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

To: PartyTime who wrote (528684)	1/24/2004 4:27:11 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I'm not sure about the military vote. The officers are usually pretty savvy about what political party butters their bread. After all, in any bureaucracy you get ahead by aligning yourself with the entrenched power. From experience I can tell you that the enlisted ranks are probably just doing their job and trying to stay out of harm's way. If they were convinced it was the right thing to do going in, they'll turn slowly over a matter of years. I'm sure they'd like to believe that their sacrifices and losses have meaning. The one thing you can be sure of is that there is no military supplied information coming out to them that is not rah-rah. If we stay long enough and enough of them die so that they are wondering what it is they are dying for, then maybe you'll be right. The reserves are a different matter. Older, more educated and with a less strong umbilical cord to the military, there will be many among them who come home and ask "what the hell are we sacrificing our men and women for over there?" No matter what you may think of the various causes alternatively or cumulatively offered to justify the loss of men and money, at some point I believe the question of what we CAN accomplish over there will begin to dominate the question of what we say we WANT TO accomplish. When that happens the realities of a different culture that whose values are often diametrically opposed to western values will overcome the pollyanna proclamations of the Bush crowd. Then the question will be "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?" I suspect that the answers will lead to the conclusion that they either had terrible judgement or that their motives were hidden and that they misled us all.