Ok moray...more platitudes and non answers from you....
"Solution set for quoted problems.
#1. Stop selling arms to the planet. The United States is the single largest exporter of military hardware on the planet. For god's sake, most of the time they're shooting our own bullets back at us. We supplied EVERY country in the Middle East with arms at one time or another...is that really so hard to understand why some of them don't like us anymore? It's like saying Great Britain sold us 100 HK91's, and then sold Mexico 5000 Centurion MBT's. We'd be pissed...so are some of them.
#2. Get off oil. We get off oil (which can be done, we're just too damn lazy to take a hit on our economy) within two decades nd show the world we lead by example. We get the hell out of the middle east... why? Because they don't want us there...no more than we want them here. If say, Canadian troops were walking down your street, guns drawn at the standbye, what the hell would you do? I'd guess, and it's only a guess, that 3/4 of the insurgency is people like you and me that see foreign troops in their homes everyday, and want them gone...not the dedicated fundamentalists. Face it... our troops being there this long, HAVE MADE IT WORSE. What, we lost 50, a hundred in the actual invasion of iraq....and now thousands in the "occupation". You do the math on that one.
3. Fix this damn country...stop rebuilding theirs. Japan loved it when we rebuilt their country, remember? Anyone looking around? Bridges falling down. Pipes laid in the 1890's are the norm in New York City. Brownouts, in the west, with the electrical grid in constant threat (a circa 1940's grid, BTW) of shutting down with overuse. New Orleans. Infrastructure stability is at an all time low, with most of it being put in place in the 1920's and 30's. We always put off making this country better, while we funnel money into every elses. It's like giving your neighbors money for their roof, while the electricity and water are shut off in yours. Remodernizing this country would reap the benefits that Japan saw in just under 20 years.
4. Target enemies in a source specific way. Intelligence plays a large part in this with roving teams under deep cover targetting active cells. The worst thing you can possibly do in a guerrilla war is give the enemy easier and softer targets. We do both, simply by putting 400,000 of them in one spot. Remember Libya sponsoring terror in the 80's? Yeah that went away pretty damn quick after we knocked out specific targets surgically. YOU DON'T need 400,000 troops there, in Iraq. The only reason we put them there is Bush thinks he's been talking to God, and God told him to start another crusade. Of course there will be an attack here and there... but we can't go invade somebody just because small groups hurt us. Are you directly responsible for your neighbor if he goes to Spain and blows up a bus? No. Is a country responsible for the conduct of a few idiots who think Allah told them to kill us? No. (case in point, we didn't invade Saudi Arabia did we?)
Nothing will change though. Money makes the world go round. Haliburton and the defense industry makes and changes the policy of administrations now. Straight from Eisenhower:
"We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method..." "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Sounds almost prophetic.
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CPID MORAY in AH (present)
These are great sound bites and long term goals for the most part... good speeches for a politician to make... and then not keep..
Let's take em one by one in reality world tho... the world of possibilities for the next few years shall we?
#1... shows a lack of understanding plain and simple.. the insurgents are not using Ak47/74's and bullets that we supplied them to kill us... they are not using US made planes or rpg's or IED's supplied by us... while we are the largest supplier of arms world wide... we are far from the only one.. russia and england and any of a number of other countries will be more than glad to take up the slack if we stop... and... they mostly will be a lot less picky and our allies will suffer to boot along with more taxes to us to supply our military.
Your answer and solution here are worthless in any real way short or long term.
#2..Get off oil??? LOL... Of course we will get off oil.. it is inevitable. not in any way that makes sense for us tho in the next decade or so. again... a non solution... to get off oil in time to bring the troops home next year or the year after or... or when? this is not a solution but a slogan... and... if you look past your soundbite you see the pain... "get off oil" in any way but a free market way is a path to the worst economic ruin and big government socialism... monstrous increase in taxes and fees and loss of standard of living for every single US citizen.
Your answer and solution here is worthless in any real way short or long term.
#3...fix the damn country??? socialism... is your solution to life here but nothing to do with the question or a solution to the war.... I expect you mean you want the democrats to take the money spent on the war and use it to install a whole bunch of new socialist programs... build levees and build roads that they robbed gas taxes from. Nope.. the less money government has to "fix the damn country" the better off I am.
Your answer here is a non answer.
#4... target enemies in a specific way??? I fell for that one myself early in the war... It is unworkable in any effective way tho... send in 40 smart bombs and you will have weeping women holding dead babies 24/7 on cnn and msnbc and the new york times all calling for whatever pres is in power to be impeached and lynched and for it to stop right now. And what do you hit? without eyes on the ground? you can't hit a suicide bomber with a cruz missle... you can't hit a mosque.. if we don't have boots on the ground we make things infinitely worse. We already got all the targets that we could "target in a specific way" we won on that front... no more exist.
Your answer would not work in any real way and is not an answer to what to do this year or next.
It all comes down to... like it or not... we are doing the only thing we can do to get any kind of good result in the near and long term. Pulling out troops before the iraqis can handle their own country is deja vu all over again.. we can watch the last chopper out being fired on. would look like a mid seventies news reel.
so no... I don't think that surrendering and then making pretty speeches like you just did will work. the devil is in the details and you have no details.. only soundbites... unworkable or abhorent ones at that once you scratch the surface of em
lazs
