http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17104704.htm

Okay, on the one hand, there is less here than meets the eye. We're still training them; we've just shifted top priority to the "surge" and U.S. combat operations.

But consider this:

Also consider the "our strategy sucked" revelation implicit in the following paragraphs:

Um, didn't we have that exactly backwards? Shouldn't we have established security first, then begun the transition? Four years later, we're back to square one.

I suppose you can still blame Democrats:

But that doesn't address the fact that we tried to leap straight to transition without first securing the country, or that military and administration officials fed expectations with their relentless "happy talk" about the progress of the training program -- talk that turns out to have been more than a tad overoptimistic.

So our exit strategy is in disarray, and our response is to send 23,000 more troops and think that will make a difference.

Color me pessimistic.

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Man up.

The whole problem lies in the fact that everyone, regardless of whether you agreed with the war or not at any point from the beginning until now, thought that the Iraq War (or Iraq Campaign, if you prefer) would be pretty easy to execute. We had imprecise knowledge and false perspective concerning the whole reason. We were lead to believe that, regardless of what civilization we are dealing with, freedom would awaken some love of peace and cooperation amongst the population and good will toward the United States. Using that misconception, we thought that securing the peace and stability of Iraq would be much easier before we would have to begin the transitioning phase of the operation. And security was easy to maintain...for two hours. To save face, I believe, the order was given to begin the transition and the difficulty of securing the territory, as well as the fact that stability wasn't achieved, was swept under the rug. And now we have a mess. Although I don't believe it is half as messy as the media and the Democrats would have us believe, it is still a mess, and we are walking a tightrope. However, the Democrats see our tightrope walk as a sign of failure and want us to jump off. I believe, as opposed to the Scaredycrats, that we must continue our tightrope act until we get to the platform on the other side and are able to climb down the ladder with dignity and pride and adulation from the crowd.

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My enduring personal, original quote: Many mistake what should rightly be called "passivism" for pacifism. Pacifism and passivism are COMPLETELY different.
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Ronald Reagan was not the only one to suffer from Alzheimer's Disease. America did, too.

Spanky, you and your Gang can live in your fantacy world but in the real world that "adulation from the crowd" are bullets.

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"I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land" - Guess Who? You go it !

STAYDUHCOURSE! -neocons

I don't quite think you understood my analogy. Once we have the region stable, settled, and running autonomously, which will take a long time, our withdrawal will be under honorable circumstances. However, you don't have patience for nation building, and unfortunately, now that we are nation building, we must not pull out until the job is done. You claim (or at least the claim of those with whom you agree) is that we have already lost and that the longer we remain in Iraq, the least useful and beneficent we will be. I believe that this believe derives from the notion you have of how long a war is supposed to last. You believe that after 4 years, we should be able to resolutely declare victory, and your mindset is framed around timetables. You make comparisons to Vietnam when there either are none or are only superficially, and you make these comparisons based on the fact that you didn't really want us to succeed anyway. You falsely believe that a victory in Iraq would be a Republican political victory instead of an American national victory.

George W. Bush has said from the very beginning that this is not a normal or classical war. It will have to be handled differently with different targets. Most of the country was in favor of this war at the time he made that speech, but now our nation's public opinion has reversed itself. Perhaps most of us weren't mature enough to understand the true ramifications of that policy. Perhaps the American population is full of fair weather friends who desert any cause that isn't running smoothly. To me, however, failure is not an option, and even if we are failing now, we haven't failed yet and can still greatly salvage the situation. A withdrawal of troops now is not as much an admittance of defeat as it is an indication of thin-skinnedness and lack of commitment and resolve. A withdrawal now would be like zipping up your pants when you are only halfway done, and now you've peed all over yourself.

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My enduring personal, original quote: Many mistake what should rightly be called "passivism" for pacifism. Pacifism and passivism are COMPLETELY different.
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Ronald Reagan was not the only one to suffer from Alzheimer's Disease. America did, too.

...

Sorry, friend, your entire argument fails on the first assumption. "We" are not in a position to make the region "stable, settled, and running autonomously."

Never were. Aren't now.

All the rest is simply commentary based on a false assumption.

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"To announce that..we are to stand by the president whether right or wrong..is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

We are in a position to make the region stable because we are responsible for making the region unstable after we apprehended Saddam Hussein. We need to clean up the mess. It will eventually be handed to the Iraqis to do themselves, and it already has been, but we need to take our share of the responsibility for the situation and act accordingly.

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My enduring personal, original quote: Many mistake what should rightly be called "passivism" for pacifism. Pacifism and passivism are COMPLETELY different.
----------------------
Ronald Reagan was not the only one to suffer from Alzheimer's Disease. America did, too.

Sorry. Another logical error. "Responsibility" is not equivalent to "capability." Just because the US is "responsible" for instability doesn't mean it is capable of creating stability.

There is no question that the US bears significant responsibility for creating the mess. It would have been good to have recognized that before we did so. But as conservatives are so fond of pointing out, that's water under the bridge.

The question now is what to do with the mess we created. Hint: The answer is not to continue doing what we've been doing. It hasn't worked.

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"To announce that..we are to stand by the president whether right or wrong..is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

There are 3 myths that the US are prone to.

1. That the world thinks that the US form of "democracy" is the best thing since sliced bread and that the world world would be a better place if they had it.

2. That everybody is Jealous of the US.

3. That the US are world police.

US Hubris: hubris noun arrogance or over-confidence, especially when likely to result in disaster or ruin.

It's the or bit that Europe apply to the US not the arrogance.

jsh1120,
OK you liberal butt head, lets hear your plan.
Lets hear in detail your dam plan, besides running away.
what is the liberals long term plan? not one liberal has
spoke out on this. liberals are as silent as Islamic groups
are against speaking out against radical Islam.

But now it's your turn to speak out with the plan.
Keep in mind that we and WE alone broke Iraq
and the rest of the world WILL judge us on how
we fix what we broke, so a time table will not work here
because if Iraq is not fixed by your dam date, the rest
of the world will say the Americans truly are dangerous
to the rest of the world, because as they can point out
with facts, we break crap and don't fix it.

And to top it all off, when we pull out and Iraq falls to
something as bad as the Taliban, then that problem
too, will be our fault in the eye's of the rest of the
world.

Now it's your turn to speak out about your plan
that will solve those problems I just spoke of.

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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson