Oldie but a goodie....(match is struck, fire is lit)

Bush did something, which was good, in trying to root out the terrorist threat in Afghanistan. Then he got the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, which makes the initial "war on terror" impossible to fight.

Instead of staying the course in trying to cut off the terrorists head (Bin Laden), he ran to fight another war, which has been shown to have been on false pretences, overstretched the military, and lost all credibility with close to all world leaders.

 

In Iraq, hell yes. It will just as easily continue as a murderous civil war without us there as it will with us there.

And set us straight. What should that apparent sewer hole Europe be doing?

 

I just mentioned that the world hasn't figured out how to fight the overarching terrorist threat. But appeasement never works. Europe has a history of hiding its head in the sand until it's too late. I don't see Europe tackling the problem head-on. There's likely a solution between Iraq and appeasement. Of course, debating that would only get in the way of feigning outrage on a message board.

 

Oh, it's not feigned.

 

Ok, so if Europe isn't fighting this head-on, then what is the U.S. doing? It appears it seems happy to fight a war it misled the country about instead of actually going after the leaders of the terrorists.

They should revive the Where's Osama Bin Hidin' bit on Leno, just to jog peoples memories a bit.

 

Tossing the word "appeasement" around in this debate is akin to using Yards Per Carry as a stat to determine the NL Cy Young. It's a completely different ballgame. This isn't World War II, and trying to make the two comparable is foolish at best, and disgraceful at worst. Just because Herr Douchebag is German and writes more intelligently than your president speaks does not mean he can't be wrong. By the way, Yawn, just because you think you can guess the responses of what you clearly know to be flaming, it doesn't mean you've outsmarted anyone. And since you get to have so much fun posting entire articles, now it's my turn. And yes, it's from the Times, so let me put the Yawn Dunce Cap on and pre-empt your whining: "Oh sure, the New York Times, shockingly he pulls out a big fat Liberal source..."
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Ten Months or Ten Years
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
29 November 2006
The New York Times

Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can't even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons -- religion, crime, politics -- that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia's civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war -- it's gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It's Hobbes's jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq's institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq -- and ''self-sustaining'' is the key metric.

 

In his must-read new book about the impact of culture on politics and economic development, ''The Central Liberal Truth,'' Lawrence Harrison notes that some cultures are ''progress-prone'' and others are ''progress-resistant.'' In the Arab-Muslim world today the progress-resistant cultural forces seem to be just too strong, especially in Iraq, which is why it is so hard to establish durable democratic institutions in that soil, he says.

''Some may hark back to our successful imposition of democracy on West Germany and Japan after World War II,'' adds Mr. Harrison. ''But the people on whom democracy was imposed in those two countries were highly literate and entrepreneurial members of unified, institutionalized societies with strong traditions of association -- what we refer to today as 'social capital.' Iraq was social capital-poor to start with and it now verges on bankruptcy.''

On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my ''pottery store'' rule for Iraq: ''You break it, you own it.'' It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell's advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there -- broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam's iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn't take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail -- no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we're not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave -- because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

 

Just noticed I typed 'You're' instead of 'Your.' Damn.

It would be great to get Bin Laden (assuming he's still alive), but part of ignoring the greater problem is pinning all one's hopes that doing so would somehow end the threat we face from radical Islam. It won't. This is about a lot more than Bin Laden. At this point, he's just the face of the movement. Bush had the big picture in mind when we went into Iraq, but he has prosecuted the war awfully. Still, focusing solely on Bin Laden is not the answer.

 

'Disgraceful.' Now there's the self-righteousness I was waiting for.

 

Perhaps, although I think it's more of the answer than you do, but either way, If Bin Laden is "just the face of the movement," then Iraq is a Henna tattoo on the body of the movement. It is not, and never has been, the point, despite what Shrub and Big Dick have fooled themselves (and a frightening number of others) into thinking.

Nobody involved in these threads should accuse anyone of self-righteousness, pall. We're all guilty of it. Though I don't particularly think "disgraceful" is self-righteous, because my point was that it was an insult to the people who fought in World War II to make this seem like the same thing.

 

How the hell was attacking Iraq, which was happily being oppressed by its own leader and a threat to no-one, part of the big picture. That is just absolute spew.

If you want to go after the terrorists and root out the big picture problem, you go to the places they are, not the places they are not. Now Iraq is in turmoil, and the terrorists have come to join in, not vice versa. All of the terrorist units, which were spread out at the time of the initial attacks, saw Iraq as the huge battlefield they could come into and find a lot of people to help them.

The problems now are entirely of America's making. Saying Bush was looking at the big picture when he issued the instruction to invade is ridiculous. As I said earlier, doing something and doing the right thing are not always the same thing.

 

I swear, we could start a thread about the Muppets and it would devolve into arguments over Iraq and Bush-sucks posts in no time.