Who else,besides me, agrees with what the president said tonight?

Question

I think that this is a better, more refined stratgey and within 6 months, the situation will improve drastically.

Answer 1

I agree. The only time I've seen him this nervious and pissed is when he vowed to get the terrorists after 9/11. He's serious about this, and admitted to screwing up before. Its not often a President admits his own mistakes.

I thought it was impressive that he gave the Iraqis a clear message: Buck up, or we're pulling out.

Answer 2

As a military member myself, and someone who voted for Bush twice, and has been to Iraq, there was a time I would have agreed. But the more I look at the history of the region, however, the more I question the wisdom of that decision.

Prior to the 1300's, there were no "countries" in the Middle East as we think of them today. Most of the land belonged to city states (a single city with a ruler that also controlled some of the surrounding land), or to warring tribal factions. Even the ancient civilizations of the Fertile Crescent were more allied city states than unified nations. The early Islamic Empire made a noble attempt at unifying the region, but internal politics fragmented it as quickly as it expanded.

This all changed when the Turks began their conquest in the 1300's and began forming the Ottoman Empire. They defeated much of the Middle East, and united it into a single "kingdom". The Persians (Iranian) never completely fell under the Ottomans, but themselves ended up forming a single nation, which effectively cut the Middle East into two countries (and some unclaimed desert that neither side really cared about). What's more, these two countries also divided the Middle East along its major religious lines, Sunni and Shia'a Muslims. This was the state of events in the Middle East until the 1920's.

The Ottomans found themselves on the wrong side of WWI, and their empire was broken up when they lost in 1919. Then the Ottoman Empire was handed to the British and French by the League of Nations (a European entity), and the British were tasked with managing it until it could be divided. The British then set forth on one of the most corrupt, elitist, and politically inept missions in the regions history...the creation of new Arab nations. They doled out land to people who did them favors, and completely ignored entire civilizations they didn't like. The Armenians were given a region completely outside their ancient homeland. The Kurds, one of the Middle Easts larger ethnic groups, were conpletely ignored because the British didn't like them. The Assyrians, one of the Middle Easts most ancient civilizations and the decendants of the Babylonians, were ignored by the British on RELIGIOUS grounds. Jordan, which was originally supposed to be a part of Palestine (and which was populated by Palestinians), was given to King Abdullah (a non-Palestinian Arabian prince) as a political favor. The Shia'a of the southern Mesopotamia, who had always identified themselves as Persian, were cut off from Iran and forced to become a part of Iraq. Even the problems in Israel trace back to British political maneuvering.

In other words, these people had nations and borders IMPOSED on them by foreign invaders who cared little for peoples and customs. They are forced to live with people they don't like, be seperate from their own people, and suffer under rulers who consider them "foreigners" in their own homelands. Most of the strife in the Middle East and Western Asia, from Pakistan/India, to Afghanistan, to the Iran/Iraq war, to the battle over Palestine, can be traced to the blind and careless actions by the European colonialists of the past century.

Should we really be trying to preserve Iraq as one country? Wouldn't doing so simply amount to Europeans preserving the mandates that Europeans imposed on them long ago?

Bottom line, the Sunni, Shia'a and Kurds can't stand each other and here we are in the middle of a civil war. Can putting more troops in the country quell the violence? Maybe in the short term, but as soon as we hand it back to the Iraq government, they will loose control because those people don't want to get along.

Answer 3

Ditto, I've been in Iraq for the past 26 months and know for a fact that we need to get more aggressive with the militias if we are ever going to see stability. We can not pull out here until we achieve that goal!

Answer 4

Just the wino down on the corner. He said the President sounded almost coherent, and then he peed himself.

Now there's today's young Republican for you.

Drunk, stupid, and soaking in his own urine.

Answer 5

i agree, i think sending more troops will definatly speed up the process in settiing up the new iraq. If your going to do something do it right

Answer 6

I've never ever understood anything he ever said.

Answer 7

He's dead in the water and he knows it.

Answer 8

I agree with him.

Answer 9

i think just you