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Originally Posted by LUVMBDiesels
I agree 100%. The situation in Iraq was mishandled for the past three years. It is only now that we are doing what should have been done in 2004. However, the Democratic party and more and more Republicans are saying that all is lost there even in the face of things getting better.
You also have to remember that that the toll in Iraq is MUCH less than we saw in Vietnam and amounts to less than the losses on D-Day. The idea that we are doomed to fail in Iraq would have had Eisenhower, Patton, and MacArthur turning over in their graves.
As far as the other countries go, China is my biggest worry. They have the ability to paralyze us economically. They are also a unrepentant police state that should NEVER have been given Most Favored Nation status. They have modern American weapons thanks to Wild Bill Clinton and they have shown themselves to be ruthless (Tienanmen Square) I predict that there will be a day when they get tired of Taiwan and invade it. That would bring us into a conflict with them.
As far as Iran goes, there is a huge amount of people who want to be rid of the Mullahs. The Persian society has always been very cosmopolitan. It has only been since the Shah tried to modernize the countryside too quickly that the whole Islamic Republic thing came about. A Persian friend of mine, whose father was a cabinet minister under the Shah told me that she had supported the revolution thinking it would lead to greater democracy. Nobody expected Khomeni to take over. There have been large protests in the streets there that nobody reports on here.
I think that if we can do it right (big IF there) that country would be better suited for decapitation of its leadership than anywhere else.
As for Russia, they are slipping back into a police state as well. Look at the engineered elections they are gong to have with BOTH candidates hand picked by Putin. The thing is, their military has gone rapidly downhill and is now little more than a joke. Still they are dangerous and we should be trying to make them into more of an ally, as they were under Yeltsin.
Just my 2 cents...
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I do not know if Patton et al would have felt that way. Those who have known and seen war are acutely aware that it is a horrible waste. No matter what the casualities in Iraq, it is apparent to most that this is a war that did not have to be fought. I believe they would have seen the loss of what will soon be 4,000 men and countless Iraqis as just that, a terrible waste. We promised them a release from a tyrant and gave them a world much worse than tyranny, for a WMD fantasy, and once that was discovered for what it was, ever-new increasingly bizarre reasons for why we ever went to this unfortunate land.
A friend of mine who is involved with Russian business tells me that the key mistake made in our relationship with them was to berate them for their war in Chechnya. The Russians saw it as responding much the same as we did to September 11, and when the Chechnyan rebels massacred hundreds of Russian school children the Russians began to severely resent us for our posture, and to see us as hypocrites.