Kerad said:
Biden's plan is the partial division of Iraq for the 3 seperate sects, with a centeral govenrment overseeing country security, and division of oil revenues. We're going to hear alot more about it as Republicans try and call this plan their own, after the elections. But that;s another matter.?
I'm not convinced that partitioning Iraq is a good idea at all, even though it may come to that anyway. (Let me clarify - it may come to that anyway - but it doesn't mean it's desirable). Allowing the Baghdad vilayet to re-emerge as a separate entity would be tantamount to putting Saddam BACK in power. THAT'S where all the violence is happening - the Southern and Northern regions are largely at rest.
Partitioning it again along these lines also ignores where the money is, where the oil is, where the industry is - it's pretending that nothing happened in the country in the last 80 years.
Kerad said:
Baloney. A plan that isn't working is not the same as no plan. The Pentagon always has a Plan B - and a Plan C - and so on. They're so friggin' redundant with backup plans, it sometimes borders on the absurd. There's an old axiom referring to war, specifically that goes any plan goes out the window once combat begins. Same for post-war - you have to adjust your plan as you go along.
I think the US had poorly assessed the Iraqis willingness to participate in the formation of their own country - we overestimated their desire for freedom into the same kind of citizen-based democratic rule we've seen in the West. We thought they'd take up arms and fight for their country. But what they've done is more like what happened HERE in the South during our revolution - once they were engaged in battle, they preferred to settle old scores with neighbors instead of fight (alongside the British; the South was fairly Loyalist, but the Brits soon found Southern Loyalists to be useless as allies, because they couldn't be relied upon to do anything but fight with each other). In our own country, even with strong territorial and colonial identity - people identified with their colony as their "nation" - we banded together (per the familiar mantra and symbol of a cut up snake "join, or die"). because we put aside the differences against common enemies.
That's actually less common worldwide that we'd like to believe - everywhere this past century, when totalitarian governments collapsed, the nation has dissolved into regional disputes, because the only thing preventing them was one great big oppressive BOOT.
I'm not sure what the solution is - I'm not sure if we should have just hauled azz out of there once Saddam was gone. I'm pretty sure if we HAD done that, we'd all be bickering over who was to blame for the inevitable CHAOS that would have ensued.
Kerad said:
Lastly...don't throw that Iraq War Resolution in my face. We all know the "facts" presented to secure that vote was pure BS.
And yet the same data was presented to all of them.
You know, this argument gets dumber every time I hear it, especially in light of how stupid we're all supposed to believe Bush is. Somehow, he's barely smart enough to turn around when he reaches a dead end, but smart enough to present a flimsy case for war with flawed data to a clearly anti-war crowd and sell it to them. They all vote for it - or a lot of them do - and to cover their tracks, their response was "it was all lies! I believed it - don't blame ME for believing the cockamamie stories crafted by a village idiot! I'm too SMART for that!".
The idea that the intel was picked over before any Democrat could vote on it is bull, but it keeps getting repeated often enough, I think you're beginning to believe it.
There were plenty on hand who after reading it, thought the case wasn't strong enough.
There were others on hand who were against going to war under any circumstances. This is actually relevant; there were some who, BELIEVING Saddam had dangerous WMD's - still were against going to war.
But all the data that Bush used to "cherry-pick" - was available to everyone. I could cherry-pick the Washington Post today, but nothing is stopping you from reading it yourself. If I parse out an article written TODAY, and you go about repeating and believing what I SAY without checking it out yourself - well why should I vote YOU into office if you're that damned stupid?
)
, so we moved to the Marine Barracks 3 months later. I finally left Beirut in April of 1983, 6 months later on Oct 23, 1983, 241 US service members lost there lives when the terrorist blew up the Marine Barracks with a truck bomb. 