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Originally Posted by smooth
You sound like you swallowed the president.
He accused kerry of being stuck in a pre-9/11 mindset, yet he was the one stuck in the past.
His inability to connect the realities of fighting a decentralized enemy plays out in the media, which amplifies his message, and settles in your mind as an objective fact.
The reason why both Iraq and Fallujah were pieces of cake are because there is no centralized command. There is no stronghold. The fighters melted away again. That is failure in this type of war. Especially if you hinge victory on the notion of winning hearts and minds of people.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are being killed by direct military action and indirectly due to the disruption to the cities. These events in no rational universe equate to victory.
What exactly is going on with the interim goverrnment? The top people are resigning and elections are nowhere on the horizon--aren't they supposed to be happening in a few weeks? It's sickening that those people's offices are being raided and the people disappearing and harassed by our government (oh, scratch that, by other governments that we fly them to).
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First of all, Bush isn't on the ground planning the fighting. His commanders are. And they understand fully the nature of this insurgency. And as far as the media reporting the situation, they've done just about everything they can do to portray this in a negative light. So when you say that Bush can't understand how to fight a decentralized insurgency, I would say, yeah maybe he can't personally, but his generals can. And they're doing it, slowly. The strategic victory of Fallujah was the removal of one more place for them to hide. And it absolutely was an insurgent stronghold, a sanctuary, a rallying point, a financial hub, a waystation for traveling bandits, a philosophical center, a resting place, an ammo dump, a command and control base, on and on. Iraq doesn't have too many big cities where these roaches can find sanctuary. Now they have one less place. And pretty soon they won't have anywhere else to hide.
You want to know who the mindless killers of Iraqi civilians are? The fanatical Iraqi suicide bombers who kill 20-30-40 fellow Iraqis at a time every other day by driving carbombs into crowds of civilians. I think you'd find it quite enlightening to read about the extent to which US forces go out of their way to avoid civilians casualties. I know I did.
As far as elections go, they're on schedule. If you are referring to Chalabi as the one whose house was raided, well too bad for him, the rumor was that he was running his mouth to the Iranians, so now he's out and Allawi is Interim Prime Minister.