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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (486274)	11/4/2003 12:05:06 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

You'd be funny if you weren't actually serious about your paranoid, one sided views of life. It must be nice to believe that every vet that agrees with you is a "great [man or woman]," while those that disagree with you are a "buncha pansies who are too shell-shocked by Vietnam." That's a ridiculously stupid point of view and you can try to personalize it to me, but you threw a broad net over a big group of people and now you can't pull it in, can you? The fact is that there are rational men and women with multiple backgrounds and from all walks of life and all regions that disagree with you. In fact, the polls indicate that despite the "good news" efforts of the Bush administration, the majority of Americans are beginning to question the wisdom of our Iraqi adventure. They question both the wisdom of going in and the wisdom of our current strategy. These are people that are wondering what we are going to be able to say we bought with those lives and those billions of dollars when we finally leave Iraq. You can vomit out your fears disguised as anger and toughness all you want. You can parrot the administration's rhetoric about how we will not fail in Iraq over and over again. History is replete with instances when that rhetoric was the theme of the day for our nation and many others. It's a sure sign that things are going badly when you have to talk about how determined you are not to fail. The fact is that it's not in our hands just as it wasn't in the Russians hands when they occupied Afghanistan and set up a puppet government, and just as it wasn't in our hands when we entered S. Vietnam and set up a puppet government. The question of whether we are able to accomplish our objectives in Iraq (whatever they are), will be determined in large part by the collective action of the Iraqi people. Right now we are facing a guerrilla type of war, aided by foreign fighters we like to call terrorists. We are having a hard time containing our losses because of what the administration likes to call a "lack of intelligence." What they mean is that the Iraqi population shelters the terrorists and that they are not volunteering to us the information we need. Many are going further as you'd know if you'd watch public television. On the Lehrer report there are films of post-American loss sites, and there are usually crowds of joyfull, cheering, dancing Iraqi men, women and children. Get a clue. The guerrilla's will NEVER be defeated unless and until the Iraqi populations that feed, shelter and hide them change their view and turn against them. Do you think that's going to happen soon? Maybe you think we can "hire" them to change their views and support us? Or maybe it's about big ideas, and cultures and religions and history. In the meantime every one of our men and women in uniform and in civilian jobs in Iraq is walking around wondering if the next bullet or bomb is about to end them. Think about the panic in the DC area when we had one sniper team shooting a person every few days out of a population of millions, and then think how it is for them. They don't know who, they don't know when and they don't know where, but they sure as hell know that there are a LOT of people that are hunting them and that are pretty good at killing them. It's those people I worry about, not people like you that are scared silly, angry and grieving about an event that already happened. What makes it even worse is that the moves we have made in Iraq aren't even calculated to make scared people like you safer. The level of hatred and determination on the part of terrorists and terrorists in making has skyrocketed since we've preemptively invaded and occupied Iraq. Even Rumsfeld has finally asked the obvious question of whether we are facing a situation where we are seeing more terrorists created than we are capturing and killing. I think it's obvious and so does most of the world outside of the "home boys rooting for the U.S. team." You can lay all your deeply held fears onto "Muslims" if that makes you feel better. You can tell yourself how great we are and how evil they are until you believe it, if you want. The ugly truth is that it's about the REALITY of the world and that's something that neither you nor the Bush people seem to be able to understand. There are different cultures, religions and interests involved and the use of blunt force against those religions, cultures and economies is sure to lead us into a renewed understanding of the limits of power. It's a lesson that powerful nations never seem to tire of learning. You better take another look at what we were unable to accomplish in Vietnam, and why, and another look at what the Russians were unable to accomplish in Afghanistan before you mouth off too much about a "buncha pansies who are too shell-shocked by Vietnam."