On the Iraq War

Hi Phil!

Don’t worry about the time it takes to get back to me…my time is yours! Besides…I am pretty much done with the school year and am not working this summer so I have plenty of time to work on my golf handicap & debate you whenever you get back to me…no rush.

I enjoyed response…a couple of those shots drew blood…nice! I started gentle but now I am warming up!

Topic: Iraq

You are right, WMD & AQ were just the excuses Bush gave us to try to reshape the Middle East into a pro-west & peaceful region. That is the greatest fallacy of all…expecting to reshape the Middle East into something acceptable to the West is idiotic.

I can more than take a look at a map my friend…I can understand how that map came to be…

Iraq, known as Mesopotamia for centuries, was the cradle of civilization and the origin of writing & the wheel. Throughout its long history, Iraq has been the center of the Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Abbasid empires, and was a conquered part of the Achaemenid, Macedonian, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Mongol, Ottoman and British empires.

The British cobbled together the Sunni, Shia, & Kurdish regions into the country of Iraq in the 1910’s to try to establish a stable mandate to allow for the extraction of oil. The British set up 3 different failed regimes and finally left in disarray in 1947. When the British left, Iraq passed from one failed regime to another until Hussein was the 6th regime to come to power in 1979.

To believe that we can invade and set up a democracy in this country in anything less than decades shows a contemptible lack of historical knowledge and foresight.

The one major accomplishment we have attained since we invaded Iraq in 2003 was to allow Iran to become the regional powerhouse…free to pursue its own agenda because everyone in the world knows we cannot invade Iran too…we do not have the military resources to fight a third major combat action in the Middle East.

How do we win this global war on terror? Define victory and how we get there…in measurable steps please. I don’t think you can…which is dangerous territory for a democracy to fight a war on. The United States has always been successful in wars because we entered and left when we had achieved clearly-stated goals.

This is the paradox of terrorism…a huge nation like the US can’t “win” it…because there is no standing army to defeat or territory to conquer.

The best way to achieve peace in our time is to reduce our demand for oil…the real reason for us being there. Before Desert Storm we had 9 Islamic terrorist attacks against the west in 30 years…roughly 1 every 3 years. In the 10 years between 1991 and 2001, after the Saudis gave us permanent basing rights, we had 31 attacks in 10 years…roughly 1 every 4 months.

I admit that the United States will always be a target of radical Islamists…but their ranks and ability to recruit will be reduced if we remove the large Western military presence in the Middle East.

You touched on the most over-looked fact of the Iraq debate…the withdrawal has to happen because our military, namely the army, is at the breaking point. We cannot sustain the troops in Iraq indefinitely…unless you go to 18 or 24 month deployments. Even then, sustaining the war on a material level is becoming a huge issue.

The old saying goes that only a fool throws good money after bad. The surge is over and the monthly civilian deaths are slowly starting to rise, increasing every month since February.

Choosing to exit from an unwinnable situation is not weakness, it is prudence. Going down in a blaze of glory might make for a wonderful John Wayne movie and be very appealing to a military man such as you but it does not serve the interests of America.

No, I do not take estrogen before I vote…I simply put on my strap-on, that’s all. Do you have to read the bible and beat a minority before you vote? ;-)

Hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day you damn redneck!

I look forward to our next topic…Jon

P.S. Thanks for all you do and give your men a big thank you from your favorite Democrat…