Earth to Junior: The only real way to win is not to play

[thatcrazycajun]

Showing yet again his inability—or unwillingness—to hear what the people he supposedly represents are telling him loudly and repeatedly (even using simple words of less than three syllables to make sure he understands), Junior Bush is stumping for Republican Congressional candidates in close races around the country with the charge that the Democrats don't have an alternative plan for winning the whatever-we're-calling-it-this-week (war, peace, occupation, travesty...take your pick) in Iraq. (See Reuters report here.)

Um, Mr. President: We do have a plan for success. It's called getting our troops' asses the hell outta where you should never have sent them to begin with and where the locals don't want them. Get a clue; it's over, as columnist Jay Bookman pointed out in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a couple weeks ago (see earlier entry). There is not a snow-cone's chance in the lowest circle of Hades that we can "win" on your misguided terms any longer. But I suspect not even your party's losing control of Congress (which seems ever more likely by the day) will make you wise up...which is why I'm praying that top of the list on Speaker-to-Be Pelosi's agenda in January will be formal hearings into the conduct of this war...with an eye toward removing those responsible, up to and especially including the Fuckup-in-Chief. Only with these clowns yanked can we finally hope for governance by people who understand that the USA has neither the right nor the ability to rearrange other countries' governments to suit its wishes.

And I am sorely tempted to rearrange the face of the very next conservative and/or Republican who accuses me or my party of being treasonous cowards who want the terrorists to win, our way of life destroyed and Americans killed. News flash for you twits: The insurgents/terrorists don't give a rodent's backside which party wins. They'll keep killing our people and their own until and unless we withdraw our troops (and probably even after), regardless of next Tuesday's results.

Comments

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Rule Number 1:
New blood does not wash away blood already spilled.
I think we need to care more about our own citizens then those in geographic locations that have something our government desires (in this case, oil).
Right now, Iraq is not a country. It is a poorly maintained protectorate.
For better or worse, we should leave and let them determine their own fate.
People will die, but, I think that will happen anyway.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

I won't accuse you of it, but I definitely do accuse the ANSWER/moveon/netroots faction that now pwns the Democratic Party of wanting the jihadists to win. Whether it was a good idea or not to get into Iraq (we'll disagree about that), it's indisputable that getting out now will give the jihadists a major victory, for which we will pay for years or decades. The intel report that the Ds or their sympathisers partly leaked to the NYT a month or so ago, made that clear (in the part that wasn't leaked, but which was declassified as a result).

Pulling out of Somalia may have seemed to many like a good idea at the time, but we now know that it was Osama bin Laden's inspiration. And Barak's pullout from Lebanon turned out to be exactly the disaster that many of us predicted at the time that it would be. Pull out of Iraq now, and Iran, Syria, and jihadists all over the world, will conclude that the USA can be beaten just by bloodying it a little. And the ANSWER/Moveon crowd wants that result.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

I would hardly call 2,814 US deaths since the invasion "bloodying us a little bit." And don't even get me started on the Iraqi death tolls, including government troops and police, insurgents and innocents. And it shouldn't be about what other countries, or even the "jihadists" (and there are those experts in Islam and Arab society who consider that a misuse of the term "jihad" as it actually is meant in Islam), think of us; we can never hope to control that. What it should be about is what WE think of ourselves. What kind of nation do we want to be -- a light for the world, or a boot on its neck?

And I am *part* of what you call "the MoveOn crowd." If you accuse them of wanting the US to look vulnerable to its enemies, you accuse ME of it. I want no such thing; I just want our soldiers to stop being killed and maimed, to stop the torturing of prisoners and to end our blunder into yet another Vietnam-style quagmire that Bush and Co. wanted us in for venal, petty reasons. We can better protect ourselves against whatever Al-Qaeda may cook up if our troops aren't tied up in misbegotten adventures abroad.

[filkferengi]

Uh, I hate to rain on your analogy, but have you read Dante lately? The 9th Circle is actually perpetual, frozen ice, so your hypothetical snowcone could party quite happily. You might mean a flamethrower's chance, a firefly's chance, or some such.

Pardon the pedantry; maybe I've been partying with Dr. Whom too long [although the Bujold list also has a bumper crop of the critters].