SGM

Well..the Big Bad Wolf is dead...
Now -- who do we go after --to have our young men slaughtered and maimed..for the sake of Politics...???
Shame - so many dead and maimed --in the name of PEACE !!
Time to get out of IRAQ - time to get out of every country we are in.. Time to look after our own. Time to CLOSE our Borders.. What it cost sto run this lousy IRAQ conflict for 1 week - we could build that wall across our Southern Border and keep all the freekin illegals out.. All the tanks coming home coud patrol the borders..with 'SHOOT TO KILL" orders.. No different then IRAQ -- except in this case -- it would be for "OUR" benifit -- not some foreign country..
I know the score -- the "rest of the story"...was around during WW2..and the crap after that too........34 years Military -- "OURS" -- USA....
GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW !!!!

dalem

Why?

-dale

CMartel

The results so far from Al Jazeera's website:

Surprisingly close.


POLLS
Should Saddam Hussein have been hanged?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don't know
Number of Pollers: 9057
Close Date: 7/1/2007

A. 40.9%
B. 42.7%
C. 16.4%

Ray

How many Shias and how many Sunnis?

How many Saudis and how many from the Sheikdoms?

All these things have meaning!

Further, polls by computer?

The illiterates have no computers and they are the menace!

The well fed Arab is too scared for sacrifice.

The Emir of Kuwait ran out of his country like a whipped monkey, leaving his own subject to their fate, at the sound of his own tanks moving! Remember?

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

Shek

Is that the Arabic website? If it's the English site, can you provide a link? Thanks.

__________________
"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

wabpilot

My naval tenure was shorter than your military tenure, but I have to disagree. Let me say that I strongly criticise the conduct of the war since the end of major combat operations. It has been one command failure after another, compounded by bad decision making by the national command authority and arrogance. But, that does not lead to the conclusion that we must leave now. Rather, I think we should tell the Iraqi government that they have to win the insurgency and we will provide the training to do that. I think we need to radically increase the training support we provide. We need two to three times as many advisors per Iraqi battalion as we have now. We also need to reassure the Iraqi people that we have no intention of staying in their country. Finally we need to tell the Iraqi government that they do have a deadline, not benchmarks. If they fail to meet the deadline for ramping up against the insurgency, we will pull out.

Weps

^^Agree^^ Time to set down the law and stop playing around with time tables. IMO our forces are fighting a new war, with little training in the area, and I can see our military trying to asses and improvise to this radically chaging battlefield that is alwasy in a state of flux, using "Silly String" to detect IED's and I can't remember what it was, something to do with panty hose and something or another. But what the problem is that there is no stability, no real objective.

__________________

Bluesman

We can talk strategies all you'd like, but I'd like to be sure that we all understand one thing: no matter what approach we use to get there, VICTORY is essential. No pull-outs, no withdrawals, no cutting, no running, NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY, no matter what it costs, no matter how long it takes, NO MATTER WHAT.

We can win, we just have to decide to, and keep the willpower to do so.

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

Shek

This isn't a new war. It's a variation on a very old way of warfare. In fact, our military has fought as insurgents and counterinsurgents many times over. The only problem is that we have never institutionalized counterinsurgency, and this is evident in looking toward some technological solution, i.e. your Silly String example. All the new gear are merely tools, but somehow, we try to treat them as ends.

Take a look at this book (an easy read at exactly 100 pages) that's over 40 years old and used to be issued to cadets here at West Point at some point in the Vietnam era. Unfortunately, when COIN was no longer a fad and it was falsely pronounced that it was a lack of taking the fight to the enemy, we once again lost the opportunity to learn from the past and were sentenced to repeating the mistakes of the past. It is only now, nearly four years after the start of OIF and 3 1/2 years after it was pronounced that we were fighting an insurgency that the Army and Marines Corps have a counterinsurgency manual!

http://www.amazon.com/Counterinsurge...e=UTF8&s=books

texasjohn

I could not agree more Blues, but I am afraid the deck is stacked against that principle. The Democrats have both houses, all the " Gucci people" are eyeing 2008, public opinion polls are down, and I see willpower slipping away.

Rumsfeld essentially by marginalising the professional military cadre has almost brought us to the brink of defeat in two wars. Very, very sad, since by the time he was dumped, the damage was done.

We would have to muster the good people of the US to believe in ourselves again.

I hope we can.

SalemPoor

That's insane.

Chaitanya

yawn.....
you are.

Confed999

Stop baiting. If you have some point, some example, something, then discuss it. If not, try another thread.
Stop baiting. If you have some point, some example, something, then discuss it. If not, try another thread.

__________________
No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

SalemPoor

What is this with this "blaming the victim"? Our arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance created a problem that did not exist. Demanding that the Iraqi government, what little there is, step up to the plate when it is the sole creation of our policies is a bit ridiculous.

While I once whole hardly ascribed to the "We broke it, we own it" school of thought, we are well past the point of being able to fix the problem. It is time to pay the piper and move on. Whether the US stays 6 months or 6 years, one day after that period the forces that we unleashed will be at each other with a vengeance and not one more American life is going to change that.

SalemPoor

Baiting? Hardly. It was an honest response that needed, in my opinion, no elaboration.