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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (66703)	8/1/2006 2:50:34 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93284

Much of the DNC position is to claim that they would have invaded Iraq in a smarter manner than the stupid Dumbya did. And this article, titled "Iraq : A Total Mess" was from a year ago. What kind of a mess is it now?! We are running out of adjectives to describe Dumbya's shit! Iraq: A Total Mess By Tom Murray Elm Opinion Editor My good friend from high school just finished his tour of duty in Iraq on Monday, and he will be in transit back to the States for good. Thank goodness he is all right. It will take him about eleven days to get back home, with stops in Kuwait, Turkey, Germany, and North Carolina. Like so many others from my hometown, he is the product of a blue-collar family, with no means of paying for college. My friend joined the United States Army Reserves in order to pay for school. After training, he attended Mansfield University in Pennsylvania where he was majoring in music education. However, he was only there three semesters until the powers that be sent him off to Iraq to "find the weapons of mass destruction" and later to "liberate the Iraqi people." Now, this is not a sob story about how my friend was pulled from college to go fight across the pond, or how the Reserves are being forced to fight. My friend would not have joined with the illusion that he would never get deployed anywhere. Besides, my friend comes from a long line of veterans from the Second World War to the present. However, the illusion my friend did have was that when he was asked to fight for his country, it would be for a worthy cause. How wrong he was. My friend was home for two weeks in August for leave, and he told me about his experiences. "The military is filled with idiots," he said. "You would think that the greatest military in the world would have impeccable leadership, but you're wrong. I am way more intelligent than the people leading me... having seen how our military runs, I am surprised that we can win wars at all. It really tells me something about the people we are fighting." He continued, "Most of the Iraqis don't want us there; at least with Saddam things were stable. Now the country is a mess, a total war zone." My friend is a gunner on a Hum-V, you know, the guys that keep getting blown up as they ride through the streets. I would never want that job, so I was surprised when he told me that he had volunteered for the job, saying, "I'd rather it'd be me in the gunner seat, than some of the jackasses in my company. Everybody's life in the patrol depends on me and what I do. If I see a car approaching us quickly, I will open fire, but the Iraqis know better. They know how to act when we pass through, they know our policy is shoot first, ask questions second." When he told me this I was floored. He meant to tell me that you kill whoever doesn't follow the directions? I guess that was my naive inner liberal coming out. But then I thought about what he said: "better safe than sorry, better them than me. It stinks that they are dead, but we've been there long enough that they know the rules, especially because our Hum-Vs are equipped with loud speakers that constantly give directions out in Arabic." I figured I would do the same thing in his position. The more we talked and the more he explained how horrible things were over there, the more I realized what a mess this war really is. My friend told me that no one over there is our friend, and that the "trust no one" attitude has taken over our soldiers' brains. I write this article because I am thankful that my friend is coming home alive, because I find it ironic that my friend went to war a George W. Bush fanatic and now can't even say his name, because I want people to realize what a mess it really is in Iraq, and because this week the number of Americans dead in Iraq has broken 2000. Think.