Well, the American public agree with him, according to those left-wing wackos at the Wall Street Journal:
Victory in Iraq still possible? No: 55% Yes: 36%
Deadline for withdrawal? Yes: 57% No: 35%
msnbc.msn.com/id/18312789
Americans siding with Dems against Bush - Politics - MSNBC.com
More from Pat Dollards site:
[quote]
It’s Official: The Democrat Party Tries To Formally Surrender To Iran And Al Qaeda On Behalf Of The American People
Is This What You Voted For? Is That What Thousands Have Died For, The Personal Benefit Of Democrat Politicians?
WASHINGTON — A sharply divided House brushed aside a veto threat Wednesday and passed legislation that would order President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by Oct. 1.
The 218-208 vote came as the top U.S. commander in Iraq told lawmakers the country remained gripped by violence but was showing some signs of improvement.
Passage puts the bill on track to clear Congress by week’s end and arrive on the president’s desk in coming days as the first binding congressional challenge to Bush’s handling of the conflict now in its fifth year.
“Our troops are mired in a civil war with no clear enemy and no clear strategy for success,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
Republicans promised to stand squarely behind the president in rejecting what they called a “surrender date” handed to the enemy.
“Al-Qaida will view this as the day the House of Representatives threw in the towel,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee.
The $124.2 billion bill would fund the war, among other things, but demand troop withdrawals begin on Oct. 1 or sooner if the Iraqi government does not meet certain standards. The bill sets a nonbinding goal of completing the troop pull out by April 1, 2008, allowing for forces conducting certain noncombat missions, such as attacking terrorist networks or training Iraqi forces, to remain.
House and Senate appropriators agreed to the legislation earlier this week. The Senate was expected to clear the measure Thursday, sending it to the president.
While Bush was confident the bill would ultimately fail because Democrats lacked the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto, he kept up pressure on lawmakers. On the same day as the House vote, the president dispatched his Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and other senior defense officials to Capitol Hill to make his case: Additional forces recently sent to Iraq are yielding mixed results and the strategy needs more time to work.
Petraeus told reporters sectarian killings in Baghdad were only a third of what they were in January, before Bush began sending in additional U.S. forces. He added that progress in the troubled western Anbar province was “breathtaking,” and that he thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was “doing his best” at leading the country.
But “the ability of al-Qaida to conduct horrific, sensational attacks obviously has represented a setback and is an area in which we’re focusing considerable attention,” Petraeus said.
Petraeus said he would not touch on the “minefield of discussions about various legislative proposals,” but he noted that the new strategy in Iraq was just beginning. He said he planned to provide more details in early September.
Petraeus briefed his findings to lawmakers in a private room, where protesters outside chanted “Troops home now!” Republicans and Democrats alike emerged to say Petraeus had only confirmed their positions.
“This briefing reinforced our view that the solution in Iraq is a political solution,” Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters. Also confirmed, he said, was “our belief that we must hold the Iraqis accountable for achieving real progress.”
Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, said Petraeus acknowledged there were challenges. “But considering where we are, I think the general feels good about the progress thus far,” Boehner said.
Bush said he stands firm on his latest strategy for winning the war and dismisses as counterproductive the Democratic call for withdrawal.
“That means our commanders in the middle of a combat zone would have to take fighting directions from legislators 6,000 miles away on Capitol Hill,” Bush said this week. “The result would be a marked advantage for our enemies and a greater danger for our troops.”
Petraeus’ comments Wednesday put a finer point on when the much-awaited decision about the length of the U.S. troop buildup may come, saying he will make an assessment of the conditions in Iraq in early September, and report back to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military leaders.
Gates has said he expects the assessment this summer, but this is the first time military leaders said it would not be until September.
Pat Dollard[/quote]
[quote=“MikeN”]Well, the American public agree with him, according to those left-wing wackos at the Wall Street Journal:
Victory in Iraq still possible? No: 55% Yes: 36%
Deadline for withdrawal? Yes: 57% No: 35%
msnbc.msn.com/id/18312789
Americans siding with Dems against Bush - Politics - MSNBC.com[/quote]
Well that is where the problem lies. Politicans on both sides of the aisle are waring over the war and quoting polls. But as of yet nobody has a plan how to deal with Iraq.
Stay the course until whenever, or pull all troops out are not plans to fix Iraq, but they do make good rallying cries.
Iran . . . 911, Iran . . . 911. Must attack. Must avenge. Must strike back before mushroom clouds kill . . us . . all . . .
Mofangongren, your Lincoln essay/book review or whatever it was is great. You should get that published. So much thought condensed into a pretty tight read.
This is an interesting thread (when it stays on topic). Some of the posts have made me think much harder about the concept of withdrawal from Iraq. I’d never really thought about the issue in fact. My feelings were always similar to TNT’s: Need a plan for withdrawing before withdrawing.
It’s kind of scary how unified the so-called left appears to be on the ‘Support the troops by bringing them home’ bandwagon. I remember in the run-up to the war, many liberal writers and talkers were saying if we do invade, we’ll be stuck there cleaning up the mess we make. That was my thinking at the time too.
I totally agree with MFRG that we are tragically unfortunate to have a boob like Bush in charge. The case must be that the astronomical sums spent on the American military go into expensive hi-tech crap that doesn’t necessarily translate into ability to control real estate.
I think both sides of the argument, that is, the Democrats and the Bushies, should be compelled to present their arguments in terms of REALITY clearly and honestly. If there are breathtaking improvements in the western part of Iraq, lets get some camera crews and translators out there to prove it and put the results on prime time. To keep it clean, they could subcontract the job to an assortment of independent (and otherwise) journalists. Send bloody Michael Moore too.
If the Dems say the troops should be reeled home pronto, make them prove it factually. They must be required to show why this is the BEST option, taking into consideration not only what is “best” for the troops (since when did we ever care about that? Troops are for sending into peril and every soldier claims to accept that, and I think most do in reality), but also what America owes (morally) to Iraqis, whose country America invaded without advance polling of support levels (didn’t learn from Vietnam). If the Dems merely want to withdraw to save American hide, then they are more evil than Bush himself in my book. And I’m suspicious. I already have set a policy for myself to spit whenever I say or type Nancy Pelosi’s (spit) name. I’m batting about .200 I think. At least I’m trying.
Back to my method. A third party should be given the chance to demonstrate their plan to the American public as well. This would be the plan of staying but massively reconfiguring the use of money and resources. How many billion a day are sunk into Iraq these days? Maybe if half that money were spent with intent to seduce rather than subdue the Iraqis, things would start to look different. I can only think of the UN as a possible presenter of this perspective, since the Dems seem to have chosen to make withdrawal their rallying point, which means the troops will be in limbo until the next election and probably nothing positive will happen in Iraq.
I want to see a movie like Jarhead that was made more recently. The public support percentages cited by MikeN mean nothing. Who cares what the American public thinks, because they’re not properly informed on the parameters of the question at all. And their priority will be to “protect America” as it always is, so they will be oblivious to the moral debt America owes to Iraq right now.
You are aware though that it is this public who will decide via elections (indirectly as it may be) how much support this war receives?
The last thing I thus would suggest is to call public support “meaningless”. In fact as Vietnam has highlighted it may be the single most important element for the kind of war fought in Iraq.
Any plan not caring what the Amrican public thinks is unrealistic. One may lament this, but eventually one has to deal with that fact. Merely prancing around and flaunting “morals” does little good when one ignores what’s in the cards.
Regarding your question “What if we leave?” - the American Conservative had an article just about that earlier this year. The conclusion drawn there is that leaving Iraq will kill the U.S. about as much as leaving Vietnam did.
Not at all.
Well, what I mean is, I think this is a decision for experts to make. It’s like the Lincoln thing as explained earlier, but maybe not that autocratic of course. I believe this is why the presidency is given so much power over military and diplomatic affairs.
So I don’t see it as mattering if more than 50% voice support for prompt withdrawal.
And as for it mattering at election time, I bet there is no way the Democratic candidate will ever let her/himself get pinned down on the issue of immediate withdrawal. S/he will keep options open. Wouldn’t surprise me if Hilary wins the nod because of this. It is a situation where they need an intelligent person in charge to clean up the enormous mess Bush made. I like Obama, and of course I like his heart (he better not be faking.) but maybe he doesn’t match up to Hilary in some ways.
Problem is, in spite of everything Rumsfeld once may have claimed (doubting 6 months) this war may very well drag on for a couple of elections.
How many more do you think American public support is good for? Especially given how the PR element of this war had been dealt with from the very start up to now? Because this is the timeframe one got to “fix” Iraq.
Fred claims it will take 60 years. 15 elections in other words? Sounds realistic?
All of this is just a big ruse…
does anyone really think that stabilizing iraq will somehow change the make-up of the middle-east?
the hatred espoused from every angle in the region is so much bigger than iraq.
who exactly is going to control iraq? shias? sunnis? kurds?
no, they will NOT have a coalition government in iraq…the history of the region shows that the acrimony runs far too deep between these groups.
this war is not about iraq. its about a seemingly endless “cleansing” of the mid-east…an impossible and terribly misguided mission.
the kurds are not going to sit by and allow the sunnis or shias take their land; the syrians and lebanese are not going to magically embrace isreal; iran is going to continue to fight against sunni domination; egypt will continue to funnel money into sunni coffers; the clerics in saudi arabia will not stop trying to suppress any influence that iran might have…etc., etc., etc.
why the hell does the US have so many of their young men and women in the midst of this self-perpetuating mess???
My guess is you will now get a smokescreen again how all of this “was just as necessary as the U.S. entering WWII” (which they never did out of their own volition, and justly so) “and as fighting the Cold War” (in which they cleverly refrained from attacking a souvereign nation direcly themselves if I recall right, and justly so again).
Either that or again some hippy guilt mongering of “how we just owe all these poor foreign people to nanny them because it is so moral and we have to make up for being bad white people ourselves all the time.”
I would be surprised if some other rational were named.
Edit: Damn forgot 9/11 … the crime best avenged by doubling the U.S. death toll via Iraq.
dearpeter, The problem with relying on expert opinion is that someone always has to pick the experts, and decide what to do based on their advice.
That’s what just happened with the Iraq Study Group, remember?
Whether a country fights a war is always a political decision, and in democracies those decisions are made by the people who are paying for it, and whose fellow citizens are fighting and dying.
If the American people reach the decision that they want this war to end, then it will end, no matter what the experts say.
Bush will not end this war or leave Iraq. When the Democrats win the presidency in 2009, they are less likely to end the war because they will be responsible. That is precisely why despite all the gleeful hand rubbing after the midterm elections, I merely laughed. Since November, the Democrats have controlled both houses. Today is April 27. That is fully six months after the midterm elections and no pullout, but a surge? hahaha We will remain in Iraq for 60 years and the best guarantee of that is a Democrat win in the presidential elections. Sorry, but there you are. And given that 30 years of appeasing, sorry, talking to the Iranians and Syrians has not worked, is it any wonder that Bush (supposedly the dumb one) is not choosing to go through the charade of consulting the Iranian and Syrian leaderships? Much better to go with the smart adults like Baker who talked and talked and talked and talked to the Iranians (remember Iran Contragate?) and got what? a few hostages released from Lebanon? Harumph!
Lest you think that I am crowing because I want to control Iraqi oil, which we do not and never will, the truth is that I know that this will be for the good of the Iraqi people and it will offer a better future to the people of the Middle East. This is PRECISELY why the elected government of Iraq has not asked the US to leave but to stay. Strange then that the lefties on this forum continue to demand a pull out in accordance with the wishes of the terrorists, insurgents and Iranians. What strange bed fellows, but I doubt many have thought this through that far. If Lefties were excessive thinkers we would have less of a problem. As it is, they need to feel and that is the problem. Feel this!
Kind of how Schröder jumped ship and left the mess for someone else to clean up, right?
G.W. Bush’s love child said:
it’s interesting that someone who is proud to call himself a conservative would be so overjoyed about spending so much of the American taxpayer’s money…
on a completely unrelated note,
the middle-east won’t be in good working order until we have every one of those heathens espousing their love for Jesus, eh Fred?
what exactly do you prescribe when you say a “better future”?
as far as al-Maliki is concerned, which side is he on this week? do you really want to rely on him to lead the iraqi’s to the promised land?
[quote=“mofangongren”]Having just finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent “Team of Rivals” about President Lincoln’s cabinet, I figure that if the Republicans cared so much about winning this war, they would have taken a few hints from a successful leader: …
[/quote]
Is President Lincoln the ideal war leader? Then President Bush should…
Was that book rose colored?
There is a third way between appeasement and mindless war mongering. It’s to get out of their countries, stop meddling in their governments and stop providing the money, munitiions and moral support necessary for the taking of their land. That hasn’t been true for thirty years
Until we stop doing those things first everything else is bullshit.
"I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq’s history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven’t been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.
I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night."
– Riverbend
One would assume therefore that Riverbend is a Sunni Iraqi? haha
This war will end when more Republicans join Hagel in voting with the Democrats–and the Democrats get their act together–and put an end to the administration’s delusions.
Bets on when that’ll be? Feb '08 sounds good to me. [quote=“Novak: Washington Post”]Over a dozen years, I have had many such conversations with Hagel, but not for quotation. This time, I asked him to go on the record about his assessment of what the “surge” has accomplished. In language more blunt than his prepared speeches and articles, he described Iraq as “coming undone,” with its regime “weaker by the day.” He deplored the Bush administration’s failure to craft a coherent Middle East policy, blaming the influence of deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams.
[…]
After his latest visit to Iraq, with stops in Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi, Hagel told me: “This thing is really coming undone quickly, and [Prime Minister] Maliki’s government is weaker by the day. The police are corrupt, top to bottom. The oil problem is a huge problem. They still can’t get anything through the parliament – no hydrocarbon law, no de-Baathification law, no provincial elections,” which are needed to bring Sunnis into the governing process.
The regional problem, as described by Hagel, is a U.S. policy breakdown with the failure to engage Iran and Syria. “I do know that there are a number of Israelis who would like to engage Syria,” said Hagel. “They have said that Elliott Abrams keeps pushing them back.” He quoted foreign ministers, ambassadors and former U.S. officials as saying that they believe Abrams “is making policy in the Middle East.”
Hagel certainly is no peace-now zealot. “We’re not going to precipitously pull out,” he told me. “We have [national] interests in Iraq.” While he asserted that “we can’t get out by the end of the year,” he called for “pulling some of our guys out – not all of them, but you’ve got to get them out of [Baghdad] at least, get them out of the middle of civil war.” If not, Hagel said, “then the prospects of the Republican Party are very dim next year.”
What about claims by proponents of the Iraqi intervention that failure to stop the terrorists in Iraq will open the door to them in the American homeland?
“That’s nonsense,” Hagel replied. “I’ve never believed that. That’s the same kind of rhetoric and thinking that neocons used to get us into this mess and everything that [Donald] Rumsfeld, [Paul] Wolfowitz, [Richard] Perle, [Douglas] Feith and the vice president all said. Nothing turned out the way they said it would.”
It is “nonsense,” Hagel said, because “Iraq is not embroiled in a terrorist war today.” Hagel, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, cited “national intelligence” attributing “maybe 10 percent” of the insurgency and violence to al-Qaeda. Indeed, he described Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds as opposed to al-Qaeda: “They don’t like the terrorists. What’s happened in Anbar province is the tribes are finally starting to connect with us because al-Qaeda started killing some of their leadership and threatening their people. So the tribes now are at war with al-Qaeda.”
“So,” said Hagel, “when I hear people say, ‘Well, if we leave them to that, it will be chaos’ – what do you think is going on now? Scaring the American people into this blind alley is so dangerous.”[/quote]
[quote=“Groo”][quote=“mofangongren”]Having just finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent “Team of Rivals” about President Lincoln’s cabinet, I figure that if the Republicans cared so much about winning this war, they would have taken a few hints from a successful leader: …
[/quote]
Is President Lincoln the ideal war leader? Then President Bush should…
Did Lincoln support this? I don’t think so. The Confederates all took off from the House and Senate before the commencement of hostilities. There was an isolated case of an Ohio politician who was briefly arrested in the midst of trying to rouse large crowds into rebellion – mindful of the sensitivies, when Lincoln heard about the arrest he had the politician then released to go to the Confederacy if that was what he truly wanted. The politician took it, went up to Canada where he continued his rebel-supporting activities, and then before the end of the war re-entered the Union in time for the 1864 elections.
Conscription was something that Lincoln fought long and hard to avoid. Only when they ran into manpower shortages did the Union start a draft – which led to riots in NY City but which was accepted relatively peacefully elsewhere. One of the solutions was the recruitment of thousands and thousands of American blacks into the U.S. Army.
This was controversial but limited geographically to Maryland (a then-slave-state that surrounded Washington D.C.) and parts of southern Indiana where there had been riots and militia kookiness, but then at the start of the war (even from the observations of Brits who were watching the situation), there was a serious problem with infiltration of the Union with southern sympathizers. I do not think the post-9/11 era of unity and nationwide mourning really had a parallel with the situation facing Lincoln in which the very nature of the war centered on a divided America. Lincoln did suspend habeus corpus in some limited circumstances; Jeff Davis did it throughout the Confderacy.
How so? In Iraq, perhaps disarmament from the start would have been a good idea. But instead, we had a bunch of wing-nut ideologues spouting that what’s good for the NRA in the U.S. should be good for the Iraqis. A massive overpriced buyback of AK-47s and other weaponry would have been far cheaper than the bloodshed we’ve had there over the past few years. Regarding depopulation, we’d need to know more of what you’re suggesting here about Lincoln. Here’s one article on the topic of Southern refugees:
Some of the ones getting the boot were the families of serving Confederate soldiers – families that were living high on the hog in Union territory – using their land and slaves (which they were able to keep until the Emancipation Proclamation took effect late in the war) to outfit the men of the family (higher-ranking officers often equipped troops serving under them as well) with the equipment being used to attack the Union. The war split families for sure – Mary Lincoln, herself, had a bunch of siblings who fought for the South. So, how would you have done it differently? How would you have denied the South the material support necessary to continue the fight? How would you have dealt with pro-South families supporting the soldiers?
The whole idea of Sherman looting and burning his way across the South has gained some toehold thanks to the “Gone With the Wind” movie, but the truth of Confederate efforts to burn war material ahead of the advancing Yankees and the lack of good urban fire control methods was another part of the picture. Johnny Reb burned down a quarter of Richmond before the Army of the Potamac even got close … a prelude to oh-so-many future cigarette fires in mobile homes over the ensuing century.
Not sure what you’re talking about here. The South-leaning racist U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Taney didn’t think that blacks could be considered “citizens”, but Lincoln’s AG did the research and came back with opinions that Taney was wrong. Thus, if you’re talking of his recruitment of black soldiers, I don’t support at all the idea that this was a recruitment of “foreign mercenaries”. As to recruitment of mercenaries, Bush has already done plenty of that with the private contracting “security” firms running about Iraq these past several years.
Did he? There were plenty of newspapers “critical of the war” and critical of Lincoln and his cabinet that survived without missing a single deadline – Lincoln was active in publishing public letters in which he sought to explain what he was doing to the American people in a candid way even in papers that had savaged him and his presidency. Now, if there were newspapers shut down by executive order, was it that they were just “critical of the war” or were they actively supporting the Confederacy? Are we talking about newspapers in some of the border slave states that stayed in the Union (Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, etc.?). Give us some details so we can size up what Lincoln was shutting down.