Hannity on pulling out
Published by Mike Stark June 16th, 2006 in Bill O'ReillyWoulda been nice if his father did… but fate decided otherwise…
Anyway, the conversation I had with the Army Dog was pretty amazing to me. It could be that I get so caught up in wonky policy stuff that I completely overlook messages that hit home with the 99% of the people that just don’t dig politics the way I do.
Again, we deposed Saddam and exposed a total absence of any WMD threat.
Why are we still there?
As a bonus, I included a Hannity reference to Lieberman. I think it is a perfect illustration of the reason I believe Joe must go.
Every time Joe opens his mouth, Joe provides cover for Republicans. He’s made himself a tool of the radical right wing and is deadweight on the Democratic Party. We shouldn’t have to drag - or kiss - his lame ass every time our party is working towards a consensus.
[UPDATE] Many thanks to regular visitor Jack, for the picture.
28 Responses to “Hannity on pulling out”
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Hannity on pulling out — is this title a pun? it’s kind of funny.
“So you just want to surrender, is that what you want to do?”
Hey dipshit, could you please define “surrender”? Are we there to enjoy the spoils of war then? Is that what we went in for? Does anyoine know what we went into Iraq for? That is the policy discussion that needs to be addressed. What are we there for since Saddam has gone? Okay, we got him, he’s out, the violence we create by shooting back at everyone who hates either this country or now hates it because of our fourth year of being in Iraq has a chance to kill and American every day. Or lots of Iraqi’s, or try and whip up a civil war we will be in the middle of.
What are we there for, and what is the planned legnth of this occupation? What is the reasoning behind any future decision to redeploy our troops?
How about someone ask this administration for a discussion on these important questions?
Somebody in the administration needs to answer the questions, “What is our end goal? When has a democracy been created? When will the we start standing down, the Iraqis have been standing up for years.
Good call mike.
If we pull our troops out now, then Iraq will fall into total and complete chaos and warfare. Many, many more will die on a daily basis than is currently happening. So while people here may not agree with the decision to go to war, it is our obligation as a compassionate nation not to allow such a fate for our fellow human beings. We must stay to help the Iraqis build a strong and viable state and work toward a more peaceful society before we pull our troops out.
Obviously at some point our operations in Iraq will get to the point where it’s not worth the risk of losing our ground troops to get the last few “dead enders”. It seems to me the “fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here” strategy has turned our troops into bait. We put them out there, hoping to draw out the enemy. We are basically using our troops as chum. In the process many are killed or injured by IED’s. I want to know how close the Iraqi troops are to being able to handle the situation on their own. Just because we pull out most of our ground troops, doesn’t mean we won’t have airpower available to drop precision guided bombs on targets that the Iraqi troops have selected. It’s not like the Iraqis would be on their own. Infact Zarqawi was tracked down with the help of Jordanian intelligence.
“A Jordanian official said that Jordan also provided the U.S. military with information that helped in tracking Zarqawi down. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was addressing intelligence issues, would not elaborate, but Jordan is known to have intelligence agents operating in Iraq to hunt down Islamic militants.
Some of the information came from Jordan’s sources inside Iraq and led the U.S. military to the area of Baqouba, the official said.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198651,00.html
markovits:
what makes you say that? it could well be true, but as far as I can tell, it is still a theory in need of testing.
what we do know is that Americans are being shot at and blown up because they are there. we do know that Americans have been the true power behind the throne and just about every decision they’ve made so far has been catastrophe. From disbanding the military, to the radical economic shocks they introduced, to the day to day military malfeance that has manifested in the media as stories out of Haditha, Abu Grahb and various checkpoints that have seen entire families (and pregnant women) gunned down.
Letting the people that own the country determine their own fate is a common-sense solution whose time has come.
they can’t determine their own fate without help from our military to provide protection and help stabilize the country.
we pulled out of somalia. look what happened to that country.
we didnt pull out of germany and japan after world war II. we stayed and rebuilt both nations. we will do the same in iraq.
markovits Jun 17th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
surely, your reasoning and understanding of world history and current situations are better than that? Somalia was in a civil war well before the US was involved. it was in a civil war as early as the 70s by some accounts. Japan & Germany as a nation attacked the US and a good part of the northern hemisphere. After the war, we left bases but we didn’t occupy those countries.
now back to iraq. there was no civil war before the US. Iraq didn’t attack the US or any country except kuwait, which the US addressed 15 years ago. This war is most similar to Vietnam. Another country that we attacked preemptively, with no formal declaration of War. People had the same arguments for not pulling out there too, except substitute the words “terrorsits” for “communists”. When we finally left there we had no more controll of the situation than when we went in, but civil war eventually ceased too. So there really is no evidence to your claim.
Dont forget the election that was held in South Vietnam that, according to reports from the 1960’s, over 80% of South Vietnamese participated in (I think we had the previous S.Vietnamese leader assasinated) but my point is that an election, like the purple thmbed one we crowed about, often means nothing in realpolitik. If we think there is some kind of Democracy in A-Stan we are kidding ourselves. (Maybe in Kabul but not outside of there)
And the same holds for Iraq. I wish people had a clue when they made comparisons to Germany and Japan. Did you see the Republican twit from Texas who made the same comparison in slandering Murtha?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6nR7mgjfmE&eurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/06/15/murtha-puts-gop-congressm_n_23119.html
It seems you combine equal parts xenophobic patriotism with ignorance to come up with that historical comparison.
odanny, its even worse than that. if i recall correctly, when vietnam was granted independance (back in the 50s i believe) they were gonna hold elections, but we cancelled them for fear ho chi minh would win. and it was only after that that we started fighting. so we were fighting more for capitalism versus communism than for democracy i guess. i dont really know why we went into vietnam, that was a horrible mistake. at least in iraq we deposed a dictatorship (not that iraq is any better for it, not yet at least).
John x
At the end of the Second World War, Japan was occupied by the Allied Powers. The United States played the leading role in the occupation. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on September 8, 1951, marked the end of the Allied occupation, and when it went into effect on April 28, 1952, Japan was once again an independent state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied_Japan
John x
At the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, after Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, the Allies divided Germany into four military occupation zones – French in the southwest, British in the northwest, United States in the south, and Soviet in the east.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germany_since_1945
I think you are the one who does not know history if you get the very, very basic fact wrong that we occupied both Japan and Germany after WWII for years.
markovits Jun 17th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Nope not me you are still mixing apples and oranges i see. and only addressing 1 point. when my main point about that is that germany and japan were the ones who attacked everyone. not the us. our invasion was in self defense. Iraq was an unprovoked war. but since you brought up the Allied powers, thanks. Iraq was not UN sanctioned. most of the world doesn’t want us there. Where as even in your own words. Germany and Japan was occupied by the Allied powers. not just US and Britian (mostly US). Finally, even in your “wikipedia” posts there is no mention of a civil war. If you can’t see the huge fundamental differences between WWII and the Iraq war, then i cant’ do anything for you.
markovitz….how many allies died after the end of hostilities during the occupation of japan and germany?
give up?
a big fat zero….
cant rebuild if you are being shot at and blown up by ied’s
we are now fighting iraquis…the same people we were alledgedly their to save….it is absurd
our gov has turned people protecting their land and persons into terrorists…more absurdity
let the iraquis deal with whatever happens when we leave…if it does descend into chaos…not too hard to return
i am truly tired of wingnuts like you comparing ww2 with this war…there is no comparison…stop making it.
http://www.kultursmog.com/Life-Page01.htm
Many people thought we would fail in rebuilding Europe after World War II. We succeeded. We will succeed in Iraq.
markovits Jun 19th, 2006 at 11:45 am
your hardheaded. this isn’t wwII. this is vietnam. this is an unprovoked and undeclared war that has sparked into a civil war. we did it in defiance of the UN. after “mission accomplished” we are fighting a insugency/rebellion against us.
wwII was a formal declaration of war that was provoked by other nations. we went into the war with assistence from our allies. even in your own article there is no mention of an insurgency or armed resistence after the mission.
after wwII ended, our staying in those countries didnt create new enemies. thats what the iraq war is doing.
Actually, it is NEITHER World War II nor Viet Nam. It is Iraq, which (as the Brits found out in the 1920s) is a stone bitch to occupy. Remember them? “Sun never sets on the British Empire (and the blood never dries)?” They took the place over in the early 20’s under a League of Nations Mandate and left ten years later (and ten years early) because they discovered even dive bombing and gassing the Shi’a, Sunni and Kurds didn’t do much. They put in a spare Hashamite Prince and beat feet.
Said Hashamite ( a cousin of the King of Jordan) got blown up in the early ‘50s and its been one dictator or another since. The elections were nice. However, since these guys do Kirias Joel Democracy (vote as a block they way your religious leaders tell you), the Shi’a are going to rule the roost (such as it is).
Joe Biden has a good plan. Make the damn thing a loose confederation like Bosnia. Pull out the bulk of the conventional troops (there were never enough to do more than piss people off anyway). Leave the bulk of the SoF and the Civil Military Operators. Bribe the Sunni to play nice. (Biden says share the oil wealth from the Shi’a and Kurdish regions. I say make the Japanese build them a manufacturing sector, to give the Shi’a and the Kurds something to spend the Petro dollars [or Euros the way that’s going] on).
Is this chap on ‘Insanity and Colmes’ for real, or is he just acting the part of a nutter. J. Arno. - England.
Surrender? Surrender to whom?
Who is there to surrender to? The Iraqi people?
It’s our job to surrender to them.
We surrender our control of the country to the Iraqis.
That was the plan (supposedly) from the get go.
markovitz,
compare the way Europe was rebuilt with the way Iraq is not being rebuilt.
Europe had the Marshall Plan. Iraq has the Halliburton/Bremer plan.
One worked. One has not worked and will not work.
One was designed to succeed. One was designed to fail.
BTW, the US involvement in WWII from Pearl Harbor to VE Day was 1222 days (Dec 7, 1941-May 8, 1945) and the War in Iraq so far has been 1187 (March 20, 2003 - June 20, 2006). Our involvement in the Iraq war will surpass the war with Germany in 35 days.
It will surpass the entire US involvement in WWII in 134 days, on November 1, 2006.
orihd,
It wasn’t about capitalism, communism, or democracy. It was about colonialism, just like the Iraq war. Ho Chi Minh was going to chuck out all the foreign interests read French colonialists/”capitalists.” Just like Hugo Chavez wants to throw out foreign capitalist interests that serve to suck money and resources out of the country and barely provide any benefit, if any, to anyone besides rich elite.
Bremer wanted to make Iraq into a laissez-faire, free-market, capitalist dreamworld out of Iraq at first. He wanted to open the country up to all the multinational corporations, but mostly US corps of course. It was going to be one big free trade free for all.
Well, Iraqis started getting real pissed real fast when all their factories started getting bought up and people were laid off all over the place. Then people who did business with the Americans were threatened and killed. Read more here:
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
interesting. that sounds plausible. would ho chi minh have allowed any other foreign interests, for example, china or russia? i had always seen it as a proxy war, an extension of the cold war, and i had assumed we thought it would be an easy victory over the “enemy”.
theres also the billions of dollars unaccounted for in postwar iraq (in addition to all the grossly over priced contracts). i doubt that money found its way to iraqis.
Ho Chi Minh = Popular support, National Hero (He fought the Japanese (he was one of our Allies), French, Americans, and later the Cambodians)
Hussein = Popular support from Sunni, no one else (Brutal dictator, crazy kids who would have put cigarettes out on people long after dad assumed room temperature)
Ho Chi Minh not equal to Hussein
Vietnam not equal to Iraq
markovits,
Your Jun 17th, 2006 at 11:45 am post was well written and thoughtful. I do wonder though about the depth of your convictions. How many more Americans’ lives is peace in Iraq worth to you? Will 3,000 be enough, 4,000? At 5,000 will you decide it has been too expensive or are you comitted for the long haul and willing to see 10-12,000 dead Americans for us to have peace in Iraq?
that sort of question is interesting, but futile if we arent making progress in iraq. what if 5000 deaths later, iraq is even worse than it is now?
“interesting, but futile”
Well yes, but it was only a rhetorical question designed to elicit a specific response. The RW definition of any withdrawal as “cut & run” forces them to say there is no limit to the casualties they are willing to take in order to save face. Obviously we will either leave Iraq some day or we will stay there forever. The RW is too afraid to say they want to stay there forever and they know that *any* time-line they would ever give will prove be a lie so they simply label any and all talk of even the most tentative of future withdrawals as “cut & run.”
No RW will ever be able to tell you how many dead Americans peace in Iraq is worth.
Well. Maybe we should go about it diplomatically rather than militarily (precisely what we should have done instead of invading illegally). We should be engaging talks with Syria and Iran to see if we can come up with a solution that doesn’t involve more bloodshed. We should also try to obtain greater involvement of the Arab League and the UN in seeking a solution in Iraq. The real problem is that there is Iraqi (Sunni) opposition to the Shiite-led government and there is nothing we can hope to accomplish by sending in more U.S. troops seeking to quell the insurgency. Sooner or later we will be pulling out of there, and you can be sure nothing will have been accomplished, just like nothing has been accomplished in Israel-Palestine or Lebanon by the use of guns and name calling. Unfortunately, the 3,000 thousand American solidiers already killed will be joined by thousands unless we come up with some intelligent alternatives.
Bush is an asshole. His original policy: “let’s invade and see what happens.” His new policy: “Let’s send in more troops and see what happens.” Condi Rice is another ass. She says the sacrifice of our boys and girls in Iraq is worth it. She says it will help get rid of the people who attacked us on 9/11. She really thinks Americans are stupid and cannot see that Iraq has strictly nothing to do with 9/11.