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

To: Elroy who wrote (36645)	4/22/2007 12:05:52 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541823

You refer to "resolution", Elroy. I assume you have in mind the one which passed congress. However, the one we all have in our minds is the one the principle Bush spokespeople iterated and reiterated on the national media. They knew that removing Saddam would simply not sell. Too many other brutal dictators out there. So they sold it on national security grounds--the Al Qaeda and wmd argument. Then, they threw in the "making the ME safe for democracy" filler just for kicks. And, once it became apparent that the wmds were not there nor was Al Qaeda before the invasion, they went 24/7 to the democracy arguments. But those were certainly there before the invasions. So, I think the resolution is largely irrelevant to what the country believed. And in those terms it's hard to argue anything other than defeat. Goals weren't attained, if you prefer. Which smells like defeat to me. In general, when you get defeated in war, many you die and much of your country gets destroyed. Nothing like that is even close to happening in the US, and nothing like that is even close to happening to US forces in Iraq. Well, on the "many of you die" part of your argument, it's not clear how many would have to die for it to be "many." As for the last sentence, there is little doubt the US was defeated in Vietnam, by general agreement. The argument is over whether the war was lost by politics in the US. In that case, much of the US certainly did not get destroyed but a helluva of lot of Americans died. So it meets even the first of your criteria.

To: Elroy who wrote (36645)	4/22/2007 1:13:09 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541823

>>In general, when you get defeated in war, many you die and much of your country gets destroyed. Nothing like that is even close to happening in the US, and nothing like that is even close to happening to US forces in Iraq.<< Elroy - I dispute your definition of defeat in war. When you get defeated in a war that takes place in your own country, then much of your country gets destroyed. When you get defeated in a war abroad, it doesn't. You wouldn't claim that we won in Vietnam, would you? Anyway, it isn't necessarily a question of victory or defeat as it is whether we have succeeded or failed in our mission. Replacing a totalitarian regime with a stable democracy was an important part of the mission. We haven't really accomplished that. Another important justification was removing a threat to our own security. Since we now know that Hussein's regime was not a real threat to our security, in that it had no WMDs nor any operational connection with Al Qaeda, that mission wasn't really a success either. We simply discovered that we had been mistaken, and had removed a threat that didn't really exist. - Allen