The view from the Washington state delegation section at the Pepsi Center.
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Hmm, I think perhaps the governor should have requested a seat upgrade for the delegation in return for her endorsement of Obama.
Yes, there is wifi in the center.
Answering my own dumb question.
Oops but no food I heard.
Let’s see…
Obama says that we may very well have seen the same security gains that we have seen in Iraq without the “surge.” But John McCain says “pish and tosh” to that:
But then, the next thing ya know–and here’s where it gets funny, people–the man who McCain recently named as one of “the three wisest people” that he would rely heavily on as president, the saintly General David Petraeus himself agrees with Barack Obama.
It’s OK, Republicans. When Obama is president, all will be forgiven. Not!
Petraeus does not agree with Obama, and that’s a ridiculous distortion of his remarks.
Is he right? Is he wrong? I dunno … but he doesn’t say what DL pretends he said.
Actually, there is not WIFI in the Pepsi Center; this post was sent from my iPhone.
That said, the DNCC has provided me Internet access via an ethernet cable attached to the voting kiosk, as well as the use of a single power outlet.
The Republicans have been so wrong about Iraq, so often, that’s it’s funny how they get twisted around trying to take credit when things show any faint glimmer of improvement.
1. Bush & Co. claimed Saddam had “weapons of mass distruction”. Then no weapons turned up. Then Republicans claimed they had been hidden in Syria. Nope, not there either. Then Bush claims “he never said that”. Nope, have it on tape. Then Bush claims “nobody could have known” his intel was false. Nope, he was warned in advance. Bush now switches to claims that Iraq was a haven for Al Quida. Nope, not even close – Al Quida only got a foot in the door BECAUSE the invasion caused enough disruption, and became a recruiting tool for Al Quida. Then Bush switches to blaming Iran for the problems. Geez, a Shiite Iraqi government coooperating with a Shiite Iranian government? Who would have thought? Well, the Saudis thought so – that’s why they wouldn’t cooperate with the invasion in the first place.
2. Numerous generals in the Pentagon warned Rumsfield that they didn’t have enough “boots on the ground” to do the job properly. Rumsfield told them they had to make do with what they had. When they asked about the plans after the invasion (somewhat worridly – they had all read about Iraq’s traditional hatred of foreign occupiers), Rumsfield said the next general who asked that question was going to get canned. Turned out there weren’t enough “boots on the ground” to secure Iraq after the invasion – by far – and Rumsfield’s lies that they would be out of Iraq within ninety days (told to military planners) weren’t even in ANY of the administrations plans. The Bush administration was planning for Iraq to become a long-term base for U.S. military and economic interests in the region, replacing the Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other Gulf States who Bush & Co. had decided weren’t sufficiently subservent to U.S. instructions.
Of course, the U.S. military does a supurb job doing what it is supposed to do – defeat the Iraqi Army in the field with a minimum of casualties. But it isn’t set up for a long-term occupation, and doesn’t have enough men available to do lots of things that need to be done, such as basic security of public buildings, quickly seizing arms depots and munitions plants, etc. The problem is made worse by idiotic decisions by political appointees, who instruct the Iraqi army and police force to disband and go home – leaving a million-plus force of young men who have been trained on how to use arms and explosives unemployed in a shattered economy and with lots of time on their hands.
Then, after three years of increasing insurgency by the Iraqis, during which time Rumsfield insists that he has enough boots on the ground because his generals have told him so, and that the insurgency is just a few “dead enders” despite rising casualty counts and the start of a viscious ethnic-cleansing campaign as competing Iraqi militias compete for territory, and Bush & Co. reject calls for either withdrawal or more boots on the ground, eventually Rumsfield resigns.
A few months later, after fellow Republicans push Bush to DO SOMETHING to save their political futures, does Bush sign on to the SURGE. But it’s done on the cheap – tours are extended, and two things happen politically which have an impact. First, the Americans start paying Sunni tribes to not attack U.S. troops. Great for the troops, but how long can you sustain that kind of policy? The second factor is to obtain a cease-fire by the major shiite leader in the South, one that is being continued now on a month-by-month basis.
So now the Republicans want to take credit for the “surge”, when even Petraus admits that the (slightly) improving situation in Iraq is probably a combination of (a) payments to Sunni tribes, (b) the cease-fire with Shiite leaders which could end at any minute, (c) ethnic cleaning has pretty much been completed so the situation there couldn’t get any worse, and (d) Iraqi neighborhoods becoming walled compounds and checkpoints separating different religious and ethnic groups, and (e) having more boots on the ground, but too few and too late to avoid the worst of the damage to Iraq.
3. First we were going to leave as soon as we had a democratic government installed. Then we were going to leave as soon as the security situation improved. Then we were going to stay as long as the new Iraqi government asked us to stay, and we couldn’t do “timetables” (Bush & Co. said it was “irresponsible” for Democrats to talk about timetables. Then we were going to leave when certain “benchmarks” were met. Then we were going to leave as soon as the Iraqi government asked us to leave. Then the Iraqi government asked us to leave. Now Bush & Co. are asking the Iraqis for “timetables” going into 2011 for withdrawal of combat troops, and an indefinate committment of “training and logistics” troops. The Iraqi government wants them all to leave – now. Bush & Co. pretends not to hear them.
Now the line which Fox News was giving it’s people over the weekend was the “We went into Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi’s”. Ummm, NOT, by any stretch of the imagination.
By the way, from mail I received from a friend in Iraq a couple of weeks ago….
“….We have had a couple of rocket attacks and insurgent activity has really picked up. Diyala is now the most dangerous province in Iraq. It makes it very hard to get anything accomplished outside the wire but we are hanging in there. The temperatures have floated bewteen 115 and 122 degrees so any trip out is exhausting as well as dangerous….”
It’s not that the republicans have been wrong on Iraq. To be wrong on Iraq implies you were actually trying to do something in the interest of America.
What they’ve consistently done and continue to do is lie about Iraq.
Vote “GOP” if you want more lies. If you’re a republican you like lies so stick with that – it eliminates your responsibility to look for the truth!
Our military is very good at doing what a military is intended to do, as so well elucidated by Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf: “kill people and break things”.
It would seem that other skills are required to turn Iraq back into a viable country.
I see in the news that Bush is now losing to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Not content to become the second president in U.S. history to lose a war (Nixon was the first), Bush is now trying for a two-fer.
Ya gotta admit that losing 2 wars simultaneously would be a tough act to follow and would stand as a record for a long time.
So who do we have to kill to get better seats for our delegation? Do we gotta vote Republican or something to get their attention? What’s going on here?
Did nixon start the war?
Or because he cut and run you call it losing?
*IF* obama steals the election, and then brings the troops home, does that mean he lost the war?
Yelling Loser Boy SCUM@2 – wrong again.
What’s new…?
Marvin @ 14:
Will you Republicans make up your mind? You keep insisting that the U.S. had “won” the war by the end of the Tet Offensive in 1968. If so, then it was, indeed, Nixon’s war to lose.
Short History Lesson:
Remember that Nixon campaigned (and won the Presidency) based upon his “secret plan” to end the war. Turns out he didn’t have one, other than to try to get the Soviets and China to quit backing the N. Vietnamese, which obviously didn’t work. Nixon then attempted to widen the war into Cambodia and Laos(which first required U.S. support of a military coup in Cambodia deposing Prince Shianook, and we all know how well that eventually turned out for the Cambodians). The Vietnames responded in 1972 with the “Easter Offensive” involving an armored attack across the DMZ which was eventually blunted by American airpower, but without some brutal fighting, especially by S. Vietnamese Marines.
Then Nixon agreed to a peace deal which – surprise! looked almost exactly like the peace deal which N. Vietnam proposed in late 1968 (after the election). Nixon condemned the deal then as a “surrender” and an abandonment of our S. Vietnam allies, as it involved the partitioning of S. Vietnam into zones of influence. But as the 1972 election drew near, he was more than willing to go along with it.
The problem is, as Kissinger recently admitted, Nixon and Kissinger both knew the S. Vietnamese government would fall within a few years – their goal was to prop up the regime so that it would last at least five years. Kissenger admitted that there was a reason for this goal – Nixon wanted to make sure the collapse occured during the next President’s administration, so they could be the one who took the blame. Although the S. Vietnamese regime collapsed in only three years, it DID collapse during the next President’s administration – although that was due to circumstances Nixon couldn’t imagine at the time (Watergate = resignation).
Now, all that being said, I think the U.S. policy in Vietnam was badly handled beginning with the end of WWII. The Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations each made grevious errors, treating Vietnam as a pawn in the Red vs. Blue cold war game of global domination, and not realizing that the Vietnam conflict was essentially a nationalist uprising of anti-colonial forces which devolved into a civil war between the Buddist peasants and small merchants against the Catholic elite. Since most of our information came from the Catholic elite, it didn’t seem to occur to us that they might be using us for their own purposes, using American forces to crush local enemies (by identifying rival politicians and local strongmen as Communist sympathizers) and enriching themselves greatly (albeit temporarily) at the expense of the Vietnamese peasants and the American taxpayer.
So in the final context, by the time Nixon inherited the Vietnam mess, he wasn’t to blame at that time for the mess which had been made to date. By mid-1968 Johnson had begun to realize that Vietnam was a intractable morass, you couldn’t bomb your way to victory there, and he was prepared to get out as soon as possible if he had served a second term. Herbert Humphry pledged to withdraw as soon as possible if he were elected.
But Nixon, having campaigned as the guy who could bring “victory” to Vietnam, figured he could make things better if he simply tried harder, doing the same things which were tried before but only doing them with more men and over a greater territory. So he deserves the blame for another 3-3/4 years of American involvement in the Vietnam war which had, at that point, already been lost in that the S. Vietnamese government had no credibility with it’s people and could not exist without continued and perpetual U.S. military and financial support.
The Republicans like to say that the Vietnam war was winnable, except for meddling by politicians and the media. The U.S. military likes to point out that they were never defeated on the battlefield, that they eventually took whatever objective they were assigned. The Vietnames response to the military was: “Yes, but that is irrelevant”.
Those that continue to search for a military solution in Iraq really need to take an impartial study of the Vietnam war and learn their lessons from it, rather than try to re-fight it all over again in Iraq.