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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?
My big problem with the war and the republicans is that they say they won't leave until they "won" the war. WTF is winning the war? All Iraqis dead? Government has resources it needs? Don't they already have billions of a surplus?? Did we already win? Did we already lose?
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.
My blog
We have one candidate that opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and another that still insists it was a rousing success. This isn't even a contest.
Thomas Galvin
"Discuss the US Presidential Election & the War" is the wrong title
it should read "Trolls, Strawmen, Partisan Hacks, Propagandizers, Emotionally Unstable Wingnuts/Moonbats: Please Assemble Here"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Obama: Iraq is Bad we should withdraw on a fixed timetable agreed with the Iraqi government. Afghanistan is good, might invade Pakistan but wouldn't invade Iran
McCain: Iraq is Good we should withdraw without a fixed timetable with agreement from the Iraqi government, Afghanistan is good, wouldn't invade Pakistan but would invade Iran
And of course there is the Sarah Palin view
Palin: I live near Russia I do. War is good, war is what folks in our small towns want its what Dave the Electrician and Marge the Checkout Gal are after. Anyone who doesn't want to invade a country if just palling around with them and we need to know WHY Obama doesn't want to invade France, is he really French?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Actually, Al-Quaida endorses McCain.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
I think that the first muslim american president will bring peace to the middle east.
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.
- I'm quite certain America's enemies in the middle east will be routing for an Obama victory -- say what you like about Dubya, but those bad guys are scared pissly of him because he's a cowboy that'll bomb the crap out them without blinking
Nope, "America's enemies" would love us(I'm from the UK, we like to tag along) go and bomb the middle east; it'd give them a huge propaganda victory, and make recruiting suicide bombers from western countries much easier; at least here in the UK we have young male, disenfranchised Muslim population virtually waiting for events in the middle east to radicalise them. The Iraq war didn't stop radical Muslim terrorism, it created more terrorists, and galvanized anti-western sentiment. Bombing Iran or Syria would just make the problem worse.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
As a soldier, war is good for me, so you'd think I would want republicans. But I'd rather have a democrat who could make alternative ways for me to earn more money. As it stands, we make a fuckload of money for doing our time over there, and it all stacks up. I think if we had peace missions that accomplished the same for us, more soldiers would be in favor of peace.
I wouldn't trust Al-Qaida sources. They could very well be posting this stuff just to scare us into voting Obama, in hopes that he will give them more room to breath. The fact that they posted this on a password protected site doesn't really matter, because as any /. reader knows, anything can be hacked. Al-Qaida probably knows this as well and may have expected someone to find it.
I'm not saying this is absolutely true, but there is the possibility.
Seek and ye shall find.
Let's define "The enemy":
9/11: Al Qaeda, and a month later the Taliban
late 2002/2003: Saddam/Baathists
2004 on: Shiite/Suni Militias, Al Sadr, etc. etc.
Sure Saddam was a POS leader, but he was probably better than Kim Jong Il is and we before going into Iraq we didn't have to fight 5 fronts at the same time while burning a F'in huge hole in our national budget.
If Duyba had left "the enemy" to simply Al Qaeda, we'd not have spent untold billions in Iraq, our international relations would be less strained, we'd have 4000+ less war dead (Not mentioning the tens and tens of thousands of soldiers with mental/physical problems), tens of thousands of less Iraqi dead,etc.
You see where I'm going?
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You know??? For the 13 original colonies? Slashdot's icon is missing a red stripe at the top.
- Obama's lack of experience -- if he is elected, the 4 year presidential term will be the longest job he's ever held
Just wanted to quash a little bit of FUD, here. Obama was a constitutional law professor for twelve years and a state senator for seven years.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
George W Bush certainly scares me but I doubt if he scares the Al Qaeda nut jobs. From their point of view he has been a triumph of public relations. Consider that GWB's foreign policy has taken a situation where he had all the sympathy and Al Qaeda attracted the condemnation of just about everybody on the planet just after 9/11 to the point where the USA has the condemnation of just about everybody on the planet for being the bully boy of World politics. Way to go George!
What scares me about McCain is not McCain but his age. If he gets elected, the chance of him dying in office has got to be quite high. If that happens, the leader of the free world with the biggest guns and bombs is another religious person with a proven tenuous grasp on reality. I'll have to spend another four years hoping she doesn't get a message from God telling her it's time for the Apocalypse.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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.
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You are forgetting the numbers 1-4 are collecting the carbage the other 6 make, cleaning the roads, doing all those tiny things we are unwilling to pay for, but are rather essential. Number 10, well he is that bank manager that makes his money causing the current economic crisis. We REALLY need him.
The rich and the poor need each other. Who is going to clean your house when you are rich if everybody else is rich?
Here is a story for you.
A very rich man once kept all his money in a BIG building. A freak tycoon came along and sucked ALL the money out and then distributed it across the land. Suddenly the rich men was very poor but everyone else was VERY RICH. So rich that NOBODY wanted to work anymore. No matter how many millions they now had, they couldn't buy anything.
The rich man on the other hand kept working, on his farm and told his doubters things would soon be normal again. And so they did, faced with nobody producing anything, all the new rich people had to buy their food from the former rich guy at the prices he demanded since he was the sole supplier.
End of the story, all the money is back with the rich guy, and the normal people got their normal jobs again, putting the economy back into its normal groove.
Courtesy of the Donald Duck, a story understandable to 6yr olds.
What is missing from your bar story is the analysis that this system of taxation is really one of the few that works. Of course people will complain about their taxes and threathen to leave. It is what people do. You complain about taxes, the weather and the wife. Yet few leave the country with or without their wife for a better (financial) climate.
Furthermore you are forgetting that the truly rich rarely pay all the taxes you would expect them to pay as they can afford the best accountants to find all the loopholes while the poor idiots just pay whatever the IRS bills them for.
No my dear silly little proffesor, I suggest you go back to the school of the street and learn that the economy can't be explained with simple anologies unless you have an agenda to hide the true full complexity of the economy to create a false point.
I am reminded by an episode of Frasier, were Roz dates a garbage man. She is a produced of a program nobody needs for a shrink nobody cares about, but the guy who picks up the garbage is the looser. It is a fairly common attitude, but you can't use it to run your economy.
Tell me the results of the following two scenarios:
1: All the garbage men go on strike for a year.
2: Bill Gates goes on strike for a year.
Which one will you notice?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think once the US pulls out that more Iraqi civilians will die from secretarian fights than civilians that were killed by US soldiers.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
That all sounds fair enough except for one thing... what did we actually "win"?
I mean, what was the benefit of this and was it worth the cost? I don't see how anything is better today than it was six years ago in Iraq. It sure sounds great to say "we won", but all we seem to have done is cleaned up a mess we mostly created ourselves. It just turns my stomach a bit to hear the word "win" applied to the death of 100,000 people, the pain and suffering of countless others, the ruined infrastructure, the financial ruin of our country, etc.
Saddam was a very bad man. Maybe it would have been worth removing him from power twenty years ago when he started gassing his people, but he stopped. I feel I'm a pragmatist and I've yet to see evidence that the day-to-day Iraqi life is better post-war than pre-war.
Oh, and anyone who claims that there was a serious safety concern for the US from either military or terrorist action sourcing from Iraq is ill informed.
So we may have met some goals, but I don't really see what was won.
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.
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The Battle of Antietam (also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South), fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, as part of the Maryland Campaign, was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Northern soil. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with about 23,000 casualties. ------ Casualty estimates from the battle vary widely. The official U.S. account lists 80,987 American casualties, while other estimates range from 70,000 to 104,000. Most of the American casualties occurred within the first three days of battle, when two of the U.S. 106th Infantry Divisionâ(TM)s three regiments were forced to surrender. The Battle of the Bulge was the bloodiest of the battles that U.S. forces experienced in World War II; the 19,000 American dead were unsurpassed by those of any other engagement ------------ 4,119 dead as of July 15th 2008. As of March 2008 there were 8,914 wounded requiring medical air transport. 20,416 wounded did not require medical air transport. Of all the wounded 13,109 were unable to return to duty within 72 hours. Medical air transport was required for an additional 8,273 for non-hostile injuries, and for 23,052 for diseases or other medical conditions. That last one is from the current FOUR YEARS in Iraq.
I caught a piece on NPR this morning stating that there had been a McCain in every American war. They said that McCain had a very real understanding of how war affects Americans.
I would take that a step further - I think McCain has a distorted view of the American military. He has been raised to believe that everyone should be prepared to sacrifice their lives for whatever political issue leads us to war. That's way out of step with most of my friends. I believe that the government should use military force only when absolutely necessary.
I also believe that mankind has evolved enough that we can (mostly) end war. You might think that this sounds naive, but I have faith in the goodness of humanity and the power of the human mind. I don't dispute that there are still times when force is necessary, but I aboslutely believe that an immediate and significant reduction of armed conflict can be achieved in the very near future.
From this side of the pond, it appears that the Brits are bending over backwards to appease even some radical elements of Islam in their midst, allowing Sharia law in various places and half-fearing possible rioting.
I'll give you the "half-fearing possible rioting" bit, but the concessions made to Sharia law are exactly the same concessions the Brits have made for Orthodox Jews and their Beth Din Courts.
I'm not saying either was a good idea, but once the British government set the precedent that a religious institution can setup a parallel system of binding arbitration using religious rules, it was inevitable that someone else is going to follow suit.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"Punishing people for being successful is wrong on any level and for any reason. It encourages business owners to leave the country for greener pastures."
So I guess Reagan was a socialist? The highest income tax bracket under Reagan was 70% then 50% in his first 6 or so years. He didn't see it fit to drop it to "modern" levels until practically his last year as president (to 38%). So he allowed socialism to go on his watch for at least 3/4ths of it...
Oh and the Obama tax plan would take us to 1993-2000 upper bracket tax levels, which are slightly higher than Reagan's last year (39.6% vs 38) and MUCH MUCH lower than his first 6.
So who's the socialist? But seriously, even a flat tax is "wealth redistribution" since the guy that made 10k will only pay 3k on a 30% tax scheme while the poor unfortunate guy that made 200k would have to pay 60k in taxes (under a flat tax!). So one person is (in absolute terms) paying 20x the taxes of another!
Now if you really want to combat socialism, lets talk about wealth redistribution. What would you say to taxing the heck out of companies and then using that money to write checks for all US citizens? That would be socialist, wouldn't it?
Now what would you say about taxing oil companies (in say... Alaska?) and redistributing this wealth to all Alaskan citizens? Wouldn't *that* be socialist?
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