President Barack Obama is sending 300 advisors into military and legal jeopardy to help Shiites beat Sunnis in Iraq. The war-on-the-cheap advisor model works, "as long as the security forces of the host country have the motivation and basic combat skills to stand up and fight and are not facing overwhelming odds." Uh oh....
Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Rick Weiland says we've already lost too much (1.7 trillion dollars, 4,000 American lives) to pour troops into Iraq's oily maw:
There is no lobby for, nor explanation of, our having picked sides in a far away religious quarrel between sects of a religion foreign to all but a tiny sliver of Americans. No explanation save one. Oil.
It is the energy industry that funds the war college professors and militarist politicians who peddle the most obviously self-serving pedagogy on the planet. Their five syllable words and 6 letter acronyms purport to find vital threats to American security. What they are really finding are vital threats to their big money paymasters.
I am a patriotic American, and I am vehemently opposed to sending more men and women and dollars to Syria or Iraq [Rick Weiland, press release, downloaded 2014.06.23].
The only old soldier in the Senate race, Independent Larry Pressler, goes a step further. He says we should pull all of our military and diplomatic personnel out of Iraq:
...the United States should completely, totally, and immediately withdraw all US forces from Iraq - if our embassy staff is unsafe there, we should move them out to another country until it becomes safe, but we should not be sending any more troops of any kind into Iraq [Larry Pressler, press release, 2014.06.20].
Pressler sounds like he would pull our foreign aid out of Iraq, too:
The Obama administration also has made substantial new aid commitments to Iraq. We are spending huge amounts in foreign aid, which should be spent back home on education and other matters. We must reduce the federal deficit, and our expansion of this war will mean we will spend another $100-$200 billion in unnecessary foreign military spending [Pressler, 2014.06.20].
Would anyone like to take a swing at persuading Pressler or Weiland that Americans should sacrifice their lives to help Shiites beat Sunnis (if that's really who's fighting)?
I've been arguing with 2 of my cousins who want to send troops back into Iraq and of course, blame Obama for leaving Iraq to soon even though it was the right thing to do.
Can't explain to them that Obama is trying to cleanup the mess Bush/Cheney made.
How many right wing tools must we sacrifice to get them to see how stoopid this exercise in futility has been? Send the whole damn Bush white house crew over there and sacrifice them-it's their mess,make them pay for it.
A number of years ago I read former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil's autobiography "Man of the House". As older people will recall, Tip was opposed to the Vietnam War almost from the beginning and it had nothing to do with communistic aggression, morality, or anything else. His opposition was due to logistics, a general had informed him that military troops had not been trained to fight a war in the jungles of Vietnam. The general told him that the odds of winning the war were slim to none because Vietnam soldiers had a life time of experience of living and fighting in the jungles.
So it is true in the middle east, except that the opposition there is tribalism that exist in all these countries. In tribal cultures the mindset is that they have nothing to lose and will go to any extreme to protect what little they do have.
It should be a lesson learned by America that they have never fully defeated Native American tribal cultures in this country for the very same reasons we have never been able to successfully penetrate middle eastern countries.
Weiland and Pressler are both right in their assessment of Iraq, we don't need to be there.
It is and always be a war that cannot be won, it has been going on for centuries so why is America so arrogant that think they can do something about it now?
Ahh memories! Memories brought up by the mess we are once again facing in Iraq thanks to the Bush legacy.
Memories brought up by the Cheney's that somehow dug themselves out of a rat hole and seeks to somehow re-write history and his role. Wasn't he supposed to be tried at some world court on charges of war crimes?
All those memories from the Bush years prior to 911 when the Dems in Congress were about to pounce on Bush to post 911 and the formation of Fatherland Security, Endless wars and I remember the security level threats that just happened to be near an election which I was suspicious of and later it was confirmed they were raised for political purposes and not a real security threat.