So we killed thousands of people, spent trillions of dollars, suffered thousands of casualties, and finally brought democracy to Iraq. Good investment?
The only reason the President didn't leave troops there was because Iraq would not give immunity to our troops in Iraqi courts. To me, that would be a deal breaker too. Personally, I don't give a damn about Iraq. There are over 250,000 Iraqis in the Army and about 7,000 ISIS fighters. With that amount of disparity it is not about skill or training or weapons. It is about will. And the Iraqis have none. They recently had 30,000 Iraqi army troops up against 800 militants and the Iraq Army threw down their weapons and ran. That is not a country that can be saved. The ONLY portion of Iraq that I would even consider helping even economically is the Kurds.
Heh, yeah, they have no shame. The horror of the US involvement there is magnitudes larger than the tragedy of Benghazi, but these shitheels want to take the country back into it. Then we have people quoting a clueless plutocrat and failed politician who's sniping from the sidelines as if anything he had to say was of the slightest significance or interest.
The Iraqi army could have easily defeated the attackers; in at least one case, the army outnumbered them by hundreds to one (source). They apparently don't have any intention of defending themselves. Yet the US is supposed to ride to their rescue, or even have never left (being subject to Iraqi law all that time, by the way). These people lied to the world to start the war in Iraq, and there's no reason anybody should pay any attention to their yapping now.
This garbage is a mess. W was a total F-up agreed, but you cant discuss these things with Suzy Nation. Suzy is a bobblehead for Obama, the same ilk as Nancy Wasserman McCain Shultz. No thought or intellectual honesty.
Governmental rule is evolutionary, not revolutionary. There's not anywhere we go where we can't win the war, however 9 times out of 10 we fail to win the peace. We are under the mistaken belief that the world is teaming with a sense of Jeffersonian democracy dieing to get out. That is not the case. Even the American Constitution and governmental structure is a refinement of the English system and we are steeped in a tradition that goes back 800 years to the Magna Carta. The Iraqi's do not have that tradition, they have a Bedouin tradition based of clans and strong man rule. Perhaps they need their own Magna Carta that protects the clans and limits the power of their dictator. After all, that's where we started.
I think that there is a mistaken belief that we actually want to see Iraq or any other country for that matter become peaceful, democratic, and friendly. You would have to believe that the weapons manufacturers wanted to sell less weapons and that capitalism was benevolent....they don't and it's not. Anybody notice that ISIS captured some 450 million dollars? I haven't heard specifically but my guess is that it was 450 million dollars in weapons and military equipment. If you really want peace in any nation, weapons are the last thing you should throw into the frey. Our foreign policy might as well be called our weapons marketing policy. Everything else we are told beyond the goal of selling more weapons is pretty much one big lie.
Thank you. The American colonists had a long tradition of democratically managing many aspects of their own lives with at least the tacit approval of the Crown and Parliament. Their thinking was rooted both in the evolving English legal tradition and in the values of the Enlightenment. They were probably as ripe for democratic self rule as they could have been and even then the creation of an effective national government was a long hard slog. I don't know why we assume that everyone else has the same background, and the same concept of how society should be structured.
Again, we never cared to "spread democracy" until it became a convenient excuse for corporate profits. The fact that it is a fool's errand in the first place is almost irrelevant. Further, people tend to think of these huge dominate conglomerates as benign profit streams for some billionaires but they really represent a new form of world power. Maybe militaries, religions, governments, aristocracies, tribes, clans and any other form of unifying power over society are all being replaced by the corporate model? Corporations in this country have already made themselves the equivalent of people and their weapon of choice, the almighty dollar, is equivalent to speech. Isn't the next step world corporations? There are many ways to conquer the world. It just makes sense that the rise of the corporation is the next tyrant to come along.
Wasn't George Washington himself prescient enough to warn us that we would probably just f*ck everything up if we didn't mind our own business? I guess it was pretty simple to get around that one. We just made it our business to try impose our will on the world. Or more specifically, the will of our corporate masters and the paranoid control freaks who dominate our politics and have taken this country further to the right than probably anyone in the Nixon white house could have dreamt of.
The two of you sound like a couple of tin-foil-hat-wearing psychos. But, please continue. Your rantings are hilarious. Honestly.
The point that intelligent conversation is lost on you is only underscored by the fact that you can only start the name calling behavior but have nothing in the way of evidence refuting anything we have said. This is pretty typical of you.