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Politics : FREE AMERICA -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (849)	3/29/2006 2:02:23 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14758

Told You So by Charley Reese Every day that passes, Americans will be less welcomed in Iraq, and I wouldn't take lightly the warning of an Iraqi cleric who said, "You should leave before we force you out." An army that won't fight is one thing. Twenty million people willing to stab you in the back, cut your throat or toss a grenade in your soup are quite another. Our Army is trained and equipped to fight set battles against other armies. It is not trained to cope with a hostile civilian population. It will not do well, and if we insist on staying, the Iraqis will force us out, just as the Lebanese forced the Israeli army out. And remember, life isn't a TV show. The plot won't unfold rapidly. Slowly and gradually our victory over Saddam will turn to dust, and all those snazzy plans of the arrogant neoconservatives for a new, enlightened Middle East will turn to ashes. The Middle East is full of the ruins of superpowers. I wrote the above three paragraphs in early May 2003, shortly after U.S. forces entered Baghdad. Just wanted to remind you that I wasn't in the crowd that jumped on the bandwagon for war, as well as point out that what has happened in the past three years was easily foreseeable, even by a country boy turned journalist with no official sources. If you want to go back even further, to 2001, you'll find that in August 2001, I warned that Americans could expect a terrorist attack inside the United States. Again, no official sources. I just used the one commodity most missing in Washington, D.C. – common sense. You don't inject yourself into somebody else's war without getting shot at sooner or later. As it happened, we got shot sooner, just a few weeks after I wrote that August column. Nor do you need a degree from an Ivy League university to understand that people don't like to be occupied by a foreign army. All foreign armies that have occupied other people's countries have used the excuse that they came to liberate the people. Nobody believes that anymore. Now President Bush has let the cat out of the bag. After all this jabber about listening to the officers on the ground, he said the other day at a press conference that "future presidents" will likely make the decision to bring the troops home from Iraq. So he's talking at least four years, if not eight. If they're really going to stay until Iraq develops into a Western-style democracy, try 30 years. But they won't stay anywhere near that long. The American people's patience with foreign wars – provided the casualties aren't too heavy and there is no cost to those at home – is about five years. The president has about two years left before he will have to brand whatever corrupt authoritarian regime that emerges in Iraq as "a great victory." A man who lies us into war will not hesitate to lie us out of one. Then Americans will have to face the costs. After all the thousands of America's finest have been buried, after all those artificial limbs have been attached, all those mutilated faces reconstructed, all those blind given Seeing Eye dogs, all those mental cases put on a drug regimen, all those billions of dollars added to the $8 trillion American debt, then comes the question, the important question everybody is ignoring right now: What will we have bought for this terrible price? Another corrupt dictatorship in a still-unstable Middle East. We had that before the war. Our corrupt political leaders just didn't like their corrupt political leader, so they decided on "regime change." We certainly will not have purchased a safer America. At the end of this sorry episode, America will be weaker and more hated than it is today. What we are witnessing is the beginning of the end of Euro-American domination of the planet. When the emperors start being idiots, the empire is on the way to the ash heap of history. If you have any grandchildren, you might suggest that they study Chinese. March 25, 2006 lewrockwell.com

To: epicure who wrote (849)	3/29/2006 2:49:42 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14758

So you disagree with Clinton's signing of the Iraq Liberation Act? Not much was said about it here when it passed.

To: epicure who wrote (849)	3/30/2006 1:35:53 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14758

"perceive the liberation of Iraq as none of our business, end of story." You failed to answer the question: "Whatever good they are doing in Iraq, though, it doesn't make me any more comfortable with our invasion- with the reasons for it, with the destabilization of the region, and with the likely results in terms of the government of Iraq, and in terms of the sectarian problems that seem to be in a downward spiral." What do you perceive the reasons for the liberation of Iraq to be? It was interesting to see the coalition of bribed and coerced back peddle at mach speed when their benefactor was at risk of actually being deposed. France, Germany, China and Russia really missed the revenue that Iraq had provided for them. Regardless of what might have been if we had ignored the tyranny of Saddam through yet another Administration, we made it our business. When Democrats were afraid to face the voters and explain why they would not vote to support the liberation of Iraq in 2002 it made your line of reasoning moot. They overwhelmingly voted to give the power to the President, who used the authority to remove a tyrant. What is following is a slow progress of repressed people learning to practice democracy. "sometimes the tyrant is better than what comes after the tyrant." Do you pine for English rule of the Americas too? "The "terrorist bug zapper idea" assumes we have the moral right to turn a country into a bug zapper." It actually only requires a willingness to view current events and witness what is actually happening. Thousands of foreign terrorists have died and thousands more are incarcerated in Iraq. The ranks are thinning. "There is no news coverage in many parts, because it is so violent- and no one can cover the news." The terrorists have learned from past manipulators. They arrange an attack close to the areas that formerly mainstream media like to congregate. They time the attacks so that the easily manipulated media will have time to put it on the evening news. If these media figureheads were willing to work a little, they would venture out and report on US servicepersons working to rebuild schools, and delivering schools supplies to the students. They might report on the opening of better sanitary water facilities than that part of Iraq has ever had.