Apr 10th, 2007, 03:19 PM
Thank Gawd I have Alphabatard to tell me when my personal life is spiralling. Otherwise I might miss it. I can only assume your knowledge of my life comes as part of your general omnipotence. Now go read everything I told you to read otherwise I'm right and you're wrong.
Kevin; what I would do. I'll preface by saying I think all we're left with it this point are seriously bad options. Least bad is the best one can do.
I'm for withdrawl, as rapidly as possible. Not because I don't think it will reult in a bloodbath, but because I think our staying increases antagonsim on all sides, and if we don't intend to remain as a semi occupying power pretty much from now on, we only increase how big a bloodbath will be when we leave. I think they are in the midst of a predictable, highly complicated civil war and nothing we do can help. It's too late for anything we to be free from taint, we will never be trusted at this point, and there isn't going to be any gratitude. While we stay trapped in Bahgdad we can't even really try to do anything in Afghanistan and we are not credably prepare for anything else.
I'm also for impeachment. Not because I hate W and I think there are strong legal grounds for it, though you already know I do. But becaue I see no chance at all that W will alter his course in any way and is going to leave a far worse mess than we have even now to the next President, who will change course significantly, even if not to my liking. I see no reason at all to wait until W shuffles out the door at the end of his term when I think there are strong legal grounds to begin trying to get him out now. But that's pie in the sky, unless one of the current investigations reveals something really eggregious with smoking gun type proof. I don't think that's out of the question, since W et al have been very arrogant about their messing around.
The goal once withdrawn is to contain the chaos as much as possible. A Dayton accord style regional conference needs to be alled including neighboring countries W refuse to speak to, and there can't be any linkage to other US policy goals. Nor should we accept linkage from them. It's in their best interests to control and contain, they don't need any carrots from us and I think faced with the choas engulfing the entire region, there will be strong motivation to come up with agreements.
Do I think any of this will work? sadly, probably not. However, I'm certain staying the course plus surge won't work and I think a continued military preence their is counterproductive. I think we screwed this pooch beyond repair and we need to step back and let other people try to fix it.
I also believe we should throughly research the entire history of this war and as a nation own up to our mistakes. Not because I hate America, but because I think ingrained American arrogance made this mess. It will be a long, long time before we regain credability, and we've seen we can't succesfully go it alone.
Pulling out should be combined with closing Guantanamo, closing all secret prisons, restoring habeus corpus and passing anti torture laws with real, verifiabal teeth.
All of these points can be disagreed with and argued. But I've made them before, they are out in the public domain argued by better minds than mine, and there is still a popular myth that complainers like me only have complaints and no suggestions. What people usually mean when they say that is, no suggestions they already agree with.
Oh, and none of this is worth concidering 'cause I didn't start by saying that Jundullah has a speciffic ethnic identity and are an offshoot of Al-Quaeda. I think, failing to have made that point, there's no need to concider anything else I said.
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