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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (203134)	9/20/2004 11:45:01 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1576991

You appear to have fallen for the rhetoric. Kerry has said he'll pull out troops by a date certain. You don't think THAT's worse than anything Bush is doing? I think Iraqis should be responsible for their own security. It's hard to understand how $10 billion and one year can't train 200k Iraqis to police the streets. I don't know why the Iraqis aren't policing themselves TODAY. If they can't do it in one year (a certain date), how can outsiders? So no, I prefer a fixed date withdrawal as opposed to a commitment to stay indefinitely. Bush undertood a tough job and yes, the current situation is a tough one. But he's sticking with it. Well I agree he undertook a tough job, but my next statement would be he has totally mucked it up. Don't you think that with more planning/preparation/etc. that Iraq RIGHT NOW should be on its way to a peaceful democracy? At the moment you have a nationalistic rebellion fighting the outsiders for control of their country. They aren't going to stop. And so sticking with it sounds to me like another decade of the previous month's of Iraq news repeating over, and over, and over, and over. Dead Iraqis, dead coalition troups, dead hostages, George says we'll stay as long as it takes. Soon its 2014. Bad idea. In this scenario (which seems highly likely with Bush in charge) I don't think he comes out looking good. He made a tough decision, executed very poorly, and in my mind therefore I prefer to have someone else making the calls for what the US does in Iraq. There is every reason to believe that five, ten years from now people can look back on Iraq and see that it was a good decision from the get-go. wars are not pretty. There is no war in Iraq now - there is a guerilla uprising from a bunch of criminals. And the closest analogy to the current Iraq situation is Vietnam (which was a war - there were two countries fighting). And 5-10 years after Vietnam, few though it was a good situation from the get-go. The only way this Iraq war has a good position in world history is if the country turns into something so far from its current situation that it's really hard to imagine, and I see no reason why "zero-planning George" can facilitate that any more than "lets leave in a year Kerry". Bush's biggest fault, IMO, has been his failure to articulate in detail how the strategy of war in Iraq is going to help the War on Terror. Again you fall for the rhetoric. The war in Iraq is over (the old regime is gone) and there is no War on Terror. There is a campaign against global terrorism, which is muchly different from a war. George Bush is no more a "war president" than Reagan was a war president due to the "War on Drugs". I think the marketing of a War on Terror is George's way of trying to do what he wants without concern for other branches of government or opposing views because it's easy to argue against policies (he's not doing the right things to reduce global terrorism), but its unpatriotic to resist a president in time of war. And I don't get to see many of the commercials or even interviews, but I think Kerry seems to be a pretty poor campaigner. Bush has so many weak points that its hard to understand why Kerry just gets up and says "I'll make jobs!!!" If I were running the campaign, I'd have him pointing out the failure to establish democracy in Iraq, the potential to be there for 10 more years in Bush's "as long as it takes" policy, that George is the son of a former ruler (aren't we trying to get rid of this dynastic system of government in the Middle East), that Saudi Arabia and Iran are much less free and much more supportive of global terrorism than Iraq, that the guy took more vacations than any president before him, that he took the entire month of August 2001 off (these are great soundbytes!), that he was a C student at Yale, so how did he get into Harvard Biz School (he was really, really free), and etc. But Kerry seems to just say "I'll make jobs that count!!", so whatever..... That Saddam didn't have a role in 9/11 doesn't imply that his removal can't play a role in eliminating future threats. Everybody agrees Saddam's removal was a good thing. Any president of the US could have done it by just deciding to do it. Given that any president could remove Saddam, you've got to judge George on how well he has accomplished that goal (and installed a peaceful democratic Iraq which will show the Middle East the benefits of freedom - that was the big picture goal, remember?). I give him a D, which isn't good enough for the prez of the US.... I'm not a big Kerry fan, I just don't think Bush is very smart, his policies are not very smart, and his rhetoric about imposing his "universal moral values" through "strong leadership" is not the best way to go about dealing with the world or even the nation. He sounds like he'd be a good dad to his kids, but not the best head of state. Elroy