"Bush has made such a mess of this that there's not much they can do,"

madfloridian

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Sun May-02-04 12:03 AM
Original message

"Bush has made such a mess of this that there's not much they can do,"

Howard Dean in a phone interview ran out of answers on the mess in Iraq.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/02/ALTERNATIVES.TMP

SNIP..."Even Howard Dean, whose opposition to the Iraq invasion helped him temporarily surge to the head of the Democratic pack last year, had few suggestions about what steps to take in the short term.

"Bush has made such a mess of this that there's not much they can do," Dean said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle. "There are no real options until we get a new president. So it's sort of a question that doesn't have an answer."

The former Vermont governor repeated his oft-expressed opposition to an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal, but said U.S. forces should leave "just as fast as we can bring U.N. peacekeeping troops in."END SNIP

Yes, what a mess. I *hope* it will be Kerry who will be in the WH to fix it.....but he is inheriting a big big ugly mess.

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NMDemDist2

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Sun May-02-04 12:07 AM
Response to Original message

1. yes he will be, but the world is just waiting to help him

i wonder if that's what Clinton's October surprise will be? A coalition of countries who will work with Kerry?

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madfloridian

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Sun May-02-04 12:15 AM
Response to Reply #1

3. I agree. There is no way Bush can pull it off.

No telling what will happen in between. The world trusts none of this administration.
A cartoon from my friend in Belgium...Something about farsightedness? Not very complimentary.

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Career Prole

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Sun May-02-04 12:18 AM
Response to Reply #1

4. That's the same sense I've been getting.

I really feel the world is not going to cooperate with bush* even if he asks. They know a bush* government cannot be trusted. The world wants bush* out as badly as we do.
:bounce:

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Melsky

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Sun May-02-04 12:14 AM
Response to Original message

2. Yep

it's a hard job, cleaning up after an elephant.

I can't imagine what we can do, except that we will be paying reperations for a long, long time.

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dkf

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Sun May-02-04 12:31 AM
Response to Original message

5. I think he knew all along that this is where we would be.

Edited on Sun May-02-04 12:31 AM by dkf

Only Dean expressed these sentiments about the difficulties after Saddam Hussein and why no one else figured this out is beyond me. It is amazing that Dean is the only one who thought it through and did a decent analysis.

Why can't we have a President who can figure this out?

It seemed pretty elementary to me.

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Lexingtonian

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Sun May-02-04 12:51 AM
Response to Reply #5

7. uh, check your records

Dean at the time was all about how the war was wrong from a moralistic/moralizing p.o.v., as I recall.

It was mostly Democratic Senators pointing out that e.g. Achmed Chalabi was utterly unsuited to be installed and that the plundering of Baghdad indicated that the Bush people had no meaningful plan for the Occupation other than designs on the oil fields.

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madfloridian

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Sun May-02-04 12:59 AM
Response to Reply #7

8. No, he was saying much more than that.

I have extensive records on this. But if I present them you would not accept them. Yes, he thought it was morally wrong, but he often pointed out that we were going to be in a mess there. He said there were no plans, he went into detail many times.

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Lexingtonian

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Sun May-02-04 06:16 AM
Response to Reply #8

12. So?

They pointed out the salient "technical" problem and didn't focus on that much else about the matter. Mostly the WMDs that weren't being found, as I recall.

Dean tried to talk about every aspect of it, of course, but for him the point became to solidify a general set of beliefs about the whole thing- an audience or community unified in sharing a lot of knowledge of details and attitudes and judgments.

The first group made the simple facts primary. The Dean movement ended up making it impossible to arrive at ideas about Iraq without confronting (or acquiescing to) their shared beliefs and interpretations.

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madfloridian

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Sun May-02-04 01:08 AM
Response to Reply #7

9. And when he made the comment about Saddam,.......

The other Democratic candidates attacked him viciously. They knew better.

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Lexingtonian

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Sun May-02-04 06:04 AM
Response to Reply #9

11. well, that was an idiotic remark

Not the idea itself, mind you, just Dean's failure to couch it in a sufficiently explanatory and diplomatic form.

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madfloridian

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Sun May-02-04 11:13 AM
Response to Reply #11

13. Diplomatic. Yes, we must be diplomatic.

At all costs, we must be diplomatic.
You are so right.

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pop goes the weasel

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Sun May-02-04 02:00 AM
Response to Reply #5

10. I suppose you never heard of

Dennis Kucinich

Dennis, whose plan to pull US troops out as soon as UN troops could be brought in, was ridiculed by so many on this board who are now talking about how we need to pull US troops out as soon as UN troops can be brought in.

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zulchzulu

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Sun May-02-04 12:44 AM
Response to Original message

6. Mi$$ion accomplished.....for Halliburton

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