Trying to put my own war on Halt. Some people claaaaim,
there's a Republican to blaaaaame, but I know, ... it's all Bill Clinton's Fault
Blew out my half-track, IED carjack
I Lost my left leg and got to go home ...
But there's narcs in the IV, and Rummy on TV
The drugs and denial are what help me hang on
Wasted away on vicodin in Wingerville ...
Waiting for my neeeeext opiate hit
Some people claaaaaim there's a White House to blaaaame
But I know ... it's that Vacaville bitch ...
No goddamn good reason, in Iraq all season,
nothing to show but a shiny new stump,
But this cheap prothesis, kinda fits when I needs it,
think I'll ask the VA 'bout these new lumps ...
Yet another useless respones to a full-blown, obstinate wingnut in comments that go in endless circles like a rat with one hemisphere of its brain removed. Or maybe that rat's just 'turning the corner' over and over again.
Let me show how easy this falls into place: Al Qaeda, with the help of the Taliban in Afghanistan, both vestiges of the cold-war with the USSR and both created in large part by the US (Not that I'm necessarily blaming the US solely for what eventually transpired on 9-11. The USSR was also a real threat able to destroy the US with the push of a button and a long history of duking it out using surrogates with the US and our allies), mounted an attack on the United States which killed almost three thousand people and did at least a hundred billion in immediate damage. They've also hit Spain, Bali, Egypt, Saudi, and the UK, all US allies, killing thousands more and doing tens of billions in damage--just to name the larger strikes. The leaders of AQ and the Taliban are on the loose, in the region, promising to continue, and making good on that promise. The top leadership is believed to be in Pakistan or Iran, both possess battle hardened armies and WMDs for real. One is a soon to be nuclear power, the other sporting full blown nuclear tipped ICBMs, both with unfriendly populations sympathetic to anyone who dislikes us. Thus Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a threat to the US and our allies at this very moment.
See how easy that was? You state the history of threat to the US, you state the most recent examples of threat to the US and US interests, and you review the current status of the threat to the US and our interests. Here I'll show you again using a totally different nation how easy that is to do.
China is rapidly becoming the richest nation on the planet. They're a communist oligarchy under no pressure from the electorate and can do what they want. In the past they have directly funded conflicts via surrogates against the US and our allies. Currently, using slave, child, and forced labor, they can take away any global market they wish from the US and our allies. They currently are the largest financiers of US deficits meaning they can cause interest rates here to skyrocket anytime they want and collapse the housing bubble and any tepid recovery from five years of BushCo Economics. They have the largest standing army on earth. They are fully nuclear powered from hydrogen bomb tipped missiles on fixed and mobile sites including bombers, ships, and subs. Thus they can wreck our economy without even using their military, and they can back it up with a military threat to their neighbors like Taiwan to get us to back off of anything, or they can directly challenge us to try and stop them knowing we cannot invade them or do much about it short of starting a nuclear World War Three. China is a threat but for now at least, relatively peaceful and willing to take the non-war route to world domination.
See how easy that was? I named specifically what they have done, why they could do it, and what they are doing right now in the context of direct US economic and military interests and those of our allies. Here watch I'll do it again so you'll understand the concept.
The Saudis are the largest producers of oil on the planet, oil upon which all modern civilization is critically dependent. They are the largest exporters of oil to the US and the second largest buyers of US debt. They are the largest single contributor in terms of money, arms, and manpower to Al Qaeda. The bin Ladens are a rich Saudi family and most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudi. By simply turning off the taps for a few days, or dumping some of their massive load of US treasuries, or sending AQ some ground to air missiles to smuggle into the US or our allies, they could produce the global economic equivalent of another 9-11 or worse. Currently, the Saudi leadership, while extraordinarily corrupt and savage with one of the worst human rights records on earth, are willing to do business with the US and make at least modest efforts to curb direct open support of AQ among Saudi citizens. But they're vulnerable themselves. Given the chance for free elections or an armed rebellion, the odds on favorite in either scenario is Osama bin Laden or someone working on his behalf. OBL is perceived as a real, live, Luke Skywalker in much of the Islamic World and no where is that image more powerful than Saudi Arabia, his country of origin. Thus the Saudis are a threat to the US and our allies in the event they ever become 'free and democratic' or in the event they're overthrown, and both those scenarios are compounded until bin Laden is captured or killed.
Saddam could attack the US with what exactly in 2003? Saddam could hurt the US economically how exactly in 2003? Saddam is now sitting in jail in 2005, he could do what to the US or anyone else how exactly in the foreseeable future?
The answer is he had no weapons to attack us with, he literally could not have bombed the US if he wanted to with anything near the ease and effect of other nations and terrorist sympathizers, a few of which I listed above. I could hurt the US and break things and kill people far easier and likely causing greater damage than Saddam could. I could do that Timothy McVeigh style or similar: I myself, as a private citizen, was a greater threat to the US than Saddam was in 2003.
Saddam couldn't fly fixed wing aircraft over most of his own nation, had almost no aircraft to fly, and was routinely bombed at will by the US and others with no chance of stopping it or doing a damn thing about it. Iraq was the most heavily monitored nation in the region with the entire combined might of the world breathing down their neck. By 2003 he had no terror weapons at all. His army was smashed--according to Powell and Rice anyway a few months before 9-11 in Senate testimony and public interview. Saddam and Iraq were in the words of Dick Cheney prior to 9-11 and at a time when they were one-hundred times the threat to their neighbors they were in 2003 "Not worth one damn American life".
We bought little oil from Iraq, their two main fields, Rumulia and Kirkuk are so huge that they will still be able to produce some oil. But the formations were over pulled and wrecked; screwed up forever by Saddam in the 1990s. They will never, ever, produce the kind of oil they once could have. We had no trade to speak off with Iraq. How exactly could they pose a threat to us ten times worse than Al Qaeda, China, Saudi Arabia, or Iran? Because we're spending ten times on Iraq in every measurable way what we spend on Al Qaeda and OBL and the Taliban all put together.
You're simply unable to back up what you say with anything other than vague nonsense and long worn out platitudes, whilst I can. I'm able, without even doing any research, to lay out indisputable facts everyone agrees with that point out and underscore why other nations are a far greater threat starting with the group[s] that attacked us on 9-11 still active and growing. I can go into significant detail on several different types of threats facing us which are each and everyone extreme to say the least RIGHT NOW and simultaneously pointing out using undisputed precise facts which I can expand on in great detail why Iraq was no threat to the US whatsoever in 2003.
I can do it in a few lines of text while you flail about running and ducking and pretending that evil=danger which is absurd. Ted Bundy was evil to the core, a smart, clean cut, serial killer and rapist of dead women's corpses with an insatiable appetite. He was not a significant danger to the national interests of the US and our allies. Evil does not automatically equate with danger to the US. Saddam was evil yes, he was no danger at all in 2003.
He was on a long slide down from power and wealth, the infrastructure was crumbling. He shot his wad against Iran, and desperately invaded Kuwait to exploit the al-Aberdeen Formation and spent what was left getting his butt absolutely kicked to bits in the most lopsided victory in world history. The remaining remnants of weapons and military personnel were wasted away in the years after 1991 just keeping Saddam in power and the Shia under his thumb, and that was almost more than he could handle. He had to give up on the Kurds entirely. He was done.
Any invasion of Iraq based on the premise that we were going to reduce the global threats against the US and allies by toppling Saddam are irrational because he wasn't a threat to begin with. Thus, in the light of real, live, existing, aggressive, proven threats to the US and our allies, there is no point and no hope of reducing a nonexistent threat significantly enough to make any difference to our national security.
And if you really believed the threat was as big as you claim, you'd join the armed forces and help out. Instead you're a member of the fighting 101st keyboarders sitting safe and fat in the US probably still being helped out by mom and dad or in-laws with the bills. That you don't tells me you're either a coward or you're not serious about your own claims, or both.
In closing because I do feel I've pretty much dealt with you like a wet Kleenex in a hurricane, I'd like to point out that America is a young society. We think in terms of quarters, years, election cycles, maybe a decade occasionally like in the Moon shot program. We have the shortest range goals and the shortest operating history of all the major players on the world stage. And like all adolescents we think we're immortal. We insist we are told that the WoT will be over 'soon', victory is 'just around the corner', and the insurgency IS in its 'last throes' in Iraq.
Eurasian cultures are ancient societies and Iraq is the oldest civilization on earth. Iraqi factions think in terms of centuries and millennia. They undertake plans which will not mature for five generations as a matter of everyday strategy.
If you're unwilling to try and imagine that kind of thinking; Have you ever read Dune? Read it not watch the shitty movies? Think of operating and planning over those kinds of time scales and you have some taste of just this one aspect of the cultural gulf between our two societies I'm talking about. They have been invaded, dominated, rebelled, taken over, controlled, couped, time and time again in their eight thousand year written history. It selects for robust cultural memes. Self replicating ancient forms of resistence to invasion and occupation that work over immense periods of human time and under any temporary social paradigm inflicted from the outside.
While you and I would be thinking "Let's go in there and crush them and get 'it' over with"; They're thinking "Let's sit back and cache our gear and guns except for a few and let these cats shake out in the heat and sand for a few months and see how they hold up, pretend to be their pals maybe, get some Intel from the inside from our kids and girls ... and then we'll start gently probing them and build on what works, before deciding the best way to slaughter these bastards en masse. If need be we'll pass that onto to our kids and they to theirs; until the infidels run home ... or they're all dead ... or we absorb them into our culture". Like the last 200 times they've done this.
IOW, they know at a gut social level that we are not permanent in Iraq or as the world's dominant power. They know we will have our run in Iraq and on the world stage and be gone one day. They know that we are leaving one way or another, either feet first or running for the hills. There is nothing to win in Iraq, and there is everything to lose, and we cannot even define 'winning' much less achieve it. Losing on the other hand seems to be something the US is a natural at when it comes to insurgent warfare and Empire. They know we're leaving, they know Bush can't run again, they know the war is already falling apart over here and in their time scales it hasn't even started yet. And they my friend are not ever leaving because they live there.