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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 7:13 pm Post subject: McCain & Iraq |
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Great article on McCain & Iraq. Very accurate and definetely a great mystery. Most Americans trust McCain on Iraq, but he's had absolutely everything wrong on it at every step of the way.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks22-2008may22,0,1862622.column
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Despite the fact that he's been consistently wrong on Iraq, Americans trust his ability to handle the war more than Obama.
May 22, 2008
Unsolved mysteries of the universe: Where did matter come from? Why did all those ships vanish in the Bermuda Triangle? Is there really a Loch Ness Monster?
And here's a new one to add to your list. In poll after poll, about two-thirds of Americans say they oppose the war in Iraq, believe things in Iraq are going badly for the United States, disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the war, consider even the initial decision to go to war to have been wrong and want the next president to end the war quickly. Yet -- and here comes the mystery -- polls also show that more Americans trust presumptive Republican nominee John McCain than either Democratic presidential candidate when it comes to handling the war in Iraq.
Go figure.
McCain's the one presidential candidate pledging to continue the very Bush administration policies that got us into the mess we're now in, and McCain's record of getting it embarrassingly wrong on Iraq is virtually unparalleled.
Here's McCain, in his own words, getting Iraq wrong from Day One:
"Saddam Hussein [is] developing weapons of mass destruction as quickly as he can," he informed Fox News in November 2001. By February 2003, McCain had upgraded Hussein's capabilities and was warning Americans that "Hussein has the ability to ... [turn] Iraq into a weapons assembly line for Al Qaeda's network."
Well, no. But never mind that. We won't hold McCain responsible for the Bush administration's cooking of the intelligence books.
So how'd McCain do on his other Iraq-related predictions?
On the Cheney/Rumsfeld Delusional Thinking Index, McCain scores a perfect 10 out of 10. "I believe that the success will be fairly easy," he assured CNN's Larry King in September 2002.
Quagmire? Insurgency? Naah. "We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting," he scoffed to Wolf Blitzer in 2002. "We're not going to have a bloodletting." In fact, by March 2003, McCain was positively giddy with Rumsfeldian enthusiasm: "There's no doubt in my mind ... we will be welcomed as liberators."
When it came to predicting the sectarian conflicts that have wracked Iraq since we "liberated" it, McCain was equally off target. "There's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias," he explained confidently on MSNBC in April 2003, "so I think they can probably get along."
McCain's had five long years since then to reflect on just how well Sunni and Shiite groups are getting along, but he's still having a tough time keeping the whole thing straight. In Jordan this past March, he pronounced it "common knowledge ... that Al Qaeda" -- a Sunni-dominated group -- "is going back into Iran" -- a country led by hard-line Shiites -- "and receiving training ... from Iran." Oops ... no! Joe Lieberman, McCain's new Mini-Me, whispered a correction in his ear, presumably explaining that the Iranian Shiites hate Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda and wouldn't help the group if their lives depended on it.
A slip of the tongue on McCain's part? That would be easier to buy if McCain hadn't repeated variants of the claim on multiple occasions, insisting to a Texas audience in February that Iran was aiding Al Qaeda and wondering during Senate hearings if Al Qaeda in Iraq was "an obscure sect of the Shiites overall? ... Or Sunnis or anybody else."
McCain seems more than a little confused about who's who in the Middle East, which is maybe why he's so dead-set against the idea of talks with anyone not already a U.S. ally. It's always embarrassing, from a diplomatic perspective, to have no idea who you're talking to.
But back to Iraq. McCain has rarely questioned the overall Bush administration Iraq strategy, and he recently reaffirmed his commitment to maintaining U.S. combat troops there until Iraq becomes "a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state." "We will have victory," he promised. But he's never explained how a strategy that's failed so far is going to magically start succeeding in 2009.
Of course, maybe his success -- for the time being -- with the American public has convinced McCain that if you just repeat something long enough and confidently enough, people will start believing it. McCain keeps boasting of his own national security expertise and insisting that Barack Obama, his chief Democratic rival, is naive and "does not understand ... the fundamental elements of national security and warfare" -- even though Obama, unlike the "experienced" McCain, managed to get it right on Iraq from the very beginning.
And astonishingly -- mysteriously! -- polls suggest that a majority of Americans are buying McCain's line.
If you're one of them, there's this bridge I'd like to sell you. And there's an upcoming tour of the Bermuda Triangle that might interest you too.
[email protected]
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VanIslander
Joined: 18 Aug 2003
Location: Geoje, Hadong, Tongyeong,... now in a small coastal island town outside Gyeongsangnamdo!
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 7:48 pm Post subject: |
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| It would be interesting to see a survey with a series of specific questions about Iraq and the military. The kind of questions I'm thinking of are along the lines of 'Which candidate will work harder for retired/wounded veterans?'; '...will set policies that avoid over-stretching the military?'; '...is more likely to listen to military advice?'. That kind of thing. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 8:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Quagmire? Insurgency? Naah. "We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting," he scoffed to Wolf Blitzer in 2002. "We're not going to have a bloodletting." In fact, by March 2003, McCain was positively giddy with Rumsfeldian enthusiasm: "There's no doubt in my mind ... we will be welcomed as liberators." |
He was talking about the initial invasion.
And this doesn't change that liberals have no idea about how to defend the United States.
There was once a president named Jimmy Carter and because of his incompetence Khomeni came to power.
Perhaps the greatest strategic loss in US history.
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Iran was aiding Al Qaeda |
Which may in fact be true.
9/11 Commission Finds Ties Between al-Qaeda and Iran
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| Senior U.S. officials have told TIME that the 9/11 Commission's report will cite evidence suggesting that the 9/11 hijackers had previously passed through Iran |
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,664967,00.html
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Is there a link between Mugniyah and al-Qaeda?
Mugniyah met with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s, according to the court testimony of Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed, a naturalized U.S. citizen and former U.S. army sergeant who later became a senior aide to bin Laden. After his arrest in 1998 in connection with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Mohammed testified that he arranged several meetings between bin Laden and Mugniyah in Sudan. Bin Laden reportedly admired Mugniyah's tactics, particularly his use of truck bombs, which precipitated the United States' withdrawal from Lebanon. According to Mohammed, bin Laden and Mugniyah agreed Hezbollah would provide training, military expertise, and explosives in exchange for money and man power. It is not known, however, whether this agreement was carried out. The relationship between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda is not entirely friendly, as explained in this Backgrounder. |
http://www.cfr.org/publication/11317/#8
As I said before liberals don't know what they are talking about.
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By Noah Pollak
It is long past time that one important piece of fantastical rubbish be finally sent on its way: this is the idea that Islamists maintain some kind of fastidious ethnic and theological separatism when it comes to who they're willing to work with on killing people. The co-option of Hamas and Islamic Jihad (Sunni Arab) by Iran (Shia Persian) is one piece of reality that intrudes on this comforting notion; so is the Iran-Syria alliance, along with the reality of Iranian support for both Shia and Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
A final nail in the coffin comes today from Eli Lake, the New York Sun's talented national security reporter (and good friend). Eli's scoop is about the National Intelligence Estimate, an unclassified summary of which will be released today, but whose classified final working draft concludes that:
One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.
Iranian hospitality toward Al Qaeda is not a new story -- but what is new is the apparent fact that one of two Qaeda leadership councils meets in Iran, and with the complicity of the regime. As Eli notes:
An intelligence official sympathetic to the view that it is a matter of Iranian policy to cooperate with Al Qaeda disputed the CIA and State Department view that the Quds Force is operating as a rogue force. "It is just impossible to believe that what the Quds Force does with Al Qaeda does not represent a decision of the government," the official, who asked not to be identified, said. "It's a bit like saying the directorate of operations for the CIA is not really carrying out U.S. policy."
Stories like these reinforce another very basic idea: terrorism has a return address. |
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001492.html
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| On al-Qaeda, the picture is more murky. Iran and Osama bin Laden's movement are hardly natural allies � Tehran almost went to war with al-Qaeda's Taliban hosts in Afghanistan in 1998, following Taliban massacres of Afghan Shiites. The extremist theology that inspires both the Taliban and al-Qaeda sees Shiites as infidels, although bin Laden is on record advocating unity for purposes of anti-American jihad. The reformist elected leadership in Tehran has sought to repair its relationships with the West and rehabilitate Iran diplomatically, but the hard-liners may have hedged their bets. It remains unlikely that the government of President Mohammed Khatami has made common cause with al-Qaeda operatives, although it has long been alleged that hard-liners in the Revolutionary Guard have unofficially provided some with shelter in Iran. Al-Qaeda may also have set up shop in the predominantly Sunni border region of eastern Iran, where central government authority is more limited and the authorities have lost thousands of men in battles with smugglers. |
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,455276,00.html
Proabably the next thing the liberals and left wingers are gonna claim is that Saddam's regime didn't support terrorists. |
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