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“Terri Shiavo? The Republicans did everything their could to interfere in a family matter.” Her parents wanted her kept alive, her husband who was living with and had children by another woman wanted to pull the plug. Did you know that?

“The world is sitting back letting America fail” and don’t you think they should be helping the Iraqi people?

But come on, Perry- you said you wanted negotiations with Iran. Let’s hear it. What’s your proposal? Do you know what Bush’s is?

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Come on, liberal smart guys!

Diego – “Saddam was a crook and a dictator, but he was no madman, and he kept order in his country.” How do you know that? Were there independent media reports from Fallujah about how safe it was in the 90’s? Have you seen Baghdad police records documenting crime rates? Or do you think that if the tv news and western newspapers didn’t tell you about something, it must not be happening?

ps – “I would prefer a president who had better than a C average in school. ” That’s what Kerry had. Bush got a Harvard MBA. What did you do?
“Many of his advisors have resigned,” and I’m sure you can come up with a list, because it’s so unlike you to make an unsupported assertion.
“his lack of intelligence and vision”
Have you read
this?
it’s the first speech outlining his vision that comes to mind, but there are others.

“lack of ability and/or willingness to negotiate with our perceived enemy. ” OK, you guys can do much better. Step up. I’m Ahmadinejad. I want nuclear energy, and I want Israel moved to Denmark or Alaska or somewhere. I am sure you are paying attention to my arguments, because of the green aura coming from my head.

Counter-offers? How about speedingpullet, who complimented the level of discourse after reading comments no deeper than ‘idiot’ and ‘Satan would be proud’. Surely one of you wouldn’t mind a spirited debate.

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Perry, let’s negotiate. I’ll be Iran, you be the US. What’s your offer?

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More servicemen died during the last year of the Carter presidency than during any year of the Bush presidency. (I don’t think the last year was an aberration, but I don’t have the data available for 1977-79.)

What those deaths accomplished was the removal of two dictatorships. Some of the violence since the removal of Saddam and the Taliban has been due to Iranian agents, who would be less of a problem if the Iranian regime had been confronted earlier, by any of W, Clinton, HW Bush, Reagan, or, yes, Carter.

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‘Confirmation bias’ is the idea that people seek out information that agrees with their own instincts. You’re seeking opinions at a place where bulls think the market’s coming down 20%, moderates think it’ll be cut in half, and bears anticipate some combination of the Great Depression, Mad Max, and Lord of the Flies.

I don’t think you’ll be comfortable sitting in that condo wondering if your life’s savings is going to evaporate.

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First off, the chart you link to does not support your blanket statement. Staying with last year’s hot sector beats switching to last year’s loser 15 of 20 years. If you started with $1000 and invested in the previous year’s best sector every year from 1987-2005, you’d end up with $11770. Switching every year to last year’s worst sector gets you $3081.

The next analysis you link to is a bit suspect since the guy claims 1% increase for 20 years is, yes, 20% (it’s 22 – compounding). That bumps his supported price up to $346k instead of $315. And who says the 1986 price was the ‘right’ one? If you take the 1994 median of ~250k and give 12 years of 3.9% appreciation, you’d predict a price today of $396. If you took the 1997 price of 292k – just at the beginning of the boom/bubble – you’d predict a supported price of $412.

Your San Diego stuff is better, since Rich has collected more convincing (longer term) numbers.

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ZK, it is absolutely a valid comparison, when people ignorant of military history assert the incompetence of the Iraq war with no evidence or support. People howl about military deaths in Iraq in complete ignorance of how dangerous the military is in the best of times.

I don’t understand your objection to helping people resist tyranny if doing so advances other American interests. Spreading democracy isn’t the only reason we’re in Iraq, but it’s a reason. Life is complicated. Things have multiple causes.

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Powayseller, 9pm:
If Bush is in Iraq to go after the 9/11 source of terrorists, then he should instead be in Saudi Arabia because that’s where the terrorists came from. So this just shows it’s not about the 9/11 terrorists. It’s also not about freeing women from rape, as PD asserts, because we are not sending our military to Africa.

So what is the real reason that Bushie boy sent the military to Iraq? And what happens if they refuse to go? Are they allowed to think for themselves? Will they be court martialled for refusing to fight in an offensive war?
Earlier:
I have no agenda other than wanting to learn.
Powayseller, you’re a liar.

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that’s probably just the basic background number of deaths that occur is exactly my point about perspective. Did you have any idea military deaths were that high in the 90’s? I didn’t. It wasn’t reported. No one used that number as a handy cudgel to beat Clinton, and rightly so – it wasn’t his fault. The number of military deaths has been a staple in the news for the past 3 years, and people point to the number as support for the idea that Bush is an evil incompetent leader, without any hint as to the number of deaths that are, as you say, ‘the basic background’. We see reports of American military deaths now, and reports of Iraqi civilian deaths now, that we did not see 10 years ago. But in the years those deaths were not reported to us, they did still happen.

But you want to compare combat deaths to combat deaths. OK. There have been 2497 American military deaths in Iraq. That’s 7.4% of the combat deaths in Korea; 0.8% of WWII. Every American military death is a tragedy, whether KIA in Iraq, or in a training accident at home, today or 10 years ago. But by historical standards of warfighting, American combat deaths in Iraq have been astonishngly low.

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I read “It’s a buyers’ market”. But that seems to be what NAR normally says.

On the other hand, John Cleese would tell us:
This market is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late market. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace, if you hadn’t [invented neg-am mortgages] it would be pushing up the daisies! It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This is an ex-market!

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When you say the execution of the war was incompetent – compared to what?

Military deaths under Clinton were mostly not in combat, of course. But the number of deaths of active-duty military totaled 4621 in 1992-96, and 5187 in 2001-04. If the press wanted to report 3 more military deaths every day for 4 years under Clinton, they could have done so. Instead, they report present military fatalities today as they report Iraqi civilian deaths, without any sense of historical perspective.

I do wish Bush would lean more on Saudi Arabia. An invasion would have been a bad idea for several reasons: the Sauds had no history of WMD programs or UN resolution violations; their government had moderately more popular support than Saddam’s; there was no staging area from which we could invade Arabia; we have Muslims coming from other nations to fight ‘the crusader infidel’ as it is, and occupying Mecca wouldn’t help that; finally, while some Saudis support terrorism, alQuaeda is no friend of the monarchy, and has started to stage attacks in the kingdom. Those attacks are forcing the Saudi government to fight on ouur side for their own survival.

It’s not taken trillions – hundreds of billions, yes. I would like to help the people of Africa. I could ask you why you want to help Africans but not Arabs? The final reason all wars last as long as they do is ‘the enemy has a vote’. We have to keep fighting until they are convinced they must lose. I think if there were widespread reports that the terrorists thought they were losing and should give up, the morale in the US would be higher and we would be willing to fight longer. Likewise, I think the reports that many Americans want to give up embolden the terrorists. Frankly, I think if we had presented a united front the past three years, the terrorists would have realized they were doomed and retreated from Iraq by now, freeing the military for peacekeeping in Africa or the like.

What argument is there for intervening in Africa (save people suffering at hands of tyrants) that doesn’t also apply to Iraq? What argument against Iraq (they didn’t attack, no WMD, no American imperialism,etc) would not also apply to Africa?

If Bush’s father had done the right thing 16 years ago and abandoned the tyrants of the Arab League governments instead of the Iraqis who tried to rise up for their freedom, none of this would ever have happened – we would have deposed Saddam with more popular support at a time when he was weaker and definitely working on WMDs, giving the Arab world an extra generation to see a free government at work and demonstrating to Osama that we weren’t a paper tiger. Removing Saddam then would also have removed the need to station troops in Arabia, one of alQ’s chief grievances.

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PS, I find your statement that you have no strong opinions curious, given that all of your questions are based on an anti-war standpoint. You could ask, ‘How did Bush manage to overthrow 2 totalitarian governments, yet sustain casualties only 20% higher than Clinton in his first term?’

It is not only the US that is opposed to Iranian nuclear weapons. UK, France, and Germany have been negotiating for 3 years. While they talk, Iran has continued to develop its program. These nations are all concerned because Iran, unlike the US, UK, France, Russia, China, or India, shows signs of being run by fanatics who believe bringing on a nuclear holocaust will bring their god to earth.

The US is also concerned with nukes in North Korea. Clinton negotiated with them for years. It is now believed North Korea went back on their word and developed nukes anyway. Present negotiations have a very different dynamic than negotiations with Iran – NK is surrounded by large, powerful countries (China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan) each of which have strong interests in the Korean peninsula.

We went into Iraq for many reasons. If I asked you about the housing bubble (remember that?) you may point to interest rates. Or demographics. Or the job market. If BB stops raising interest rates, does that demolish your argument for a housing bubble? Or are the other factors enough? WMD was one reason to enter Iraq, like the need to close down terrorist funding and training and the need to provide the Arab world with an alternative to totalitarian rule. Bush was wrong to pin so much of his argument on WMD, but he made the other arguments all along.

When you say the war in Iraq is long and unsuccessful – compared to what? The war has taken as long as it has because 1) the initial invasion plan called for a second front through Turkey (we negotiated with them, they wouldn’t let us through) without which the enemy had time to scatter; 2) counterinsurgency is hard and takes a long time. By what standard is the war unsuccessful? Because we haven’t won yet? Was the war with Japan unsucessful in Jan 1945?

We get along fine with the present government of Iraq.

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Lostkitty, according to your link, the list of countries that have nukes is: US, UK, France, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan, with Israel listed as an undeclared nuclear power. It must be an old link, b/c the list of suspected nuclear powers has Libya and Iraq in addition to North Korea and Iran. (Iraq of course has now given up its program, as did Libya coincidentally at the time we invaded Iraq – funny, that.) Which are the fanatics? Bush is a religious man who will leave office when his term is up. He’s fanatical about his exercise program, but that’s it.

It’s a fair point to ask why we should get to decide who has nukes. The alternative is to allow nukes in the hands of those who would kill us. If our desire for safety offends others, I think that’s a price we have to pay.

Killing and quality of life are of course not worse than under Saddam. They are more widely reported. The violence, while regrettable, was inevitable. Saddam was eventually going to die; when that happened, the Islamists would move in, Iran would move in, former regime forces would try to hold on…everything that is happening now, but without Americans trying to midwife the birth of a democracy.

There is too much federal spending, though it’s not as bad as you claim (as % of GDP, which is a better way to measure it than nominal dollars). But spending money to rescue people from totalitarianism is the best use of our money from a security and moral standpoint.

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I’m unlurking here, because like the rest of you I feel strongly about this (and why post about the housing stuff – I agree with the consensus there).

PS, the comment “PD likes the weapons approach, probably because she is a military wife. Go figure…” is condescending. You don’t know PD. Do you many military wives, that you feel comfortable generalizing? I don’t know you, but I know you recently left ths forum vowing never to return because you felt personally slighted. Do unto others.

Foreign policy involves more than cleverness. Have the police in your neighborhood given up guns, because they have a better way of keeping the peace? We negotiate whenever possible, but that involves trust. Iran has been building a nuclear program for 19 years, and lying about it. Say we give them airplanes as you suggest, in return for their word that they won’t build weapons. What if – in accordance with their history – they’re lying?

Lostkitty – there are two countries run by fanatics that have or are trying to get nukes: North Korea and Iran. (If Saddam were still in power, given the advances in the Iranian nuclear program, would he be sitting on his hands? Would Khadaffi?) We’ve been in negotiations for years trying to get NK to give up theirs. Why let Iran have them? If Bush was just interested in oil, as you clumsily suggest, why not just offer to normalize relations with Iran and Iraq in return for generous contracts with his friends in the oil business. That’s the question Bush opponents need to answer.

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