At 12/17/05 12:41 AM, Missileninja wrote:
At 12/17/05 12:35 AM, Velocitom wrote:
At 12/17/05 12:08 AM, Missileninja wrote:
Bush is killing people for a war with himself,
I wouldnt go as far as saying he is throwing our troops lives away, but I wouldnt say he is being careful.
That's just it. He isn't being careful, he doesn't care about how many lives are lost. I believe Bush cares only about Bush. He's a very selfish man, and right now all he wants is to win a war that isn't possibly winnable.
It is winnable, the point he made about victory not looking like what Americans are used to is one that has been discussed at length by political and military scientists who are interested in this sort of thing. After WWII America became an Empire for both good and bad. It took us decades but we helped W. Germany and Japan rebuild after WWII.
Shortly thereafter we had our first imperial war: Korea. We lost 58,000 men to learn the lesson that we cannot be so blindly ideological in our wars and that they had to be about things such as strategic positioning and protection of economic interests. That rather than fighting to free a people sometimes we gotta accept the status quo. However, the government and military learned this lesson but the American people did not. They think war is only justifiable will it comes to fighting Nazis. They do not as a whole understand the nuances of international relations and the effects the international economy directly has on our way of life.
In this way I think Iraq is more like Korea than Vietnam. It is a hard fight and victory is not going to be something that we recognize and it is a long term process. In 1950 we went to war against a Communist regime not in defense of a democracy but in defense of a dictator named Syngman Rhee who called himself a president. However this person started a path for S. Korea that has led them to a fully developed market economy that is one of Asia's miracle tigers and since 1991 they have been a fully democratic state.
It took about forty years. Iraq is the same way, people oppressed by a violent dictator as well as a significant nomadic population (like Korea's peasants) for almost 30 years (compared to Korea's 50 year occupation by Japan). Once order is established (which most in the military think is a possibility) it will be possible to train governmental agencies in democratic principles and build-up their economy in a way in which they will be able to have a population that can handle and desire a democratic form of government.
Once the country is stable then we can pull out the vast majority of our troops. However as this process is proceeding we will probably maintain a force of 20-30,000 troops as a hedge against Iranian or Syrian invasion as well as training of the Iraqi military.
And finally Bush is not being careless or reckless in how this war is fought. 3,000 is a very small number of troops lost in a war that has gone on this long and has been this hard fought. Whether the current American population sees this or not through its ill-informed passion, chances are history will judge this war as one that had a high probablility for success (as well as legitimate when intel can be declassified) as well as its humanity towards the Iraqi people (30-40,000 Iraqis killed by direct US action is also a very small number) and care taken to safeguard our own troops. In fact, this last part about casualty avoidance could ironically be judged by future historians to be the major weakness of how this war is/was fought.