Dude, even CNN agrees that an early withdrawal will be catastrophic for the reasons I posted last week. I could see if Fox put this annalysis together, but your own liberal puppet CNN??? Maybe good ole' GW isn't as out of hand as you liberals would like us to believe...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/05/02/...rios/index.html

 

Clearly, someone at Fox, that conservative puppet, has hijacked CNN.

 

 

Fox news is so right winged, that they only can fly in circles.

 

Regardless on whether someone thinks the war was justified or not I don

 

two thoughts come to mind.
1) the powell doctrine. Only engage in conflict with overwhelming force.
The US only put enough boots on the ground to overwhelm the military and topple the government. They did not put enough troops in place to establish " a new sheriff in town". This allowed disorder and havoc to gain momentum, instead of establishing the peace which would allow infrastructure construction to take place. Had the administration gotten the infrastructure ( eltrical, water roads) in place it would have gotten the economy going. to paraphrase the military term a busy soldier is a happy soldier, nothing breeds an insurgent like sitting around without a job and limited future prospects.
2) The china shop rules, also from powell. you break it you own it.
walking away from iraq is a bad choice and trust me I want our guys out of thier as fast as possible. his old man knew better than to go into iraq for this very reason. nature abhors a vacuum. power behaves the same way and someone will attempt build a power base in Iraq. Two scenarios are likely. the first is a balkanized civil war which will rage for years. most likely it will be a strong man who will make hussien look like a whus.

one path would be to escalate to 500,000 to 750,000 troops to for two years and a massive investment in power plants etc. This is about as palatable as a body cavity search to the majority of the US populace. we need to coerce the other countries in the region to step up and assist in establishing stability.

hussien was an SOB, but largely an impotent SOB raving from his cage. While in power he provided regional stability and deterred other groups from grabbing power.

I think it would have be fascinating to sit with colin powell for a while in a unrestricted discussion of the record.

 

Shug & Bolton, very well said.

 

Well, whoever calls the shots on the war should certainly NOT be the congress. "Too many hands in the pot will spoil the soup" or something along those lines. If the all knowing and intelligent American public is dis-satisfied, they will have their opportunity tro vote for the next commander in chief. If they elect someone who prommises an almost immediate withdrawal, so be it. We will deal with the consequences later as we always do.

Many bring up the topic of whether or not we should have used a more overwhelming force to accomplish the goals. I think this is BS. Yes, more troops would have helped them do what they are doing, but it is certainly not a panacea for the problems in that region. No matter how large and overwhelming our occupying force would have been or is now, time is what is needed to train and equip the Iraqis themselves to police their own land. Pulling out before they can do the job is a recipe for disaster where terrorists and the like will have access to resources like never before. These will be unleashed on us, Isreal and the Gulf region. Furthermore on the overwhelming force issue, if somehow we would have sent double the troops, the majority of bafoons in the country would have been screaming bloody murder to "bring them home!" right after Baghdad fell and nothing better than what we have accomplished now would have been realized. It would have cost a hell of a lot more, which the leftists would be singing about as well.

Fooey to this whole damned thing! Let's just make it a parking lot and take the damned oil for our selves

 

we wouldn't have had to train the Iraqis if we didn't invade for no reason

 

No reason eh? Didn't we already talk about the rape, genocide, torture, defiance of UN resolutions, shooting missiles at our jets patrolling the no-fly zone, always playing games with the UN inspectors, and I still say there were WMDs there but he got rid of them while "diplomacy" took it's course. And don't tell me that he didn't funnel at least some money to the terrorist with his hatred of the USA. Cash don't leave a paper trail.

Oh, and we can chew each other up for eight hours tomorrow talking about this and other wonderful topics