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Originally Posted by junkernaut  i think youre last 2 sentences are great. the problem as i see it though is that most of us who dont have blinders on are called unpatriotic and castigated if we show the least bit resistance to the popular opinion. like the classic argument of supporting the troops, or protesting the war or our govt in anyway. i definitly support the troops, i have a lot of respect for them, and what they do, but i want this war to be over and i want them to come home, how is that not supporting them. how is bringing our troops home and letting some country thousands of miles take care of their own problems unsupportive. or like many of the protesters that u may see out on the streets....to me its like if you have a child who is messing up in school or just isnt acting right to what u feel is the proper way to go....do you try to do something about it in oder to correct a problem and reputation or do u think that if u discipline them, then youre being unsupportive. this country is like our collective child, its our responsibility to correct them when we think theyre wrong. granted, some people definitly do go WAY overboard and sometimes in the wrong direction....we should never treat our soldiers like the troops coming home from viet nam were treated, but if we see a problem, we should at least speak up about it |
Thanks for the comment on the end of my post. We humans get into more trouble by demonizing each other instead of accepting that we will each make the best deal for ourselves that we can, on a national as well as a personal level.
The troops are following orders, so they can't be faulted for that. Corrections have to be made at the top.
I supported the war because I thought there were valid strategic reasons for it, beyond the reasons that were given. However, the actual prosecution of the war has been screwed up on many levels, starting with disanding the old Iraqi Army and thus releasing 400,000 trained military into the ranks of the unemployed. Each of those men got the message "Screw you, we don't trust you" from the US government.
I would have purged the Baathists from the army and used it to - guess what! - guard its own borders and police its own cities. That would have kept our own troops out of the day-to-day line of fire and also made the Iraqis feel more like we had liberated them from Saddam and not conquered them.
At this point it's a real clusterfuck, and my overriding feeling is that we do owe Iraq not to pull out and leave a vacuum. But the problem is much more complicated than it was in March 2003.
