I’m not necessarily attacking his honor, but I also refuse to uniterally defer to his instinct on every aspect of Iraq policy. You are suggesting that because Petraeus is “in Iraq”, his analysis is necessarily accurate while Richard Lugar and John Murtha are necessarily wrong. That’s generally the extent of your argument on this point. Wouldn’t that also mean that Paul Hackett’s assessment of the situation in Iraq is worth more than yours?

“Try to find some logical connection between withdrawing from Iraq and advancing the overall war on al-Qaeda”

It’s basically the same one I was making 48 hours ago….that we have to remove ourselves from the line of fire and proceed with thwarting al-Qaeda through alternative venues….or else we’re spinning our wheels. You generally make good points about the potential regional consequences of withdrawal, but I’m skeptical that of the regional conflict you predict occurring if it meant the Saudis and Iranians destroying their economies by choosing sides in the Iraqi civil war. And I don’t believe Lugar (or anyone for that matter) is calling for complete military abandonment of Iraq, just abandonment of a six-figure American troop presence to babysit feuding ethnic groups.

“For that matter, why do the troops in Iraq keep reenlisting? Do you think they’re idiots, or maybe they actually believe we can win this thing.”

Soldiers in combat feel a sense of loyalty to their group. My best friend is very opposed to the war but nearly re-upped himself last year….so did Paul Hackett. The comradery of wartime soldiers is not necessarily indicative of love for the mission.

“and it is the long war that Bush said would happen.”

If he said it, he whispered it. What percent of the American people do you think believed we were in for a decadelong presence in Iraq back in 2003? If it’s less than a clear majority, then the people were not sufficiently informed of the magnitude of this commitment….which has fostered the ill will the administration is suffering now.

“Then you’re a bigot”

A bigot? No more than if I said I distrusted the prospects of successful democracy among Branch Davidian or Heaven’s Gate cult members, another demographic of people brainwashed by a “faith” that renders them incapable of rational thought….just as is the case in the modern Arab world.

“It is the fact that the Arab world is mired in a culture of autocracy and deliberately kept powerless.”

But it’s their radical religious beliefs that keep them from realizing that.

“That’s the sick irony here — that the Democrats want to waste American blood and treasure and ruin the Middle East for political gain”

Anybody who appreciates American political history knows the Democrats will receive no “political gain” from leaving Iraq. The second we leave, with or without the realization of your doomsday prophesies for the region, the voting public will redirect its outrage towards the “loss of American dignity and honor that came when we retreated from Iraq”. The only way the Dems can even win in 2008 is if the war in Iraq is still a mess. If we withdraw and the war is off the table, the Bush-less GOP gets to be the party of “restoring America’s might in the world”. There’s a reason why Reid and Pelosi are willing to drag their feet on this despite the screams of their base.

Your description of “those who spend every moment in Iraq” seems to be almost exclusively limited to General Petraeus….as if his opinion is infallible. Generals who are hired by the administration are done so with a reasonable expectation of being told what they want to hear.

Which is your bias, not his. Gen. Petraeus wasn’t hired to be a yes man — there are plenty of others who would do that job. Gen. Petraeus was hired because he’s the best man for the job. He quite literally wrote the book on counter-insurgency warfare.

Why don’t you try and find a copy – a decent federal depository library should have a copy, if not I’m sure someone from the Woodrow Wilson School would be more than happy to provide you with a copy.

So whether Petraeus has “more knowledge” about Iraq isn’t necessarily the end-all to the discussion if he someone else’s agenda to carry out.

Which again, makes the unfounded assumption that he does. One can read his work as being deeply critical of the way in which Iraq was handled. Again, you attack Petraeus’ honor just based on the fact that he took the job. That’s your bias seeping through. You’re not thinking objectively — and we all know you’re capable of it when you dispassionately analyze the facts.

And to dismiss entirely the idea that Lugar, a man with decades of experience overseeing American foreign policy and someone whose checks are not signed by the Bush administration, might know something about Iraq policy that lifelong civilian Jay Reding of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, doesn’t, is the height of egomania.

For one, I haven’t lived in Sioux Falls for quite some time now. Secondly, Lugar is still objectively wrong. Look at his arguments. Try to find some logical connection between withdrawing from Iraq and advancing the overall war on al-Qaeda. On what rational grounds could one make such a connection? That al-Qaeda has no interest in Iraq? We know that to be false. That Iraq doesn’t need our help? Nobody believes that, not even many in Iraq. That the Middle East would be better with a festering cesspool of terrorism? That’s a non-starter. That our withdrawal wouldn’t be taken as a sign of weakness, emboldening our enemies? Basic human psychology says no.

The only argument you seem to have is that we just can’t win. The problem with that is that if it were true, things would be much, much worse than they are. If we really couldn’t win, then there’d be nothing holding back the complete disintegration of Iraq. Al-Anbar province really would have been “lost”. Attack would be rising dramatically everywhere in Iraq. We wouldn’t be talking about a casualty rate in the single digits anymore.

The reason why the media misses the point is because the stuff they don’t report on isn’t just important, it’s the most crucial metric of the war. Why is a market opening so important? Because if you really believe that your country is flying apart, that terrorists are everywhere, the last thing on anyone’s mind is going to the market — especially because that’s where suicide bombers hit. And if you really think that al-Qaeda is going to win, you sure as hell wouldn’t collaborate with the Americans unless you have a death wish.

Yet all those things are happening. So either the leaders of those al-Anbar tribes are completely out of their minds, or they know something that the rest of us don’t. For that matter, why do the troops in Iraq keep reenlisting? Do you think they’re idiots, or maybe they actually believe we can win this thing.

The argument that Iraq is unwinnable is an excuse, pure and simple. It’s a way of washing our hands of the whole affair. It isn’t that easy. It never was. If we don’t have the stomach to fight now, things will get a lot worse — because we’re going to end up back in Iraq even if we do try to leave, but the next time will likely be in response to an attack that’s taken out a major American city. Ceding control of Iraq to al-Qaeda is not an option. Failure is not an option, and instead of sitting around carping and whining our political leadership should get the hell out of the way and let the grunts do their jobs.

Your cherry-picked quotes from Bush speeches are impressively laid out, but is it your contention that the American people were led to believe we would be engaged in a nine-year effort to squelch Iraq’s counterinsurgency back on March 19, 2003? Was the Bush administration’s “Mission Accomplished” moment really meant to serve as a reminder than only two out of more than 100 months that this military action was to require had been completed? The message to the American people from throughout pro-war political circles was that this war would be a short-term cakewalk. Anybody who disputes that only manages to further insult the intelligence of the people they already fooled once.

The war was a short-term cakewalk. But this isn’t the same war we fought in 2003. Saddam Hussein is gone. The Ba’ath are gone. Neither will ever return. We’re in a totally different phase now, and it is the long war that Bush said would happen. Again, if we don’t have the stomach for it, then we’ll end up losing more lives and spending more money down the road.

That’s the problem with this country. We’re so self-obsessed that we can’t look at anything longer term than the next five minutes. Whether or not the American people though Iraq was going to be long or short, we’ve been in a long and difficult war since September 11, of which Iraq is now unquestionably apart. You can’t win one without winning both, and if we lose in Iraq we will very likely see a return to the sort of mass-casualty attacks that marked the 1990s.

Think things can’t get worse? When we start seeing the Middle East tear itself apart and Iranian tanks start leveling Baghdad, then things will have gotten a hell of a lot worse. Sadly, our short-sighted and feckless political class is making than more rather than less likely.

At least at the present time, that is indeed the implication of my statement.

Then you’re a bigot. At least you’ve the fortitude to admit it.

Do you believe there are any Arab nations that would fail to elect a Taliban clone for a government if democracy was bestowed upon them tomorrow.

A Taliban clone? You’re missing the change that has swept the region in the last few years. Radical Islam is no longer killing Westerners, they’re killing more Muslims than anyone else. The leading cause of death in Iraq isn’t Americans, it’s fellow Muslims. Al-Qaeda is wildly unpopular in Iraq.

In the short term, the terrorists will win. However, that may be a necessary precondition for the democratic development of the Middle East. Living in an autocracy sucks, to put it mildly. No rational human wants to live in the Taliban’s world, and when al-Qaeda tried to force it on the Iraqis they were soundly rejected. Hamas can’t govern, and ended up making many Palestinians long for the Israelis to bring law and order.

The root cause of this terrorism isn’t poverty, it isn’t Israel, and it isn’t the US. It is the fact that the Arab world is mired in a culture of autocracy and deliberately kept powerless. If democratization was so good for terrorists, you’d see terrorists calling for democratic elections in places like Iraq. Yet they don’t, because ultimately a people who have political control over their own lives don’t become terrorists.

There’s no reason to believe that the Arabs are any more backwards than anyone else. There’s a difference between having a democratic deficit and being unable to have democracy. Democratization is a process, not an event. It requires development, which requires time.

The central flaw of the Bush Administration’s handling of Iraq from 2003 to 2007 was that it assumed that democratization would just happen. Now the anti-war side wants to condemn the Iraqis to hell because they didn’t make democracy just happen. Both are predicated on the same basic mistakes.

That’s the sick irony here — that the Democrats want to waste American blood and treasure and ruin the Middle East for political gain based on bad intelligence and a fundamental unwillingness to accept reality when they accuse the President of the same. And even if Bush was wrong then, doing something even more wrong won’t erase that mistake.

Your description of “those who spend every moment in Iraq” seems to be almost exclusively limited to General Petraeus….as if his opinion is infallible. Generals who are hired by the administration are done so with a reasonable expectation of being told what they want to hear. So whether Petraeus has “more knowledge” about Iraq isn’t necessarily the end-all to the discussion if he someone else’s agenda to carry out. And to dismiss entirely the idea that Lugar, a man with decades of experience overseeing American foreign policy and someone whose checks are not signed by the Bush administration, might know something about Iraq policy that lifelong civilian Jay Reding of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, doesn’t, is the height of egomania.

“Name one who said that.”

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/PatrickRuffini/2007/02/24/shhhh_the_surge_is_working
http://www.redstate.com/stories/spotlight_blogs/the_surge_is_working
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03202007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/why_its_working_____opedcolumnists_gordon_cucullu.htm?page=0
http://www.uncorrelated.com/2007/03/surge_working_democrats_panick.html
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/sshhh_bushs_surge_may_be_working/

Your cherry-picked quotes from Bush speeches are impressively laid out, but is it your contention that the American people were led to believe we would be engaged in a nine-year effort to squelch Iraq’s counterinsurgency back on March 19, 2003? Was the Bush administration’s “Mission Accomplished” moment really meant to serve as a reminder than only two out of more than 100 months that this military action was to require had been completed? The message to the American people from throughout pro-war political circles was that this war would be a short-term cakewalk. Anybody who disputes that only manages to further insult the intelligence of the people they already fooled once.

“Of course, I forgot. We all know that Arabs are just too backwards to live in democratic societies… which is the clear implication of your statement.”

At least at the present time, that is indeed the implication of my statement. Do you believe there are any Arab nations that would fail to elect a Taliban clone for a government if democracy was bestowed upon them tomorrow.

It’s not you, Jay. It’s the rest of the world.

It’s me, the commanders on the ground, and people who actually spend time in Iraq. Again, who has more knowledge of Iraq, Sen. Lugar or Gen. Petraeus? The idea that we should be listening to everyone but those who spend every moment in Iraq trying to make things work is exactly the sort of stupidity that is killing us in this war and will kill us when our current idiocy sparks the next.

It’s only now taken effect? Huh? I don’t seem to recall you and the dwindling number of war proponents having difficulty “sitting in judgment” of the surge only days after it took effect when it happened to correspond with a temporary lull in violence.

Name one who said that.

Given Bush’s political capital in 2002, if you guys had been honest enough back in 2002 to tell us that we’d be in Iraq for nine years (as you now suggest it will take to “effectively beat a counterinsurgency”) rather than tell us the we’d be greeted as liberators by a rose and tulip-wielding Iraqi peasantry and declared the mission accomplished more than four years ago, the public may have gone along with it. But since dishonesty was the game plan from the get-go, you set yourself up for this “lack of patience”. Kinda hot in the hell you’ve created for yourselves, huh?

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

– George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

– George W. Bush, May 20, 2003

[In regards to referring to the current conflict as "the long war"]

“What we decided was, it’s a good way of highlighting the idea that this war is likely to take awhile and will require both the commitment of significant resources and the resolve of the American people,” a senior Joint Staff officer said.

James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, co-wrote a book last year titled “Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom.” Carafano said the name captures the only major element of the war about which everyone agrees.

“We can’t agree it’s global, we can’t agree it’s terrorism, but we all generally agree it’s a war . . . [and] it’s going to be long,” Carafano said. “Transnational terrorism is the problem of the 21st century.”

Said a senior Central Command officer: “What we’re fighting is an ‘-ism,’ the first 21st-century ‘-ism,’ the way we fought communism and fascism in the 20th century.”

The fact that so many don’t bother to pay attention to the world doesn’t excuse them imagining their own arguments. Iraq has always been presented as one part of a very long war, a war that may not end for some time. The President’s rhetoric always made that clear, it’s just that the media never bothered to pick up on it. (In fact, the second quotation is from Bush’s much-misunderstood speech on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.)

Only you could say that in defense of prolonging the Iraqi quagmire without even a hint of irony in your tone.

No, there’s no irony. Again, read Gen. Petreaus’ doctoral dissertation. Shortly after Tet, the Viet Cong were utterly routed. The rest of the war was largely fought between US troops and NVA regulars. Mark Woodruff wrote a long and very well-researched book called “Unheralded Victory” that took documentary evidence from both sides which clearly showed that nearly everything that is popularly thought of the Vietnam War was wrong.

There would still be a South Vietnam today had the US not withheld air support in 1975. Millions of deaths would have been averted.

Again, those who fail to learn from history are damned to repeat it. Those who fail to learn the correct lessons are simply damned.

Every war ever fought could be defined as “unconventional” for one insignificant reason or another. The only thing unconventional about this one is that we idiotically invaded a nation that posed no threat to us.

Another patently idiotic comment that displays a complete lack of any understanding of this war. Again, name one single conflict in history in which the use of asymmetric warfare, a pervasive media environment, the use of suicide bombers, etc. is as prevalent as it is in this conflict. Or did I miss the part where al-Qaeda fighters wore uniforms, obeyed the rules of conventional warfare, and attacked the US using conventional tactics.

If you can’t even make a cogent arguement, don’t bother. All you’re doing is listening to the sound of your own typing, and not bothering to use those little grey cells of yours that are currently wasting away on a diet of cheap Democratic partisan propaganda.

Here you go again with the same idiotic leap of faith inferring that any opposition to the policies of the nation of Israel necessarily constitutes anti-Semitism. Isn’t that the same thing as saying you “hate Mexicans” because you oppose Bush’s immigration plan?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1721172.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3586543.stm
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASInt_13/4185_13.asp
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378460003&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Furthermore, I didn’t say that any opposition to Israel is a de facto sign of anti-Semitism, just that some of the left are motivated by it. Which is true. If you have to invent meanings to clear sentences to make a point, that’s a good sign you’re not making an argument. It’s a common tactic of yours, and it’s getting tiresome and transparent.

It’s no more or less of a pipe dream than expecting to install peaceful, freedom-loving democracies in a region of the world where the majority of the population would vote in America-hating theocrats and/or terrorists.

Of course, I forgot. We all know that Arabs are just too backwards to live in democratic societies… which is the clear implication of your statement.

Autocracy in the Middle East is feeding terrorism. If democratization inflames terrorism, then it’s a wash either way. Then again, the closest thing to a truism in international relations is that democracies tend not to declare war on each other.

Why do I get the feeling it can best be summed up in three words….”STAY THE COURSE!”

Well, then it wouldn’t stretch your intellectual capacity, would it? Unfortunately for you, it’s a hell of a lot more complex than that. Maybe you can have someone read it to you using smaller words and this time you’ll understand the argument being made…

It’s not you, Jay. It’s the rest of the world.

“It’s bad enough that Senator Lugar has the audacity to sit in judgment on the “surge” when it’s only now begun to take effect”

It’s only now taken effect? Huh? I don’t seem to recall you and the dwindling number of war proponents having difficulty “sitting in judgment” of the surge only days after it took effect when it happened to correspond with a temporary lull in violence.

“Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have the patience to see that through”

Given Bush’s political capital in 2002, if you guys had been honest enough back in 2002 to tell us that we’d be in Iraq for nine years (as you now suggest it will take to “effectively beat a counterinsurgency”) rather than tell us the we’d be greeted as liberators by a rose and tulip-wielding Iraqi peasantry and declared the mission accomplished more than four years ago, the public may have gone along with it. But since dishonesty was the game plan from the get-go, you set yourself up for this “lack of patience”. Kinda hot in the hell you’ve created for yourselves, huh?

“The lessons of the Vietnam War make that clear”

Only you could say that in defense of prolonging the Iraqi quagmire without even a hint of irony in your tone.

“we’re fighting an unconventional war”

Every war ever fought could be defined as “unconventional” for one insignificant reason or another. The only thing unconventional about this one is that we idiotically invaded a nation that posed no threat to us.

“infected with a vicious anti-Semitism that means that some of them wouldn’t mind of Israel were “counterbalanced” by a nuclear Iran”

Here you go again with the same idiotic leap of faith inferring that any opposition to the policies of the nation of Israel necessarily constitutes anti-Semitism. Isn’t that the same thing as saying you “hate Mexicans” because you oppose Bush’s immigration plan?

“It seems like every foreign policy expert thinks that solving the unsolvable is the key to Middle East peace”

It’s no more or less of a pipe dream than expecting to install peaceful, freedom-loving democracies in a region of the world where the majority of the population would vote in America-hating theocrats and/or terrorists.

“Some time in the next few days, I hope to draw up a more realistic plan for victory in Iraq”

Why do I get the feeling it can best be summed up in three words….”STAY THE COURSE!”