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Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4284
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 11:38 am: | 
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The Squalid Politics of War
by Patrick J. Buchanan (more by this author)
Posted 04/27/2007 ET
Updated 04/27/2007 ET
Majority Leader Harry Reid is being lacerated, and justifiably so, for a pair of statements about the war in Iraq.
The more widely quoted is the "war is lost" remark of April 19, which, read in context, amounts to a charge of rankest cynicism against President Bush and his War Cabinet.
"I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense (understands) and -- you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows -- that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything."
Reid is not just saying the war is lost, but implying that Condi Rice, Bob Gates and probably George Bush know it, and are denying us the truth and cynically letting our soldiers be killed at a rate of 100 a month in what they know is a lost war.
If Reid believes this, he has a moral duty to vote to terminate any further funds for this war. Even the great Robert E. Lee, whose 200th birthday we celebrate, surrendered to stop the killing when his army began to disintegrate after the fall of Richmond in 1865.
Why would Reid not demand his party deny funds for a lost war?
Hearken now to the April 12 quote of Harry Reid: "We're going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war. Sen. Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding."
One imagines Reid and Schumer sniggering in the cloakroom over the list of Republicans they can bring down if Americans are still dying in Iraq when November 2008 rolls around.
Yet, cynicism aside, defeatism aside, the questions needs to be asked: Is Iraq a winnable war -- or a losing and probably a lost cause?
Last December, Bush himself told The Washington Post: "We're not winning. We're not losing" -- a long way from his pre-election stand, "Absolutely, we're winning."
That same month, Colin Powell, who convinced America that invading Iraq was vital to our national security, said the U.S. Army is "almost broken," and "we are losing" the war," though "we haven't lost" yet.
On Wednesday, the House voted 218 to 208 to impose an Oct. 1 deadline for starting U.S. troop withdrawals, if the Maliki government meets benchmarks for progress in political reconciliation. If the Maliki government fails, first departures move up to July 1. Almost all U.S. troops, except residual forces, are to be out by next April.
On Thursday, the Senate approved this $124 billion spending bill, and Bush is expected to veto it and demand a clean bill -- no deadlines, no pork.
Congress will then capitulate and give Bush what he wants. For recalling the "Who lost China?" and "Who lost Vietnam?" debates of decades ago, Democrats do not want to be in the dock when the "Who Lost Iraq?" inquiry begins in the public forum.
Reid and the Democrats are risking having this can tied to the tail of their donkey. For though Americans want the war to end and the troops brought home, they do not want America to lose the war. And that may explain the duplicity of today's debate.
Reid and four Democratic candidates for president -- Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd -- voted to give Bush a blank check for war. Now that the war is going badly, all five are calling for withdrawal. But neither they nor their party wants to be seen as responsible for the defeat that appears inevitable if we depart now.
Politically, cynical Harry and cynical Chuck are right.
If the war is still raging and Americans are dying at the same rate in November 2008, Republicans lose the White House and Congress. However, if U.S. forces have been defunded and withdrawn by Congress, and November 2008 rolls around with a strategic disaster and Cambodian-style bloodbath in Iraq, Reid's party could be credibly charged with having cut and run, lost the war and caused the greatest debacle in American history. The stakes here are huge. Democrats believe they have a winning hand on Iraq. Polls seem to confirm it. But the situation is not static. There are more cards to be dealt in this highest of high-stakes poker games. And what looks politically shrewd in April 2007 could look like suicidal folly in November 2008.
As Bush must know, if U.S. casualties are not cut and U.S. troops have not been drawn down by November 2008, his party loses the White House and victorious Democrats will liquidate the war, my sense is that Bush himself will begin the withdrawals.
But as he believes a complete U.S. pullout will ensure both a U.S. defeat and disaster, he will leave in Iraq, on Election Day 2008, enough U.S. forces to prevent that defeat. And his successor, Republican or Democrat, will be the one to complete the pullout and lose the war, if indeed, as Harry Reid assures us, "the war is lost."
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "The Death of the West," "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
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Doberman23
Veteran Poster
Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 982
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 - 01:33 am: |
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i am so glad that i was done in 2001 before those nutsacks ran those planes into the towers. they where trying to get me to re-up, but i didn't even bother calling them back. when ever republicans run the show it's a bad time for a soldier to expect peace. |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4286
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 - 11:48 am: |
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Actually up until now the Republicans have known how to pick their shots pretty good.
Splendid little wars with short casualty lists and plenty of natural resources to sieze.
The Democrats got us into WWI, WWII Korea and Vietnam. |
Mzuri
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mzuri
Post Number: 4662
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 - 12:38 pm: |
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That's right Chris. The dummycrats got us into many more wars than the Republicans. Thank you for setting Dobey straight.
(Too bad you are too old to go and defend my freedom and protect me from the terrorists, but I know you would if you still had some fight left in you and you weren't about to be carted off to the glue factory.)
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8482
Registered: 01-2004
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 - 02:54 pm: |
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Well, once he took office, Republican Richard Nixon was very instrumental in furthering America's descent into the quagmire of Vietnam. |
Doberman23
Veteran Poster
Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 983
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 - 09:47 pm: |
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that is very true cynique, not to mention the wars that have been going on since i've been alive. desert storm and now this mess. |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4296
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 - 12:00 pm: |
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Well, once he took office, Republican Richard Nixon was very instrumental in furthering America's descent into the quagmire of Vietnam.
(Wrong. He pulled out the troops. By 1972 all our troops were out. He did play politics with it, not ending it until after the '72 elections were over and he did expand it with secret bombing and incursions into Cambodia--
But it was Lyndon Baines Johnson who told the lie about the Tonkin Gulf incident and got troop levels up to 500,000.
After deriding Barry Goldwater as a nut who would bomb North Vietnam and expand the war.
All of them did it.
Woodrow Wilson campaigned on keeping the US out of war and once re elected schemed on how to get in. FDR too. He won't send your boys off to war, or something.
Democrats are the Judas Goats of the people. When they need a big slaughter they get them to juice everybody up.
George W. is the first Republican to just plunge ahead like an idiot--but he is an idiot. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8491
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 - 02:18 pm: |
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You better believe that "military-industrial complex" is more driven by rich corporate Republican America, no matter who is in office. |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4305
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 - 03:55 pm: |
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You better believe that "military-industrial complex" is more driven by rich corporate Republican America, no matter who is in office.
(Close. But no cigar.
We ARE the military/industrial/political/intelligence/financial complex. (You must add the last three as they are now part of it)
ALL OF US.
Everybody is attached. Family members of service people. Family members of people who work in government and the defense industries. Businessmen and people who live around military bases. People who provide goods and services to these people.
You got almost 3 million people in the military (including reserves and national guard) Add millions more veterans. They are part of it. Add the millions of people in defense industries-
I wonder what the numbers are. I bet that at least ten percent of our population is in someway directly tied into the Complex.
Aren't all of us tied to it in some way?
America is now an army with a state. Not a state with an army. This complex decides things often in secret and spends we don't know how much money in ways that we don't know because large parts of the budget are classified.
Remember the Bay of Pigs? That was in the works before he got into office and all Kennedy could do was watch it go down.
Remember the Cuban Missle Crisis? Partially it came about because of nuclear missles in Turkey--missles that JFK thought had been withdrawn but nobody told him.
This thing is out of control and it is going to take us where it wants us to go because part of its mission is also that it wants to seize all the places it can where there is oil.
Don't want it to go around conquering oil producing countries? Do you want to walk to work?
And so it goes. |
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