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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (13030)	4/7/2004 1:19:33 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Indeed the bashing will continue regardless of who wins. Carter and Clinton were bashed. I don't think that Bush has had the amount of hate leveled at him from the left as Clinton did from the right. In fact, I think that Bush is getting the back lash from so much Clinton bashing. You know for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. One of the primary focuses of the presidency should be to unite the American people. Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy come to mind. They were people's presidents. Yes the president needs to lead, but he needs to have a sense of who the American people are. In the case of Bush, he has forgotten about uniting, and has led an administration bent on dividing. One example is the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Regardless of how one feels about gay marriage, backing a constitutional amendment is clearly a divisive tactic. As the facts begin to emerge about the war on Iraq and why it was engaged in, people are more and more seeing that it was not part of the war on terror. That the Iraq war was a part of a larger agenda, one of democratizing the middle east. Unfortunately you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. I much prefer the method of winning over eastern Europe to the family of democratic nations than the force feeding of democracy going on in Iraq right now. When the people of Iraq want democracy they will find the path. But they will not respond well to military occupation. I agreed with the war on terror and bin Laden. But Bush surprised me by cutting short the war there, and suddenly becoming fixated on Saddam. All the bluster over the WMD and the imminent threat seemed surreal to me. Especially as a show of military force in conjunction with the return of the weapons inspectors was turning the tide in Iraq. That in conjunction with a successful capture or killing of bin Laden and his minions, would have surely allowed us to put additional pressure on Saddam, build consensus in the UN and NATO with regard to Iraq. I feel we laid our hand out way to early in Iraq, like a drunken cowboy calling the hand on the first round when he was only holding a pair of 5's. Wrong strategy. Wrong outcome. Now we are stuck with what was served up, even though it was ill though out. We have no choice but to prevail in Iraq. Personally I prefer Kerry's plan of internationalizing the conflict. This will take the American face off the occupation. More over we need support from the moderate Arab nations. I fear that what little support we have now in Iraq is eroding...leaving the US holding the bag. Said it before...that this strategy of pre-emptive unilaterlism is a wrong path to go down. It's going to cost a lot more lives and money to get the job done. Defining what the finished job looks like has still not been articulated by this administration. On top of that the landscape in Iraq has shifted considerably, though predictably from one of a dictatorship to one of a fractured nation being pulled in multiple directions. Sunnis, Shia, Kurds and terrorists...all mixing it up with the "liberators" come occupation forces. I have been warning of such an outcome since the beginning of the Iraq war. Now we have nothing to look forward to except a tough slog...as Rummy calls it...in an ill defined mission against ill defined forces in a changing landscape. The battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world has been set back by these actions. Making it fertile ground for recruiting terrorists and jihadists. Orca