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

To: TimF who wrote (337655)	5/15/2007 10:06:05 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574727

You guys will do or say anything to justify continuing this disaster. You can't admit you were wrong, no matter how many die. That article was full of crap. Read it again. re: Who is "you guys" Don't pretend you didn't support this "war". What's your best case scenario? What do we get out of this war that you wanted so much? How long do you want it to continue Tim?

To: TimF who wrote (337655)	5/16/2007 6:28:03 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1574727

Failing by Example By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN If you want to know why we are losing in Iraq, go back and read this story that ran on the front page of The Times on Saturday. It began like this: “Two years ago, Robin C. Ashton, a seasoned criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, learned from her boss that a promised promotion was no longer hers. ‘You have a Monica problem,’ Ms. Ashton was told. Referring to Monica M. Goodling, a 31-year-old, relatively inexperienced lawyer who had only recently arrived in the office, the boss added, ‘She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.’ Ms. Ashton’s ouster — she left for another Justice Department post two weeks later — was a critical early step in a plan that would later culminate in the ouster of nine United States attorneys last year. “Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, ‘Have you ever cheated on your wife?’ Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan.” What does this have to do with Iraq? A lot. One benchmark the Bush team has been urging the Iraqi government to meet is to rescind its broad “de-Baathification” program — the wholesale purging of Baathists after the fall of Saddam — which has alienated many Sunnis and hampered national reconciliation. But while the Bush team has been lecturing the Iraqi Shiites to limit de-Baathification in Baghdad, it was carrying out its own de-Democratization in the Justice Department in Washington. We would feel that we had failed in Iraq if we read that Sunnis were being purged from Iraq’s Ministry of Justice by Shiite hard-liners loyal to Moktada al-Sadr — but the moral equivalent of that is exactly what the Bush administration was doing here. What kind of example does that set for Iraqis? And this wasn’t only a Washington problem. Read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s outstanding “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which details the extent to which Americans recruited to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were chosen, at times, for their loyalty toward Republicanism rather than expertise on Islamism. “Two C.P.A. staffers said that they were asked if they supported Roe v. Wade and if they had voted for George W. Bush,” he wrote. But this degree of partisanship — loyalty over competence — was destructive in a much bigger way. It also deprived the Bush team of the support it needed when things in Iraq didn’t turn out to be as easy as it expected. Only a united America could have the patience and fortitude to heal a divided Iraq — and we simply don’t have that today. Why? Because George Bush and Dick Cheney asked everyone to check their politics at the door when it came to Iraq, because victory there was so important — everyone but themselves. They argued that the war in Iraq was the central front of the central struggle of our age — an unusual war, a war against terrorism and the pathologies that produce it — but then they indulged in the most rancid politics as usual at home. They actually thought they could unite Iraq, while dividing America. Whenever Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had a choice between seeking political advantage at home or acting in a bipartisan fashion to buy more unity, time and space to do all the heavy lifting needed in Iraq, they opted for political advantage. When Franklin Roosevelt fought World War II, he made a conservative Republican, Henry Stimson, his secretary of war and did all he could to hold the country together. The Bush- Cheney team, by contrast, summoned us to D-Day and then treated it like it was just another political wedge issue, whenever it suited them. It has not worked. As Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, put it: “You cannot govern like Winston Churchill some of the time and like Grover Norquist most of the time.” Democrats need to be careful, though, that they don’t let their rage with the hypocrisy of Mr. Bush make them totally crazy, and blind them to the fact that they — we — still need a credible plan to deal with the very real threat to open societies posed by Islamist terrorism. But I understand that rage. After all, who can ask more soldiers to sacrifice their lives in Iraq for an administration that wouldn’t even sacrifice its politics?

To: TimF who wrote (337655)	5/16/2007 3:32:28 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574727

Who is "you guys" 1. You lie to get this country into the worst war in our history. "Lie" hasn't been established, If not a lie, it was clear exaggeration on several counts. A responsible, competent president does not start a war on exaggeration. and if it was a lie, it didn't have anything to do with me. Of course it had something to do with you.......you voted for him not once but twice. And this did not happen by chance.......the right has been on the wrong track for quite some time. Instead of admitting your mistakes and correcting them, you put the blame somewhere else, allowing you all to remain in denial. For those of us not in denial, its infuriating. As for worst war in our history that's fairly ridiculous. Its not one of our better ones that's for damn sure. 2/3 - Bad policy perhaps, mismanagement, yes, but you exaggerate both. "The entire fuking world will collapse if we leave Iraq." is also an exaggeration of what Hanson wrote. There were many people who were opposed to invading Iraq. The very thing that is happening now is what was predicted back then. To tell us now that with all the negative predictions coming true, we have no choice but to stay because it will only get worse borders on the insane. No people, with the notable exception of the right [see up above], would persist in going down the wrong track even as the evidence shows that its a huge mistake. There is no good solution to the catastrophe that is Iraq. A fire has been lit and it will burn until it burns itself out. However, there is a better solution for the US and that is to withdraw and watch the fire from afar.