Iraq

[PD]

The downfall of our society is coming, just like the Romans. However, the cause will not be that we were willing to fight, rather it will be that we were not willing to fight hard enough.

[equalizer]

jg
First, please take a vacation to catch a cool breeze as you stroll down Michagan Av and bask in the fresh autumn air and enjoy.
Then we should just stop this thread. Lets get back to finance.
You are embarassing yourself. UofC will want their degrees back (I think you said you went there). First, you stated there is present proof for fact a. Then when confronted, you rely on the Democrats voted for war excuse for justification. No logic. But you are much smarter than that.
Some of us went to Chicago public schools, learned nothing from 4-8th grade, got beat up by gangs and subsequently couldn’t go to Hyde Park with Milton Fr. Therefore, we won’t get embarassed by our pathetic rebuttals.

[zk]

The fall of our society is coming. The cause is that we are fighting the wrong fights.

If all the effort we’re focusing on Iraq had been focused on Al Qaeda (our true enemy) to start with, you wouldn’t hear people not wanting to continue to fight.

[Anonymous]

PD, my sense is that we’ll muster the will to fight. The 50-60 year old Baby Boomers are on their way out from positions of power. The new generation is rebelling against the divorce, etc. that they’ve had to live through, and strike me as being more religious, generally. We’re a nation of the most daring immigrants from Germany, Britain, Ireland, China, Vietnam, etc. I think we’ll fight.

[PD]

JG, I’m not so sure. All the will and fortitude seems to be dying with my Grandfather’s generation. We have become a nation of lazy quitters and complainers who expect instant gratification and stunning success. Without it, they demand retreat.

[PerryChase]

jg, I bet that you’d still argue that Vietnam was a fight worth fighting. History, however, pretty much declared that conflict a terrible fiasco and embarrassment.

zk, I’m so happy you’re here. I feel that there’s hope for the future after all.

[Anonymous]

Why ask me, PC? Why not ask one of the 2MM slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge? Why not ask one of the Vietnamese who’ve had to live stunted lives for 30 years? The dominos did fall, partially. Absolutely, Vietnam was a noble cause.

At work, we have four engineers whose families fled as ‘boat people.’ One, himself a Democrat, tells me that Vietnamese are hard-core Republicans. Kind of like Cubans down in Miami. Those folks know that you must stand up to tyranny, early, or face a much more powerful threat, later.

Red-staters and immigrants get it.

[zk]

“PD, my sense is that we’ll muster the will to fight.”

Sure, you’ve got the will to fight. But you don’t have a reason to fight. And that’s the problem. Your government has tricked you into wanting to fight their fight rather than yours. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is whose fight we’re fighting.

“All the will and fortitude seems to be dying with my Grandfather’s generation. We have become a nation of lazy quitters and complainers who expect instant gratification and stunning success.”

This is typical of the right wing’s other main tactic. When logic and reason fail (which they obviously have in this case), resort to emotional rhetoric and lobbing made-up insults at the other side.

If anything, our country is doomed to become fascist. When people stop questioning their government, that’s the first step toward fascism. If ever a government deserved to be questioned, it’s ours right now. I always wondered what kind of idiots cheered mussolini and stalin in the streets. Now I know. They’re not idiots. PD and jg aren’t stupid. That’s pretty obvious. They’ve merely fallen for emotional rhetoric and placed too much faith in their leaders. And it seems to me that maybe that’s what happened to all those people who followed stalin and mussolini.

I understand that it’s human nature to want to feel good about yourself. And that’s Karl Rove’s genius. He’s made people stick with his side because it makes them feel good about themselves to say,”we’re strong and you’re weaklings. We’re right and you’re “liberals.” We’re willing to stay and fight and be manly and you want to cut and run, you little girls. We’re righteous and moral and you’re degenerate and heathen. We’re just better than you are!” The problem is that none of it is true. Just because you want to engage in war doesn’t make you strong. If you are willing to fight to defend your country, that does make you strong. But if you are willing to fight simply because gwbush says you should, that makes you weak. And basing your morals on a fantasy being doesn’t make you righteous. Having morals and ethics based on what’s good for the human condition doesn’t make you degenerate. It’s what you do and not where you get your guidance that makes you good or bad. And people who get their guidance from god are, in my experience, no more likely to be “good” than those who don’t. In fact, in many cases, it gives them license to do bad things.

Actually, if there’s one man to blame in this whole fiasco, it’s Karl Rove. A more brilliant person at what he does I cannot think of. He’s managed to get people to elect a complete idiot to run their country, and to support the conservatives long after they’ve displayed their incompetence. It really is absolutely amazing. But he knew, while the democrats didn’t, that what people respond to is emotional rhetoric and propaganda. Not logic and reason. Even in the information age, people don’t want too much information. They just want to feel good. Unfortunately, while Rove knows how to make people feel good about themselves and to get his people elected, he doesn’t know how to run a country, and neither does the fool that he got elected.

[powayseller]

Well said, zk. “And people who get their guidance from god are, in my experience, no more likely to be “good” than those who don’t. In fact, in many cases, it gives them license to do bad things.” Don’t you think Bush is using his religion to kill, just as the terrorist are doing? Doesn’t he feel it is his mission, his calling from God, to liberate Iraq? He is misuing religion too… If he really cared about the plight of Iraqis, why isn’t he in Darfur or Sudan? If we only knew the real reason for the Iraq occupation… If Bushy boy only had the courage to admit he made a mistake… If he had not deliberately misled us about the WMDs (you know ,the lie he told so he could get Congress support for the war.)

The Iraq fiasco is making us weaker in the Middle East, as now Iran and North Korea are emboldened. They see that we have no ability to defeat the Iraqis. We proved to the rest of the world, via our mistake in Afghanistan and Iraq, that our military is not adept in these insurgent type of wars.

PD, what is it exactly that you want to fight for? The fight in Iraq is being lost. Is that because the soldiers lack testosterone so they don’t have the fortitude to kill enough Iraqis and torture them sufficiently? What would satisfy you?

Is this war in Iraq really about our freedom, or is it about Bush’s delusion of doing God’s will by overthrowing Middle East governments or his wish to give contracts to his buddies at Halliburton?

What is really interesting, is why I even have to ask about his motives. I’m just a regular person who counts the minutes to Sunday night at 9pm for the latest fiascos on Desperate Housewives, and believes most things people tell me, if they make sense. Why do I mistrust our reasons for being in Iraq? Simply, it’s because the story we’ve been given doesn’t make sense!

[PD]

Do you think that is clever, PS, using my unhappiness with policy to cast aspersions on our brave forces?

[PD]

Has anyone else noticed that postings on other forums have dropped a lot since this thread was opened? I do not think discussions like this are good for Piggingtons.

[lostkitty]

Maybe these threads make you uncomfortable PD, but political discussion is vital now, especially at election time. Hearing your thoughts from the right are just as important as voicing ours from the left.

It is intersting that in our little Piggington community our discussions show that so many of us agree about the state of the economy, the housing market, the importance of exercise, eating healty, feeding our kids healthy foods and limiting TV, but we disagree so vehemently regarding politics.

My views are not a result of the “liberal media” only reporting negatives from Iraq. I felt it was a mistake before we ever went. I was shocked when we did. They knew AHEAD of time that there were most likely no weapons of mass destruction. Plenty of people, including the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, were screaming at the top of their lungs trying to get anyone to listen. To no avail… off we went to stoke the fires of extremism and hatred for the US. Look where that got us. The ranks of young Muslim men and women that are motivated to act against us now has exploded. That is the real bomb we’ll have to deal with… and it is a direct result of our actions in IRAQ.

Claiming that the media swayed my thoughts is the same as the NAR claiming that the “media” is causing this real estate downturn (and we’ve all read that claim repeatedly). Kill the messenger, I suppose.

I am happy we have the freedom to even have these discussions… This ‘Right’ I would fight to protect. Access to cheap oil????? Not worth it, not worth the loss of life, not worth the backlash of anger from people who live in that region, not worth the high $$ cost, not worth the terrible divide it has caused in our country … and on and on.

[PerryChase]

I think that lack of posting in other forums is not because of this Iraq thread. It’s because there’s not been much relevant real estate news lately. The news about the RE downturn, is only confirming what we already knew.

With 9 days to the elections, Iraq on the other hand, is very important news.

I hope that Piggingtons are open-minded enough to make up their own minds rather than let the media tell them what to think.

Remember that the news media generally reports what has become obvious. There’s a lag between what smart people know and what the news is reporting.

[PerryChase]

I would agree that psychology plays of big part of everything in life.

Yes, it feels good to support your country through thick and thin. However, it takes more courage to own up to our country’s mistake and try to fix it. We don’t do everything right and Iraq is one big mistake. Staying the course will not fix that mistake.

Sometimes the best course of action is to cut the losses and move on. That’s not quitting but it’s doing the right thing (whether in personal life, business, or in politics).

[powayseller]

PD, did I misunderstand your testosterone comment? I read this thread for the first time today… As far as the forums being quiet, that’s because frequent poster powayseller was asked to write less. According to some, it would make the forums a more diverse and interesting place. Now back to Iraq. The problem seems to be a lack of sufficient troops in the first place. We should not have gone in there, but since we did, we should have put in 5 – 10x the number of troops, so the job could be completed. With too few soldiers, the war was doomed from the start. I remember lots of debate early in the war about sufficient troops, and Rumsfeld was criticized for not bringing in more soldiers. Why hasn’t this been raised again as a problem?

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