Well this is a no brainer question.
Do yourself a favor and google "iraq cost per day". I won't tell you here not to spoil your fun.
Try to be sitting down at the time of this action, and also have some kind of a drug: valium, beer, PCP ready...
In spite of being a cynic who sees the glass of beer as half-empty, I believe that the only thing that's going to save us is going to be not-so-enlightened self-interest. Never mind all the hundreds of innocent Iraqis dying every damn, just think about how much money this damned war is costing us.
(sigh)
Hey, whatever works, right?
I meant to say hundreds of thousands. Sheesh. Pardon me, it's been a long seven goddamned years...
Less Jobs More Wars--
if you haven't seen these yet, go now.
I want the war to end desperately. But it really galls me that we went into these people's country, toppled their government and now would just pick up and leave with a 'fuck it' attitude. That's not going to play well in the rest of the world if the Iraqis have a civil war. I just wish their damn gov't would get their shit together. They need to face the same hard truth we are facing. Yes it was wrong, it was a mistake, but we can't change that, so move on and take control of your country and 'make it work.' Why tell me why, wasn't Bush impeached over this????????????????
That's not going to play well in the rest of the world if the Iraqis have a civil war.
They already do.
I just wish their damn gov't would get their shit together.
They don't really have one. Saddam was important because he kept that country in one piece. We went in there and kicked the crap out of it. We also played both ends against the middle, enlisting the Shiites and Kurds to aid in suppressing the rump of the former Ba'athist regime.
This drove the rural Sunnis into the waiting arms of AQI. That turned out to be a bad bargain for the Sunnis, so now we're using the resulting tribal reaction to try to buy some more time, while hammering AQI.
Bottom line? Iraq is broken.
We're not going to fix it, because we can't. Almost none of our people in Iraq even speak Arabic, let alone have enough insight into the way things work there to resurrect a state from statelessness.
The language problem alone, just by itself, is damned near hopeless. You don't go from zero to conversational Arabic in six months or a year or even four years.
And nobody else is going to be able to rebuild the Iraqi state any time in the foreseeable future, either.
we can't fix it, the best thing we can do is get out of the way.
oh-- and stop making it worse.
"First, do no harm."
Oh well, guess we kinda blew that one, didn't we?
What Stormcrow said.
From the moment we crossed over the border with enough force to break a fourth-rate army, but nowhere near enough to secure the country, we lost whatever slight possibility there might have been of "fixing" Iraq. And even if we'd had the troops, our ignorance paired with not just our typical brutal arrogance towards the jabbering brown folk but a deliberately stoked itch for payback for 9/11, ensured our chances of pulling it off were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of drawing a royal flush.
And getting a black eye as a result of a stampede of wild elephants running through your house between 3:55 and 4:00 PM on the Fourth of July, during a hailstorm.
From day one, the Iraq Occupation's been one idiotic improvisation after another, to cope with the unanticipated consequences of the last idiotic improvisation.
Prof. Fate--And one baby zebra! 
prof fate -
You forgot one - the built-in incompetence of a regime that makes a point of substituting ideology for experience.
EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK, the Bush regime has appointed the most singularly incompetent people I have EVER seen together under one roof.
Bear in mind that once upon a time, I worked for now defunct Network Commerce Inc. Previously Shopnow.com. Previously Techwave. And my next job was at FreeInternet.com. This was stupidity packed more densely than neutronium.
The Bush regime is even WORSE.
Rumsfeld in charge of the overall planning. After he had already made a good start on wrecking the Army. I never thought in my most hideous nightmares that I would ever see the appointment of a SecDef worse than McNamara. I was wrong.
Bremer in charge of the occupation. He STARTED OUT by recruiting up 400,000 combat-experienced trained men for the insurgency.
And then a troop of buffoons in overall military command that individually and collectively made William Westmoreland look like Flavius Belisarius.
I thought Josef Stalin was bad. But at least he managed to stop micro-managing by 1943.
Adolf Hitler was at least an excellent propagandist in his own right. Even if he was a steaming pile of shit as a civilian supreme commander, from 1939 right through to the end of the war. And he inherited the best army in the world, a paradigm shift ahead of all the others. He hadn't managed to murder or sack or run out ALL the competent men even by May of 1945.
Chocolate Jesus, W is even worse than Benito Mussolini.
So I ask you, where do we look in history to a record equal to the one Bush has compiled?
Aethelred the Unready and King John weren't too hot, but even they seem reasonable compared to W.
We who sit in the middle of this madness have no idea how BAD the situation really has been. We are shellshocked by incompetence. Honestly, George Bush is going to be seen as a man who singularly destroyed the American nation at a time when it should have been at the height of its' power, prestige and effectiveness. Just think of what we could have done positively on a domestic front with the manpower and money wasted in Iraq.
Dubya doesn't bear the foremost responsibility for ruining the USA. He's just the dummy; Darth Cheney is the ventriloquist.
2 Visitors Online
Commenting by HaloScan
