Well your wrong, it is not as simple as anti war or not. There are just wars, and there are unjust wars. One of these wars is not like the other. One was started by a president with no good reason behind it, and one was justified because of 9/11. Just to make this clear, even Dick Cheney says that the evidence behind the Iraq war was wrong. How does that even remotely relate to a legimate war to go after who killed the folks in the world trade center? Secondly, to say you don't have an agenda is just like saying "I think your all stupid." Kind of like the regime in Iran saying the vote wasn't a fraud. I would respect you more if you said you had an agenda, because at least then I would know you aren't lying. The more I read your post, I expect you to say "Read my lips".
I'm still interested in the answer a previous poster sought from Denny about why he is against a ramping up of military action in Afghanistan. If our nation is still of the mindset that -- to use a poor sports analogy -- the best defense is a good offense, it occurs to me that a concentrated effort to hit these factions in Afghanistan and also take aim at their revenue sources (opium crops) is an effort worth pursuing.
The benefits of building a democratic Afghanistan are immense, IMO. With India twice electing a moderate economically-focused prime minister, and Pakistan being swept up in the lawyer's movement, you have the potential to solidify a region that has historically been mired in severe ethnic and religious conflict. And that's ignoring the fact that two of those nations have nuclear weapons.
You can't win the hearts and minds of 32M people when there's no infrastructure (like TV, newspapers, delivery of those). The place is barely out of the stone age, the people have no history of being unified as a nation. In spite of its vast size, the country has little in the way of natural resources to generate wealth or a vibrant economy. The best they can do is heroin. So few of the people live in cities or routinely use paved roads, sewer systems, electricity, water, etc. Iraq is about the oldest civilization on the planet, having once been Mesopotamia. They've had roads and sewers and power stations and plumbing and universities and public schools for a long time. The people are quite reasonably educated (certainly compared to the average Afghani). As soon as we took out Saddam, the sales of satellite dish/TV were huge; the people are sophisticated. Putting 500K troops in tiny Vietnam didn't do much for us, this place is huge and has the same really big problem - you can't tell friend from foe, nor does the side we're fighting for care enough to try to help us win. I'd rather see us spend money trying to develop the place, and use military force on occasion should the Taliban resurface. Seems like we only need an aircraft carrier nearby and some special forces teams to achieve our primary objective (keeping the Taliban out of power). Unlike Iraq, we can't possibly "free" all 32M of the population from some despot leader and restore the nation to former glory.
What is my agenda? And why is your choice of war somehow "just" and the one supported by most of congress and a huge majority of the people (see the polls at the time) and against a repeated violator of international law is somehow "unjust?"
Why do you need tens of thousands of troops to destroy opium crops when a few sorties with napalm can do the job? On the other hand, you have two presidents of quite different politics who don't seem to want to destroy these opium crops because it's the peoples' sole source of any wealth at all.
We did try and win over the people. But the Taliban had a better offer- stay with us or die. We still haven't been able to match that one.
Let me ask a reasonable question. OK, it's two. What does victory in Afghanistan look like, and when will it be over? Victory in Iraq looks like a (fragile albeit) democracy, a united country, and what looks like a path to an orderly way to bring our troops home.
I would love to see us undertake a program of paying farmers for their opium crops for one season. Buy them for what they'd get by selling them to the Taliban and then burn them to the ground. Then provide a fertilizer for the crops that treats opium like a weed and offer food seeds for free. Let them know that you'll buy their crop if they don't sell it. However, if they grow opium again, then their crops are burned and they get nothing. If the Taliban forces them to grow opium, offer to provide security.
Well, what exactly is positive? They created the credit crisis by strongarming banks into lending to people who couldn't pay back the loans. Since they've taken complete control, we've lost 2MM jobs and our annual deficit has quintupled from the previous year. They've added $2T in new debt with no end in sight. They wasted $678B on payoff money to their friends and are now paving the way for another "stimulus" package because the first one clearly didn't work. North Korea is emboldened. Our President says Iran is not our concern when an election is stolen from someone more moderate than the current whackjob, but he'll jump in with two feet for a Honduran president who wanted to become Hugo Chavez by changing the constitution. Russia is now slapping him around like Stalin did to Roosevelt at Yalta. Oh, and they're going to use the occasion of the worst recession in 27 years to raise taxes on energy and create a health care plan they don't have to join and for which they cannot pay. Yep, the Left has done a bang up job.
