We're not going to be defeated in Iraq or anywhere else. Thats just 'vonK' talk. We weren't defeated in Vietnam either, we quit. I happen to think there's a big difference.

For those of us who know better lets keep standing tall. Its what we owe the fallen.

Is this a real poll, or an overnight job done on the heels of a string of bad news?

The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted Aug. 1-3 by Ipsos, an international polling firm. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Well, that gives me plenty of confidence in the results. Time for Operation Peace With Honor.

Along with JM, I'm not inclined to put any credence in polls. They've become far to politicized and slapdash to take seriously, which is a shame, because they're a useful tool when conducted properly.

The poll was conducted 8/1-3 (M-W) and has a 49-39 split for Dems/Reps.

Here's the link.

Contrary to the thoughts of many of my left and liberal friends (and yes, I do have them, and yes, they are friends), I completely understand their frustration here.

They genuinely feel lied to, and they genuinely feel that the war was launched for the wrong reasons. Their problem is that they can't bring themselves to support the war now towards victory because, in effect, they feel that would be "rewarding" a bad decision.

Twisted logic? Yes. Understandable? Yes, as long as you start from what I believe are erroneous assumptions (the whole "lie" thing).

So, that's the challenge with the Left, at least the folks on the Left still open to reason here: how do you convince them that supporting the war does not require them to like George W. Bush and Republicans? Obviously, one angle worth playing is the one that Ace highlights-- actually losing the war at this point is far, far worse for *America* than the political implications of winning it benefit the *Republicans*.

Yes, I wish we lived in a perfect world where partisan political positions played no role in choosing whether to support or not to support military action. But let's face facts, that world *never* existed.

Anyway, in the end, the Left is happier complaining that someone shoved them into a hole instead of figuring out how to get out of the hole, because getting out of that hole will acknowledge that their anger, whether worthy or not, has no bearing at all on actually getting out of the hole.

Bottom line: vote Democrat if you're angry with the war, but in the meantime, grow up and help us win the war, you bastards.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

Of course, the perception of the war would be improved if the media weren't in the throes of VNS (Vietnam Nostalgia Syndrome). We're getting very few good reports out of Iraq about what we're actually doing there - it's all blood, bombs and beheadings.

So the American people have been getting a steady dose of what amounts to propaganda disguised as reporting. And yes, I believe it is propaganda to accentuate the negative due to bias.

It's too bad more reporters aren't like Michael Yon, who reports from Iraq as an independent blogger. This guy is a modern day Ernie Pyle and his stuff is just ignored, for the most part, by the mainstream media. If you haven't visited this guy's site, I encourage you to spend some time there. Excellent writing and outstanding reporting.

(2002-2005) Leftist: Let's do everything we can to help the Islamists and screw Bush and the USA!

(2006) Leftist: Look how Bush fucked up the war! He lost it!

Islamist knows the US suffers "Vietnam Syndrome"

Islamists bases his strategy on this.

Leftists assist Islamists.

US falls for it...and Islamists win

Brew -

I'm not so sure the "angry Muslim men" would see any difference between the US being defeated and the US quitting. Quite frankly, I don't either. Not to grope his "jockey-plums", but Ace is dead-on with this. We can't afford to do either.

And it makes me nervous that support for this war is dwindling. Bush still has another 3 years in office and I wouldn't put it past him to keep troops in Iraq for that amount of time if need be, but politically, I feel like if that happens, we might as just usher Hillary! into the White House on '08.

This whole thing is starting to become quite the juggling act. I still whole-heartedly support what we're doing there, but Bush has his work cut out for him.

Anyone who wants a good overview of the war should just kiss off the MSM right now, including FSN. Wretchard is your go-to guy (he called the River War about a year before the MSM caught on), with Bill Roggio backing him up. Some of Stephen Den Beste's stuff at U.S.S. Clueless are still essential reading too.

The upshot is this: history will look at the OIF campaign with a much less jaundiced eye, and will see it for the absolutely nonpareil operation that it is. While the talking heads are muttering and the liberals are crying and pulling their hair, military historians are seeing something historic and unparalleled going on. This is not "triumphalism" (as leftists love to snottily point out), but rather a sober look at the tactical and strategic war aims.

Public opinion swings according to the fortunes of war, but I think the essential truth is that no matter how weary the American people are of this war, we will still see it through to the end.

Excellent comment by Dave, I'm going to highlight and comment on it:

They[Dave's leftist friends] genuinely feel lied to, and they genuinely feel that the war was launched for the wrong reasons. Their problem is that they can't bring themselves to support the war now towards victory because, in effect, they feel that would be "rewarding" a bad decision.

Not only do we believe the administration lied to and manipulated the country into this war, we believe that the administration is incompetent in its prosecution of both the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism and the war in Iraq. This makes it difficult, even when we see clearly that the mess in Iraq HAS to be dealt with, that we cannot just walk away, it makes it difficult to support the administration's policies because we don't trust the administration to be telling the truth OR to be competent.

I support winning the war in Iraq, but I do not support much of the things that the administration is doing/has done to prosecute the war. Our military has with few exceptions been magnificient. I have hopes that the River War strategy will succeed in crushing at least the Jihadist branch of the insurgency and perhaps even bring the bulk of the Baathist insurgency to move from violence to politics to try and acheive their goals. It may well be that we are on the verge of winning the Iraq war; winning being defined as enabling a self-securing Iraqi state with a legitimate political structure.

Once such an Iraqi state exists we may have problems keeping our hands off as the state is likely to look more like Iran than Turkey.

Nice defeatism Ace.

Part of the reason this war turned into a "long dirty slog" was because we decided to fight humanely: to avoid destroying people and infrastructure as much as we could. This is something that both anti-war folks and many pro-war folks get wrong: we're not taking casualties because the enemy is better than we are; we are taking casualties because we are being careful.

If America really were the New Roman Empire that many leftists believe it is, we wouldn't have bothered trying to rebuild Iraq. We would simply have descended upon the country with fire and sword (ignoring the Turks and sweeping in from the north too), removing the threat to us for generations. We would have simply taken over the oil-producing capacity of Iraq and used it to our own ends. We would long ago have crushed both Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran for their interference.

But we are not a new version of Rome. We are America, and so we do our best to rebuild Iraq, avoid harming innocents, avoid shooting into mosques, and spend countless billions to rebuild a country we recently invaded.

We have made and will make mistakes. For all our military prowess, we are not perfect war-making machines. Our enemies are smart, adaptable, and dedicated. It will require the utmost of our skill (and that of the national Iraqi forces) to defeat them. But we can only lose if we quit -- the enemy will never be able to defeat us, and they know that. Their only hope for survival is to convince us here at home that victory in this war is not worth the cost. And I for one am not going to simply give away the victory that so many of our brave soldiers gave their lives to earn.

Our "exit strategy" is victory.

49-39 split for Dems/Reps.

It's pathetic that polls like this even make it into the news.

actually losing the war at this point is far, far worse for *America* than the political implications of winning it benefit the *Republicans*.

True. Good luck convincing them of it.

When people like me accuse leftists of being anti-American, we don't mean (or at least, I don't) that they wish America ill under all circumstances. There are a few, like Moore and Chomsky, who fit that bill, but it's a tiny group. I think the great majority of them do want America to succeed.

Just not as much as they want Bush to fail. It's really as simple as that.

That being so, I don't know where we go from here. I was e-mailing with Jeff Goldstein a few weeks ago and telling him how, from where I stand, left-wingers and right-wingers almost literally don't speak the same language anymore. As such, there's no sense trying to communicate with each other; best just to fire insults at them and blow off a little steam that way than work up more frustration by making sane points like Ace is trying to do. Ace says, "Whether you hate Bush or not, whether you think this Iraq mission was ill-advised or justified, the stakes are simply far too great to allow ourselves to lose this one." Right; duly noted. They don't fucking care. Got it?

someone,

It's not defeatism now just to express some concern and anxiety, is it?

'Sides, I don't think it was defeatism at all. I think it's reality. The American people have, thank goodness, some capacity to stick with a long-ish war, as long as it's not too long. That just seems to be a fact.

And anyone who thinks the Iraq experience has not made the American people more reluctant to fight the next war, well... I'm sorry, if that's what you think, you're living in a dream world.

Not to say we could not go to war with Iran if absolutely required to. But it would be a much, much harder sell (and not just because Iran is three times as populous as Iraq).

Right; duly noted. They don't fucking care. Got it?

Cripes, that's depressing.

But I think you're right. Unfortunately, some of those people are in the media.

Some?

ace:

I disagree with you -- I think this war is maturing the American public as to the reality of life in the 21st century. America is the world's cop now; it's obvious to everyone that the UN is worthless, and no one else is up to the job. I think the American people are no less willing to use force against an enemy now than before; in fact, I think we're somewhat more likely, given a sufficient threat.

I simply disagree that the Iraq war was oversold, or mis-sold, or whatever you want to call it. The fact remains that we acted on the best intelligence we had. And the lack of WMD's (while embarassing) does not materially affect our rationale for invading -- regardless of whether Saddam had WMD's before, it's clear now he will never get them, and that was the point of the whole exercise. And while the cost has been high, we and the Iraqi's have done some astonishing things in the two years since the invasion.

The problem at home is that of perception: a preception driven by a relentlessly-negative agenda-driven media, and a defeatist Left that despises any proactive use of American power.

"Not only do we believe the administration lied to and manipulated the country into this war"

You and the left can believe what you like. Frankly I feel like I'm being lied to and manipulated everytime a lefty opens their gob, but that doesn't make me correct. The reasons for the war are clear, you can either see it or not, but don't expect the white house to go spelling out every little nuanced detail for benefit of the left and the enemy (is there any difference any more?).

Nobody gave a crap about reasons for war when Clinton wanted to go kill white christians who appeared to be oppressing brown non-christians. I didn't question our involvement in that war, but given the last few years, the lying media, and the agenda of the left, I seriously wonder whether we were duped into being on the wrong side.

Personally, I believe that the left are simply doing anything and everything you can to drag a Republican President down simply for partisan politics, and throw every obstacle in the way of winning the war in Iraq. To this end you have defanged the military who have been handcuffed into fighting the war without ferocity lest CNN have it splashed across the news and someone in the Democrats are yet again called for someone to resign because a foreign terrorist in Iraq was beat up by the US soldier he was trying to kill moments earlier.

The democrats have spent more heart-ache over enemy combatants held in Hotel Gitmo than the US troops that have been killed because of their political games.

Bush is also to blame for allowing the left wing (the media, the dems and the moonbats) to take the big stick out of his hand and force the US to fight with the little stick. Georgie, they hate you, fighting nicely won't win them over to your side. Since they are going to call you a monster anyway, just unleash the military in Iraq until every last insurgent is dead.

To boot, Bush is too far up the ass of the muslim community and is still allowing them to use our democratic processes (with the aid of the left) against the US.

Frankly, we need solid conservatives to win this war, to make the hard choices and get this done. The current liberal in office, and the supposed GOP majority are not those men.

vonKreedon--

While we can agree to disagree, can I ask you what you think should be done? Or, more accurately, what the Democrats, and more importantly, the Left, should advocate as far as winning the war?

"Vote Bush out of office" won't work. He's there for three more years. Advocating that the Dems merely wait him out involves letting American soldiers fight for a cause they either don't believe in, or fighting in a method they feel will not contribute towards victory.

Positive recommendations, not negative attacks. That's all I ask from the Left, yet I rarely hear it.

Of course, if the Left is against the war in total, and wants us to walk away now, fine-- that's a defensible position. I happen to disagree, and will be happy to argue that position. But unfortunately, most of what I-- and other pro-war conservatives-- hear is a kind of schizophrenia. Bush lied, people died, the war was wrong. . . but hey, we support our troops, we have to win the war.

Fine. I'll accept that. But why, when I ask my liberal and leftist friends-- who say they recognize that we must win in Iraq-- what we should do differently to win in Iraq, why do they so often reply with "We shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place," or" Osama Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, not in Baghdad."

That's all very interesting. . . but it does nothing to help us win the war.

My cents.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

Anyone else notice that the people who are screaming the loudest about being "lied to" are the same ones who doubted every utterance out of GWB's mouth beforehand?

Which leads me back to the same point Allah and others made: It wouldn't have mattered a single bit what GWB had said before combat nor since. The Left has been royally pissed off ever since Reagan got elected - he interrupted the inevitable march towards heavily taxed multiculti progressive bliss.

GWB simply offends the Left at a molecular level. I know this because I see it in members of my family - they literally can't speak the guy's name without spitting.

You see the same behavior on the Right towards Hillary!. Which is why we're going to see more of the rancor, not less, in the run-up to the next election.

People are just too committed to their views at this moment. We are experiencing a fundamental - and in a lot of ways, I think unmendable - split on how people think the country should be run.

"Positive recommendations, not negative attacks. That's all I ask from the Left, yet I rarely hear it."

To add on to that point, if the dems want to do nothing more than criticize Bush, then they could do it over his weakness in Iraq, and domestic terrorism policies. They could be asking why hate spouting imams haven't been deported, or why he hasn't quashed the influx of terrorists into Iraq by focusing the military on the issue (incidentally, is there any reason we aren't sat around watching and waiting for these guys to cross over the border before bombing the crap out of them? I know its a big border, but we have the tools surely?).

The answer is that they aren't interested in criticizing positively, they are only interested in holding back the war effort, to lead it to failure and to send republicans away with their tails between their legs. That and the fact that they too are handcuffed by the PC moonbats that they helped create.

Before I answer Dave's question I want to address something that Ring said wrt our initial invasion of Iraq
The fact remains that we acted on the best intelligence we had.

This is thing that is wrong. The best intel available at the time we invaded was that there were no WMD in Iraq. In the months prior to our invasion in March 2003 the US had been giving both UNMOVIC and the IAEA inspectors information based on our intel on where the Iraqi's were hidding the WMD materials. In every instance the inspectors found nothing. The last two reports from UNMOVIC and the IAEA, 2/14 and 3/7/2003, were increasingly confident that there were no substantial unrevealed WMDs or WMD related material/infrastructure in Iraq, and they asked for more time to complete the process. Instead of this new and hands-on intelligence causing the administration to take pause and re-evaluate the quality of their intel, the administration pushed forward the invasion.

Please see Complete timeline of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq for details of this and other ways that the administration lied and dissembled us into this war.

The best intel available at the time we invaded was that there were no WMD in Iraq.

From where? The CIA? France intel? Great Britain intel? Russia intel? They all said the weapons were there. Remember George Tenet and "slam dunk"?

If there was ANY credible intelligence stating Iraq had no WMDs, why did Gore, Kerry, Hillary, Biden, Lieberman, Bubba, Daschle, Kennedy, Leahy, Byrd, etc. ALL claim Iraq had WMDs? Why did all of them vote to give Bush the authority to invade?

VK,

We also had reason to believe the UN's teams had been compromised, that Saddam was moving the material around as a matter of security, or both. The fact remains, and many seem to choose to forget this, it was Saddam's responsibility to be open and show he did not have the weapons. It was not our job to chase leads all around Iraq and prove he did not have it. That was part of the UN ceasefire agreement.

vonK,

To add to Dogstar's list, why do you think Clinton made regime change in Iraq official U.S. foreign policy in 1998? Because he couldn't get any of those Oil-for-Food vouchers?

The American people have, thank goodness, some capacity to stick with a long-ish war, as long as it's not too long. That just seems to be a fact.

There's a difference between conventional wars and guerrilla wars, I think. In the case of the former, it's easy to tell if you're making progress. You know where the enemy is, you know how many of them there are, and you know if you're winning by the amount of territory you take and casualties you inflict. You can also point to a concrete endpoint, i.e., surrender. Continue to advance towards that goal and people will support the cause.

All those guideposts are lost in guerrilla war. You never really know if you're winning or losing, and you have no sense of when, or if, the end will come. True, we stuck it out for twelve years in Vietnam, but that'll never happen again considering the results. Which puts the Pentagon in a rather difficult position: not only do they need to figure out how to win guerrilla wars, but they need to learn how to do it within a two-year window of time.

The important point here is that Iraq, not Vietnam,, now constitutes the benchmark of a "long" guerrilla war. Our friends on the left, who are anti-war under all circumstances but shrewd enough to know that they can't sell that to the public, will start bleating about quagmires and unwinnability and pointless loss of lives at around the four-month mark. And so the window for victory will shrink a bit more. And it'll continue that way until either the military figures out a way to defeat a guerrilla army as quickly as they defeated Saddam in Gulf War I or we adjust our expectations and timetables for what constitutes success when fighting an enemy using guerrilla tactics.

I close with the words of Dal LaMagna, head of the Progressive Government Institute:

Bring the troops home before more of them can’t get rid of images of death and destruction, of children being caught in the line of fire and of children carrying bombs.

Bring the troops home now so fewer of them will become victims of mental illness.

Bring the troops home. Now.

Onward to victory, Dal!

So Dave asks me what I believe the US should do given that we have invaded and occupied Iraq.

• We should continue the military campaign against the Anbar province insurgency.
  
• We should do everything in our power to give Iraquis work to do. I'm not in a position to say that this is not happening now, but it did not happen in the first year or so of the war when we were importing truck drivers and construction companies from the US.
  
• We should recognize and accept that in order to be successful we are going to take more casualties and spend more money. This means that we should repeal some of the Bush tax breaks for the already wealthy and we should expand the active forces so that we can return the Guard/Reserve back to reserve status as much as possible.
  
• We should get multi-national organizations, such as the Arab League and NATO to take on more of the day-to-day operations while we pull back to a quick reaction stance out of day-to-day view. Now this would be a very difficult thing for this administration to do since most of those organizations/nations don't trust Bush or wish to save his ass. To help with this we should do one more thing.
  
• Get the administration on a 12-Step program, particularly steps 4 through 10. Stop denying that we fucked up and make amends.
  

And to just pile on to VK, WMD's were only one of about fifteen casus belli used for Congressional approval. Which is to say, WMD's aren't and never were the only cause for going to war with Iraq, which is something you and your fellow liberals conveniently forget.

Further, it is clear that even though Saddam did not have WMD's, he wanted them very badly was was anxious to have UN sanctions lifted so he could get them. The intent of the invasion was to keep Iraq from gaining WMD capability, and we did that. We also illustrated some serious problems with our own intelligence apparatus -- notably the CIA -- in the process.

VonKreedon:

Get the administration on a 12-Step program, particularly steps 4 through 10. Stop denying that we fucked up and make amends.

Boy, if that isn't just the most succinct example of Leftist "therapeutic victimhood" crapola I've ever heard in my life! Make amends! We were the mean nasties who hurt people! The poor brown victims who were happily flying kites until we angry white men came in with our nasty guns!

Holy Christ, vonKreedon, do you actually believe the crap you just spewed? If so, then I can only pray to a Deity I don't even believe in that a Democrat never gets to the White House again in my lifetime. I mean, this is just too goddam stupid for words.

Did Roosevelt tell the American people that the Kassarine pass was a disasterous mistake? Tarawa? Anzio?

The worst thing Bush could do right now is start a public discussion of mistakes, bad judgement, second guessing strategy, etc.

Want to know what we should be doing right now? Here are ten simple rules:

Rule #1: While fighting a war, talk and think about winning it. Period. All the "kinda, shoulda" bullshit is for the military history books after the war is over.

Rules #2-10: See Rule #1.

Loose shit, once again. Should be "coulda, shoulda". Damn, and I was on a roll, too.

"Get the administration on a 12-Step program, particularly steps 4 through 10. Stop denying that we fucked up and make amends"

That irrational hate thing always seems to creep in doesn't it? As long as we're recommending treatments, perhaps anger management is in order for the left?

Dogstar and Brew both re-ask the question about what intel indicated no WMDs and cite a variety of sources and people who are on the record as believing that Saddam had WMDs. But these cites are all from before the resumption of UN inspections in November of 2002. Once these inspections began it became more and more clear that Iraq did NOT have the WMDs that everyone believed they had. Further, Iraqi cooperation continued to improve throughout the perioid 11/02 to 3/03 and the inspectors believed that they were within months of completing their work when we invaded. Instead of adjusting to the new information and giving more space for inspections and diplomacy the administration cut the process short and resorted to a war they had promised would be a last resort.

Brew - Care to desconstruct the phrase you cite and demonstrate the existence of hate or irrationality?

"giving more space for inspections "

vonK,

Ok. You're right. We should have given him 11 years and 5 months instead of 11 years and 3 months. Oh yeah, and 18 UN resolutions instead of 17. That would have made a difference.

"Brew - Care to desconstruct the phrase you cite and demonstrate the existence of hate or irrationality?"

No I don't care to. It stands on its own merits.

Further, Iraqi cooperation continued to improve throughout the perioid 11/02 to 3/03 and the inspectors believed that they were within months of completing their work when we invaded.

What, you mean those same UN folks who were stealing money hand-over-fist from the oil-for-food coffers? Those people? Those same folks who blithely looked away while Pakistan and India went nuclear, and are continuing to look away while Iran does the same?

Those folks? Is that who you mean?

[...with my best Cosell voice...]

"Oh! Von Kreedon is rocked with a vicious right! He. Did. Not. See. That. One. Coming! And the challenger is back on his heels!"

Nope, different more professional group of folks at UNMOVIC and IAEA. And the last I looked a lot of people who are not the US have been working very hard to keep Iran from going nuclear.

Nope, different more professional group of folks at UNMOVIC and IAEA. And the last I looked a lot of people who are not the US have been working very hard to keep Iran from going nuclear.

You know, I can't even say that out loud without throwing up a little in my mouth. They've been "trying very hard" for a decade now, and have accomplished approximately fuck-all. (These people were also supposed to supervise North Korea's "peaceful" nuclear program, and we know how that turned out, don't we?)

Trusting these dumbasses with our safety is like trusting a toddler with a loaded gun.

Monty - So the Iranians have the bomb?

Come on VK, you know very well that has more to do with technical and material issues than anything else. You can do better than that.

Sorry, I don't know that. How do you know that?

vonKreedon:

Yes. At least one, and probably more. Probably not missile-mounted and probably of tactical yield (say 20-50 KT). If you follow places like StrategyPage and Janes, you can read between the lines and see that most of the world's intel agencies are pretty sure Iran has at least one and probably more functional nukes. They probably got the tech from A.Q. Khan and the material from N.K. -- all states that the U.N. was supposedly monitoring for "non proliferation" purposes.

Remember that the UN assured everyone that Pakistan was non-nuclear until Pakistan conducted a nuclear test and showed that the IAEA was staffed by a bunch of credulous mouth-breathing retards.

Monty - That is serious news, can you provide a cite for the Iranian nuke? Also, a cite for the Pak nuke being a surprise would be great.

Do your own research. I don't need any convincing, and if you want some neat two-paragraph summary of everything I just said, you ain't gonna find it. It's there, but it's spread out.

Better yet, go to your local library and check out some actual defense literature: Janes Defense Weekly is a good place to start, along with Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly) and Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute Quarterly).

Some background on Pakistan's so-called "peaceful" nuclear program can be found here. Note this statement:
The Pakistan delegate, Mr. Mirza Javed Chauhan, told the [UN] Disarmament Commission that Pakistan does not possess nuclear weapons, nor does it have any
intention to do so.'--Islamabad Domestic Service broadcast, 5/10/89.

Von Kreedon - you still seem to be unable to grasp the fact that under the UN inspection / Security Council regime, the onus was on Iraq to prove compliance - not on the UN to prove non-compliance. I realize it is a technical issue, but it is an important one, and surely a (wo)man of the party of John Kerry, the very soul of nuance and sophistication, can grasp it.

Perhaps you can also grasp that the UN inspection teams had been compromised to a fare-thee-well by Saddam's int services - they were bugged, followed and rarely, if ever, allowed to inspect so-called presidential sites. As a result, anything that they produced had to be suspect or at least viewed as seriously incomplete. Moreover, the UN reports also talked about large stocks of chem and bio weps that they had seen in the 1990s, but which were no longer around but the destruction of which could not be verified. I'm sorry to be a cynic, but when dealing with a regime which had, within recent memory, invaded 2 of its neighbors, gassed its own people, attempted to assasinate a former US President (which would have been grounds for war at the time if Clinton wasn't such a pussy) and run 2 seperate nuclear programs undetected by the IAEA and the UN (the same IAEA and UN that missed the Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, Libyan and North Korean programs), then a huge frickin dose of skepticism is called for. Of course, as it turns out, the CIA isn't much better - they also missed most of the aforementioned programs - and when they finally did "catch" one, it turned out not to be there.

BUT - none of that adds up to a lie.

VK,

Since the Russians are neck deep in the program, they must have some idea.

This?

Or this?

Or maybe you think the negotiations are keeping a fanatical regime from a source of great leverage.
Whichever.

The cite you provide has many many quotes from Pakistani officials and US officials, but nothing from IAEA officials.

The problem is that your arguments indicate you have greater faith in Kofi Annan, Hans Blix, El Baradei, Saddam Hussein, and Khatami than you do in most Americans who happen to be Republican.

Dude - Interesting articles on the Russian-Iranian business, but I don't see how it invalidates my contention that international action, including UN, is impeding Iranian ability to produce nuclear weapons.

And yes, I have greater faith in the competence and truthfulness of some international figures, El Baradei and Blix for instance but not Hussein or Khatami, than I do in the current administration.

UNMOVIC and IAEA inspectors were on the ground, using the intel we provided and finding nothing. Should have been a strong clue that our intel was screwed ..... but NOooo..

vonKreedon:

Man, you are thick, aren't you?

I'd love to hear what magical property the IAEA possesses that would keep rogue states from lying to them the same way they do to all other UN agencies. And exactly what enforcement power do they carry? The dreaded "UN Wagging Finger of Doom"?

Well, it is time for both the Left and the Brainless Bush Backers to both step back and acknowledge reality.

1. The WMD bullshit debate that goes on 2 years after we learned we were fed crap on the subject doesn't help anyone. What does it matter? Will the 2006 election turn on it or the 2008 one when the 2004 election didn't??? Jeeeez, bury the dead horse, dumb Lefties...

2. The neocons and the Bushies totally fucked up in having no postwar plan....and assuming the grateful Iraqis would have to pried off hugging their liberators, offering their daughters for sex, signing contracts to US oil companies right and left, and begging to send their oil to Israel - as Chalabi said would happen.

3. Bremer, Feith, Cheney, and Wolfowitz's idiotic decision to remove all Sunnis from any position
of power in gov't, military will be marked by historians as the day the Iraqi Civil War started.

4. There is no support anymore for the neocon's proposed string of major wars undertaken by America to safeguard Israel's colonies (Cakewalk! See! Iraq was easy! Next Syria! Then Iran! Then Sudan! Then Saudi Arabia & Yemen! Go Troops! Go! Faster America! Faster, please.)

5. The coalotion of the willing is just about dead.

6. America's military is battered, stretched out by occupation duty, and has lost combat effectiveness from inability to retrain on new elements in manuver warfare because all that is on hold to get the bodies needed for Occupation tasks. At the same time, Bush refuses to increase military funding because it would threaten his tax cuts for the wealthy - and senior officers Know the Official Party Line. They need no more troops there or elsewhere, no additional reserves and know by now how to look one in the eye and lie..

6. Iraq is looking like it will be an Islamist State when we leave, and America will hardly be appreciated once we do leave. Already there is Iraqi Gov't talk of the need for awarding oil contracts to Russia, France, and China to demonstrate that Iraq is truly independent of the former American Occupier. Iraq has already signed treaties with Iran that prohibit America from attacking Iran using any Iraqi bases.

************

The best we can hope for is that the country is a stable, Iran-Lite type of state when we leave. Where women are all required to chador-up, but aren't stoned to death, just beaten when they lip off to a male and master of their house..Where an American might be safe to walk around 10 years from now outside the Kurd areas.

C'mon gang. You can easily follow the logic of VK if you go with the first law of liberal foreign policy :

America= exploitive, aggressive, guilty.

UN (and other useless international bedwetters)=
virtuous, caring, pristine.

Please run all your arguments through the proceeding filter, and viola! you're one of VK's fellow travelers. Get it?

America's military is battered, stretched out by occupation duty, and has lost combat effectiveness from inability to retrain on new elements in manuver warfare because all that is on hold to get the bodies needed for Occupation tasks.

Cedarford, I understand that you are not the only person who is saying this, so don't take this as a personal attack. However, with roughly 400,000 Army personnel, 200,000 Marines and several hundred thousand National Guard/Reserve personnel, I don't see how in the hell anyone can say our 160,000 Iraq force is making our military "stretched thin". We've got several armored divisions in Japan, Germany, Korea and stateside doing absolutely nothing right now. How in the hell is this being "stretched thin"?

Despite their initial protestations of support for the GWOT, liberals have never understood what "war" really means or how the military works. They have continued to evaluate our response in terms of a large-scale police action, with concommitant standards for our troops' actions and schedule for success. Andrew Sullivan is a stellar example of this, with his initial enthusiasm waning as he became intimidated by the resistance, then returning a bit as we held fast, then fading with the Abu Ghraib scandal.

A poster above mentioned Wretchard, who has continued to use military briefings and news accounts to patch together an understanding of the military's strategy and position. The accuracy of his crystal ball is not the result of some psychic power, but rather his underlying assumptions. He knows what the press does not: that the military is competent, that it has created a strategy for dealing with the insurgency, and that it is relentlessly pursuing that strategy. His job, then, is to suss out what that strategy is. This contrasts sharply with the impressions of the press and our liberal friends, who seem to believe that the military rides around on aimless patrols, waiting to be blown up.

From the left's perspective, it is obvious that we should leave Iraq as soon as the government as soon as possible, and should try to suppress the irritating influences that cause insurgents to want to blow things up. The conservative's view is that the military is successfully handling a very nasty situation, and that their success and our resolve will combine to destroy the enemies' capability and will to fight.

We have not of late been very energetic in making this point: the current sag in support for the war (to whatever extent it really exists) can be attributable in part to the ennui the conservative blogosphere felt after the elections. Exhausted after the election frenzy, many bloggers talked about retiring, or at least throttling back their commitment to their blogs. At the same time, without the unifying issue of the election, the dextrosphere lost its focus and splintered its attention into myriad side interests. And now Chrenkoff is leaving the field . . .

We need to pull back together and refocus our attention on the GWOT. And if our war-fighting policy needs adjustment (like Hillary's 80,000 troop increase proposal), we should be leading the fight to adjust it. As Ace (channeling Instapundit) would say: "There's a war on, people!"

Not the least advantage of a warmaking policy of blood and iron would be avoidance of the need for such interminable wrangling about whether our half measures are excessive.

Arafel

Ace, I think you're dead wrong.

First, even if the poll weren't bogus, its sort of number misses the point because it lumps together the Deaniacs with the folks who think Bush has been too -soft- in Iraq.

Second, it's again measuring waaaay out of campaign season, when there's been no administration pushback.

If it's 2008 and there's a cut&run candidate running against a semi-articulate hard-ass Republican, the cut&run has no chance. None.

We stuck around in Vietnam for almost ten years. Iraq fatigue will take at least as long.

For the left everything is obvious because they are so smart:

The best intel available at the time we invaded was that there were no WMD in Iraq.

Any global or national damage or destruction incurred during the wresting would naturally be the fault of the Republicans for resisting, because even they can't possibly be too stupid to know how stupid they really are.