Sad to watch?!
"Destroyed" Presidency?!
Oh please...
We've gone more than 5 years without another 9/11 attack on the U.S.
Our national missile defenses are deployed. Hussein's in jail. Syria's army has retreated from Lebanon. The Taliban hide in remote, rural, Afghan caves, unable to so much as stop little girls from going to school.
Our economy is rocking. Wages are up above inflation. Home ownership is at record highs, as is the stock market. We've got full employment. With a mere 4.6% unemployment, only those transitioning between jobs or who don't want to work are left out of employment.
The annual budget deficit is down to $250 Billion and we just funded 700 miles of border fence that begins construction *this* year.
Moreover, we've killed Zarqawi. A. Khan is under house arrest. International terrorists Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal both met their death in Iraq, too.
For that matter, thousands upon thousands of radical jihadists (4,000 foreign fighters and many times that number local Iraqis) have discovered (too late) that we've transformed Iraq into a giant Roach Motel that lures 'em in and checks 'em out in body bags (if that).
In the meantime, Libya has surrendered its WMD program and Japan is re-militarizing to help us.
Yet you see gloom and doom.
Buck up! Open your eyes.
Great post!
Prez Commission Headed By *James Baker* Advises Cutting Iraq in Three
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1715724/posts
His group has yet to reach a final conclusion, but there is a growing consensus that America can neither pour more soldiers into Iraq nor suffer mounting casualties without any sign of progress. It is thought to support embedding more high-quality American military advisers in the Iraqi security forces rather than maintaining high troop levels in the country indefinitely.
Frustrated by the failure of a recent so-called “battle of Baghdad” to stem violence in the capital, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, said last week that the unity government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, had only two months left to get a grip. Rumours abound that the much-admired ambassador could depart by Christmas.
Khalilzad’s warning was reinforced by John Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee, on his return from a visit to Baghdad. “In two to three months’ time, if this thing hasn’t come to fruition and this government (is not) able to function, I think it’s a responsibility of our government internally to determine: is there a change of course we should take?” Warner said.
Bush and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, have resisted the break-up of Iraq on the grounds that it could lead to more violence, but are thought to be reconsidering. “They have finally noticed that the country is being partitioned by civil war and ethnic cleansing is already a daily event,” said Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Gelb is the co-author with Senator Joseph Biden, a leading Democrat, of a plan to divide Iraq. “There was almost no support for our idea until very recently, when all the other ideas being advocated failed,” Gelb said.
It seems that all of these people are reacting to the events on the ground in Iraq much the same way I have posted here. One can only discount so much as being the product of media bias and, evidently, the likes of the people quoted and summarized above, including George Bush himself, know that what we're doing is broke and needs fixin'.
To Southack: much of what you say is true but they are of no relevance whatsoever if 1) they do not make America safer (that means if a terrorist's ability to set off a weapon of mass destruction and an American city), or 2) if Iran gets the bomb. As to 1) the idea that we can attride enough terrorists so that the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world cannot find another 19 suicide murderers is preposterous. We are demonstrating to the world that we cannot inflict enough casualties in this kind of asymmetrical warfare that our domestic consensus will endure. The idea of killing terrorists in Iraq so that another 19 cannot attack America again, is the policy of shoveling flies. As to 2) if Iran gets the bomb everything we have gained and sacrificed for in Iraq and elsewhere will be marginalized into insignificance.
I think James Baker sees that too.