I don't give a damn WHO you know who did a tour. Assuming you're not simply being an asshat liar (a might big assumption, but for the sake of discussion, I'll go with it), if you're 2-tour buddy thinks the war is worth sacrificing for, that's an opinion he's entitled to, because he has made the sacrifice himself. He'll put his money where his mouth is.
You sitting in the cockpit running the gnar (as you allegedly do) while saying it's the right thing for OTHERS to do, that makes you a coward in my book. Coward. Something I have no respect for. Until you have raised your right hand in oath to the Constitution, giving years of your life to defend rights that actually don't fully apply to you while you're in uniform, you have no idea what real honor and real sacrifice are about. It's not something I take lightly, nor is it for anyone who wore the uniform, who sweat, suffered, and bled to earn the right to say "I'm a veteran."
I'll be honest: I think I'm a better citizen than people who haven't served, but I generally don't carry a chip on my shoulder about it. But when someone like you, CasperMike, comes along, yeah, I wish there was a draft again. In those moments I wish the long repressive arm of the government could subject you by force to the things the men and women in uniform today VOLUNTEER for.
Irrespective of your yellow streak, for which I hold you in utter contempt, you're obviously an idiot, as evidenced by your poor grasp of the politics that have unfolded before your eyes since 2003, and that doesn't even begin to touch on your atrocious grammar. In addition to making me an all-around better man than you, my 4 years in the Army paid for my Bachelor's degree.
Spell check. Think about it.
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. - R.W. Emerson
attacks in london discovered! germany discovered! america happened!
did i say iraq attacked anybody? i don't think so.
ok, i don't know anybody who lived through the shit huh?
okay the boater going down the main event of bluegrass up side down is my good buddy, he has been in 2 tours already. he was out on patrol, roadside bomb blew the other entire side of the humvee. he was the only one who survived in the vehicle!
i guess i haven't talked to enough people.
anybody know what will happen once we do pull out? is violence really going to stop? do you think they will just forget about everything? and we can just be friends?
mike - give up dude. you're fighting a losing battle, just like bush is in iraq.
helio - very nice post. you made the point better than i did.
livingston - i'll have to check that book out. sounds like it might be a good, although depressing, read.
i think you have all seen michael moore propoganda movie to much.
whats going to happen when we do pull out? do you really think the voilence will end anytime soon?
i want to hear what everybodys else thinks should happen if we do pull out. besides just bashing me what do you have to add that would help the problem?
Depends on the pullout.
One of the sanest measures I've seen is the soft partitioning of Iraq by ethnicity. They're already killing each other based on that anyway.
Stage US troops in the Kurdish region. That region has been autonomous since after the first Gulf War. It has friendly relations with Iran (the Shia hegemon) and the Sunni. Al Qaeda in Iraq does not operate in Kurdistan because the local populace will turn them in to the Americans. They are extremely friendly to the US. Set up bases there from which we can maintain power projection opportunities, and stay safe inside a friendly operating environment.
Next, establish some bases in Western Iraq to maintain a presence against the Wahhabists who infiltrate from Jordan and Syria. Not as safe a proposition as with the Kurds, but many Sunni tribal leaders "seem" to be leaning toward pro-US stances for two reasons: First, and most importantly, simple demographics predict that any central government in Baghdad is going to be 1) Shia dominated, and 2) Powerless in the provinces. Politics abhors a vacuum as much as nature, and the only Leviathan that can protect against Shia dominance is US power. Second, Al Qaeda doesn't care who they kill, and since 2005 has adopted a strategy that it's more successful to fight any Iraqi who aids the US than it is to fight the US itself. This has pissed off the Sunni to the point that they've realized "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." That's us.
Next, back to Kuwait with most of our troops. That's our supply line anyway, and the ultimate goal of any political strategy has to be to maintain the flow of oil out of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
This leaves the Shia, which is not a hegemonic entity in Iraq. There are many factions of Shia, both within Iraq, and then there's also Iran. Our presence in Iraq had enabled the Iranians to look like the good guy to Iraqi Shia. The Iranians are playing all sides against the US. Remove our presence from Shia areas, and the civil war has nowhere to go but inward. Then Iran will have to choose who it's going to back and who it's going to let die on the vine. This is the civil war consequence of our pullout. It's already happening, we just keep a slow burn on it by interdicting whoever seems to be most powerful on any given day. Let that job fall to Iran, if they want it so bad.
A phased pullout of US forces puts the pressure on Iran's Shia influence to do something, as well as a few Sunni groups, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. While we are in Iraq, all these factions benefit by American power being diluted sixteen different ways (I just pulled that number out of my ass, much like everything Caspermike says). It's easy to give support to someone and say 'go kill the americans and get them out of your country'. We leave, and suddenly they actually have to show themselves doing something productive, and they have to pick a side, take a position, and invest in it. All everyone in the region is doing now is investing in the Americans to lose.
Wow, it's like I read something about this, isn't it?
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. - R.W. Emerson
What will happen after we pullout? The same thing thats been happening for thousands of years but it wont be my tax dollars or american lives that are lost. Seriously, the only reason we are there is for oil and that may or may not be a valid reason but at least face that fact.
Casper, I'm not trying to bash you but you are pathetic. I have two direct family members over there. My nephew is on his second trip and I pray he come home. Now about you and your lack of any reality. Michel More, Bush, Kerry, Clinton, Oriely and Oberman work for the same team. A gang of criminals who will eventually be outed. Politics are all a sham, A distraction to divide America. And man it works good on you. Bash on that for a while.
seems like the only one with something positive to add is helio.
distraction to divide America? ahahah okay the world works as a whole we are not the only counrty involved with whats happeing in the middle east.
when i added something positive to the discussion, you didn't want to acknowledge it, so here it is again, my solution to the problem: get our forces the hell out of their now. as gh said, we have not to this point done much if anything in the way of something positive for the region. we've actually made things worse, both for iraqis and americans, and probably the planet in general. so why continue to try fix something that can't be fixed? admit the mistake, save what little face you can, and end the senseless killing of american and other forces for what is essentially a grab for world power. let about three or four generations pass in order to repair the damage caused by this war and the administration.
as far as what to do once we're out of the country, i have no answer for that. it's a total lose-lose in my opinion. we stay, we continue to lose lives and waste a whole shitload of money in the process, but the problem of civil war in the country stays the same (after all, we haven't fixed it yet). we pull out, we end the loss of our forces' lives, but not civilian iraqi lives. we presumably would end the monetary commitment of funding the war, but i would guess that we would need to provide some sort of police/security force for all of the private contractors in the region (that's a whole different topic) that are doing various types of work. anyone else know how that would play out?
mike, as far as you outing bush for being unamerican among other things, if you continue to state that invading and occupying iraq is a good thing for this country, you're the same type of person: head in sand and refuse to admit that you're wrong.
I'm a veteran of the first gulf war, which I don't even count as 'combat' compared to what my brothers in arms over there now face. I had 100 hours in a combat zone, and I got shot at more by americans than by Iraqis, by a ratio of 2 to 1.
I 'believed' in the causus belli to begin with (that means the reason we ostencibly went over there in the first place, Casper). I was wrong.
Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Hussein's regime, although he did make guests of a couple terrorists of note (Abu Nidal to name just one), and he did allow a miniscule, fringe training camp that had no clear affiliation with Al Qaeda in Northern Iraq. That's about as much "terror" as you can associate with him after his fiasco attempt to assassinate Bush 1 in the mid 90s.
Now, terrorists of all three stripes (that's Sunni, Shia, and Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even effing EXIST until we invaded) are using Iraq as a training ground. And our successful countermeasures to IEDs only made the terrorists more resourceful. Now they use Infra-Red triggers for the ESPs (or is it ECPs - explosively shaped projectiles). IR can't be jammed. Cell phone frequencies could. And the extra armor we put on Hummvees is no match for an ECP. Those are essentially HEAT rounds (High-Explosive, Anti-Tank) as opposed to the poor-man's bombs they used to use. Yeah, we can thank Iran for that technology. But Iran wouldn't have exported it into Iraq if Hussein were still there (ah, how sad that those are now the good old days).
Bad enough we're ineffectively occupying a country, allowing the civil war we created the environment for to burn slowly, bad enough we're spending my tax dollars, and worse, the lives of men and women who are my true brothers and sisters, and horrible that we made Iraq under Hussein look stable. I've got to listen to pussies who "thought of joining" play armchair soldier from 10,000 miles away, who know nothing of guys having a friend cut in half by an IED in the seat next to them.
I know what goes into being a soldier. I did it for four years, and it's one of the proudest achievements of my life. And I wasn't some REMF, I was an M1A1 tank crewman, which is still a helluva lot easier job than doing combat patrol on foot in Iraq. It pains me, it makes me ill, that we're throwing good boys and girls into this fucking mess. Get them out of there. Let Al Qaeda, the Sunni, and the Shia do what they want to each other. It's not worth another American, unless it's you CasperMike.
These guys are doing the impossible to save Bush's sorry ass from having to admit he fucked the whole thing up. That's the only reason they're there. If he'd wanted to fight terrorism, he'd have never gone in; if he'd wanted to create a stable environment for democracy, he'd have had an occupying force a half million strong. He half-assed the whole thing, but that's pretty much how it seems he's lived his whole life, isn't it? Half assed, on a silver spoon.
Yeah, I voted for Bush twice. At least I have the good decency to be ashamed of myself for it. And yeah, I drank the cool-aid in 2003. By 2005 I knew the whole thing was, to quote a great book about another horrible war, "A Bright and Shining Lie."
Bring them home. Now. Fuck every other consideration.
Helio, this is one of the most eloquent and intelligent discourses on the subject I've seen in three years. I follow the issues closely, but I must admit that I gave up arguing it a long time ago as most Americans are too misinformed as well as too far removed physically and emotionally to argue the points intelligently and therefore I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I am glad that there are people such as yourself who are in touch with both sides and still have the motivation to spread information to the "ignorant masses" as it were.
And Casper- Without judgment, a few things to think about:
George Washington said, "I will venture to assert that a great and lasting war can never be supported [by patriotism] alone. It must be aided by the prospect of interest, or some reward." What reward have we seen from this war and what is our true interest here? Is it an interest of the people or simply an interest of the wealthy and connected? The majority or the powers that be? Perhaps it's time we start exercising our rights as Abraham Lincoln encouraged that whenever the people "grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
CMike, pull your nose out of that paint can for just a second.
Are you really still buying that we went into Iraq for any reason having anything to do with 9/11? Woh. That's pretty heavy, man. Maybe you just need to sober up for a few days, find your center, get a moment of clarity. Admit your mistakes. Then go back to huffing.
The Iraq war has been planned for decades. It's all in a paper co-authored by Cheney, Wolfy, Rummy and others back in the mid '90s. The power of American outrage is an easy thing to harness. Ask FDR. Difference is, the country (or two cities) we levelled in 45 actually had something to do with bombing us.
jimmyned, you're my kind of paranoid bro. I love it. The Matrix is real. But it's not the machines that controll us, it's the rich people. Keep the idiots comfortable and they'll sleep through anything.
Helio, you appear to be an intelligent man. I can't believe you voted for Bush twice. I still owe you two kicks in the nads. Ah, alright, we'll call it one. I voted for Nader in '00 so I guess I'm not too much brighter than you.
Iraq is beautiful this time of year. Temps only topping in the 90s. And it's way safer to walk around than LA. That's why the guys wear 45lbs of ceramic and kevlar body armor and carry automatic weapons. That statement, actually, narrowly edges out everything said by CasperMike as the dumbest shit on the thread. About 1500 Iraqi civilians die violent deaths...per month. I think even Bush would do something if that shit were going down in a US city. Well, I guess it depends on which city and the demographics involved.
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I hope in the future Americans are thought of as a warlike, vicious people, because I bet a lot of high schools would pick "Americans" as their mascot. -Jack Handy
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