How can a patriotic person wish for defeat for their country, regardless of who is President? Completely assumptive "Rush" style fallacy filled question. The question assumes 20,000 troops will bring stability to Iraq. Put down the Coulter and get a hold of yourself AAA. Please use that educated brain of yours. Not wishing further death to American troops by increasing troop levels in a country that is in the civil conflict Iraq is in, is not unpatriotic. Please, just this one time, detach yourself from the neocon Bill Krystol point of view and think purely logically. Tell me if the following is both logical, accurate, and makes a lick of sense: The reason people are dying in Iraq due to the levels of violence we see, the reason Iraq is unstable, the reason for civil unrest, the reason the Iraq Government has not trained enough police and military to defend themselves is that we are shy 20,000 US troops. Only an idiot would think the reason for the quagmire of Iraq is that we are shy 20,000 US service men/women. You could at least possibly make an argument, a logical argument that the problems in Iraq, the instability in Iraq is because we are shy 500,000 US troops or more. That would give you a fighting chance at sounding rational. But 20,000 troops? This is why it is so illogical to send in another 20,000 troops when we both know it is futile, and putting more soldiers in harms way for no logical reason. This has become a US political battle between Bush, who is still pissed off that the American people flipped him and his Iraq policy the bird in November of last year. Nancy Pelosi has to succumb to such childish action by Bush, a man who ignores the will of the people to put more US servicemen/women in harms way by agreeing not to with hold funding for this meager troop increase, maybe or maybe not because she cares about the troops, but because if she does with hold funding, and this plan of Bush fails, then he will turn around and blame her for lack of funding. It is absolutely patriotic for any American to express dissent. Where you get this notion that Americans should support what the military does at the request of the president without any dissent, any question, any careful analysis, any input by Congress...is just plain horse shit. This country was built on the foundation of dissent, even violent dissent against a government that was believed to be tyrannous and did not listen to the people being governed. I can understand if you have a different point of view about the rightness or wrongness of the US being in Iraq, but this brandishing of Americans as unpatriotic because of their lack of support for Bush's plan is born of a weak mind, when those in dissent actually care about what is best for America. Really AAA, time to come out of denial and think logically for a change.
This is not surprising at all. The millions of moonbats of this country would far rather see Bush fail than bring peace to Iraq. That is how staggeringly short-sighted they are. One must wonder how they would answer if given a choice of an Islamic Caliphate governing this country or Bush. Actually they all ready have answered that, haven't they?
babybush has already failed. He is just trying to keep US troops in Iraq till he fades into oblivion after next year when it will become some one else's problem.
I'm not sure you understood the question. It was NOT, "Do you agree with the troop surge" or "Do you think the troops surge will produce vicotry", it was "Do you hope it succeeds?" It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with the President or his s trategy, so it is not a matter of dissent. It is simply a question of whether or not people prefer to see our troops win or lose. Nearly 40% chose the latter. Of course, they no doubt also claim to "support the troops" and would be indignant if someone questioned their patriotism.
ZZZ, I fully understand your point that 20,000 troops are not enough. That was part of what Buchanan wrote in the column I pasted. If Iraq is as crucially important as Bush claims, then why only 20,000? Why not enough to finish the job? I think that is a very good question, to be answered when they answer the ones about why we only now getting around to disarming militias and securing the Iranian border. If you think I have a shred of confidence in Bush, you haven't been following my posts. He is approaching the point where conservatives revile him as much as liberals do.
People are smarter than the pollsters. They see that question as a twisted way to drum up support for surge, so they give negative answers to voice they opposition to the idea. If 40% of a population is truly unpatriotic, then there is something wrong with the government. Don't blame the people.
If additional 200,000 troops were proposed, there would be atleast a glimmer of hope that the job maybe finished with wiping off or significantly curbing the insurgency. I think the fact that bush is suggesting this kind of nonsensical approach does not ring right with majority of the populace and they show their disagreement in the form of negative answers to the pollsters.
To paraphrase Einstein: Insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results If we can step back from the name calling for a moment, and try to look objectively at the present situation in terms of actions taken and results obtained, it seems abundantly clear that the administration's policies have not only failed but have produced results opposite to what was intended, i.e., the threat of terrorism has been made worse, not lessened. It is also rather obvious that current foreign policy is a failure in that it has not made us safer, nor has it, on balance, increased the cooperation of our allies or engendered respect for U.S. policy. Consequently, a change is needed. The Presidents plan for a "surge" in troop strength does not constitute change, but instead is a further step in what has been demonstrated as the wrong direction. Consequently, the sooner Bush's administration can be replaced, the better, because the administration has shown itself incapable of accepting the need for a drastic change in policy, and none of the measures proposed in Congress for war-conduct-oversight include specific changes in policy at mandatory decision points. All these measures will result in further travel down a road that is producing harmful results. (As an aside, i should point out that total "coalition" troop strength in Iraq will be largely unchanged because increases in U.S. forces are balanced by withdrawal of troops by other "coalition" partners. This, of course, makes the announced policy of the President doubly absurd.)
The problem here is that Bush can't seem to control the mexican border, but he expects us to trust him to control Iraq. We have three plus years experience with him, his advisors and his generals calling the shots and getting a free hand to do what they wanted. The results have been disastrous. Republicans have to admit that if Hillary Clinton had produced a mess like this, we would be screaming bloody murder. The other side of the problem is that we have also had experience with Democrat liberals calling the shots. We got a bloodbath in vietnam, the killing fields of cambodia, turning Iran over to religious fanatics, Black Hawk down, a steady stream of terrorist attacks with no retaliation and now, 40% of the country more interested in seeing Bush be humiliated than our soldiers winning. We need somehow to put the partisanship aside on this one issue and recognize that we made a mess of it but we are still there, and it is not in our interests for Iraq to become a clone of Iran. It probably is in our interests to keep a large number of troops there, provided we can protect them. We don;t much care what happens in Iraq, provided they do not assist Iran,try to develop WMD's or attack our troops. That means that pulling out is not a good idea, but wasting a lot of effort on nation-building or imposing democracy is not either.
I don't know about other things that you mentioned, but if you want to put partisanship aside, can you stop lying for a moment? How can you pin cambodia on democrats? Nixon invaded cambodia, against wide spread opposition in the US, in near parallel to what Bush is doing now. How can you blame it on democrats? After Pol Pot was overthrown by Vietnamese troops in 1979, his insurgency received mostly Chinese support. Since 1985, Pol Pot received indirect American support through the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which Khmer Rouge dominated. How can you not blame Nixon or Reagan for Cambodia, but blame it on democrats? How can that be anything but partisan cheap shots?