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Originally Posted by smooth
Sometimes I just don't know what to make of your posts, ace.
First of all, the "left" is not in sync with Obama on going into Afghanistan. The reason you can't understand this is because of your annoying tendency to frame everything "not you" as "left." Hence, Obama is a leftist, all of his positions are leftists, and leftists are in sync with all of Obama's positions.
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I did not use the term "left" or "liberal", I simply stated that "some people" held the view that I find ironic. If you are not one of them, fine.
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A more sane and informed view would recognize that the leftist, anti-war movement was supportive of Obama's anti-war stance and opinions range from reluctant to appalled that he wants to reproduce strategic errors in Afghanistan. I don't know of any leftists groups that support invading Afghanistan...although there may be some people who position themselves along the political spectrum in all sorts of permutations that I don't control the labels of who do support going after bin Laden.
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From early on here I emphasized the fact that Bush had the support of Congress, the UN and most of the world prior to the US taking military action in Iraq. Often people re-wrote history to make it seem that the Iraq war was a unilateral action by the US and specifically Bush. I thought this was a deception with the intent to gain favor with those tired of the war and those who were against the war from the beginning. Obama's rise to power was based on this deception. Needless to say Obama does not have my confidence nor do those who let the deception go on unquestioned. That is just my viewpoint
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Secondly, the reason I and others I know were opposed to invading Iraq had nothing at all to do with President Bush.
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My experience, involving a number of different issues, has lead me to conclude that many dislike Bush so much that they do form their view based primarily on that issue. When you put Bush's actions in a historical context the contradictions are obvious to me, and we are already seeing the patterns when comparing Bush to Obama.
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I don't have any personal feelings about him one way or the other. I knew that destabilizing a nation-state would leave us with very little options if anything went wrong, I knew that the public was not aware that we were going to destabilize a nation-state, or the history of why and how Iraq became a nation-state with Saddam in power, the lack of insight into which led to the faction warfare we are witnessing today, I knew that the search for weapons of mass destruction was built on flimsy evidence...and that the link between Saddam and Al Queda was tenuous to put it mildly, I suspected that military contracts would strip our resources beyond capacity, and that in no uncertain terms was the war going to be quick or easy despite the claims initially made.
Most importantly, I am opposed to Bush's form of international relations. I prefer Obama's usage of leverage and diplomacy, which has a long history of success. Even after all this time I'm not sure what you are defending other than it appears we have achieved something...but I'm not sure what that something is. We've essentially supplanted one ethnic group for another and I'm always baffled as to why people think that is a good thing other than the fact they usually don't have a good handle on all the information.
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I don't want to go over the reasons why I think Saddam needed to be removed from power, this has been discussed many times in other threads and in great detail, however, "Bush's form of international relations" has not been much different than most other previous Presidents and won't be much different than Obama's approach. Obama has already moved to the "center-right" in his approach to international relations. His comments on international affairs have been very much in sync with what any US President would say. His claims of making the US respected again, etc.,etc. are words with no real meaning. The real test is based on what the US actually does and unless we are going to abdicate power to other nations or to organizations like the UN, nothing much will change as we exercise our dominance in the world.