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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EJhonsa who wrote (100702)	6/8/2003 2:12:46 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Eric Jhonsa; Re: "The Moron in Chief is going to keep us in there until our body bag total gets well over 1000." Uh, that's precisely compatible with what I recently wrote about this happening sometime next year. Re: "I'm guessing that he throws in the towel somewhere near the 10k level." That's right. If Bush is reelected, I think he will continue to send the troops in. As the fighting intensifies, 10,000 over a 4 year period is only about a half dozen per day. That's only 1/5th the Vietnam total, and Vietnam had many advantages, as an arena, over Iraq: (1) The Iraqi people are nutcase Moslem fanatics, the Vietnamese people were peaceful Bhuddists. (2) The Iraqi people are armed to the teeth with modern weapons, the Vietnamese people had to use bamboo "punji" sticks. (3) Iraq in 2003, has twice as many people as South Vietnam in 1975, meaning that our troops are that much more outnumbered. (4) The other Arab countries (also populated with nutcase Moslem fanatics), far outnumber the North Vietnam of 1975. (5) The locals in Iraq come pre-trained to hate us (before we send in our teenagers armed with machine guns), because we've been killing their brothers, uncles, sons and fathers for 12 years. Oh, and we've been starving them too. (6) The Vietnamese couldn't delude themselves into thinking that we were stealing their oil. (7) In Vietnam we had the assistance of the Catholic minority to do the fighting. They filled most of the body bags, but in Iraq, most of the troops are ours. I guess the reason you didn't understand my posts is because you thought I was implying that Bush would throw in the towel next year. No, I don't expect that. I expect other American government officials to throw in the towel, either late next year or during the next administration. I expect the neocons to be claiming that this war was "winnable", if only the US had not been "stabbed in the back" by left wing elements. Or something like that. It's what they said after Vietnam. Hell, it's what Hitler said after WW1. It's what the right wing in a country usually says when the country gets its butt kicked because of something stupid that the right wing did. My opinion on this war is very much a minority one. We're no where close to the end of this. Most people are still sitting around thinking that "wow, this is kind of bad. hope it starts getting better soon". That's cause they haven't run the numbers. I'm hoping that Bush doesn't get reelected, but I think that he is stupid enough, and suffers from the usual human inability to admit error, that if he is, he will keep us in the losing war for the rest of his term. And I think that the American public is way more than stupid enough to reelect him. Our history of extricating ourselves from losing wars is not long. But the Vietnam indication is that it takes another president from another political party to do the extricating. That is, the Republicans have to be able to blame the Democrats for the fiasco, or vice-versa. Otherwise they'll just stand up there, sing the "barney song", and minimize the problem by incrementalization, turning it into an issue for the next administration. By the way, Nixon's mistake was getting elected to a second term. That left him with no one to blame the Vietnam fiasco on. -- Carl

To: EJhonsa who wrote (100702)	11/4/2003 2:48:13 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Eric Jhonsa; Back in June, I wrote: "We could get the butcher bill up to "thousands of American troops", but it would require us stick around long after it becomes obvious that it is a lost cause. Right now we're losing about one a day or so. That will triple well before the end of the year. At that rate, we get to the thousand level sometime next year. Right when Bush is running for reelection." #reply-19012803 Any doubts now about what I said then? Go back and reread the crap that you posted to me at the time: #reply-19013142 -- Carl