A nice Los Angeles Times editorial unendorses the surge in Iraq, and makes most of the points that need to be made about the futility of the continued American military presence in Iraq.
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Well-Put
07 May 2007 09:15 am
Comments (9)
"yup. they come close to what I think will be an important formulation for '08:
This never was America's war. This was Bush' war, and he lost it all on his own."
Way to take a largely thoughtful editorial and convert it to partisan left wing spin. The Iraq War is America's war, not merely President Bush's war: an overwhelming majority of Congress (including two of the leading Democratic candidates for President) voted to authorize the war, and a vast majority of Americans was in favor of it as well. Congress has also repeatedly voted to continue funding the war, for several years now.
Is there anyone on the L.A. Times editorial board who knows the difference between a battalion and a brigade?
Fred, it's really pointless to debunk the "voted to authorize the war" type of comment any more (no, they didn't: they voted to authorize the war under specific and explicit circumstances, about which bush, not to put too fine a point on it, lied), but you really better study your polling data.
if you go back and look at the polling prewar, you find that the support for the kind of war we actually have (the one that was predictable to anyone not caught up in bushism), one with more than 1,000 deaths and limited international support, was generally around 33%.
just the kind of support the war has.
Woohoo! And timely too!
way to pretend that the opinion of the vast majority of Americans is "partisan left-wing spin", fred.
Bush wanted this war from before the day of his election--there is now ample documentary evidence that he was talking it up from day one of his administration.
The nation never cared much about Iraq *unless* people were tricked into thinking Saddam was behind 9/11 (as Dick Cheney still works at doing) or deceived into thinking that Saddam had a nuclear program.
With those two big lies in place, Bush had a window of opportunity to use the US military for his own personal agenda. So he did. It was a misappropriation of public funds for personal uses, just as much as a secretary stealing toner cartridges.
So then it eventually came out that America had been railroaded into a pointless war on false pretenses, and we all realized: it's just not our war. It never was.
That's about where the American people stand right now, Fred. It ain't left-wing spin. It's the polls.
The casualty figures (US and Iraqi) are first priority, of course, and the absence of any "pony" we are about to uncover from the morass means the expected casualties over the next 4-5 years should move us toward withdrawal. Iraq could become another Cambodia, but how likely is that? Not very, in my view.
Also important is the $350 billion - the S&L crises was about $110 billion as I recall. What made the US notably more successful in dealing with that mess (compared to Japan, which had similar issues) was the US ability to shut things down and cut its losses. Hopefully the same pragmatism will come to the surface now and help bring us out of this Iraqi mess promptly.
Brigade vs. battalion - what a brain fart! Maybe the LAT board needs a US Army vet or two.
"Voted to authorize the war"
No.
72% of the American public is liberally biased!
Bush made a speech in 1999 about the need to take Saddam out, so fuck you Fred, you ignorant 28%er.
Comments closed May 21, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
yup. they come close to what I think will be an important formulation for '08:
This never was America's war. This was Bush' war, and he lost it all on his own.
Posted by sim | May 7, 2007 9:36 AM