funny, I feel like we've had many of these same arguments before with someone else who had a penchant for posting in a certain color all the time (though I believe it used to be blue) ???  I'm just waiting for different fonts to start showing up and a hissy fit over a certain eatery....

Anyone else feel that way too?

i'm just one guy. there's only so much propaganda i can muster.


you do very very well, even though you are a guy.

May I be so bold as to ask where and when.  Not only that why you came back "normal"?  If I would call you normal.


Goodness, are you always such an antagonistic fart? 

Anyway, I served in the 80’s, all over the place, in the Navy… (And I answered even though you wrote that you were not interested, as you said in the previous thread - see how nice I am?).

you do very very well, even though you are a guy.


well, thanks, i do try and i... uh...

hey!

About as dramatic as posting a bunch of figures that have been skewed to prove a point (which is about all you'll EVER get off of a biased website) or putting an "n" in democrat ::)


I didn’t get those facts from a biased website hun, didn’t you see the sources? They were LIBERAL BIASED sources… I know this is tough, but truth hurts sometimes!   


You might want to tell the Iraqis that are still fighting our troops and endangering their lives that they're supposed to be our allies.


Again with your weak sarcasm! The president of Iraq has really been stepping it up, which is disappointing to you I know. But he wants us there, Iraq and their government are our allies, even if it hurts your case!


It breaks my heart to see and hear about families losing loved ones because they have been killed by one of our "allies."


They are NOT being killed by our allies, (WOW)!  Why do you write this way? It is so unbecoming it puzzles me!



If it's only Democrats (see, no "n") that are making the statements, why are even some of the Repubicans turning on Dubya now?


Republicans, (see, an “L”) are against a date for withdrawal. The reason it even passed that way is because the demoncrats put so much pork in it, kissed asses all over the place. But as for the country and the Republicans, they are not for the cut-and-run (and dangerous) withdrawal crap! 



Saying that they need to see "significant progress" or they're going to basically switch sides.

Uh oh, a Fib! They are NOT for running - they KNOW the dangers. For that matter, so do the demoncrats! The big difference, like Reid said, they are playing for more votes in the next election & really need to lose the war to win!


and again, I say "you need to tell those Iraqi insurgents that we're their allies"


That is ridiculous; obviously you are not that knowledgeable about the meaning of the word “insurgent”



Bush doesn't do what's in his heart, he does what's good for his wallet.....


A. You don’t know what is in his heart … B. That’s again, juvenile and ridiculous!



Not yours either, hun. And we're supposed to "vote" on a obviously biased Repubican website why?  I prefer to support the troops directly......


Don’t contribute then, it's your option!. There are only poll questions there, there are not suggestions on how you should vote! If you do not like the results, vote yourself to help change them… but don’t whine about it.  As for supporting our troops directly, how do you do that? By telling them we are losing the war and we want to cut off funding to them? Ahhhhh, feel the love!

Goodness, are you always such an antagonistic fart? 

Anyway, I served in the 80’s, all over the place, in the Navy… (And I answered even though you wrote that you were not interested, as you said in the previous thread - see how nice I am?).






Yeah well I get that from my dear old Dad.

Navy, eh?  I think you sold yourself short.  Wonder if Special Forces takes woman.

Yeah well I get that from my dear old Dad.

Navy, eh?  I think you sold yourself short.  Wonder if Special Forces takes woman.


Tell your dear old dad thank you for me!

Navy, yes; they gave the better deal then

Tell your dear old dad thank you for me!

Navy, yes; they gave the better deal then


Dad's a Conservative Republican.

A better deal?  Is that like going to Bahrain for duty instead of Bagdad?

I thought military pay was the same for all branches.

Serious question for a moment.  Any Republican who even hinted at sentiments like "you cannot change an ancient culture" that you've cited above, he'd have been flamed into ashes by the left, for saying "Them ay-rabs is jest a buncha primitive tribal butchers, barely human, and should be left to wallow in they's own filth."
And rightly so if a Republican said that.  I didn't say anything of the sort.  This is not war.  This is imperial occupation.  Just as the British, the French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese did in centuries past, we are half way around the world to extract the resources from other lands and cultures by force.  I am neither exalting nor denigrating these "ancient cultures."  Empires fall because they serve to enrich the few at the expense of the many both at home and in the conquered lands.  In the 1870s, when the sun never set on the British empire, the life expectancy of a working class male in Liverpool was 20 years.  As Kevin Phillips points out, all the great European empires ran up unmanageable debt until they collapsed under their own weight.  That is happening now to the United States.  Iraq is a great drain on human life and the common weal and a great boon for a few rich dudes.  

The Reaganesque sort of of optimism that "Them Ay-rabs" (much like them Commies) probably were just regular guys, and would do OK if given a shot at freedom, and that all we had to do is topple the first domino, was a notion held almost exclusively by those on the right.
1. Reagan was no optimist.  He was a cynic.   He stated on several occasions we were living in Biblical endtimes, so lets fleece the world and get rich.
2. Reagan did not believe in freedom.  Not for the people of the world.  He believed in the "freedom" for corporations to loot the wealth of the world from the people.  As a direct result of Reaganomics, the average American is less free today than he was 30 years ago.

It's not so much Orwell and Shooting an Elephant, it's more like Rudyard Kipling and White Man's Burden. 
Two sides of the same coin.  Some have called Orwell a racist.  Of course they have.  He is a dead white male who wrote books.  That's the university Women's Studies mentality.  Orwell was really saying this "white man's burden" was unbearable and he saw at the age of 20 in Burma that Britain had both a practical and a moral obligation to cede the empire back to the people the Brits had conquered in the previous two centuries.  Orwell died less than two years after the liberation of India.  As a police officer in Burma, Orwell (known to mum and dad as Eric Blair) couldn't stand the Buddhist priests hanging around and laughing at him, but he knew why it was happening.  



Well, sure -- and that was my second reason for my initial support for the war.  Not just the fun of seeing the entire Middle East turn into "Vegas on the Arabian Penninsula" place like Qatar, but the money that could be made - both in building a few zillion skyscrapers, but in the profits that could be made by drilling/exploration/oil-services companies as them Ay-rabs paid us a few billion to apply modern technology and drilling techniques to get a few tens of billions of dollars (as in, a damn hefty rate of return) out of their underexploited oil fields, even at $20-30/barrel.  That woulda rocked!  American taxpayers invest $100B in a war that unleashes the economies of the area to produce $1T of wealth, maybe 10% of which would have been returned to the treasury in the form of taxes imposed on US companies involved in the reconstruction.  Net cost to the taxpayer is zero, net return to the military-industrial complex is $100B in "free" money, and the fact that the standard of living rises for 100 million people... is just a side effect, but it's a nice side effect.
I believe they are building skyscrapers in Qatar and the U.A.E. because the supreme cynics of the Dick Cheney order are going to flee to these fortified city-states in undemocratic nations.  The U.S. will not be safe for them in another 20 years, not with the way they are grinding down the middle class and creating more inequality and poverty than we have seen since the Great Depression.  The U.S. still appears to be a rich country, but we are like spoiled trust fund kids squatting in a foreclosed mansion.  

You know, when a conservative says "the cost to the U.S. taxpayer will be zero," you can be sure they're about to pick your pockets again.  The Iraq war was sold as a kind of six-month venture in which we would be greeted with flowers and candy and the oil revenues would cover all war costs...and then some.  I don't doubt they're going to try for "Vegas on the Arabian Penninsula," but that scheme you describe sounds completely cockamamie.  It's like something I'd get in my spam email box.  No, the American tax payer will fund it all, and the robber barons will horde all the loot and kick us in the head when we inquire about our share!

Again, this is about empire, no democracy, and certainly nothing to do with raising the standards of living for poor folks here or abroad.  And there is no such thing as "free money."



Problem is, you can't invest in oil wells and pipelines, (nor even the sort of educational system required to raise a generation of engineers) without a robust free-market economy.  So - back to the original line of reasoning, namely that if freedom is a universal human value, then them ay-rabs are people just like us, and their only problem is that their governments kinda suck... the best way to increase freedom and prosperity in that part of the world would be to kick over the first domino.

Sir, I don't know how cynical one man can be, but you seem to be pushing the envelope!
::)

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the saddest thing about Iraq War II.  It looks like Kipling wasn't the only one who was right -- the rednecks who misread his poetry were also right.  They's really not like us.  They're not interested in prosperity, just in perpetuating an argument over which guy was the rightful heir of their religion -- and judging from where the car bombs are going off, they're more interested in killing each other over that than in killing us for invading their country.  Who knew? :)
A lot of folks knew.  It's not politically correct to say so, but while Western imperialism did exacerbate ethnic/religous conflicts around the world, it is not as though these cultures lived in peace and harmony before the Europeans came to town.  It's the human condition.  The liberal democracies born out of two world wars of unprecedented death and destruction are the exception to the rule. This goes to my original point about our hostile presence in Iraq being no help.

The only rational option is to pull out, watch the ensuing genocide from a safe distance, and decide at that time whether or not to work with (or finish off!) whoever wins.
As above.  Nobody here was a fan of Saddam.  However, what Saddam did in Iraq was similar to what Marshal Tito did in Yugoslavia.  Nasty and brutish, but not chaos.

Finish off?  Yeah, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the US and Britain had gone ahead with their 1945-6 plans to finish off Stalin while the USSR was still reeling from its WW2 losses.  We chose not to "finish off" the Russians because the West's voters were, after 6 years of food and fuel rationing, sick and tired of the friggin war, even if we'd just won the damn thing.  And it's usually a better economic bet to deal with the survivor than wipe him out; Stalin was evil, but at least he was sane.  I'm not convinced the winner of the "Iraqi" (Saudi Arabia-vs-Iran, using their respective religions as proxy armies, and Iraq as the battleground) civil war will be as easy to deal with.
If we had tried to "finish off" the Soviet Union starting in 1946, we would have squandered our treasury in what?  An endless occupation.  The very proposition is prespammersite.  American/British occupation of Russia would certainly have touched off World War IV by 1950.  Stalin's paranoia was driving him pretty batty by the end.  

I always say who ever emerges as the strongman to unite Iraq will be much bloodier and more brutal than Saddam.  He will have to be.

Meh.  Dust off, nuke the site from orbit.  The Indians have a lot of good biotech engineers in the pipeline (more so than America is likely to for at least a generation), and a few gigatons' worth of fallout would give 'em just the impetus they'd need to develop a cure for cander :)

OK, OK, you're having a joke here.  A cure for candor?
:P

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the saddest thing about Iraq War II.  It looks like Kipling wasn't the only one who was right -- the rednecks who misread his poetry were also right.  They's really not like us.  They're not interested in prosperity, just in perpetuating an argument over which guy was the rightful heir of their religion -- and judging from where the car bombs are going off, they're more interested in killing each other over that than in killing us for invading their country.  Who knew? :)

well, the american brand of conspicuous consumption -- constantly laboring and spending to accumulate enormous amounts of pretty much worthless stuff like suvs and mcmansions -- that is not a universal blueprint for happiness. much of the world actually detests the idea of living their life that way. i certainly do. but i notice a lot of the folks who DO want to live this way just assume that everyone else must want it, too. i always thought that was a curious phenomenon.

this is in no way an endorsement of islamic radicalism, just saying there's more ways to live fruitful, productive lives than the bigger-is-always-better conservative american model.