Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Yours and Bush's war, Mr. ETWolverine	excon	04/06/04
Hello Elliot (and the rest of you miscreants): It’s time to apply the “Q” and the “B” word to Iraq. I listened to you, Elliot, and in my heart, I hoped you were right. But in my brain, I knew you were wrong. Quagmire and bogged down are the two words I’m thinking of. Our differences: 1) I distinguish between Iraq and Afghanistan. To you, it’s all the same war. 2) You see us as liberators, but the Iraqis (and I) see us as invaders. They did not attack us, nor did they plan to. Plus, they had no capacity to attack even if they wanted to. Hell, even the Shiite, whom we expected would throw flowers in our paths, hate our guts. 3) Your friend Bush, wants them to have elections before they write a constitution. Really? 4) Your friend Bush wants to turn government over to the un-governable in 3 months time. Surly, he’s kidding. 5) Now that we’re there, we’ll be there for generations. If we leave anytime soon, the killing in the Balkans will appear tame. Civil war will erupt and will engulf the entire region. 6) Your friend Bush maintains that he has enough troops to finish the job. Poppycock! We’re vulnerable all over the place and we’re getting our asses handed to us. In my view, I think we’re on the verge of a world war. The entire region will become embroiled and we’re stuck in the middle. Iraq IS a job that we would have eventually had to undertake in any case, but it should have been on OUR terms, and it isn’t. Nobody’s going to join the Reserves anymore, and our regulars are stretched too thin. Korea can tell us to go to hell, and they did just that. We’re in deep, deep doo-doo and your guy put us there. excon
Answered By		Answered On
stevehaddock		04/06/04
1) Indeed, the "Bushies" are treating this as one big war, and in their own minds it probably is. However, this is the same sort of thinking that drove the Vietnam War - Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon weren't fighting the Vietnamese, they were fighting the Russians. Like the Vietnamese, the Iraqis don't see liberators, they see a nation trying to impose a government structure on them. That worked in Germany and Japan because their previous government structure had failed them. Iraq may have been a cesspool, but everyone had a job and no-one went hungry. Now the only place with a worse employment drop than the U.S. is Iraq and getting a steady food supply seems to be the order of the day. 2) Indeed, the change from liberators to occupiers has happened a lot in American history - the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba being the main examples. At least Russia was honest about its security goals when it ran over Eastern Europe in World War II. 3) I note that the English were militarily defeated in 1781. It was 1787 before the U.S. had a workable constitution, and they already had a provisional government during that war. 5) Indeed, it seems that even Bush Sr. is looking good in retrospect - he knew that an attack on Baghdad in 1991 was a bad idea. He even seems to have raised the issue with his son before the invasion. The U.S. has no "exit strategy", the same problem that it had in the Philippines and Vietnam. 6) Indeed, during Vietnam, the battle was always "almost won", but the demand for troops kept growing. In "The Fog of War", Robert McNamara notes that when he left the post of Secretary of Defence in 1967, there were 25,000 American dead in Vietnam - that number more than doubled during the Nixon administration. The United States has pretty much broken all of the rules of war outlined by Clausewitz in the 19th century. They failed to remove the means of war from Iraq (guns and improvised explosives) had no plan to absorb Iraq, and had no plan to remove Iraq's desire to fight. Things are only going to get worse.

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