Good writeup...little heavy on the spacing...but I'll let it slide.
You do have a point...our troops should be focused on Afganistan (which is now falling apart) and not Iraq. There wasnt a link to Iraq and 9/11...so why we are in there is beyond me.
We also had the best chance to get Osama during the firefight in 2002 in Tora Bora. What did we do? We sent in the Afghani troops to clean up and get Osama. HELLO! Earth to the commanders!! You send in more troops to get Osama, you dont send in the 2nd string to get him. Its no wonder he escaped.
How do you not catch a 70 year old Arab on Dialysis? Seriously!
We did have the chance to get Saddam in the early nineties during Storm/Shield. At that time, Rummy AND Cheney saw no good way to enter Baghdad and to remove Saddam from power and have a good exit strategy. This was during the FIRST Bush administration. The situation never changed a decade later. 41 and his adminstration knew that if they took Saddam out there would be a huge civil war that would erupt putting US Troops lives at risk and in the crosshairs. 43 ignored this fact.
How do I know that 41's administration knew: THEY PUBLISHED A 900 PAGE DOCUMENT DETAILING WHY THEY DIDNT OVERTHROW SADDAM!
Simply put, Saddam was put there to be a buffer to Iran and the other nations. Iran and Iraq had never gotten along, and leaving Saddam in power meant that Iran had their focus elsewhere.
Truth be told, most Iranians dont hate the American people. Many of them are pro-West. They are just stuck in a country where the leadership is fanatical and rigged, and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.
The possibility of Iran getting ahold of enriched uranium and creating a bomb is there, but they are a few years away from actually making a bomb. That said, we still could be in Iraq in a few years time. The only way to stop this is to have the US Govt support the Iranian people and erode the leadership of Iran from the inside out. You dont go straight to the fanatical leader with another fanatical leader, it just doesnt work.
Now there is a new report from the Army that was released today. Let me bring the headline forth for you:
Army: Troops to stay in Iraq until 2010
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061011/..._st_pe/us_iraq
Now, last I checked, weren't we assured that we would be greeted in the streets by the Iraqi's and that this operation would be an in and out operation? 2010 doesnt seem to be an in and out date to me.
A new report was released not too long ago saying we are creating more fanaticism than we are preventing in Iraq. Another report came out saying that more than, get ready for this, 2,660 Civilians were killed in Iraq in the MONTH of September. Overall throughout this conflict, more than 655,000 Civilians have been killed. This might seem like an insignificant number, but its quite a large number when put into the relationship of the population of Iraq and the percentage of Civilians killed.
Population of Iraq (according to the CIA): ~26,074,906
Number of Civilian Deaths: ~655,000
Percentage of the population killed in this occupation: ~2.5%
2.5% of the population. That's not a small, insignificant number at all. Lets also not mention the 30% unemployment rampant throughout the country.
Its a civil war in Iraq, and we are the cause of it.
The whole "stay the course" and "stand up, stand down" policy is a joke. There are 30,000 Iraqi police now Mr. President. I believe that it is time for the US Military to stand down.
Even the people of Iraq know they are in a civil war. It IS a civil war. There is no denying it. You cannot actually believe that its not, when 2 factions are going at each other, not caring about the lives of the citizens around them. Our troops are going on multiple tours of duty, not because they are being asked to, but because they have a band of brotherhood with their fellow soldiers. Their Company. Their Batallion. We are outstreched and overworked.
And now with a Nuclear North Korea on the map, its time to rethink our total strategy.
Bring our troops home. Get a timetable going, and bring them back.