Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (36644)	4/22/2007 11:54:17 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541710

If you go attack a one legged blind man, who you claim had a gun but didn't, beat him in to a coma and kill him, is that a win? If the choice is a win or loss, it's a win. But that analogy isn't the best. If you kill a wealthy father of ten because he beats his kids every night, and then the kids end up fighting each other to death over the inheritance, and you try to stop them for years, then finally after there are only 5 kids still alive you say "screw it, I've done my best to help you kids but I can't seem to stop you from fighting, I'm going home", were you defeated by someone? Who? THAT is a closer analogy. Anyway, my point is the 'victory versus defeat' verbage loses much of its meaning once the war with Saddam's regime ended, and his team was captured, placed in jail, and subsequently killed. We won, he lost. In the next campaign, to stabilize Iraq, the US can't really "win or lose", we can only keep trying or give up. If we give up, it's not (IMO) accurate to describe that effort (to help the average person of Iraq to have a normal life) as a US military loss. THEY lose, we just go home. And since this war was supposed to be part of the war on terror, I think the War on Terror is a stupid term, and should be abandoned. leaving Iraq more filled with Al Qaeda than it was when we started, leaving it a growing base for Iranian influence (one of our evil enemies according to Bush), leaving it a problem for Turkey and all its neighbors, is certainly not a "win". It's a big black hole of failure. We'll see. I think an Iraq with zero US presence serves as a pretty big deterrent to Iran, al Qaeda and threats to the US from Islamic extremists. Once we're gone, the people of Iraq are not going to all unify and try to blow up the Transamerica building in San Francisco! They are going to be squabbling amongst each other for years if not decades. Iraqis may welcome all the Iranian assistance that they can get, but once it turns into an ounce of Iranian leadership over Iraqi affairs, you're going to see some Iraqi-Iranian battles. The Arabs don't exactly like the Persians. And I think the polls show most people see it that way. Polls shmolls. Starting a civil war, as we did, in the quest to "defeat" an enemy that it turned out was not much of a threat to us, is never going to be an easy thing to cast in the positive. One can try, but I have serious doubts a majority in this country are going to swallow that. Yeah, I can't argue that the Iraq campaign will probably viewed as negatively in history as the Vietnam thing. I'm not even arguing that it was a good idea. I'm just saying to term it a US defeat, makes it sound like the US lost a war, which is not the case unless we wanted to colonize the place, which we don't. We resoundingly won the war, and then didn't know what the hell to do.