Various things heard during a five minute stint of watching Fox News, and my answers. Don't you wish you could talk back to the talking heads? I do.
Comment: Are you suggesting that we should have left Saddam in power?
Answer: Yes! He was under control. He had no weapons of mass destruction, he couldn't hurt his neighbors, he couldn't hurt us, and he had only a limited ability to hurt his own people. The Koreans should be so lucky.
Comment: Are you saying we should just cut and run? That would turn Iraq into a haven for terrorists.
Answer: Iraq is already a haven for terrorists. Neither the Iraqi government nor the US forces control significant portions of Iraq. We aren't doing anything positive for ourselves, and we certainly aren't doing anything positive for the Iraqi people. So let's leave. We can always come back to blow things up. We can keep doing that until the terrorists find a more hospitable place. Oh, wait, they already have found a more hospitable place - in Pakistan. The Pakistani government seceded parts of their country to al Qaeda just a couple months ago. They don't need Iraq, they have Pakistan. Isn't Pakistan one of our fearless president's big allies on the war on terror? With allies like that, we will lose the war.
Comment: By fighting them there, we aren't fighting them here.
Answer: No. By fighting them there, we encourage them to come here. The American war in Iraq is a recruitment ad for al Qaeda. We've done what we wanted to do: we got rid of Saddam (and why didn't someone put a bullet in his head rather than turn him over to the Iraqis?); we set up an elected government. We're done. If we respect the democratic rights of the Iraqi people, we'd leave. Around 65% of them want us to leave. What? We don't believe in democracy when it's inconvenient to do so? The mass of the Iraqi people was us out. We should listen to them and leave.
Comment: If we lose in Iraq, that will encourage the terrorists and other rogue states in the area.
Answer: Our enemies are already encouraged. Our forces are so tied up in Iraq, we can't do anything else. We can't help out in Darfur, we can't threaten Iran, and the North Koreans aren't afraid of us any more. Just about everyone can thumb their noses at us with impunity. The terrorists even have a nice new home in Pakistan that the Bush Administration is afraid of doing anything about. They have turned Iraq into a war zone. They can attack us any time, anywhere. Our enemies are at the maximum level of encouragement. They can't get any more encouraged. So how could marching out of Iraq in six months, obeying the will of the Iraqi people, living up to our own ideals of self-determination, leaving an elected government behind with assurances that we'll come back and blow things up if needed, how could that encourage people who are delighted that we are stuck in Iraq?
Comment: Now Kerry's being jumped on for saying that America's poor are fighting our wars.
Answer: I don't usually make excuses for things I didn't say, but....it's a demonstrable fact that the upper classes don't serve in the US military. This has been true since long before TR's dad dodged his service in the Union Army during the Civil War. My friends served, my neighbors do, but we're remorselessly middle class. This war is being fought by the sons and daughters of the poor and middle class. The US military knows this, look at their recruiting ads. They talk about money for college, good benefits - that isn't the language used to attract trust fund babies. Remember: the US military recently lowered its standards. It's now just about the only place to go if you don't have a high school diploma. Some cutie out there is going to write in that his family is rich and he heard the patriotic call to serve. Bullets are whizzing around his head right now. Just goes to show you, it's always the exception that proves the rule. If a rich guy exists in the military, his service honors me. But where are the hundreds of thousands of sons and daughters of the rich, of politicians? They aren't there. The middle class is the bone and muscle of this country. The rich are always the rich, they'll always cut and run.