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Discuss the US Presidential Election & the War
With under a week to go, we're opening up discussions on the US Presidential Election. Yesterday we discussed
the economy. Today we take on one of the other major election topics: The War. From the actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to foreign policy issues related to potential threats like North Korea, Russia, and Iran, how do the candidates stack up?
Well, there's only been one candidate who has been consistent in his stance about the Iraq war for the entire time -- Barack Obama. And it's a stance I agree with -- the Iraq War is a farce. It is a war on false pretense. We need to leave as soon as humanly possible. Really.
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It's a "war" that can't be won. There's no real central point of authority to surrender. In a conventional war (if there is such a thing) the losing side signs off on it, the winner reap the spoils and everyone rebuilds. But at $10B a month it keeps a lot of Republican supporters in business.
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We took out their previous government and replaced it. We disbanded their army.
The criteria of "winning" the occupation seem to keep changing.
And without clear criteria, you'll never know if you have "won" or even if you're getting closer to "winning".
Not to mention our continuing strategy of treating the occupation as if it was still an invasion. We're using air strikes on buildings instead of arresting criminals.
Well, the thing is...at this point, there really is no difference between Obama and McCain as to ending the war in Iraq.
Both of them pretty much have said they will withdraw troops in accordance to what the commanders on the ground over there (Petraus?) say is safe for our forces and Iraq.
You can debate all you want about how the two stood on starting the war, but, at this point, the two candidates are essentially in agreement on methods and timelines to end our participation in it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why on Earth are people talking about having Iraq pay back America for the costs of this war with the proceeds of oil sales?
Do people really think that after you've come in, destabalized their country, mangled most of their infrastructure, and generally made a mess of things that Iraq should be paying you back for that?
People keep talking about recouping costs from sale of oil, and I have no idea why you'd expect to recoup costs from a country that you invaded. Especially since, other than finishing what W's daddy started, there really wasn't a good reason to be in Iraq in the first place.
This is like the worst form of imperialism -- we'll invade you and topple your government, and then we'll bill you for it.
Discuss.
The only way to win, is not to play.
Listen, during WW2 we fought people with a political difference. When Germany fell, though there were "terrorists" until the 1950s, remants of Nazis that refused to give up, they eventually were either captured, died out or simply gave up and accepted things the way they had become.
Today, we are fighting religious fanatics.
They will simply never, ever, ever, quit. And more are being indoctrinated every day. You cannot argue, or reason with, a fanatic. It simply will not occur.
So we either accept we will forever be in Iraq being pecked to death, fighting for a gov't and country that doesn't want us there and may not understand what to do with democracy once they get it, or give up, go home, and admit we can't fight religious nuts.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
oh, don't worry about it, the people lining their pockets with war profits are winning just fine. Four more years of it and they'll be home free. Never mind the effect on the rest of America (or the world for that matter).
Catch-22 was *much* too friendly in it's spoof on war profiteering. Reality is so much harsher.
I always figured that there never was an all-out effort to catch OBL simply because if it were succesful then there would be no more need to continue all these crazy expenses.
Speaking of expenses, simply shutting down this crazy war will give Obama more money than he could hope to raise through taxation, if all the money destroyed in Iraq would have been used for good the USA would be in a completely different position right now.
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I see news of marches by anti-abortion activists frequently. Clearly that means all Americans are anti-abortion.
Right?
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What I've been reading from people who've actually been there is that Iraqis badly want us to leave. And greatly fear the prospect of us leaving. It isn't that they are cheering our presence wholeheartedly, but they know we're a big factor keeping the peace (such as it is) right now. While it would definitely be expedient for us to leave right away, it might not be prudent. It's a tough situation, one that I'd prefer we were not in. But we are.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
And if the US leaves some other time, that won't happen?
Find an end state that
A) Doesn't leave the US in Iraq indefinitely and
B) Doesn't result in a sectarian bloodbath
and
C) Doesn't involve nuking the country to glass or any other form of genocide
and that's a valid argument for the US not leaving now.
But if whenever the US leaves, there will be a sectarian bloodbath, it may as well be now.
I think the "experience" thing is a straw man - NOBODY's ready to be President of the US until they are. The experience doesn't matter near as much as what the man is made of. As a few examples of "inexperienced" presidents, I'll throw out Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry "the bomb" Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. For "experienced" (at least in the context of this election) we've got Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, the Bushes, and Ronald Reagan - well, 1 out of 6 ain't bad.
As to the "Obama has never run anything" charge, can you name another presidential campaign which has run as smoothly, with less drama, massive staff-churns, leaks, rumors, staffers or surrogates going off-reservation, etc.? This is a well-oiled machine, run with discipline, vision and purpose, and a huge number of ground troops, all on the same page. I think that's pretty impressive.
America's enemies and friends BOTH are rooting for Obama, simply because an unstable America leads to an unstable world. I have no doubt that Obama would incinerate a foreign power, given the provocation, but that's WWII/ColdWar thinking, total war isn't really a viable option. Nations are not the danger today, Iran and North Korea included. If they really did get out of hand, say by firing nuclear missiles at somebody (Israel) we could destroy them utterly, at a whim. What's much harder, and what Obama would be far better than McCain at, is talking to them, in bringing the level of discourse down from a shouting match to a conversation.
I would really really really really like to have an intelligent, thoughtful man, who can see shades of gray, who can weigh alternatives, who is not an ideologue, running the country for a change.
I'm going to vote for Obama because I think that having him in the White House will make the world a better place, a different place, both by his efforts and by his mere presence. On his very best day, all McCain can offer me is the status quo.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I am pretty sure that the definition of "winning" goes far beyond the US just leaving, even for the Iraqis. I am fairly sure that if the US leaves and Iraq descends into a Rwanda style genocide, they will not call that winning, even though American troops are gone.
The war was stupid to jump into in the first place. I thought it was dumb from day one. Unfortunately, you can't unpull a trigger. The US fired, it killed the government, unleashed the openings to an ethnic genocide, and made Iraq their problem. Now they have to fix it. If the cost of fixing Iraq is a few more billion dollars and some dead Americans, that is the price the Americans have to pay.
Everyone wants the "war" to be over with. The problem is that if the Americans leave, it doesn't suddenly make the war over. It makes it over for the Americans, but it doesn't mean it is over for Iraq. Now that the Americans have broken Iraq, the balancing act for the Americans at this point is to get the fuck out as fast as humanly possible without leaving behind a genocide.
The average Iraqi and the US have the same goal at this point. Get the hell out without as little blood as possible. The US wants to go as badly as the Iraqis want them out. The problem is that the players in this game are not just the Americans and the average Iraqi. You also have new Shiite majority leaders still smarting from Sunni brutality under Saddam, nostalgic Sunnis, independence seeking Kurds, Turks, Iran, and Al-qaeda that all have an interest (to greater and lesser extents) in making Iraq a blood bath.
The sad truth is that the US right now is the biggest and meanest on the block in Iraq, and they are what is keeping the conflicting parties from drowning each other in an orgy of blood. At some point, Iraq's central government will be competent and neutral enough to take over the roll of biggest bad ass with a gun and the US can slip out the back. Assuming genocide is not your goal, the question you need to ask yourself is, when will the central government have enough power to keep everyone from killing each other, AND will the central government be able to resist from whacking one group or another?
We can argue until we are blue in the face if or when the time will come when Iraq's central government is strong enough and neutral enough. The simple fact of the matter is that we don't have a frigging clue. Smarter men and women with better knowledge and more information don't know the answer.
Personally, I think the best plan for the Americans is to draw down and pretend like they mean it. If wheels start to fall off, pause, take a breather, then try again. You want to push the Iraqi government to grow a pair and go into the deep end, and you want them to try like their life depends upon it, but if they actually start to drown you want to be there to drag their ass out.
Personally, I think it is a good lesson for the Americans. Next time they try this sort of stupid stunt they will hopefully go in with eyes wide open as to the true cost of kicking over a government and taking responsibility for a nation. Hopefully they will make sure the war is worth the price they are going to pay and reserve toppling governments for when there is truly no other solution.
war tends to destroy stuff - infrastructure, materiel and people - in vast quantities, money gets moved from the tax payers to the producers of these war toys in equally vast quantities, they are *not* going to use it to improve the state of affairs in the country that does the spending. Most of it will end up in numbered accounts in .ch.
Spending an extra 10 billion every month on education or infrastructural improvements *is* going to put that money back in to circulation.
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obviously the ~1,000,000 iraqi deaths dont count as people for you!
It's an interesting ideological quagmire, isn't it? Is a countryman worth more than a foreigner?
If you say "no", then the logical progression is to a weakening of the sovereign state. After all, a woman abused or denied universal rights in Iran is the same as in New Jersey, right? Your response should be the same as if it were occurring in New Jersey.
On the other hand, if you say "yes" it allows you to adopt the attitude that a sovereign state should be left alone unless they impose some burden on you and your people. If someone is being tortured or oppressed somewhere, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt a different response than if it were happening in New Jersey.
Unless I'm missing something, it looks like the overwhelming majority of people in the US would have to honestly answer "yes" - an Iraqi life is not worth the same as an American life. How much less is the only real argument.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The US is not leaving to prove that Iraq isn't another Vietnam.
No. The US didn't leave because the war would have been lost if we had left. If we had left, there was no chance of any favorable outcome. But there was a high probability of a fierce civil war with perhaps millions dead and a widening conflict that brought Iran and Turkey into it.
The people who wanted to leave didn't care about that though: millions more dead, a wider war, no chance of an ongoing democracy, a loss for America, and a future where US allies could be certain that the US would abandon them as soon as anything went wrong. And any regime around the world could feel confident about invading a neighboring country, knowing that the US would stay out of it or run away after a few casualties and some bad PR.
The problem with current defence spending is that the money doesn't really go back into the economy other than paying wages of employees. The rest of the money (massive profits from no-bid governmental projects charged at more than 3 times the normal rate) is siphoned out of the economy, usually through offshore bank accounts and 'head offices' to benefit the shareholders. If the defence industry (building all those machines of death) were nationalised then it WOULD kickstart the economy, but then that's socialism so half the population would go run shrieking in terror that they were going to be marched off to death camps (some people really can't distinguish between socialism and communofascism). And if you're going to spend so much money on producing something, then it might as well be something constructive and good for the people (alternative energy production anyone?) rather than perpetuating the trade in nonsensical killing.
As long as the UN is mostly composed of representatives of dictators, theocrats, and kings, I will happily stick with our "abject stupidity."
The US may be flawed, but it's still the best place on the planet.
You can't spend your way out of debt, but you can INVEST your way out of debt.
If your serpentine belt is worn, investing money on a new one will, with some models, save you the price of a new engine or extremely expensive repairs should it break. Letting it go will cost you even more money, putting you farther into debt.
Buying a new car when your present car is running fine and you're broke is a stupid expense.
It's better to borrow money to repair a bridge than it is to let the bridge collapse.
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And the people who are the most terrified and speak the loudest when it comes to "national security" are not even near New York City. It's funny how the rest of the country (especially the backwater parts where no sane terrorist would go after because it wouldn't make a difference) gets all paranoid while the people in New York City go on with their lives albeit with a little more vigilence.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."