Pulling out would be bad for who??? staying in would be bad for who??? it doesnt matter wether it be bad or good only who it affects.... never going in in the first place may have been the best choice...but thats behind us.... TM_DIRECT....does this bump me to the top of ur list....
you mean the way the articles frame the issue is bullshit, or do you mean you disagree with those that are questioning the amounts? replacing the electrical system and infrastructure the US destroyed is one thing, but improving their postal system and building million-dollar prisons? telling US citizens their children should go without in order to send iraqis to graduate school? and then smugly stating that all this should be a "gift" to the iraqis, no need to pay it back, the generous americans paying half their income in taxes don't mind at all... but then again the 'liberals' don't seem to mind that much, as long as *they* get to spend someone else's money, too: Congress Likely to Add to War Request Lawmakers' Priorities Probably Will Push Bush Proposal Beyond $87 Billion http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19346-2003Sep29.html
Washington Insiders' New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq By DOUGLAS JEHL - NY Times Published: September 30, 2003 WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 â A group of businessmen linked by their close ties to President Bush, his family and his administration have set up a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects. The firm, New Bridge Strategies, is headed by Joe M. Allbaugh, Mr. Bush's campaign manager in 2000 and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency until March. Other directors include Edward M. Rogers Jr., vice chairman, and Lanny Griffith, lobbyists who were assistants to the first President George Bush and now have close ties to the White House. At a time when the administration seeks Congressional approval for $20.3 billion to rebuild Iraq, part of an $87 billion package for military and other spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, the company's Web site, www.newbridgestrategies.com, says, "The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq." The site calls attention to the links between the company's directors and the two Bush administrations by noting, for example, that Mr. Allbaugh, the chairman, was "chief of staff to then-Gov. Bush of Texas and was the national campaign manager for the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign." The president of the company, John Howland, said in a telephone interview that it did not intend to seek any United States government contracts itself, but might be a middleman to advise other companies that seek taxpayer-financed business. The main focus, Mr. Howland said, would be to advise companies that seek opportunities in the private sector in Iraq, including licenses to market products there. The existence of the company was first reported in The Hill, a Congressional newspaper. Mr. Howland said the company was not trying to promote its political connections. He said that although Mr. Allbaugh, for example, had spent most of his career "in the political arena, there's a lot of cross-pollination between that world and the one that exists in Iraq today." As part of the administration's postwar work in Iraq, the government has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to American businesses. Those contracts, some without competitive bidding, have included more than $500 million to support troops and extinguish oil field fires for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney led from 1995 until 2000. Of the $3.9 billion a month that the administration is spending on military operations in Iraq, up to one-third may go to contractors who provide food, housing and other services, some military budget experts said. A spokesman for the Pentagon said today that the military could not provide an estimate of the breakdown. Administration officials, including L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, have said all future contracts will be issued only as a result of competitive bidding. Already, the Web site for the Coalition Provisional Authority, http://cpa-iraq.org/, lists 36 recent solicitations, including those for contractors who might sell new AK-47 assault rifles, nine-millimeter ammunition and other goods for new army and security forces. New Bridge Strategies was established in May and recently began full-fledged operations, including opening an office in Iraq, its officials said. They added that a decision by the Governing Council of Iraq to allow foreign companies to establish 100 percent ownership of businesses in Iraq, an unusual arrangement in the Mideast, had added to the attractiveness of the market. Mr. Howland is a principal of Crest Investment in Houston and was president of American Rice, once a major exporter to Iraq. Richard Burt, ambassador to Germany in the Reagan administration and a former assistant secretary of state, and Lord Powell, a member of the British House of Lords and an important military and foreign-policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, are among the 10 principals. Mr. Allbaugh, the chairman, spent most of his career in Texas politics before Mr. Bush appointed him to head the federal disaster agency. Mr. Allbaugh, who now heads his own consulting firm here, did not return calls to his office today. Mr. Rogers, the vice chairman who was a deputy assistant to the first President Bush and an executive assistant to the White House chief of staff, is also vice chairman of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, one of the best-connected Republican lobbying firms in the capital. Mr. Rogers founded it in 1991 with Haley Barbour, who became chairman of the Republican National Committee and is now running for governor of Mississippi. Shortly after leaving the White House, Mr. Rogers was publicly rebuked by the first President Bush after he signed a $600,000 contract to represent a Saudi, Sheik Kamal Adham, who was a main figure under scrutiny in a case that involved the Bank of Commerce and Credit International. Mr. Rogers canceled his contract to represent the sheik, former head of Saudi intelligence. Mr. Griffith, a director of the new company, is chief operating officer of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, which he joined in 1993. He was special assistant for intergovernmental affairs to the first President Bush and later worked under him as an assistant secretary of education. Until November, Mr. Rogers's wife, Edwina, was associate director of the National Economic Council at the White House. Reached by telephone today, Mr. Rogers said he did not want to speak for the record and referred a reporter to Mr. Howland. The company Web site says the company was "created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq."
Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance. By Max Cleland The president of the United States decides to go to war against a nation led by a brutal dictator supported by one-party rule. That dictator has made war on his neighbors. The president decides this is a threat to the United States. In his campaign for president he gives no indication of wanting to go to war. In fact, he decries the overextension of American military might and says other nations must do more. However, unbeknownst to the American public, the president's own Pentagon advisers have already cooked up a plan to go to war. All they are looking for is an excuse. Based on faulty intelligence, cherry-picked information is fed to Congress and the American people. The president goes on national television to make the case for war, using as part of the rationale an incident that never happened. Congress buys the bait -- hook, line and sinker -- and passes a resolution giving the president the authority to use "all necessary means" to prosecute the war. The war is started with an air and ground attack. Initially there is optimism. The president says we are winning. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense says we are winning. As a matter of fact, the secretary of defense promises the troops will be home soon. However, the truth on the ground that the soldiers face in the war is different than the political policy that sent them there. They face increased opposition from a determined enemy. They are surprised by terrorist attacks, village assassinations, increasing casualties and growing anti-American sentiment. They find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla land war, unable to move forward and unable to disengage because there are no allies to turn the war over to. There is no plan B. There is no exit strategy. Military morale declines. The president's popularity sinks and the American people are increasingly frustrated by the cost of blood and treasure poured into a never-ending war. Sound familiar? It does to me. The president was Lyndon Johnson. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense was Robert McNamara. The congressional resolution was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The war was the war that I, U.S. Sens. John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John McCain and 3 1/2 million other Americans of our generation were caught up in. It was the scene of America's longest war. It was also the locale of the most frustrating outcome of any war this nation has ever fought. Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president. Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad. They could have learned some lessons: Don't underestimate the enemy. The enemy always has one option you cannot control. He always has the option to die. This is especially true if you are dealing with true believers and guerillas fighting for their version of reality, whether political or religious. They are what Tom Friedman of The New York Times calls the "non-deterrables." If those non-deterrables are already in their country, they will be able to wait you out until you go home. If the enemy adopts a "hit-and-run" strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but (as Walter Lippman once said about Vietnam) you can't win the war. If you adopt a strategy of not just pre-emptive strike but also pre-emptive war, you own the aftermath. You better plan for it. You better have an exit strategy because you cannot stay there indefinitely unless you make it the 51st state. If you do stay an extended period of time, you then become an occupier, not a liberator. That feeds the enemy against you. If you adopt the strategy of pre-emptive war, your intelligence must be not just "darn good," as the president has said; it must be "bulletproof," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the administration's was against Saddam Hussein. Anything short of that saps credibility. If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington. In a democracy, instead of truth being the first casualty in war, it should be the first cause of war. It is the only way the Congress and the American people can cope with getting through it. As credibility is strained, support for the war and support for the troops go downhill. Continued loss of credibility drains troop morale, the media become more suspicious, the public becomes more incredulous and Congress is reduced to hearings and investigations. Instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, where all of the above happened, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense have gotten this country into a disaster in the desert. They attacked a country that had not attacked us. They did so on intelligence that was faulty, misrepresented and highly questionable. A key piece of that intelligence was an outright lie that the White House put into the president's State of the Union speech. These officials have overextended the American military, including the National Guard and the Reserve, and have expanded the U.S. Army to the breaking point. A quarter of a million troops are committed to the Iraq war theater, most of them bogged down in Baghdad. Morale is declining and casualties continue to increase. In addition to the human cost, the war in dollars costs $1 billion a week, adding to the additional burden of an already depressed economy. The president has declared "major combat over" and sent a message to every terrorist, "Bring them on." As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight. Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East. Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance. Former U.S. Senator Max Cleland volunteered for duty in Vietnam where he lost both of his legs and his right arm in a grenade explosion. He headed the Veterans Administration in the Carter administration and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996. In 2002, Cleland lost his bid for reelection when his opponent ran attack ads that questioned his patriotism and featured photos of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He has received numerous awards for his bravery and service including the military's Silver Star for Gallantry in Action. When the Reserve Officers' Association named Cleland its "Minute Man of the Year" for his work in the Senate, he joined past Presidents Bush, Reagan and Ford in receiving the association's highest honor. Currently, Max Cleland is a distinguished adjunct professor at American University's Washington Semester Program.
More of my tax dollars at work, thank thank you .. ummmm UN inspectors anyone???? Officials Say Bush Seeks $600 Million to Hunt Iraq Arms http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/02/politics/02WEAP.html?ex=1066103469&ei=1&en=9ff7cf23e2a63ce7 WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 â The Bush administration is seeking more than $600 million from Congress to continue the hunt for conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had an illegal weapons program, officials said Wednesday. The money, part of the White House's request for $87 billion in supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, comes on top of at least $300 million that has already been spent on the weapons search, the officials said. The budget figures for the weapons search are included in the classified part of the administration's supplemental appropriations request, and have not been made public. The size of the request suggests the White House is determined to keep searching for unconventional weapons or evidence that they were being developed under Mr. Hussein. The search so far has turned up no solid evidence that Iraq had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons when the American invasion began in March, according to administration officials. Counting the money already spent, the total price tag for the search will approach $1 billion. How long before we plant some there? get on with the program fools, cupla delivery trucks from homeland depots. gggggg enough already with WMD hunting speeeeeend...hmm HAL to get the assignment?? hehehehe
The eastern world, it is explodinâ. Violence flarinâ, bullets loadinâ Youâre old enough to kill, but not for votinâ You donât believe in war, but whatâs that gun youâre totinâ And even the Jordan River has bodies floatinâ But you tell me Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you donât believe Weâre on the eve of destruction. Donât you understand what Iâm tryinâ to say Canât you feel the fears Iâm feelinâ today? If the button is pushed, thereâs no runninâ away Thereâll be no one to save, with the world in a grave Take a look around you boy Itâs bound to scare you boy And you tell me Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you donât believe Weâre on the eve of destruction. Yeah, my bloodâs so mad feels like coagulatinâ Iâm sitting here just contemplatinâ You canât twist the truth, it knows no regulation. Handful of senators donât pass legislation And marches alone canât bring integration When human respect is disintegratinâ This whole crazy world is just too frustratinâ And you tell me Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you donât believe Weâre on the eve of destruction. Think of all the hate there is in Red China Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama You may leave here for 4 days in space But when you return, itâs the same old place The poundinâ of the drum, the pride and disgrace You can bury your dead, but donât leave a trace Hate your next-door neighbor, but donât forget to say grace And⦠tell me over and over and over and over again, my friend You donât believe Weâre on the eve Of destruction Mm, no no, you donât believe Weâre on the eve of destruction. :-|
Thank God you candy-ass liberals weren't around 200+ years ago......this country never would have made it. All you guys do is cry and bitch and moan. Man, get over it. We are there. When we leave, Iraq and world will be better off.