there is a big difference between 60-90 people killed in one week(still only about 3 per week average) and having hunderds die every week.

I think Israel properly compared it with their own personal struggle against Hamas. The numbers are not extremely large like Nam, but they are consistant and seemingly random. At least in nam you knew clearly who was enemy and who wasn't. Now anyone who passes you on the street is a potential enemy in Iraq and could kill a large number of people

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What does the European Union relations commissioner know about it? Must be nice to just "sit on the sidelines" and watch.

...Like the horrible deaths of over 3000 Americans

quote:

"If things go wrong in Iraq we will be living with the consequences for a very, very long time," he added.

your right, there is a difference between the iraq war and vietnam.

Vietnam was an embarrasment, Iraq will be a catastrophe

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"The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false" - 1984

cannot compare them because we do not know how bad Iraq will get?.
While we are on the subject who said 3000 americans died i take it that
you are referring to the WTC .They were not alll americans!

What are you talking about?

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in Ômission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome." --- George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (199, pp. 489-90

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You did? How? Did you have a crystal ball? Just curious what uniforms the VC and sympathizers wore. I'm further curious at how you could differentiate a communist with a nationalist.

The reason I ask is that a lot of us had trouble identifying the 14yr old girls with grenades in their baskets and the 15yr old boys with an AK47 that would pull it out and spray a sidewalk bar with bullets.

oc

Your point taken. Does that make it less evil? It was still on our soil.