8 Months After U.S.-Led Siege, Insurgents Rise Again in Falluja

[RickSp]

Quote by: bishop funny... i thought it was to protect us from wmd's in the wrong hands.. silly me. let the iraqis die for their country.. if they feel it's worth saving, they can fight for it. the best plan i've seen thus far (and only plan as a matter of fact) has been the one issued by the libertarian party.. dunno about the rest of you, but i've read it and found it to be very well thought out.

I thought the only reason to go to war was to defend our country, not to try to reshape the world for some imperial purpose. Maybe we should go back the old name call the "Defense Department" the "War Department" as ir was before WWII.

I think the Libertarian Party deserves a lot of credit for doing what the Republicans and Democrats lack the courage and/or integrity to do.

[bishop]

well, if saddam did have wmd's or at least active programs, then an argument could be made that we did go to war to defend ourselves.. it's a debateable point, and clearly one more salient than what we did end up with - e.g. a wmd-less iraq.

and that plan... hell, you can take the LP ownership off of it.. it's a damn good plan. very reasonable - it doesn't aim to create a vaccuum, but it also doesn't place the fate of our country in the ability/desire of iraqis to fight for their own country. it's a responsible, america-first plan. compared to bush's "plan" of waiting indefinitely until he decides that the iraqis are capable of defending themselves, i'll take the LP's plan any day of the week.. i know the democrats have big ideas of getting nato involved - i think this is a go-nowhere-fast idea to be honest. nato is in afghanistan, although you wouldn't notice their presence or effectiveness.


i'll bet that by the time the next rat-race for president begins (probably only 1 year away now), we're going to get all sorts of proposed plans to make the iraq situation better. but, my bet is that we still won't get any real plan from either leading party. joe biden (the most intelligent man in congress imo).. i've heard him talk about drafts.. not too much about withdrawal though..

[mr.perfecto]

Iraqis are dying for their country--on a daily basis. And not just the police force/army, but civilians too. It isn't coalition soldiers killing them either. But of course this is just a nationalist insurgency that enjoys widespread Iraqi support. Thats why the insurgents feel the need to target their fellow citizens. The city should be razed.

[bishop]

they should be the only ones dying for their country...

if we were to withdraw, my guess is that the nationalists would settle down quite a bit - and they would focus their ire against the terrorists. we already know that there is a good amount of dislike, and even conflict, between the nationalists and the terrorists.. so long as we're there, though, we're enemy number one.

[Zeebadee]

Quote by: dotcoma It is a war that is meant to restructure a deeply messed-up ideology.

Oh, this is good. We have a supreme court that says local governments can take private property away from citizens and give it to other citizens for private gain. We have FBI agents that can write their own search warrants and enter private homes without any notification to the owners. We have at least one U.S. citizen jailed for almost 4 years now in a military prison without any formal presentation of evidence or charges. We have an Attorney General that says the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to us. U.S. soldiers have been convicted of mistreating the very citizens of the country we invaded "to protect" from mistreatment from their own leader. The environment is getting screwed, the deficit continues to rise, a good portion of American citizens can't afford medical insurance, yet illegal immigrants get free medical care, Social Security is going broke, and large corporations with close ties to our elected officials are getting fat no-bid contracts awarded to them for open-ended periods of time with no defined goals and very little oversight.

Perhaps the "deeply messed-up ideology" that we should be primarily concerned with is our own. If we don't anymore have an American style democracy in this country, how can we possibly install one in Iraq??

[BooRadley]

Quote by: dotcoma ok..I agree Sonart, the administation may have been too cocky and figured Iraq a lame duck that would be easy to plow through, BUT..that still does not suggest we should just pull out and let the region have more reasons to launch more attacks on us.

I agree that we can't pull out now. It was stupid as sin to go into Iraq in the first place, but now that we're there, we have to stay. I

Quote by: dotcoma This is a culture war.

No, it's a control war. It's about us controlling foreign governments.