying "Don't worry about the guy that's building a nuclear arsonal, beware of the guy who only wants one bomb."

"There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
Life, the Universe, and Everything

[billvon 3,120]

>There are Iraqi terrorist but a lot of who we are fighting over
>there is being imported from other counties.

Well, not that many. A recently declassified US intelligence estimate places the number of foreign fighters at about 10%. Most of the people we are fighting are Iraqis. They're mad at us because we're killing their families, which is understandable.

>With the communists they were trying to win, with the terrorists, they
>just want to see us loose.

Well, they're getting their wish. I think it's time to stop showing the world how well we lose.

>With communists, there were rules and no one wanted to see the world
>destroyed.

I grew up during that time. Per our own government, there was no trusting those bastards. That's why we needed a missile defense - so we could stop a lunatic USSR sub commander from taking out LA.

Now the rhetoric has neatly switched. The communists? Oh, they weren't all that bad. Just misguided. Now the terrorists - those are the insane stop-at-nothing destroy-the-world murderers!

Machiavelli was one of the first to describe the usefulness of fear when it came to controlling a populace. And people don't fear small groups of nearly powerless nomads. But evildoers who are going to detonate nuclear weapons in their hometowns? Now THAT can get you some votes! It is useful for our government to create a very scary worldwide threat, because they can use it as their trump card - well, you don't want your town blown to bits, do you? But just as in Vietnam, we'll soon realize that it's silly to trade thousands of hypothetical deaths for thousands of real ones. Best stop the slaughter and start working to _prevent_ any further deaths.

[kallend 2,151]

"The greatest Secretary of Defense in history." - Dick Cheney talking about Rumsfeld last week.

And this guy is one heartbeat away from the presidency!

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Andy9o8 2]

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"The greatest Secretary of Defense in history." - Dick Cheney talking about Rumsfeld last week.

And this guy is one heartbeat away from the presidency!

On the bright side, from what I understand about Cheney's health, it may only be "one" hearbeat.