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

To: longnshort who wrote (261596)	11/22/2005 11:40:28 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1571443

"Forget the fact that we've made remarkable progress under daunting conditions." Absolutely. Remarkable progress. We now have a growing civil war in a region where the three groups, Shia, Kurds and Sunni have a strong influence on their neighbors. We also have a quite impressive training ground for terrorists where that was none. Once things heat up, it has the potential for spilling over and putting groups in direct confrontation where they might not have come toe to toe at all. And to top it all off, we have drained our military, pushed our equipment to the edge, so that when things do ignite, we are in a far worse position to deal with it than we were before. The fact is, there are no good options any more. We are under-equiped to hold the lid on the civil war and we don't have the capability to contain it when it does goes hot. It is possible that we could have headed this off if we had gone in with the people and material that experts said we needed, and policed it at the level that many agreed we needed to. But we didn't. So now we have a situation that gets worse by the moment and we have at risk every asset we have in country. Wishing it were different is no help, neither is dreaming things are different than they actually are. Unfortunately, we now have a situation where Turkey will almost certainly take out Kurdistan. After the Shia smush the Sunni's, which at least has the salient quality of eliminating the terrorists in Iraq, they are probably going to ally with Iran and make them the regional power. The terrorist, miffed at this change of affairs, are going to spread out and probably bring Saudi Arabia down, possibly others. All the skeikdoms are going to dive for cover, making things even more precarious. And at some point, some dim bulb is going to decide that, in the confusion, now is the time to squash Israel... It might not be too late. We might be able to reverse things if we make a Vietnam level commitment. Frankly, I am dubious. It looks as if things have gone too far down this road to reverse things. It is going to get real ugly, and we are pretty helpless to prevent it.