How will Kerry fix this?

Every day that passes, the Iraq war becomes more and more a fiasco of epic proportions. Let me see if I can recall the rhetoric and the reality....
Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and was determined to gain more....we now know that he did not possess WMD and that the intelligence was flawed, overstated, exaggerated....well we were lied to, but there are few reporters who are willing to take that hard stance.
The Iraqi people will be liberated and democracy will transform the middle east. The US will be greeted as liberators. We now know that Iraq faces an occupation that is not interested in democracy, nor will it institute freedom insistutions such as freedom of speech (newpapers shut down because they reported negative stories about the coalition authority) Nor will we hand over sovereignty to the new government, for soveriegnty means that the people would write their own laws to govern and provide security to protect their own people. The US will not allow that to happen, so we must admit that this handover is a whitewash to help Bush during the election year.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who tortured his own people. We now know that we are no better than he when it comes to information gathering methodology which justifies many forms of torture meant to "break" the spirit of the prisoner.

So, as each day passes, and as more and more troops get killed over in Iraq, as we lose more and more credibility in the eyes of the world, how would John Kerry fix this monumental error of foreign policy?????? We stand naked before the world for all to see, with all our flaws and inconsistancies. How will John Kerry restore our name and reputation? Will he, at last take a firm stand against the war and make preparations to withdraw? This is in no way condemning the military - it is only recognizing the limits of what the military can and cannot do, what it is good for and what it is ill suited for. This is not a failure of the men and women serving in Iraq today. It is a failure of policy. Will John Kerry step up to the plate and work to restore peace?

It is apparent to me that we are at a point of a no win situation. There is no strategy that I can fathom that the US can gain anything positive from the Iraq war if you exclude the profits of Halliburton. At what point would we cut our losses, admit our error and pull away? We cannot fix this. A show of strength will not fix this. Each time we attempt to "rout" out the insurgents, we create more distrust and hatred. We have fallen into the same trap the Israeli's have fought for 50 odd years. Are we naive enough to think that Israel's problem is that they did not possess enough strength and somehow because we are Americans, the outcome will be different?

If we stay, we are hated, attacked and targeted. If we leave, we are made out to be weak, paper tigers with empty rhetoric. What a freaking mess Bush has led us into. How will Kerry fix it? I do not envy his upcoming job. Kerry will be president, of that I am confident. But how far will he go to restore our reputation worldwide?

all.

Bush initiated the whirlwind, and like the real ones in Nature, the innocent, as well as the guilty, can be swallowed up by them.

I suspect it will ultimately be fixed the way Vietnam was fixed, no matter who is in power.

I hear all of this talk from the high paid "political analysts" and all they talk about are the similarities between Kerry and *'s plans for Iraq and the need to nationalize it. What Kerry needs to do is say yes, our plans are similar but I can make it happen. He needs to remind everyone how this administration has so insulted our allies and is therefor not capable of getting the international support we so desperately need. Kerry can deliver, * can't. It is quite simple and I don't know why Kerry doesn't come out and say it.

We need to take responsibility and clean up the mess we made and we need to be humble enough to tell the world that we need there help to do that.

Accept responsibility should not equate into retaining control. THAT is the problem imho. I can't comprehend how the UN could do much better than us, unless the UN could somehow transform Iraqi distrust and hatred into forming political parties working towards a democratic rule....and even that is rife with potential violence.

Iraqi's distrust the UN just as much as the US and for good reasons. NATO? Just another military....

Legitimacy in the eyes of the world might not be legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi citizen. And that is what counts the most.

It HAS to better then what we are doing right now! I hate the thought of our "shock and awe" campaign where we spent billions of dollars of blowing the place up and trying to make a parking lot out of parts of Iraq. I hate the thought that we would destroy cities and not clean up our mess.

We need to hand control over to the UN and NATO because international cooperation is better then American occupation. * cannot internationalize because of his pre-emptive, unilateral foreign policy.

Once Kerry is inaugurated he can start to undo the damage Bush has done to out international alliances. Once the rest of the world sees that we have a sane leader who is willing to listen and negotiate instead of simply making inflexible demands they might co-operate.

We need a UN mandate for a peace keeping force and a plan forward to a real representative government in Iraq (assholes like Chalabi should be thrown in prison). Obviously the US will have to bear the brunt of the cost of this (we, or rather Bush on our behalf, broke it so we get to pay for it) that will likely include US troops staying. Although it will be politically difficult and unpopular, the US troops should not be under US command given the tremendous ill-will we have generated (The UK seems to doing slightly better, so maybe they could be in command, or (if only to see the freeper's heads explode) the French :eyes: ).

All this is dependent on a humble US being able to admit its mistakes and sincerely work toward a solution that benefits the entire international community & obviously that will never happen while Bush is still president.

Of course even with President Kerry the rest of world might still say "thanks, but no thanks, its your mess now clean it up" and I have no idea what should happen then. :(

My wife was reading a Chinese language website (not an official Chinese gov't site)that said that the US abuse was worse than anything under Saddam, as Saddam's methods were almost purely physical, while the US used humiliation & psychological torture in addition to physical...

If Saddam's torture was 1,000 times more common and a 10 times worse, its still not justifiable. After all we're supposed to be the "good guys" we're supposed to be better than Saddam.

Damage control is the name of the game.
The longer they take to get around to it, the "worse"
the long term outcome will be.

(I put "worse" in quotes because I favor an end to the US
empire, and this farrago bids fair to accomplish the job.)

How about a partial pullout, but we go back to the way it was under Saddam - only without sanctions - with the US enforcing a separate Kurdish area in the north, and also enforcing a division between the Shiites & Sunnis? Let the Iraqis rebuild themselves, but keep enough troops & air power there to prevent a Rwanda-like civil war.

Kerry represents change, a chance for a better way of doing things. They don't believe George&Co's mess can be cleaned up by George, only a new face can do that. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, George is damaged goods. These guys never learned the lesson that how you do something really affects the quality of your results.

I think there will be a cosmic sigh of relief when George&Co loses the election. But, you're right, it is one mucked up mess they've created. And bringing American democracy to Iraq is a ludicrous. Any democracy that takes hold there has to "bubble up" not be imposed from above. What arrogant idiots these guys are.