Two ads, two views of Iraq war

7 years of war, 4660+ dead young Americans and rising, and 9-trillion-dollar in debt (also rising). Still no bin laden in sight! Yeah, the surge REALLY worked. Yes BushCo failed, but what did Dems do? Chucklenut led us straight to hell and Dems followed him with their spineless bodies as usual. We are tired of being sold out by corporate greed that’s leading the economy melt down just to make the 1% richer with no ethics or accountability whatsoever, while the other party bent over and did nothing to stand up to the BushCo. It’s time to take the government back to the people. WWW.VOTENADER.ORG. We need to stop the two-party sell out now!

Moveon.org is a seditionist organization that has tried to undermine the troops and the war effort from day one. George Soros & company are not loyal to this nation and hate the US, while finding no fault with murderers, radicals, neo-soviets and any other piece of human filth operating at their moral and intellectual level. While this scum has First Amendment rights, I wonder if any of us would have those same rights if this gaggle of leftists ever took power. The scary thing is that Comrade Obama is indebted to these people, and at any given moment , if elected, he and his neo-soviet pals just might yank the First Amendment away from the rest of us. If anyone doubts it, talk to refugees from Cuba, Chile, China, Eastern Europe or any other socialist slave-state. Better yet, go to any major university and see how the left stifles free speech (other than its own). maybe we need the troops home to take care of Moveon.org and others of its treacherous ilk.

How can any thinking American think Barack Obama is ready & qualified to be president. He has dissed experience and trumpeted his great judgement. His judgement to give a so called important speach on forreign policy & the Iraq & Afghanistan wars before his visit to these countries & talks with the commanders on the ground is not only bad judgement but stupid. Americans better wake up. electing him would be a disaster.

At 12 billion dollars a month price tag this war is too expensive. It is enough already. Please so much has been spent over 3 trillion dollars? double that for rehabilitation?

so why did Bush wait 5 years to do it????? remember mission accomplished, and "we have turned the corner", and how it would be a "cakewalk", and how Iq oil would pay for it, and ?????

The surge worked? puleease. The bad guys arent stupid, they know the american presence is a temporary thing and are just waiting for the USA to scale back some and they will be back. There is too much oil ($$$$) there for them to abandon anything. They are there for the long run.

Reports from outside our country, and Middle Eastern Islamic experts (see juancole.com) do not believe the surge did anything. Mutaqua al-Sadr's cease fire was responsible for the decrease in violence in Baghdad and elsewhere, even in Basara after the government forces lost. Our murderous, civilian killing,regionally destabilizing war has caused even the Iraqi power brokers that benefited from our backing to call for our departure!

You cant put a time table on war. If you do then we will end up in the same place as when you started. Then all the lives of our brave men will have been in vain.
Wake up America and lets finish what we started so our enemys will know we will not run as soon as the blood starts spilling.

"The surge is working" is the most ballyhooed falsehood perpetrated in this election. Several other factors far outweigh the troop surge in diminishing violence. In fact the troop surge was unnecessary.
Many maintain that the Suni Awakening was the most important reason for diminished violence against our troops when they turned from aiding Al-Quaida as insurgents to eliminating Al-Quaida with American financial incentive. This occurred in late 2006 several months before the surge.
The greatest factor in reducing Iraqi on Iraqi violence is the ethnic cleansing the violence forceably enacted. Mixed neighborhoods are no longer the reason for enacting violence. Both these reasons outweigh troop escalation for increased tranquility in Iraq today. The Sadr faction decision to pull back from violence is also key and is not associated with the surge.

It looks like the special interest groups will be a factor after all. I think Obama said he had to keep his campaign finances independent so that he could argue his cases against these organizations as they appear. Good Judgement.
To the subject matter, I was there, all over Al Anbar Iraq for most of the year in 2006 and I always thought we needed more troops. Baghdad is the only area that got the extra troops. Our area had stop loss to keep more troops in the area.
The war being fought as it is, will fail. Not enough on the ground, even with the "surge". Iraq is a huge country and lots of places to cause trouble. There are not enough troops to cover the area. The people will not help us if we can not protect them 24/7. As it is now, we patrol through an area and are gone within hours. Anyone that talked to us often is intimidated or killed. That is the reason for failure. So I thought if we are going to not fully commit we should leave...But I hated to leave the friends we made and those that helped us. We needed to provide security for the Iraq's to rebuild their power grid, water and sewer system. But we did not and when some contracts were arranged to allow the locals to do the infrastructure work the trucks supplying the job were hijacked, the drivers threatened and the workers identified and harrassed because they workers were "helping Americans". A lack of security 24/7 was the problem.
General Shensakey(sp?) the Joint Chief of Staff, prior to the invasion, that recommended 550,000 troops stay on the ground to provide security and help the country meet the policeing needs as the country learned to provide for itself, was right about the number of troops needed. If we had done that I think we really would have been out by now.
The country basically fell into anarchy, a riot. I always compared the problem to policing a riot, keep adding policemen until the riot was quelled. We did not and still do not have enough on the ground to get the job done.
Without security 24/7 on every street corner, the Iraq's would not come out to help rebuild their country. They mostly wanted too but were afraid to talk to us as when we left the bad guys would kill them.
So I guess they are both right. It is a noble thing to stay and win. But to stay and not get anything lasting done made me want to leave.

The people who like the war so much should just sign up for it, shut up, or get educated. How on earth is anyone still for continuing this iraq disaster. we want us out, they want us out, its only getting worse with us still there...time to adapt old folks and silly america (silly america is the south and middle america, whereas normal america aka smart america is northeast and west coast.)

Going to fight a GROUND WAR in Iraq and Afghanistan was President Dumbo Bush's idea of becoming a war hero. The stupid, arrogant, brain damaged Republican had to have his way like a spoiled baby. Look at all the people who ended up DEAD and the trillions, TRILLIONS of tax dollars WASTED on this mess. We need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan permanently and just drop some bombs on their headquarters next time WITHOUT the endless, senseless, NEEDLESS ground war and occupation. THAT is what is wrong with the Republicans, Americans stupid enough to support them, our economy and everything else to do with the multiple crisis situations we are NOW having to deal with both at home and abroad. AMERICA NEEDS TO RECOVER and learn to stay out of these worthless countries. We have accomplished NOTHING but to get thousands killed and go down the tube financially, what a complete and utter stupid WASTE of lives, time, money and resources. VOTE THEM ALL OUT.

A TIGER BY THE TAIL
Middle Eastern cultural is vastly different than ours. It is one with a history of disunity and violent disagreement, state to state and Muslim to Muslim. Our version of “decent and good” is not theirs. Often it is quite the opposite. Going into Iraq, regardless of how many of us approved of it when it began, has helped no one. It was a mistake, and failing to admit this now suggests either incompetence or denial on the part of the Groupthinkers we elect to decide such matters for us. We need better leaders than we have at the moment, leaders who do not think going full speed in the wrong direction is a virtue, who do not point to a genuine threat to our survival to justify continuing a flawed strategy.
Reflecting on how much we and the world we knew have changed as a result of our entry into Iraq is painful. We have angered our friends, undermined the cause of freedom and democracy, encouraged the fanatics even as we weakened our ability to cope with them on a global scale, and revealed our limitations to the world, which Islamic fanatics and those of our friends who have had enough of our go-it-alone, never-a-doubt arrogance, will now be anxious to exploit. There will be attacks on our soil, of that we should have no doubt. And they have been made easier by the flawed strategy of intractable ideologues.
If you have a tiger by the tail, you are bound to get hurt in some way. If you let go early, you might retain enough energy to defend yourself against the worst of its anger, but if you wait until you are a step or two beyond fatigue, it will be the same tiger you release, but you will be less able to escape its wrath. Whatever foolishness possessed you to grab the tiger's tail is not so relevant at the moment. Having done so, you now have to decide how best to let it go, for sooner or later, you are going to have to.
Iraq is in shambles and will likely remain in shambles for many years to come, this whether we stay or leave. In making the decision to go or stay, we must apply realism to our argument, recognize our limitations here, what we are capable of accomplishing and what we clearly are not. As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence pointed out before the war began, Iraq is a deeply-divided society, one we are ill equipped to understand, let alone manage. And there is considerable argument that, even though we have made a bad situation (Saddam) worse, there is little reason to try. The countries in the area, however their anger at us will grow as a result of our leaving behind a worse situation than we found, must come to grips with the problem of Iraq and solve it in their own way, “an Arab solution,” as the late King Hussein of Jordan once put it. Considering the close similarity of cultures, there is promise in an Arab solution, more so than with us arrogantly (and naively) promoting “the American way.” We stand little chance of winning the hearts and minds of a populous that sees only their arch enemy, the infidel Crusader. They will shoot solemn glances at us during the day and bullets at night.
Yes, the situation has been made worse for Middle Eastern countries, but every day we remain in Iraq we add to the dangers they face. Iraq breeds terrorists who foster death and destruction, not only to the Western world, but to Middle Eastern countries as well (anyone who disagrees with their ideas of the moment). Terrorists are using Iraq for training then are branching out to do their mischief elsewhere. We have invaded a country that was once an enemy of al Qaeda and turned it into a recruiting and training ground for that same al Qaeda.
The Bush Administration persists in claiming no one has yet come up with an alternative plan for Iraq. They make this claim because no other plan meets their selected criteria, principal of which is it must lead to “victory.” That criteria, however is flawed. It is too limited; it is thinking inside the box when what we need is just the opposite. (This is not to say, however, that the Democrats can claim the high ground. Since taking over Congress in 2007, they have made no serious effort to end this war, their feeling being that to attempt to do so this close to the next presidential election would be risky, offering too much of an opportunity for the other side to show them as weak on terrorism.)
Whatever our government does or does not decide with respect to Iraq, it is critical that they (and we) become more strategic in our defense against Islamic fanaticism, that we take aim at the people who raise generation after generation of Islamic killers, that we cure our addiction to oil and thus starve Islam-dominated countries of the money they use to buy weapons and methodology. Since they are not a people prone to invention, once their income is lost, they are as well. Restated, spending hundreds of billions of dollars unproductively in Iraq does not protect America as well as spending an equivalent amount on alternative energy. The latter is a sensible strategic approach to victory; firing our guns wildly in Iraq is not.
This world, as is increasingly driven home to us, is becoming daily less safe due to Islamic fanaticism fueled by our misguided adventures in the Middle East. Unless we latch on to a leader (or leaders) who can think outside the box, the threat will grow until too large to effectively counter without a monumental loss of human life. And if we do arrive at that point, rather than admit fault, we will likely see pointing fingers everywhere we look, pointing at everyone but oneself.
(From my book, “If You Can Keep It”)
N. C. Munson