Any nation (if we can we can try to exclude nations that harbor terrorists), has the right to maintain their own political and leadership structure. Not to say Saddam was a nice guy, but a nice guy would not have kept some kind of law in Iraq for the period of his reign.

WMD was not a real reason for this war, it was from a president that was blinded by rage, oil, misdirected revenge for 9/11 and revenge for Desert Storm.

Having wrongly supported the war, you are really in no position to demand to know from others what we should be doing now. The fact of the matter is that by being so incredibly horrifyingly wrong about the war, no one who wants to criticize you-even in the harshest terms possible-is under any obligation to offer their own little solution to what we should’ve done before, or should do now. The fact is there are no good answers, and that is precisely because people like you encouraged the drive to war without really having the last notion what you were talking about. Now people who are more clear-headed and reasonable must figure out what to do about the mess that people like you helped make, and at this point it would best if those who supported this war were simply quit talking, as their credibility is now lost.

Your man made unwarranted, false, and dangerous speculation about honorable men in Iraq that is why I most strongly criticized him.

Unwarranted!!! False!!!! Dangerous!!! Honorable!!!

Whew, I’m sweating!!

Another mouthful of a meaningless generalization in which Jeffy J shows us he remains truly qualified to write with the soap bubble vocabulary of a 10th grade brain.

But you banned me not really for saying fuck but for saying you were wrong and asking how the war would make us safer when we were ignoring Bin Laden.

You sir, are a fucktard, and you sir have the blood of Americans, Coalition Members and Iraqi civilians on your hands.

And god forbid there is another attack from Osama, then you sir, have that blood on your hands as well, since it was your goal to suppress dissent and call dissenters traitors, when what we were trying to say is that we were losing focus.

So sir, GO FUCK YOURSELF. And then die in a fire. But don’t give us any of your crap.

Resign from blogging.

However, you didn’t need to be an expert on Iraq to be against the war from the beginning. There was plenty of evidence that Bush was incompetent, that the Republican party was off the charts–and by extension, any war they prosecuted would lead to failure, lives painfully lost.

You didn’t just support the war. You couldn’t just support the war without also supporting the awful political leadership of that war. They’re not separate.

Maybe your omission of mistake now is only your first step in a longer, harder process. I suggest you start by reading Siffried Sassoon.

“Survivors”

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain

Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ —

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Craiglockhart. October, 1917.

© George Sassoon

There was a dream mode going in the years round 2003: With your pure goodwill-power (backed by US fire-power) you thought you could impose the good on a tortured country like Iraq …

It didn’t work. It made bad things worse.

In politics, intentions do not count. The result counts. Nothing but the result. And your responsibility is in anticipating the probable result, not in having acted from good intentions.

Everybody has good intentions … even Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are people who are convinced that their intentions are good.

When you argue, Jeff, that your good intention was to free Iraq and the Iraqis from a mean cruel dictator - so what? It was also MY intention. Or Juan’s. But we politicians have to consider the real (= NOT the intended) RESULT of our actions (or the result of the actions we support). And toppling Saddam Hussein and replacing all Baath from power resulted in anarchy. This anarchy was easy to predict - for those who knew politics and history and were realist enough to take into account the realities of Iraq.

By the way, who are these honorable men Cole falsly speculated about?

What is best NOW for the Iraqis?
I wonder.
But I assume that a US occupation army is more part of the problem there than part of the solution.

My suggestions:
- strike a deal with Iran and negotiate with Iran about a stable solution for Iraq; bring all neigbors (Saudi-Arabia, etc., Syria included) to the conference hall …
- impose a withdrawal of Israel to the borders of 1967
- earmark 50 billion dollars for a reconstruction of Iraq after the end of anarchy - as a compensation for the damage done by the USA in Iraq

I know, the USA will not do that. Neither with a Republican nor with a Democrat President. It would be a humiliation for the proud USA. You want to have a John-Wayne-solution. But world politics no longer is a “Western”!

Your man made unwarranted, false, and dangerous speculation about honorable men in Iraq that is why I most strongly criticized him. I still await his apology to them.

I’m glad you live in such a neat world, where everything is right and wrong. Was it right to leave the people of Iraq suffering under a murderous tyrant? The cure was wrong or most certainly wrongly executed, I now fully concede. But the humanitarian crisis was still there. Should he have been deposed by the first Bush? Should he have been left in power? And what should be done now? Iraq had no easy fix before; that was the mistake of those who thought it did, as you point out. But it also has no easy fix now. And what I do not hear in the nya-nyaing is a humanitarian, a liberal concern for the Iraqi people and a discussion of what is best to do for them. As I said above, nya-nya all you want; knock yourselves out. But then return to reality. Through all this, one thing that has happened for me is that I have made friends in Iraq and they suffered before the war and they suffer now and no end of blog-and-comment blathering and bickering is going to fix that.

After all, you’re in an accountability mood at the moment.

He was right, and you were wrong.

Maybe you should just admit you don’t have and never did have and probably never will have the knowledge or wisdom to know what the US should have done or should do in Iraq. And maybe you should acknowledge that, whether or not you knew what you were doing at the time you gave your full-throated support to a war in a country against a people you didn’t really understand, your ignorant position was, as was that of so many others’ with similarly disproportionately large megaphones, very much responsible for the contentless “debate” that briefly preceded the war and promptly got us into the intractable mess we’re in now.

No thank you for your too late arousal from sleep, Jeff. No thank you for any more of your wisdom of the world.

You helped silence the middle and the “establishment” of traditional American foreign and military policy. Labelling individuals like Zinni and Scowcroft defeatists and appeasers was a policy of the machine you joined. You and Rush had your fun mocking and now you want to be considered something besides a traitor who energetically worked to sabatoge any chance of success by believing faith based reality would substitute for the real thing.

Your choice, and your voice, supported a policy that’s left thousands upon thousands dead.

Live with that.

Kat doesn’t seem to notice that a few people who are not named Saddam have been killed and tortured, and a few more people who are not named Saddam Hussein are going to be killed and tortured in the years ahead because of this little adventure. This is a pretty obvious point, but what arguments does a war supporter have to offer this many years into Operation Iraqi Freedom? That the war isn’t a disaster? That less people are killed every day in Iraq than in 2002? That America is stronger? That our leaders spoke the truth in 2003?

2
Al Qaida bosts of 4000 killed AlQaida fighters in Iraq. Al Qaida is PROUD to present 4000 martyrs!
Weird to see how some people here interpret that as a defeat. The more martyrs AlQaida can announce the better for the organization. It shows their strength.
Iraq is the perfect recrutement area for AlQaida terrorists. With every fighter killed they can hire two or three more rookies.
Their death toll shows: They are really fighting! They really sacrifice their lives! They are ardent idealists, and that attracts all those young Arab men who are humiliated again and again by Israel, by US “shock and awe” methods of fighting, by Arabs who behave like US puppets, by the weak performance of moderate Arabs.

3
How to defeat these fanatics?
Take away their motivation! Stop giving these people and their supporters and adorers their reason to fight!
Withdraw from Iraq. Force Israel out of the occupied territories in Palestine. Rebuild America’s soft power = reputation and appeal.
– I know, for macho brains that is a no-brainer.
So I assume: The USA will go on with counterproductive politics. With self-destructive politics. And you, Jeff, will continue to support this suicidal line?

Laney

Can you explain why it took so long to recognize your intellectual shallowness whenever you mouthed opinions on Iraq or the middle east for the last three years?

Will you cease offering opinions about Iraq now that you’ve made the first step in acknowleging that you don’t know anything about Iraq: not the culture, not the language, not the history. Nothing.

Can you face your own intellectual shortcomings by at least admitting that you are more passionately interested in your own ideological narrative of events than on the acutuality of the events?

1) Move all US & occupation coalition troops out of Iraq.
2) Pay Iraq reparations for the 600 000 dead, and the destroyed infrastructure.
3) Punish those responsible for this genocide and related crimes against humanity at a public tribunal. The civilian leaders,the military leaders, the propagandists & apologists, the soldiers on the ground, etc.
4) Declare all economic exploitation arrangements forced upon Iraq as null and void.
5) Constrain the US military forces for the next 50 years to defensive duties on US soil only.

Piece of cake, really.

O.K. …

If you REALLY are, as you imply, interested in the will and insights of other Iraqi bloggers, then you might check out a survey of Iraqi bloggers at (http://baghdadtreasure.blogspot.com/2006/10/their-own-words.html).

It’s like looking at a schizophrenic’s drawings and trying to figure them out. You are just yelling at your own fantasies, but in public. Weird.

What does it take for the American people to wake up and smell the coffin?