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brutally Kamphausened 15000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 26,350 Likes: 38 |
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
I've repeatedly agreed with many of the dissenting generals, who were being constructive and not just in bed with the Democrats and playing partisan games.
Any American has the right to question the leaders and critique the war. Every complaint I've seen from Democrats is generally worthy of examination.
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r3x29yz4a said:
1. Questioning the methods of war is hardly the same as supporting the enemy in a war.
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Wonder Boy said:
You, and many liberals who attempt the same argument, say nothing in defense of U.S. policy, you only leap eagerly on every setback in Iraq, cynically question every statement from our own government and military, while eagerly accepting verbatim every stated rationalization made by our enemy.
We're now legally bound to support U.S. Policy? There's a difference between America and the U.S. Government, between the Presidency and the President. Questioning Bush is not the same as hating America.
I've never questioned the ability to dissent from Bush, or any other President. Only that Democrats have done so over the last five-plus years in such an uncivil, bitterly mean-spirited and unproductive way.
Before Bush had even taken office and had the opportunity to do anything wrong, Democrats were smearing his legitimacy as President, and ability to lead. Based on nothing but smear and innuendo.
Compare this to how Nixon lost an equally close election in 1960, and chose not to ask for a re-count, because he knew it would have bitterly split the nation.
Definitely not the same consideration given by Gore in 2000, who pushed for every re-count he could get, and then was all too glad to perpetuate bitter conspiracy theory within his own party for the last 5 years, and no doubt long into the future.
If you have facts with which to constructively criticize Bush and offer a viable alternative action, respectfully state them, and let your criticisms be considered on the weight of evidence.
But when you constantly assume Bush is guilty of things, and accuse him of pursuing the Iraq war for all kinds of arcane ulterior motives, or to get rich off of Halliburton, based on NO evidence, ZERO, then you are clearly crippling a President's ability to act, just to vindictively tear down the guy who won, just because your guy didn't get elected.
That's not patriotism or civil discourse in pursuit of better government. That's just crippling and badmouthing your own country out of pure vindictiveness.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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W B said:
Democrat leaders like Murtha, Albright, Durbin and Dean provide factless propaganda soundbytes that our enemies eagerly report throughout the Muslim world and use as a recruiting tool.
All politicians use BS soundbytes. Both sides.
Who cares if the terrorists are happy over some disagreements. They could eagerly report Bush screwing up a speech. What difference does it make? Also, I think they use the chaos under Bush in his wars and the hundreds of thousands of muslims who have died as a better recruitment than "they disagree in Washington."
Who cares?
I care, that the propaganda of Murtha, Reid, Pelosi, Durbin, Dean, etc. is defeatist speculation that serves no purpose but to divide the country.
And that liberal rhetoric is broadcast by our enemies to give hope to terrorists, who might otherwise despair and give up.
But when Dean says there's "no way" we can win, when Murtha says "we'll leave Iraq defeated, and it's only a matter of how many American soldiers will die" before we're forced to retreat in shame, those are soundbytes played in the Arab world that could rally terrorists to fight another thousand years, who would otherwise give up.
I call that giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Not saying: How can we change strategy to win?
Democrats are instead saying: No matter what, we are doomed to failure in Iraq.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
You eagerly jump on a few isolated incidents as if they were standard U.S. military policy.
There shouldn't be any. Al Sharpton of all people had a good line about this sort of thing when someone defended police brutality as isolated. He said (to paraphrase) "If a woman has 6 kids and ones a serial killer, you don't point to the other kids and say they turned out okay, you figure what went wrong with the bad one. We should focus on the isolated abuses. Show the world we have principles and won't stand for them being violated by our own guys.
That's a bullshit rationalization, designed to bypass that these are exceptions.
And that these exceptions are severely punished by our own military and leadership.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
As does our enemy.
Again, so what? Why do you care so much about what terrorists are happy over?
Again, if Democrats would limit themselves to the facts, and offer constructive criticism, and valid alternative actions, then Democrats wouldn't be providing propaganda for our enemy, that wouldn't be helping to stoke the enemy's endurance and rage to press on.
But instead Democrats say in no uncertain terms that we're allegedly doomed to defeat, providing Al Qaida with soundbytes from our own leaders (i.e., Durbin, Dean, etc.).
Saying that the U.S. is more evil than the beheading, suicide -bombing murderers that we're fighting. Soundbytes that stoke rage and greater resistance when broadcast in the Arab world.
Yeah. I care that Al Qaida is happy with these quotes. They rally rage and resistance against our forces in Iraq.
They provide aid and comfort to our enemy.
They cost American lives.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
And yet ignore that the U.S. military prosecutes and punishes these isolated incidents.
As they should. However, all I've seen shows they prosecute the lower ranks. Meanwhile Bush/Rumsfeld have refused to give up the option to torture.
The commanding officer at Abu Ghraib was dishonorably discharged.
The officers cannot be charged with complicity and knowledge of these acts, only negligence, of not preventing these humiliations/intimidations of prisoners (which still fall short short of torture, by the way) under their command. That is the limit of what can be proven and punished under the law.
You make it sound like they were put back in battlefield command, or put in charge of another prison camp.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
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r3x29yz4a said:
3. Roosevelt still had to run for reelection and prove himself and his policies. And the people supported him, Bush's numbers are sinking because he's failing not because he's being questioned.
And while Franklin Roosevelt (like George W. Bush) won re-election in 1936, 1940 and 1944, his numbers did go down and he carried less states with each re-election.
First of all, Bush was elected once and appointed once. Secondly, every popular person loses popularity over time. People like new things. Not sure what your point was with that.
No, Bush was elected in 2000 by the electoral college, and elected again in 2004 with a more clear majority.
There was an attempt by the Florida Supreme Court to manipulate the election result in 2000, which was countered by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But it was always ultimately winning a majority of votes in the electoral college, in accordance with U.S. federal election law, that won the election.
Democrats tried every trick in the book to overturn the result illegally, and manipulate the public with inflammatory rhetoric, including attempts to exclude the absentee ballots of U.S. soldiers overseas. But ultimately, it all came back to the electoral college.
My point initially was that Roosevelt, like Bush, had declining popularity as W W II dragged on.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
It should also be pointed that Roosevelt didn't have to face the kind of concerted media attacks on his Presidency that Bush did, from the day he was elected.
Which would have lowered Roosevelt's popular opinion standing through relentless trashing of his presidency, as it has G.W. Bush.
the press has changed in general. And I like it. I like that they go for the president with gusto. That means the President has to be more careful.
I think the people deserve to know what their leaders do and say. I think the people deserved to know Roosevelt had polio. I think the people deserved to know about Monica Lewinsky.
You may cry liberal bias. But the fact is Kerry or Gore would get the same scrutiny.
Would they?
I can point to a number of incidents that disprove that notion of yours.
While the media did go after Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair, they did so somewhat reluctantly.
If Presidents Bush Sr. or G.W. Bush had done the same thing, the media would not have relented until they were pushed out of office.
Conservative Bloggers have made the liberal media more accountable in recent years. But in the recent examples of almost simultaneous remarks by Karl Rove and Sen Dick Durbin, Rove made the controversial remark:
"In the wake of 9-11, Conservatives saw the threat and prepared for war, while liberals offered sympathy and therapy for our enemy."
This every liberal network and major paper blasted as its top headline for a week.
But when Dick Durbin compared our troops to "Nazi storm troopers, Soviet Gulags and the Pol Pot regime", those same liberal networks gave minimal coverage, and did their best to ignore remarks that embarassed the Democrat party. The liberal media did their absolute best to give Durbin's remarks a minimum of exposure.
And another example, the Dan Rather story in October 2004, a show of liberal media partisanship that cost Rather his job.
But yeah, sure, go on believing that Republicans get the same scrutiny.
Read Bias by Bernard Goldberg, for a 30-year CBS News veteran's (and self-proclaimed liberal's) take on media bias.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
An Iraq that in 1990 had the third largest military on Earth.
Did they have that rank in 2003?
No, but they were still sabre-rattling and de-stabilizing the Middle East region, which made necessary creation of Northern and Southern no-fly zones over Iraq to keep them from greater genocide on their own people.
And made necessary the creation of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates, to contain the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq still posed to its neighbors.
We flew raids every day over Iraq's no-fly zones, and Iraq fired on our pilots every day.
The no-fly zones alone cost the U.S. 2 billion dollars a year, to contain Saddam, and to minimize his threat potential.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
An Iraq that previously had nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
That used those weapons on Iranian soldiers, and on Iraq's own people.
First of all, we helped them get those things. And secondly, did they have them in 2003?
We didn't know for certain that Iraq didn't have them, until after we invaded in March/April 2003.
Saddam's own inventory records, reviewed by U.N. inspectors before Saddam tossed them out, showed that Saddam had about 5000 chemical-tipped missiles that were unaccounted for.
After the war, it was shown that Saddam's military had lied to Saddam to impress and please Saddam with inflated numbers of weapons production.
The David Kay report showed that Saddam was in material breach of the ban on WMD's in post-1991 Iraq, that there was the bare bones of a WMD program that would have gone into production, at any point U.N. sanctions would have been lifted.
And David Kay said in Senate hearings on the Iraq WMD report that Saddam's government was very near collapse when invaded, and without U.S. occupation, all these Iraqi scientists would have been " a nuclear arms bazaar, on sale to the highest bidder".
We did provide supplies for chemical weapons production to Saddam in the early/mid 80's. But the Reagan administration had become uneasy with its ties to Saddam and severed relations well before the end of Reagan's second term.
That Rumsfeld/Saddam connection (and the photo of it you love so much, and constantly post) could be compared to U.S. and other European nations who had ties and were military/industrial suppliers to Hitler in the 1930's, before his full threat and capacity for evil were revealed.
But the Reagan administration grew uneasy with Saddam's brutality, and severed its ties with Saddam. Rumsfeld became one of Saddam's fiercest enemies.
The Reagan administration's looking the other way and allowing Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons on advancing Iranian forces (as I discussed in another topic) prevented Iranian fundamentalists from over-running Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
A difficult choice for Reagan, of several bad options.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
An Iraq with a current population of 25 million people, and that murdered an estimated 1 million of its own people, being un-earthed in mass graves now all over Iraq.
This has nothing to do with military power or how wars are handled.
On the contrary, it has to do with one of the most morally defensible reasons for invading Iraq: To stop genocide.
Bosnia.
Kosovo.
Somalia.
Rwanda.
Darfur.
These are some other nations that have been invaded by the U.S. and/or U.N. for the same humanitarian goals.
I'm willing to bet you found this less irrelevant when Clinton was in office.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
An Iraqi resistance that is largely not native to Iraq, and is being perpetuated long beyond its natural insurgency life by an international Al Qaida organization.
which, if it had been managed right, would've been stifled. The fact is we have turned Iraq into a terrorist magnet with our failings.
As I said before (about how we should have gone in with an invasion force of 200,000 to 300,000 men, as the generals wanted but Rumsfeld rejected) I actually agree with you on this point.
It's conceivable that a larger occupation force would have deterred the insurgency from forming.
Not absolute, but very possible.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
An Iraqi insurgency that is NOT supported by the overwhelming majority of Iraqi citizens, that relies on terrorism and mafia tactics to intimidate Iraqi citizens who clearly want democracy.
see above point.
I do find that liberals like to pretend as if the Iraqi people don't want us in Iraq.
But I think it's very clear that a majority of Iraqis want us in Iraq for a period of years as a stabilizing force, to prevent sectarian violence and civil war, as well as to protect them from terrorism.
It's an important distinction to make: Many Iraqis want us to stay in Iraq, to stabilize their democracy through its formative years.
But if the U.S. withdraws prematurely (as Murtha and other liberal assholes are pushing for) these same people will be pleading for their lives and cutting deals with the people they are most afraid of.
The rhetoric of Murtha and other liberals makes Iraqis less willing to commit and risk their lives, just so they can be sold out by Democrat pressure later.
How would Germany be today, if we had the same partisan calls to withdraw from West Germany, the same potential for sudden withdrawal?
Would the German people have committed to democracy?
Or would it have likely taken a lot longer because of distrust and wavering commitment on our end, or even failed?
Democrats know the answer to this, despite the cost.
They'd just rather vindictively snipe at Bush than admit the truth.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
It should also be pointed out that in W W II, the U.S. was helped out greatly by the full military and financial participation of Great Britain, Russia, the Soviet Union, and many other countries with a greater stake in that war.
it should also be pointed out that Germany had already invaded countries, had a strong military and economy.
Yeah, that's right. It's not like Iraq had invaded Kuwait or threatened its neighbors. 
Are you serious? You're not the first Democrat to defend Saddam Hussein as if he was innocent of genocide and regional aggression.
And not the first to look foolish in doing so.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
In Iraq, the U.S. is rebuilding the country almost completely with its own resources.
So Rumsfeld lied when he said this would only cost like $10 billion and the Iraqi oil would pay for the rest?
No one knew, beyond the war cost itself, that the infrastructure was so worn and neglected.
You want to personalize it and accuse Rumsfeld of "lying".
But this was a failure of intelligence. Perhaps a failure that could not have been forseen by anyone.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
And much of the reconstruction cost is of an Iraqi infrastructure that was allowed to deteriorate for 30 years, far beyond just the war damage.
We've made the country worse. There was an article in the paper last week about how they have a fraction of the water and power they had under Saddam.
That's unproductive defeatist crap that distorts the truth.
I posted an article from the U.S. Army Corps of engineers that gives the exact numbers, pre-war, post war, and post-reconstruction, in the It's not about oil or Iraq... topic. Page 37, I think.
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r3x29yz4a said:
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Wonder Boy said:
U.S. World War II deaths:
U.S. Iraq War deaths to date :
And by the way, you're gloating and making the propaganda points of our enemies again.
But the points you make are distorted propaganda, and not truth.
The Iraq war approaches same length of time, but not nearly the same magnitude or casualties.
Not even the same scope and magnitude as Vietnam (58,000 dead) or Korea (56,000 dead).
Your arguments could only be persuasive to the uninformed.
See, that's the problem right there. You use arbitrary numbers to bolster some point and then say because I don't like how the war is managed that I support the terrorists.
Bullshit, I say, Bullshit.
WWII soldiers had more casualties because they had less technology. In fact, with our advanced weapons systems and body armor and all that jazz the numbers should be way lower and things accomplished much quicker.
Given the exactness of my numbers, and the lack of substantiation on your part to counter it, beyond your saying "it's bullshit", I stand by what I said.
A war that has endured for 3 and 1/2 years, with 2,522 casualties is hardly a bloodbath, relative to other U.S. wars.
Despite divisive emotional arguments by liberals to paint it that way.
- from Do Racists have lower IQ's...
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
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