I read the news today and all that anger came right back. I had to take a walk outside to calm down.

What is it good for...absolutely nothing...say it again.

Obama is not W Bush — he doesn't have anything to "prove" about his manhood, or to avenge his daddy.

We probably will send air support of some sort but but no troops.

Obama knows there is no "winning" there. We went in in '03 and accomplished nothing except for enriching the war profiteers/corporations. We blew trillions of dollars, had a hand in killing a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans, got enough new recruits for Al Queda and now ISIS to fuel sectarian unrest in the region for at least 2 more generation, and we didn't even get the oil contracts Chaney and his cronies thought were a sure thing.

Like I said, Obama's too smart to fall into the gaping trap that W, Chaney and the neo-cons just couldn't wait to walk into.

He knows that the Sunni and Shia will have their civil war, which, btw, was shunted to the back burner during our invasion and occupation.

Obama knows they have to sort that sectarian mess out for themselves — and it's going to be bloody.

I read an article somewhere a while back stating that the goal for Cheney and Co. wasn't to GET the oil, it was to make sure the Iraqi state-owned oil company under Saddam couldn't put their product on the world open market, and thereby cut the worldwide cost of the stuff.

Either way, it was a Dick Move, undertaken purely for the profit of a few.

The impact of this will last for GENERATIONS in this country... and the history books will NOT look kindly upon those who led us there, no matter how hard the neo-con's might wish it otherwise.

Thanks, Volaris. That sounds like Cheney's thinking all right.

Obama is smarter, more psychologically balanced and has less to prove, but he still faces enormous pressures, both overt/international and covert/corporate.

It's a shitty no-win mess.

Pls see my reply to post #95.

It hurts. I think it hurts Obama too, psychologically. The silverspoon sociopath never had much of a psychological landscape to work with, so painting puppies and self portraits is fine for him. I think Obama, just like a number of other Presidents (Carter comes to mind) will be permanently scarred by being beholden and therefore responsible.

Sure, the heinous hours contribute to the rapid aging of our Presidents while they are in office, but I think the no-win immoral, no win choices that come fast and furious don't help.

Dead is Dead.
Mutilated is mutilated.

Why is it acceptable to kill Brown People as long as we don't have any Boots on the Ground.

Why is bombing them OK, but shooting them NOT OK?

is the same, except for the visibility to the few americans that even care any more.

Drone strikes conducted from the air-conditioned comfort of a military base anywhere in the world using 20-somethings to do the cold-blooded killing doesn't have the visceral impact that all of those embedded cameramen had during our "victorious" first part of shock and awe. Not that fux or Time or any MSM would bother reporting on this anymore.

Dead is dead, no action is preferable, but I was referring to boots on the ground. But less face it, he's the president and commander-in-chief of the United States and all that that entails (the most rapacious, imperial power the world has ever known). There is already great pressure being applied by the warmongering, corporate toadies in Congress to send troops so that huge profits can be made. It's certainly not about "liberty and freedom" for the Iraqi people that they love to go on about.

Hell, McCain is on the talk shows already talking about "we had the war won with the surge but Obama blew it by pulling out the troops." Can we get McGrumpy a strait jacket, please?

I think this president will resist as he did the calls for troops in Syria. Air strikes probably will, unfortunately, be the pound of flesh demanded to avoid sending troops.

By any objective standard we are remarkably limited compared to the widespread slaughter the British empire caused, or the Spanish empire, or even the French.

Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols wiped out entire nations. They went in and killed every male taller than a wagon wheel. We've never done that. Yes, we've done some awful things, dropping nuclear weapons, firebombing Dresden etc, but the fact is we can debate those things. Whether the cost was worth it, whether we should do it again. Do you really think the Mongols thought about it? Do you think the Japanese soldiers in WWII thought "hey maybe we shouldn't be forcing Chinese and Korean women to serve as "comfort women"? While the punishment given to William Calley was woefully inadequate, you won't see a U.S. president going to his grave like you see Shinzo Abe going to the graves of war criminals in Japan.

The closest you can come to matching that sort of destruction is the decline in the native populations of the Americas, but much of that was due to disease and while there are examples of small pox blankets being given out and such, there just isn't the evidence that was done intentionally on a significant scale. And much of the damage was done long before the U.S. was independent so that root cause is still the expansion of the British empire.

Last edited Sun Jun 15, 2014, 12:55 AM - Edit history (2)

whether Genghis Khan's or the Mongol's violence was worst than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone?

And that's not even counting the Native American decimation, or the hundreds of years of lost lives of the middle passage of slavery for God's sake!

C'mon already! It's all horrible. We live in the belly of the beast whether you want to acknowledge it or not. We've been either at war, occupying a country, or staging coups continually since the late 1890s (read Steven Kinzer's book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq&quot . We've perfected it and make Genghis Khan look like an amateur, all in the name of freedom and liberty of course.

I'm just glad we finally have a president whose first inclination is to avoid war not to start it. I say it's about time we had someone like him in the White House. Maybe he can set a precedent that others will follow and we can get off the endless war track.

We knew this excellent adventure abroad would not end well, we said it before it started and we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a decade.

I think two different humanoid species occupy this planet, because I can't say I share ANYTHING with the creatures who thought starting that war was a good idea. Any war is bad enough, but this one?

but when you look at this it seems very confined to certain areas of Iraq which makes me a little suspicious.

There are not that many of them, only 800 to 1000. The Iraqi army in Mosul (2 divisions I think--30,000 men) had more than enough men and material to stop them--if they really wanted to. Apparently they didn't feel risking their lives for Maliki / Iraq was worth it.

What exactly would be the motive of the US and UK death squads?

back in the 1980's, when Reagan was President?

De-stabilization, I suppose.

and a stable, functioning state promotes that, why would we then destabilize it? Do you, does anyone, think that the oil will be flowing freely from Iraq in the coming days or months?

Who knows whether this is all somepart of a "Grand Plan" or just one element that has gone its own way.

From 1964 to Spring 1975, our nation spent twenty billions of dollars bombing the people of Vietnam back to the stone age.

For that amount of money we could have bought every household in South And North Vietnam a new house. Equipped with luxury items. So why do we always go the war route?

Perhaps it boils down to this: the inner cabal prefers war as the destruction it creates has to do with their love of control. If a truly prosperous society were to come about, it would threaten these monsters.

George Orwell went to great lengths to explain this. It is not just about earnings per se, but the fact that the inner cabal want and I guess "need" to be the only people with a sense of well being, while the rest of us are nervous wrecks, especially the people whose societies they have chosen to destroy. (And currently that includes our own ravaged society.)

but speculation about UK and US death squads causing or adding to the current chaos in Iraq is tin foil hat territory.

The abysmally stupid and immoral invasion / occupation was more than enough to cause this, and plenty of us knew it beforehand.

back when he spent time here at DU, informed so many of us as to whom the inner cabal of all things financial were. He also predicted what would happen to this economy, in terms of a recovery for the upper five percent and an L shaped non recovery for the rest of us, once Obama let that inner cabal have at it.

Since I view those articles as an indication of the truth-assembling abilities of this writer, I stand behind the new article with its new thesis.

You trust your source. I don't.

BTW, if we don't restart the war/re-invade, what, other than chaos and horror on a comic-book-villain scale, would be the be the purpose of this enterprise?

a false flag real interested in having a war start in this particular area. Hint Hint

...is the headline.

This is a nice gift for ISIS in my opinion.

. . . same calls to intervene on, basically, one side if they're talking airstrikes against the Sunni oriented rebels.

There's absolutely nothing we can do there with our weapons except to add yet another hostile element to the conflict.

Throwing a whole lot more munitions and money into the mix, certain to help tamp things down in our classic modern "our military can do everything" style.

Civilization, Ho!!

hearing the right-wingers blame Obama. I don't agree with Obama on all fronts but he was handed a bag of shit on this one.

and he's also smart enough to not have a Cheney whispering "invasion" in his ear and pulling his puppet strings

I'm not sure that he has better goals, though.

Hope I don't get a message saying it was already posted. See below"

Dead is dead, no action is preferable, but I was referring to boots on the ground. But less face it, he's the president and commander-in-chief of the United States and all that that entails (the most rapacious, imperial power the world has ever known). There is already great pressure being applied by the warmongering, corporate toadies in Congress to send troops so that huge profits can be made. It's certainly not about "liberty and freedom" for the Iraqi people that they love to go on about.

Hell, McCain is on the talk shows already talking about "we had the war won with the surge but Obama blew it by pulling out the troops." Can we get McGrumpy a strait jacket, please?

I think this president will resist as he did the calls for troops in Syria. Air strikes probably will, unfortunately, be the pound of flesh demanded to avoid sending troops.

I hope your analysis is correct.

And Boner can go kiss my shiny metal ass!
Obama was taking a nap. Yeah right, and where the fuck were you John BONER? At the bar, or at the golf course? Perhaps you were slathering on more of that tan in a can that you seem to love?
Give me a freakin' break, you worthless bag of flesh!!

forward rather than take the bull by the horns and start investigations immediately. He told us it would be better for the country to look ahead.

We said at the time that protecting war criminals was a huge mistake. They don't view themselves as criminals and the only way to force that reality on them, is to prosecute them.

So now they are blaming him for their crimes.

Is anyone surprised?

The Left was right again. And again they were pretty much told to stfu because the adults were in charge.

But for the warmongers this is all great news. But of course they won't say that publicly, it will be hard for them to hide their excitement at the prospect of more billions of dollars, but they will and they will blame the person who saved them from getting the justice they deserve.

No doubt Obama was more concerned with getting his second term than doing the right thing. It probably didn't help that the DLC was even more concerned and scared shitless that the Democratic party would be tarred and feathered in the MSM as being kings of the Blame America crowd. And with the power and reach of modern mega-media conglomerates and the all-out monopoly of right wing hate radio I have no doubt that Obama would have been defeated in his second try because of that move.

But I still think it would have been important, critically important to a so-called law abiding democracy. And I firmly believe that once the facts were laid out like that eventually the American public would come around DESPITE the yammering of the MSM and perhaps having to suffer through another Republican administration.

really much of a sacrifice.

John Adams eg, DID just that to keep this country out of a foreign war. His opponents used it against him and he lost his second election, but HISTORY has recorded that his decision saved the new democracy's future, which imo, he probably knew and chose to do the right thing rather than think only of his own immediate future. He is still rsemembered as one of the more eithical of the FFs, and as one of our first presidents.

I'm not sure who said it, perhaps George Washington, about politicians and their duty to the country. They 'should go to Washington for the term they were elected for, do their job, and then go back home'.

Imagine if everyone who was elected decided not to worry about the next election, but to do everything they could during that term, to make this a better country.

Funny thing, we don't know what might have happened had the war criminals been tried. Things come out in trials that people don't know and a whole lot of Americans might have learned some disturbing things about their 'leaders'. I guess to me doing what is right while you have the chance is worth risking a second term. And you never know, doing might have made Obama even more popular after people got a look at just how corrupt the Bush admins was.

Regardless, now he is in a position of allowing them to blame him. That should NEVER have been allowed to happen.

will be regarded as one of the biggest mistakes of this administration. How many of our previous top administration officials in the past have had to worry about leaving the country for fear of being arrested or at least heavily demonstrated against?

in terms of any kind of gratitude. And we know that he has pointed out to them that 'I am the only thing standing between you and ' pitchforks, I believe was what he said. So he KNEW what he was doing, protecting war criminals which he may have believed was the right thing to do, I can't say.

But in return for that protection and I'm sure both he and they knew that a lot of the reason Obama was elected WAS to begin to hold those criminalss accountable, he has received nothing but attacks from them and their supporters.

And now they have the audacity to blame HIM for what THEY should have already been tried and convicted for.

Saddam is gone. The oil is ours for the taking. We are liberators.

A lot more money to made and programs for the poor to be cut here in the US. A Republican's dream come true! Turning plowshares in swords.

I was also on DU when we invaded Iraq and took part in protests, as well. I never thought it could happen, felt sick for days when it actually did...

We had them in front of the library in a nearby town, in the town square in Woodstock, NY.
My friend Pete Seeger, as old as he was, was at the protests each and every Saturday, near his home town.
So many of us were proven correct on this, and so many times were we proven correct that war is not the way.

People forget what General Smedley Butler said in 1930, when he said, "WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

read the whole thing at: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

It made no sense to me that we'd invade Iraq, but then I was on DU at the time so I was paying attention. I remember when Nelson Mandela came out against the impending invasion and I was sure that the powers that were would listen to him. I live in a fairly small town, a traditionally red district (NY-20), but couldn't believe how many came out in the cold to take part in the protests.

I figured if I knew that this invasion was a terrible mistake, there was no excuse for those whose job it was to understand the repercussions of government decisions, not to mention the lessons of history.

And how cool that you were friends with Pete Seeger! He is truly a legend.

I know it is cold up in the NY-20.
It's not much warmer here in the NY-19 in the winter.
But at least we had a congressman, Maurice Hinchey, who voted AGAINST sending troops to Iraq.
Oh there were people on cold days all right.
I wish I had pictures of the darn thing.

Pete was just another guy, like any one of us. He merely stuck to his beliefs, and played folk music. He was one of the good guys though.

He was great! I coveted him! And, yes, winters here n the North Country are brutal.

We were stuck with Republican representation for years, the seat often went uncontested until Kirsten Gillibrand finally defeated John Sweeney in 2006. President Clinton even came to the district to campaign for her, such a wonderful speaker with charisma and presence. When she was appointed senator, I worked on the campaign of her Democratic successor, Scott Murphy, but he only lasted for one term. I went to his debate with challenger Chris Gibson (are you stuck with him now?) and the audience was full of disruptive red shirted senior citizens who were very vocal in their opposition to Scott's vote in favor of ACA.

We are doing all we can to throw him out.
Unfortunately, there's a kid in his 20s running.
He sounds good, is well polished, but I don't know about him, something just doesn't seem right with him to me.

also, and I feel the same way. On issues of equality he is spot on ( worked with Freedom to Marry and is currently Senior Advisor). I need to know more about how he stands on income inequality. My sense is he is a centrist at best. He founded an investment firm - Hudson Valley Ventures - that works with small local companies ( solid ones, too, like Bread Alone). Where I am less than enthusiastic are not his ties but those of his spouse, Chris Hughes who started off as one of the co-founders of Facebook and recently bought The New Republic.

There is a lot I like about the guy, but it is what i don't know that worries me. Main charge is going to be that he is a carpetbagger and trying to buy in ( moved to the district just over two years ago), and given how weird we can be on that issue. . . .
I could be wrong, but I think he has been pegged as an up and comer ( worked for President Obama's campaign in 2008 and so), and that they are testing the waters in a reconfigured district where the current R is not a complete loon and the Democrats lack a really strong candidate. Possible long term investment, but now sacrificial lamb.

Ah well. off to beers at the Rosendale Cafe. God, I miss Hinchey.

Live farther upriver now, but still stuck with Gibson.
I miss that brief lovely time that we had a Democrat repping us in Congress...

saw a request to help a Democrat in upstate NY who was being hounded by right wing nutcases because of something he said t a town hall meeting.

The request was to call his office and tell him that he has LOTS of support, and that the harassment his office was getting was from an organized Right Wing plot to try to silence him.

So, I called his office. The woman who answered sounded so scared so I said right away, 'I'm here to support Rep Hinchey and told her what we had learned online. She sounded so relieved as she had been trying to handle the harassing calls all day. I know she received tons of supportive calls that day after the request went online.

maybe things could have gone differently. Probably not, but i like think bushco would have had a tougher time selling their goddam war.

Poll "Do you support returning to Iraq?", and I bet you get near zero support. Entering Syria would be popular by comparison, and Obama couldn't manage that.

In Europe the notion of re-entering Iraq is probably radioactive. Even if by some miracle we managed to convince congress, we'll have no allies.

This is DOA. Obama can only send arms.

That when one calls the nitwit who got us into this...well nitwit...the reference is missed.

We are up a shit creek, ain't matter if we wave the single shit filled paddle in the air...we never ever are right, until of course...we are.

Vietnam, waning days...and I called it in 2002 on the AOL boards. Of course, I was the cowardly lefty, commie who hated Murica (with husband in the line) while the full throated patriots had all kinds of excuses why their asses were not at the recruiters.

I am sure they will scream for war, with asses firmly planted on chairs...

Things are being proactive.

Jacob's Ladder

our minds must run on the same track, cause that was exactly the thought I was about to post. Same as it ever was.

I REALLY tried to stop this debacle before it started....

He read it over the air. The grammar needs some cleanup, but I think you can get my point.

Mike,
Many of us never stood up for these wars for corporations.
We understand what General Smedley Butler said, when he said, "WAR is a racket. It always has been."
"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." General Butler said this way back in 1930.
We understand Howard Zinn when he said, “How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
We understand Noam Chomsky when he said, "Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."
We understand countless others when they said the equivalent.
We understand that the corporations, and their leaders never see a second of the killing, yet they profit from it.

We also understand Mahatma Gandhi when he said, "If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children." And we are trying to do that on whatever small scale we can, by ourselves, with no help from any corporations, or politicians.

And we KNOW that the next war will not be over oil, in the Middle East. It will be about water. Drinking water, which will soon be hard to find, because of these darn corporations. And these same corporations will seek to make the same profits from water that they did on oil.



Good rant tonight. Keep it lit.
Rocco in Rosendale, NY

Pissed off to hell...

is not much comfort is it? ugh.

we didnt invent that.
that goes back to chimps. lone bachelors making themselves useful by adding to the real estate. how we got upright.

insurgents to current government. Insurgents right now treating civilians ok. You have to listen to new from sources outside the US.

Most Iraqis hate the government set up by US. And any air strikes will just kill a lot more innocent people.

Who remembers when Iraq under Saddam was virtually a secular government allowing all people to worship by their chosen beliefs, even including Jews? Sure there were political divisions and one group were the "haves" one group were the "have nots" but there was stability and a national Iraqi pride. Women were educated, and the government was running services though scant in some area but now hardly anyone has services, jobs or safety.

I worry we are getting sucked back in there.

When profit is the only motive . . . life doesn't matter
.
.
.
.
.
.
Will we ever learn?
.
.
.
Life is about more than profit.

Going back to the horrific casualty figures of the Iran-Iraq war and continuing to the present day, those folks have had a total shit-storm descend on them with very little in the way of respite.

and after a lifetime of expressing that, this crap is getting real old.

The thing that I watched on the evening news last night that really got my goat and actually made me chuckle a bit was when they showed a photo of piles of money and gold, sitting in a vault somewhere in one of the "fallen" cities. As they flashed that image, the commentator was saying that an Iraqi governor claims the ISIS has stolen $429 million, making it the world’s richest terrorist group. Not even close, I think to myself.

This is beyond tragedy. And there isn't a shred of satisfaction in being right.

My Grandson a Iraqi/Afghani Veteran who is trying so very hard to overcome his PTSD and return to some kind of "normalcy.." He is having a hard time hearing of the events now occuring in the very same places that he once lived and fought. He and his comrades made many friends among the Iraq and Afghan civilians and military who they shared their training, their language their care packages received from home. They not only lost fellow comrades, but many of our troops understood the daily hardships their fellow man encountered.

Although it is heartbreaking to hear this as civilians, please be aware of the affects on our veterans who are trying to deal with all of this with PTSD.

our debts to Iraq. This situation will fix itself Iran won't stand for a sunni fundamentalist state next door. We should wait to see how this resolves itself and then help the winner.

And a lot of voters will believe that.

We need to stay out of other nations' business. Our actions only end up making things worse for everyone.

I think Iraq 3.0 calls for a new round of tax cuts for the wealthy. Whattayathink?

Last edited Fri Jun 13, 2014, 07:31 AM - Edit history (1)

We had no choice but to resist that war. The United States had invaded a country which had not attacked the United States. Resisting that monumental mistake has to have been right? We also must resist even harder all efforts now afoot to get the same war started up again!

to mean that we were right to attack Iraq. But on reread I understood that Will was referring to the left who opposed the war. We really tried to stop it. We knew what the end result would be.

That did not sound like him, at least not as I have come to know him from comments on these boards.

Thanks for enlightening me on that important point.

I'm Will. Nice to meet'cha.



Published October 2002.

Believe me, I'm honored.

Carl

I seem to remember when we first went to Iraq -- because Biden did agree the threat of Iraq being a conduit for arming some really horrible extremists, was real -- he spoke of the need to create three near-autonomous states per the Yugoslavia model. Ya can't stop the flow of history, ya try to channel it, he'd say, you try to soften history's blows the best you can. I completely agreed with his analysis, and have no doubt that Obama does too. And that they expected the country to be riven by civil way within a year or so of our leaving -- it's the flow of history, stupid. It's in the best interests of the country not to act stupid.

So there is no fucking way Obama will send in troops again. Rather, the really entertaining chapter is the one now coming up, where the country finally faces the fact that we've got hospitals overflowing and triaging like crazy with sick solders of a we're-number-one military that lost two consecutive major military engagements, that we've been (involved with?) the aggressor in something like 208 of the 245 conflicts since 1945, and what the hell has it gotten us other than a sick planet, a suck economy, a stick government, a slick oligarchy -- all in all, a medicated, sad society?

Joe was right. Joe was right. Now Hillary says it was her vote for Iraq was her biggest mistake in her legislative life. How superficial a self-analysis THAT one is. Jeesh the woman begins her coronation with a mea culpa? Shortly I guess she'll stab her Democratic President in the back on this issue, as she did in the Sawyer interview re POW swap.

Sure would be interesting to see the progressives coalesce around a Biden-Warren ticket -- surely these two very competent people reflect the rising populism of the moment (see Cantor), not a ticket that features a Clinton or some other obvious Wall Street mobster.

the capped teeth and hair plugs really helped.

We have got to get hold of the steering wheel, somehow.

they left us by the road side years ago.

Out of sight and mind, yet still along for the ride.

weeeeee

most people who wind up in the trunk usually have very little say in their own outcome.

but not as much fun.

Friends lost in Fallujah, friends that have lost to the darkness and hopelessness back home.

Talabani was told before we left to include the Sunnis in the NorthEast. Treat them well, I guess giving his Shiite buddy's millions of dollars, the best equipment (who won't release any of it to Sunni requests) is literally coming back to bite him in the ass. Sunni military posts with all the military arms and ammo just being left open for ISIS.

Already broke a bunch of shit this week Will, it didn't help. Thankfully I had an appointment at the VA yesterday and got a bunch of shit off my chest. Now I have to go fix and replace what I broke.

two buddies and I wrote a script back in 1991. It was a dystopic tale about a future society gone wrong and those who could, escaped the daily visual depression with a trip in to cyberspace.

Anyway, at one point the hero, of said tale, passes a homeless vet on the street. The vet had no legs, and his begging mantra, for those still kind hearted enough to spare some change, was "Gulf war 4, give some more!"

My buddies and I weren't psychics or anything, we were just writers trying to make it rich, but sometimes I look back on that script and that one particular line and shutter a little.

Holy shit!

Until the MIC and the 1%er's complete destroy this country. They will gut and kill SS and every other social program in there is, loot them and feed the results into the bloody maw of the MIC till there there is no country left worth defending unless you are a 1%er.

Who's going to stop the masters of war?


Every poll says NO!


Ask everyone you know if they think we should start fighting AGAIN in Iraq. Yeah.....


And yet the deaf bastards just keep marching on to Armageddon!

President Obama managed to draw down in Iraq because the nation had been sota-kinda-maybe pacified, or could be sold as such--not based on a principled stance against preemptive war. Therefore, any violence can be used as an excuse to lather-rinse-repeat, because no matter how horribly awful an idea invasion was, we have to go back because, well, we did it before. And there are no good targets in Pakistan, or something.

But if the worst that comes of this is that we sell some more weapons, I will be pleased and amazed at our president's forbearance.

He never saw a war he didn't like.

and in public. He's the problem, always has been, always will be.

Get ready to protest again.
Because the neocons will push for our re-entrance into Iraq War
But I don't think the American people will fall for it so much this time. The last time, a lot of people thought that the Iraqis had attacked us on 9/11.

It'll take something really horrible to whip up a frenzy. I hate that I can't dismiss something like a false flag attack from my own government, but there's just to much money to be made on the blood of our servicepeople. I just wonder of it will be before or after the election. And it would have to be BAD. A dirty bomb attack against one of our middle eastern bases would probably do the trick.

If, in an effort to defuse a growing global situation centered in Iraq, we brought formal charges against the human and incorporated instigators of our military actions in Iraq (and beyond).
Would this help in getting a temporary ceasefire in the region?
Would the chance to testify against the "common enemy" work to pacify angry survivors of our misadventures?
Could whatever lull we might get, be a gap the UN might work a treaty into?

I was proud to stand next to you and fellow DU'ers at that first Iraq war protest.

where we pointed out that the only winners would be the military industrial complex -- especially since they disbanded the army.

Same as it ever was...


rocktivity

i was arguing with a bunch of chickenhawks on another forum, they're all like "yeah let's get rid of Saddam, it'll be great!"
and i'd say, "so what are we going to do when we pull out our army and Iraq turns into a 3-way civil war between the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds?"
and they'd wave their internet hands and say, "oh that won't happen, the Iraqis will love their new democracy so much it will unify them in spite of their differences and they'll stand out as a shining beacon of freedom across the middle east."
and i'd say stuff like, "that sounds like bullshit to me."
and they'd say stuff like, "why do you hate America?"
and it went on and on like this for a while.

Profit over logic.
Profit over lives.
Profit over truth.
Profit over children.
Profit over the poor
Profit over our disabled vets
Profit over our government.
Profit over the common man.
Profit over compassion.
Profit over (start adding your own).

The bottom line is all that matters in this country anymore.
As long as we profit we win!
The "we" is not you and me.
The we are the true enemy in this battle.

It's like deja vu all over again.

decision made by, maybe, half a dozen twisted men/women in power at the time.

Powell said '...we break it, we own it.' True, morally. But we aren't operating from a moral position in the world. Not only is it hard to know how to help the people of Iraq the most here, even if we knew what to do we probably couldn't politically get it done. Maybe once you've broken a country in that part of the world (starting a long time ago, accelerated in 2003) there is no restoration in the short term....especially by the people who did the breaking -- those who understand the least and who are among the least qualified in the world to say they can act in the best interests of their own citizenry, let alone people in other countries.

We screwed up. We owe Iraq a debt we don't understand, don't know how to pay off, probably can't fix.

We are linked to Iraq for a long long time, and not in a good way. In a way that will/should regularly remind us of our greed, impotence, stupidity, arrogance, and disastrous ability to elect sociopathic leaders.

Even in the 20th century it's been one government overthrown after another. We cannot bring peace to that area. It's futile and not worth one more dime, or one more soldier's life. I know we have to be concerned about Israel and Saudi Arabia, but at some point we have to say enough is enough, we just can't do it anymore. Let them sort out it out themselves. All we'll do is create more anti-American jihadists.