Posted on 10/06/2009 3:18:18 PM PDT by euram
For two years as a candidate, Senator Obama called for more resources for the war in Afghanistan and warned about the consequences of failure. As President, he announced a comprehensive new counterinsurgency strategy and handpicked the right general to execute it. Now General McChrystal is asking for additional troops to implement the strategy announced by President Obama in March. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers in harm's way in Afghanistan right now. We owe it to all those brave Americans serving in uniform to give them the tools they need to complete their mission.
We can win in Afghanistan by helping the Afghans build a stable representative state able to defend itself. And we must do what it takes to prevail. The stakes are very high. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Afghanistan, and if we are not successful there, al Qaeda will once again find a safe haven, the Taliban will impose its cruelty on the Afghan people, and Pakistan will be less stable.
Our allies and our adversaries are watching to see if we have the staying power to protect our interests in Afghanistan. I recently joined a group of Americans in urging President Obama to devote the resources necessary in Afghanistan and pledged to support him if he made the right decision. Now is not the time for cold feet, second thoughts, or indecision -- it is the time to act as commander-in-chief and approve the troops so clearly needed in Afghanistan.
- Sarah Palin
(Excerpt) Read more at facebook.com ...
We never lost a single battle in Vietnam. The public simply realized that it wasn’t worth all of the blood and treasure. In many ways, the same is true for the American Revolution. When cost, both in terms of the dead and financially, outweighs the potential benefits, a war is doomed to fail.
Uhhhh... Just a guess... maybe because Saddam Hussein was a terrorist madman who invaded and occupied Kuwait, attacked Saudi Arabia and Israel?
The Shah never attacked anyone... the only big actions his army saw were 1946 taking back Iranian territory the Soviets tried to steal, and 1973-77 fighting together with the Brits in Oman against Communist rebels. Other than that the only thing that stands out was the Shah, Israel and USA supporting the Kurds against the Iraqi Baathists in the 1970's. That's it. Big deal. I wish we could have a leader like that in the Middle East again.
To compare the Shah, who was the biggest stabilizer of the Middle East in modern history, with the aggressive, genocidal, raving lunatic Saddam Hussein is bordering on the grotesque.
“Freedom can’t be given, or forced. It must be taken by the people. It was true here, it’ll be true in Iran.”
Your point has merit but your points of why Iran is where it is now are far more wrong than you know, but that is not your fault because you are only dealing with the hand that was dealt to you. Just imagine the finer points of Alice in Wonderland and the apply them to the conventional wisdom and then you might be enlightened enough to see the conventional wisdom was being dealt from a deck that was not from the house.
The initial strategy for Iraq was spot on and it showed for the first 30 days after the invasion. There was a poison pill in a nasty little thing called the fedayeen that initially caused problems.
Then the dolt who was originally in charge of the coalition summarily made a whole group unemployable and the excrement hit the fan and the fedayeen had a place to go for material and moral support.
From that the sectarian crap started and the Iranians took advantage to support and supply the insergents. That was the beginning of the IED invasion.
We surged up and kicked their tails but the landed back in Afghanistan through Iran. That then brought the same tactics that caused problems for us in Iraq and now we are at the same stupid place we were in before the surge in Iraq. Our problem of infiltration in Iraq was from Syria and now it is Pakistan.
So now we get full circle to Iran. This is the central problem combined with the Russians using all of these people as surrogates to do to us what Ronald Reagan’s masterful bluff did to them. The only reason Iran changed hands was not political but a botched plan to punish the Shah for not giving into a ponzi scheme with regards to its oil resources. The problem is the dolts had no idea that the old way of doing business there was to find aliances of convenience until the convenience was no longer necessary, demonize those in the aliance and take all the spoils.
So what is the answer? Cut the phoney diplomatic crap, say what you mean and back it up with extreme prejudice. Absolute power is the only thing they understand and anyting less shows weakness.
Please... Iran can do better than that. UAE... LOL. A bunch of billionaire absolutist sheikhs who employ SE-Asians as slaves to maintain their fancy toys from the West. If anything the secular system of Turkey could serve as a model for countries in the region.
You have no sense of history, military background, your talking points are just that, talk, ;no facts.
The collapse of Lyndon Baines Obama will give us the next Goldwater & Reagan, aka Bachmann & Palin.
Perhaps that analogy wasn’t the greatest, but you get my point. Our support for dictators has constantly backfired, Hussein in point. Your use of the word terrorist doesn’t make sense here though. Terrorism is a guerilla tactic used against a much more powerful force.
In the grander scheme, since you support that dictator, perhaps the most logical thing to do in Afghanistan and Iraq would be to simply install “US friendly” dictators and get out.
So what are you suggesting, the only way to stop the rebellions is to nuke Iran?
She sounds Presidential... D’oh!!!
Funny, history backs me up here. That’s why we were right about what would happen in Iraq when the neoconservatives started pushing Clinton for regime change back in ‘98. and when the war drums started beating in ‘02 we said exactly what would happen. Same thing with Afghanistan. But don’t take it from me. Dick Cheney had us libertarians beat when he laid out exactly what would happen if the US occupied Iraq... way back in 1994.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YuD9kYK9I
>The Afghans took on the world’s second leading superpower (which was sitting on their border) and won!
Actually, before we sent them Stinger missiles, they were on the verge of defeat.
It's not the first bad analogy you made for sure.
Our support for dictators has constantly backfired, Hussein in point.
Hindsight is 20/20. We needed after 1979 someone, anyone to keep Khomeini in check (and Iran to keep Saddam in check). That's realpolitik. Case in point we should have taken out Saddam after Desert Storm already.
Your use of the word terrorist doesn’t make sense here though. Terrorism is a guerilla tactic used against a much more powerful force.
Terrorism means spreading fear as a tactic. What you talk about is guerilla war. There is also state terrorism. Saddam was a state terrorist and supporter of terrorist groups across the region. To call him a terrorist is apropos.
In the grander scheme, since you support that dictator, perhaps the most logical thing to do in Afghanistan and Iraq would be to simply install “US friendly” dictators and get out.
Yes. I would prefer secular, modern-minded authoritarian rulers in the Middle East (like the Shah of Iran, the King of Jordan, Zahir Shah of Afghanistan or Sadat) to a chaotic unstable democracy. But I would still prefer the latter to terrorist madmen.
How old were you during the viewnam war?
Didn't need water wings on 9/11 did they cupcake?
I have seen about a dozen posts from you on various subjects and they all follow a common theme. You really don't know a damn thing about anything.
Case in point...Hopefully my government can minimize my rights enough to protect me
The US military can and will do anything asked of it.
Either of you guys ever been in the military? It sure doesn’t seem like it.
Touche’, almost. I’ll take my chances living with Germans, Japanese or South Koreans any day, rather than Turks, Kurds or Indonesians, as far as feeling safe is concerned.
So?
You still haven’t answered my question,
How old were you during the vietnam war?
I figured I’d draw you out. I never said a word about nukes which I feel is not remotely necessary to “fix” the problem, only the willingness to ignore the whiners and go after the disease with non-intrusive surgery.
I was born in 1957, so do the math. Didn’t know you had to be comically old (hell, I thought I was) to have an opinion about Vietnam.
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