Mission Accomplished: Iraq Is Broken

[Karmadillo]

It baffles me why Democrats refuse to take advantage of the growing sentiment that going to war against Iraq was a mistake. It's hard to imagine arguing we can do the war better is going to get us anywhere except where we already are--out of power in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. If fighting to take over the turf of moderate Republicans was a good idea, we'd have started to see positive results by now.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=8295

It’s hard to believe that supposedly intelligent people like Senators Joseph Biden (DE), Hillary Clinton (NY) and John Kerry (MA) call for “staying the course” in Iraq and acting responsibly by] sending more US troops with more fire power over there.

Don’t they understand that American soldiers break, not fix? The more US soldiers in Iraq, the more damage they will do and the more enemies they will make. To limit damage, to act morally and responsibly, remove the cause of violence and chaos in Iraq: the US military presence.

Since the early 1950s, US Presidents have used troops and the CIA to break other countries, not fix them. In 1953, the CIA shattered Iran’s integrity by overthrowing the elected Mossadegh government. 26 years later, Iranians overthrew the US-backed Shah. In 1979, Iranians showed the depth of their rage by also seizing scores of US officials as hostages. The Ayatollah’s regime labeled the United States “The Great Satan” – for screwing their country.

In 1954, the CIA smashed Guatemala by overthrowing a democratically elected government and replacing it with a military gang that killed and looted for forty years. Embraced by the Pentagon, these gangsters in uniform slaughtered as many as 100,000 Guatemalans (mostly indigenous peasants) and stole their land. The country has not yet recovered.

On September 11, 1973, Richard Nixon helped rupture Chile by “destabilizing” its elected government. For seventeen subsequent years, Washington supported a bloody military dictatorship led by General August Pinochet, a specialist in assassinating, disappearing and torturing his opponents at home and abroad. In 1991, the civilian government’s National Truth and Reconciliation Commission listed Pinochet’s crimes: 3,197 people assassinated or disappeared, tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands forced into exile.

In March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the US military to break Iraq.

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[justinsb]

1. I agree, the US needs new leadership.

I will not be able to trust those who supported going to Iraq in the first place. Those that claim they were decieved are, IMO, lying. They were at best doing what was politically expedient. But I knew that Bush/Powell/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice were lying and I don't have a staff to research these things for me.

[smoogatz]

2. The U.S. Army is designed for one purpose:

to kill people and break things. They are remarkably effective at this task. The U.S. army is not intended to be a police force, reconstruction crew, p.r. team, or quasi-government. They also suck at fighting insurgencies, because there are only two effective means of conducting a counter-insurgency campaign: political redress of insurgent grievances, or ruthless suppression of the civilian population. The British are pretty good at the former. We suck on both counts.

[Doctor_J]

3. Why baffled?

they've had 5 years of utter disaster and have barely made a dent in the lying coward's support. Some fair media would help, but so would tehm pointing out what a miserable failure Smirk is.

[sshan2525]

4. Because, almost to a man (or woman)...............

they are pussies. Most of them fucked up by "voting for" this fiasco and now they don't have the balls to admit that they were wrong. God, they make me sick.