Marine,
I'm not really allowed to talk much about my opinion about the relative merits of going to war in the first place... My boss decided it was a good idea so it's my job to follow orders to make it happen.
What gets me spun up however is when people get in a tiff about how the Iraq war is such a massive disaster. It's not. It just sounds that way when you look at it with zero context and ignore a million other existing problems that are 10 times worse, and ignore or forget historical parallels and past conflicts.
The self-rightousness of the ignorant hysterical blathering over the Iraq war makes me sick. Yea, people who know how to discuss the war within it's proper context tend to agree that the war probably wasn't such a good idea. But the hysteria surrounding the discussion is what is picked up on and repeated by most people who are opposed to the war. That's what pisses me off the most about Rosie... She is deliberately spreading lies about everything from the reasoning behind the war to the casualty figures in order to drum up mindless hysteria in opposition to the war. She doesn't have an alternative, she doesn't have a solution. What she does have is a vested interest in the entertainment value and viewer base she gains from this kind of mindless emotional rhetoric, and both the facts and the people actually WORKING on the problem are stomped on as ruthlessly as possible.
That's what pisses me off when people spout nonsense about the war. Don't talk to me about death tolls... That is nearly irrelevant when it's coming from someone who is silent on solvable problems that have caused 10 times the deaths each year for decades. If you want to talk casualties, you damn well better be able to intelligently discuss exactly what those lives were spent to gain or lose.
It's like the beaches at Normandy... Who here would pay any attention to someone who made a statement such as "The Normandy invasion was unjustified because we lost tens of thousands of troops the first 2 days."? Most of us would scoff at such a statement because it has no context regarding the value of the overall war effort. It's entirely possible that an alternative invasion plan would have had fewer casualties, however we generally accept that the losses at Normandy were an unfortunate but acceptable result of necessary combat operations in WWII. Why do we accept that? Because we've heard the analysis from both sides.
So what's missing with the Iraq war? On one side, we have Bush and his staff saying that the losses are acceptable because of the bigger picture. On the other side, we have Rosie making up numbers saying "there are losses!", with no context, no justification, no alternatives, no analysis whatsoever. And guess what, many (most?) Americans accept Rosie's side without question because the simple fact that there have been many deaths is true. But the WHY behind the deaths... If you offer no justification and no alternative, your position cannot be easily countered. So most of those who are against the war do no more than point at the casualties and dollar cost as if those raw numbers alone are enough justification, enough analysis, enough context to rationalize their position.
I call BS. There are tons of other issues that have worse raw numbers, yet we just let them slide. So if you're gonna talk raw numbers, you darn well better put some context into it to prove why those raw numbers are somehow less acceptable than other worse raw numbers. Otherwise you're just repeating meaningless emotional rhetoric.
