There were 10s of thousands of young Americans killed in Vietnam...did we pull our troops out of Southeast Asia? Did we do it soon enough?
In response to PROLIFE:
>>"BTW, what is a soldier? Soldiers realize they have a job to do, and they will do it. So do most Americans. They know they are not in a day care facility. Anywhere in the middle east is a dangerous place...you talk about 30 soldiers getting killed since the end of the major push. Well,
there were 17 sailors killed in just one terrorist act on the USS Cole....did we pull our boats out of the ocean?
there were 243 Marines killed in the bombing of a barrack in Lebanon in 83, did we leave the Middle East?
there were over 200 killed when our embassies in Africa were bombed...have we left Africa...
and of course even past 9/11, New York City....is still packed with Americans....and terrorists....."<<
Let's see, an administration that's proven that it's ignorant of the Iraqi culture, had no effective plan for the occupation of a country that turns out to have a substantial population that has not greeted us with "flowers and open arms," and an administration that has placed our soldiers in the cross hairs of every Iraqi or Arab group with a desire to see the U.S. our of Iraq.
This in a country where in 1992 the Shiites were attempting to rise up against Saddam in the south and we left them to die because they were desirous of an Islamic rule? The same Shiites that we've now decided we'll NOT PERMIT to have a theocratic government. IRaq's a country with a long history of fierce resistance to occupation and foreign presence and it has little of it's own blood invested in this "liberation." A country where we have now installed a puppet government that doesn't even rise to the level of a "government." In fact, the people we've appointed to the "governing council" are predominantly past Iraqi EXILES.
As far as your statement that "[s]oldiers realize they have a job to do, and they will do it," do you have any idea what you are talking about? I doubt it.
Soldiers in the field often see very clearly that the tooth-fairy bullshit that's fed to the public regarding "open arms," "jubilant Iraqis" and flowers in the street doesn't jibe with the hooded looks, rock throwing children and murderous attacks of people of a different language, different culture, different religion and different political goals. When its their lives that are being lost you can assume that they do a cost-benefit analysis of their own. It's funny how the people who make policy decisions are never killed or wounded when they are wrong, in fact, neither are their children or the friends of their children. It's easy to send someone else, isn't it, and then when they start getting killed in pursuit of goals that look more and more impossible to attain, it's easy to call them complainers. The bottom line is that they're there, they're doing the job the best they can and you're sitting in your comfortable house, typing your cut and paste neo-con drivel and not getting shot at, ambushed or booby trapped. I think I'd rather listen to them than you or the Bush administration when it comes to how welcome we are in Iraq and how much cooperation we're getting from the Iraqis. There is more and more reporting that they are unhappy with that welcome and that level of cooperation and that they are unable to protect themselves in any reasonable manner while they try to do the job this administration has given them. I'd think you'd listen to that very carefully and ask yourself how winnable the "peace" is. |
