The way to win in Iraq

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Although I am a Democrat, and a Liberal one at that (although fiscally I'm a Blue Dog), I think that the polarization our country has gone through in the last few years has been unhealthy overall, although it did appear necessary at certain points, kind of the result of overly dramatic pendulum swings - the likes which not seen since Vietnam. I am in agreement that our government functions better when both sides are heard from, which I think was a real problem in the last Congress - denying the minority party rooms for hearings, etc., etc. As a Democrat, I hope this does not happen in the 110th, although there are certain to be some points of contention with these upcoming investigations. It's funny when you trace back the history of the parties, back to being Democrat-Republicans. We now have more ingrained differences sure, but it should never get in the way of what is best for the country - but I'm certain what's "best" for the country is also open to interpetation.

Two things, first before we pulled out I'd really like to think that the government, police force, and national army is strong enough to where it can survive the kind of entropy thats going on there from the inter-faction issues rather than fragment up and have the army and police converted in function to something more like death squads rather than trying to keep the people of Iraq safe from that kind of thing. Yeah, I feel terrible for our guys and what they're going through over there but unless we felt we could take our hands off the structure and not have it crumble in front of us I'd feel far worse for everyone who tried to help us to begin with - shell shock doesn't quite compare to that scenario. Yeah we are stretched thin and we won't bring back the draft because of financial reasons, I still think we need to make sure that we can maintain credibility in the region and if people over there who want freedom in other countries want to aid us as informants or gathering intelligence we really want them to feel that we're responsible enough to have their backs. In 1991 when we went to Kuwait and kicked Saddam's army out we had wanted to cross back over and kick Saddam out of Iraq too but our UN coalition set conditions to where we couldn't - hundreds of thousands rose up in Baghdad ready to oust Saddam and they were all executed. Yeah, I don't know that we were directly responsible for that one but that's still a pretty good strike against us in terms of trust, Somalia was definitely another. Pretty much any time we pull out of a place and either terrorists or other types of extremists get what they want it seems like the progression toward more violence with even less concrete provocation just rolls forward. Its an ugly situation and since we're sucking our economy dry over here its really a lose-lose, for me I still say I'm not mad at Bush, our government, or the white house, I'm absolutely furious with the a***holes who are putting us in this situation to begin with.

The other thing, about the debt, the problem with the economy is lose lose because if we spend money on military like we are we're stacking up our national debt sky-high. However, not doing that means that any successful terror attack in the future could not only put us right back in recession but of course you have the lost of civilian lives over here and that's definitely not something we're a fan of. Heck, part of the reason we still feel responsible for staying in Iraq is because we don't want to see the loss of Iraqi civilian lives - we aren't just bugged out when our own welfare is getting trampled.

Yeah, if we're on a two party system it needs to be a little bit polarized. However, it really scares and unnerves me when either side rants and raves while the other has power just for the sake of reelection or taking back more seats - that kind of politics is something a country can only survive so much of especially when its in a sensitive situation like we're in now. I don't care if its dems doing it to republicans or republicans to dems, its self-destruction out of greed and not even just them - us and possibly all kinds of people who we have involvement with around the globe, its nothing to toy with.

I think most Democrats don't really want to leave the country a freaking mess, but it's becoming evident that "train Iraqi forces to take our place" plan ain't working out either. Mass exoduses, Mahdi army infiltration, a constant inflation of the reality of their preparedness from the Pentagon - only to find out a couple months later that we have less than we had before, but it's improving now because the numbers weren't really as high as they told us before. We were trying to do the same thing in Vietnam, you know, and that's exactly why and how we are bogged down. If history offers any lesson, it is that "Peace With Honor" is an illusion that does not justify the death of the last soldier who dies in the war. Once you know the likely outcome, and realize you have no control over that, it is not only wiser, but fairer to our men and women in uniform, to face the realities. The way that Kissinger cynically negotiated with China for an "honorable" exit was not fair to the soldiers who died while he was doing so. I believe he is now making a personal pennance with his public pronouncement that Iraq is not winnable, perhaps trying to make peace with his past. We should learn from that, I'm not exactly sure what, except that the lesson certainly is not "we only lose if we lose our will". Replace "will" with mind, and perhaps that might be accurate. At the Pottery Barn, generally they don't ask you to sit there with glue and fix what you broke - they ask you to pay for it with cash.

Last edited by tkmattson on 28 Nov 2006, 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The best thing for both major parties, and the third parties for that matter, would be to have Instant Runoff Voting. This would make it possible, for the first time in any of OUR lifetimes, that a third party would have a fair chance at nationwide office. Conversely, it would also protect the major parties from the "Nader" effect. It's a win-win all around, and there should be a nonpartisan citizen's movement demanding that kind of elections.

I think I like you, tkmattson. You obviously know what you're talking about and have given sincere thought to the problems, unlike Xuginwhatever.

Gotta disagree about Iraq being a downward spiral, though. What isn't being said is that while things have gotten a lot worse in Baghdad specifically, things are clearing up in Iraq the rest of the place. America has high levels of support among the Kurds, and moderate levels of support among the Shiites outside Anbar province. Fact is, Baghdad's the battle ground right now. And hence my suggestion at the beginning of the topic to raze a large area of it - it would take the fight out of the most militant faction.

Even if Anbar Province is a lost cause, it would be better to cordon it off, and either split the Shiite and Kurdish areas into their own countries. Who the hell is Turkey to say that the Kurds don't need a homeland?

And now I ask a question.

I'm no economist. I scraped by my economics class in college with a C. Please explain, for my sake and for that of anyone else who wants to actually learn things... 1) Why Iraq is becoming unaffordable. 2) Why the expense matters (considering that we were already trillions of dollars in debt)

I'm kind of a pol wonk, the kind of guy who watches C-Span in the same way other folks watch reality shows.

Thing about Iraq, due to the distance we all are from it, and the fact that so few of us have been there (I lived in Iran as a child, but still never made it to Iraq - still I've got feel for that part of the world more so than many of us Americans), it gets lost that Baghdad is one third of the population of Iraq. Iraq itself, can fit inside Texas. Let's say there was unrest in Austin (Baghdad), and I was in Amarillo (Kirkuk). I could probably sleep at night pretty sure that the fighting wouldn't spread all the way up to me, but that concern still would be there. My own regional set of concerns might be possible invaders from Oklahoma.

That analogy would be decent, except for the fact that in Baghdad's case, to make that Texas comparison fit, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, would all need to be one big city smack in the middle of the state - that'd be equivalent to the population percentage breakdown in Iraq. If you want to draw a population comparison of Iraq to our country as a whole, it would be as if the whole north & northwest with the majority of our established population centers were in unrest and civil war. So when they say the fighting is isolated to Baghdad, it's way more than saying the fighting is isolated to Cincinatti, it's 1/3rd the country's population of Iraq they're talking about. Take that into account, including the fact that we've yielded a full geographic third of the country to the west of Baghdad, Anbar Province, another 20% of the population or so, and we are now officially in control of less than half the population of Iraq.

Razing Baghdad could end the civil war, only to have the remaining 65% or so of the population put their differences aside, joining together against us. Not to mention, that is the one certain way that we would inflame every surrounding neighbor, likely spreading the war beyond our capacities, as if it's not beyond our capacities now.

Which brings us back to $$$, and why the "facts on the ground" actually, in the long run, matter less than the facts in the bank. We are operating every single day of this war on the equivalent of high interest credit cards, having entered defecit spending on levels never before seen in our country, even adjusted for inflation/deflation. Sadly, much of it has been due to scandals yet to unfold, but will in the coming years - that will make Halliburton & KBR as reviled in "red" households as they have been in "blue" households. What they have done to America, and to Iraq for that matter, is serious injustice, and make the whole Enron thing look like tiddlywinks equivalent to a kid ripping off your lunch money. Teddy Roosevelt & Harry Truman must be rolling in their graves. (two of the best corruption fighting presidents we've ever had, one an R, the other a D). Perhaps some monies can be recovered, and paid back to the treasury, subsuquently back to our debtors, but likely not much, if at all.

A couple things must be taken into account, as to why we cannot, financially, continue to pursue the same course of action in Iraq. The first is the nature of the supports of the American dollar. It is no longer, and has not been for some time, backed up in a traditional sense, by gold, for instance. Our dollar is instead loosely tied to price of oil, through a series of controls, and is used, via agreements with OPEC, in nearly all trades involving oil. It is the dollar as oil trading token that actually, albeit indirectly, backs up our treasury. This effect has been somewhat mitigated by the expanding international marketplace, through free trade, but it is still predominant in keeping value in our dollar, the fact that it can be, pardon the pun, liquidated for oil. Oil is our dollar's safety net.

Little known fact about the war in Iraq - shortly before "Shock & Awe", Saddam announced that he was going to be stepping away from that central OPEC tenet, and thus pricing his oil in Euros. After we took Baghdad, one of the very first things we did, even before Saddam's statue came down, was restore oil prices out of Iraq back to American Dollars. Some believe this was the real reason behind the war in the first place, and had it been, and stated as such, there is a good chance that more Americans might have supported such an endevour, if it meant the very livelihood of our country's currency, avoiding recessions like we've never seen before in our 230 years of existence, which might have happened had other OPEC countries followed Saddam's lead - draining the very life out of our dollar with every barrel traded in Euros.

If any one of our larger debtors - Canada, Mexico, China, Japan, or Saudi Arabia for instance - does not at least give tacit approval to our foreign policy, or fears that we may not be able to pay back our debt, they could, again pardon the pun, hold us over a barrel. A quick look at this list makes some of our recent Congressional decisions, or lack thereof, clear - why there won't be a wall FUNDED between Mexico and the US (not something I agree with anyway, but many conservatives aren't aware of why the bill was so toothless), or why we won't do anyting to fix the trade defecit with China - you only have to take into the account the billions of dollars worth of sway these countries have on our public policy to appreciate the level of cynicism involved in saying "We'll fix illegal immigration", but knowing we'd have to end the Iraq War first, and then pay back all our debt to Mexico from it, to even start to do so - simply due to the diplomatic implications otherwise.

Fact is, if a single one of these countries says the Iraq War is over, well, it's over. There's a lot of speculation as to Vice President Cheney's recent "summoning" to Saudi Arabia, that this was exactly the topic of conversation. They may have told us no more money for the war. As far as Democrats now having the purse strings, maybe, but it's our debtors who actually have the purse. Me personally, I'm not really willing to go over my $28,000 share of publicly held US debt for this failed policy. That is the amount that every head of household in America owes right now. That could have gone a long way in my household, I don't know about yours.

There is one way, and one way only we MIGHT be able to financially continue the Iraq War without international funds - MASSIVE across the board tax increases. I think we BOTH know just exactly how good an idea that is. (Not a good idea - excepting the top 1%, the kind of folks who think millionaires are poor, which they are in comparison with one-percenters.) Something tells me if there are any words of his father that George W. Bush does not want resurrected, it's "Read My Lips....".

These are exactly the reasons why energy independence is a national security issue, and why it burns me to no end just how much further along Brazil is toward that goal, as compared with us, using AMERICAN cars that run on sugarcane ethanol nonetheless. Grrrrr.

Hope that helps a little on some of the deeper background that I'm aware of....

I agree - I don't dislike or get bugged about people disagreeing with me, I get irritated when you have pure emotional thinkers or people just running off what's been prescribed to them to think because they can't handle that much on their own. I wouldn't go as far as making a call on Xuin, I have no idea, but just in general. If anything when someone has a very intelligent point of view that isn't on the same page of mine something happens that I really wish happened more often - its a political conversation that I actually learn something from or possibly see something from another angle that I hadn't fully had the opportunity to think out or see out.

And of course the reputation of the f*****g US is so more important than the thousands killed in iraq

It saddens me as a briton that we're associated with this mess.

Our national dialogue doesn't HAVE to be caustic, we've just become accostomed to it being so. That's not to say we cannot have opinions that are polar opposites, there's quite a difference between being someone in the middle who is an opinion triangulator, finger in the wind, and someone whose ideas are dissimilar, but actually takes the time to explain them in a way that does not demean someone who may think the opposite.

And how do you think we got associated in the first place? by the association of illegal harvesting of crops?

glow, you are bumping a thread that is almost 6 and a half years old, and you are replying to a poster who hasn't been on WP for more than 2 years...

O dear, does that mean I must forfeit?

and what must one do when ones thread is hijacked and autopsy doesn't come back?

Then and only then. shall we root around for applause or stay silent until the break of dawn reappears?

next time, i'll initiate a government health warning

you savages are all invariably the same. the only thing i hear from you imperialist savages is ardent desire to nuke countries and spread carnage. only your pro democracy facade conceals your inner savage instincts and acts as a pretext. the only people i hear spewing such fervent desire to nuke and conquer are ironically americans (irony, isn't it). the only thing that will quench these savages' insatiable lust is conquering and destroying every nation on earth, almost reminiscent of their savage ancestors. conquer, nuke, destroy, conquer, nuke, destroy. do you savages know anything else??

you realize the Iraq war ended in 2011, don't you?

The war in Iraq ended because the Americans left?