You back the Iraq/Afghan wars. You parrot the motivational pre-war propaganda about Saddam executing a million people and rape rooms. How does a 15-year war killing a million Iraqis and ruining our economy jive with your humanitarian social views, lower taxes, and less government?
I don't back those wars. I voted for Badnarik in 2004, because he would have brought the troops home. I bet you voted for Kerry, who wanted to add brigades to the military. I did back taking out Saddam, but not the occupation that followed.
After a war you occupy with military (or just CIA, if you want another 1990s Afghanistan creating the Taliban). Otherwise Iraqis, who liked Saddam, would have replaced him with someone identical. You should know that backing the initial war is the same as backing a long occupation. So now that you've seen the error of your ways, where are all your posts against these wars? They must have begun about a year after Bush invaded and been anti-Bush. I missed them.
You missed them. I've posted that I understood the occupation, but I did not agree with it. For supporting Saddam, we owed it to the Iraqis to take him out. As to who would be in power after we left, you make an uneducated guess, while I would let the Iraqis sort out their own affairs. I would have been fine with foreign aid type support. As for Afghanistan, I posted many times that I didn't see any strategic reason to be there, or what "victory" might look like, or what it might mean to reconstruct a dirt poor nation that never had any infrastructure. I also posted that I wouldn't protest the wars because I'd rather see us get it over with ASAP and bring the troops home. W was better than Obama. Clinton was MUCH better than W. Unlike many people, I don't hate any one of them.
http://sportstwo.com/threads/107570...nt-in-Ira...?p=1524828&viewfull=1#post1524828 A post I made in 2007.
It's certain, not a guess, that without a long occupation, the Baathists would have remained in power. So an initial invasion required a long war. You can't separate the two. Once you have a baby, you accept a long-term responsibility. If you don't want to kill a million people and ruin our economy, then don't invade. Otherwise it's inevitable. Similarly, yesterday Obama told Republican candidates that threatening war is not a game. (An Iran war would be much longer and more costly than in Iraq, a smaller nation.) Many many Americans screamed this during the rush to war but your side was bloodthirsty as usual and said it would be over in a week like in 1990, supposedly. (That one ended fast only because Iraqis had little at stake in Kuwait so they chose not to fight.) You really think that protestors prolong wars? I've never seen them have any effect, from Vietnam and on.
A longer response. What I supported was getting rid of Saddam. He was evil. He took oil-for-food money and built palaces the children of his country went without food and medicine. He gassed his own people. We flew no-fly zone missions over his country to keep him from continuing that, but he fired upon our peacekeeping planes regularly. Clinton bombed Iraq on the day Lewinski testified before the grand jury, and republicans noted the coincidence but also said Clinton had to do his job as commander-in-chief. And more importantly, we helped make Saddam what he was. We gave him the intel to defeat Iran, in spite of those Iran-Contra weapons. We went into Panama and got Noriega. We didn't stay and occupy. That is the model - kill or capture Saddam and leave. Neither Iran nor Iraq would be a tough war for us. We won the Iraq war within 2-3 weeks - Mission Accomplished! Occupying Iran (or Iraq) is a very different thing. I don't suggest we attack Iran, nor do I suggest we should have occupied Iraq. If we did attack Iran, it'd be over in 2-3 weeks as well, and we should destroy their nuclear sites and leave. Let their people sort it out. Iraq was 2/3 Shiite, not Sunni-Baathist. If they ask us for aid, we give it - send them building supplies, food, medicine, portable generators, and so on. The USA is a good country and that kind of charity is hardly unprecedented. As for Obama, I saw his speech and liked what I heard. However, I saw his speeches last year and did not. I get it that it's an election year, and he's actually trying to do popular things. My beef with the guy is he didn't do these things the first three years. You say there was a rush to war. 9/11 happened in '01. We invaded Iraq in March of 2003. NINETEEN months passed. That really puts the hurt on your "rush to war" rhetoric. During those 19 months, there was wide open debate in public. Noted Republicans wrote opinion pieces in the NYT opposing military action. Congress VOTED to authorize the action 297-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. 80% of the people thought the war was justified in May, when the war part was over. And as I posted earlier, we lost the Vietnam war. Not only were the protests a HUGE factor in us losing it, similar but much smaller ones during the Iraq invasion time frame clearly extended that conflict (comforted the enemy). Where were these protests during Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan War? Sure looks like partisan protests to me, rather than principled ones.
Ben and Jerry's sells ice cream. The Earth revolves around the sun. My dog watches Bonanza. We're listing things that have no relation to each other, right?
Duh. And? The administration made several cases for invading Iraq, and one of the key ones was to disarm Saddam so another 9/11 wouldn't happen.
Nope. We're listing the time frame that makes up jlprk's "rush to war" - there was no "rush" but a 19 month deliberation. A very public deliberation. Bush spoke at the UN. Powell presented satellite photos to the UN. Congress debated giving the authority. People on both sides of the issue freely wrote op-ed pieces. And so on.
we went over there to disarm saddam of all his saudi arabians? wait what? wasnt saddam against al queda, as they threatened his power?
Saddam used mustard gas on the Kurds and against Iran. One of the reasons given for invading was to prevent him from getting his WMDs into the hands of terrorists. There is an Arab saying, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Saddam was disarmed. For that, the world is a better place.
