More of the same
This is a blog about Minnesota politics, but two things:
1) No, I would not support the war in Iraq if Iraqis were "white". South America, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia...it doesn't matter where it is or what color the people are, I would not support it. I did support the first Gulf War. I did support the war in Afghanistan (although it would have been nice had we finished up there).
2) For those war supporters, when do we leave? Seriously, when do American troops get to come home? Just give me a metric. X number of Iraqi troops trained, Y number of schools rebuilt, less than Z roadside bombings or kidnappings per day. Saying "we have to fix Iraq now that we broke it so we can't leave" doesn't explain when Iraq will be "fixed". So when will that be? Saying "I'll know it when I see it" doesn't cut it. This is war, not pornography.
Josh Marshall is absolutely right: the Republican plan is no plan. It really is more of the same. Republicans think that we should be in Iraq indefinitely, maybe even forever. Not one has said when it will be over. So when is it?
posted by MN Politics Guru @ 18:42
3 Comments:
"When do we leave". I don't know, when do we leave Germany, South Korea, and Japan? When do we leave Bosnia, where we've been for 10 years after Slick Willie promised only a six-month deployment? I say pull our troops out of areas where we've been for 50-60 years and are not needed anymore, and redeploy to get this country up and running, in order to help stabilize the entire Middle East. We are already well on the way, as countless returning servicemen report and the media continually ignores.
Former Vice President Walter Mondale has called for pre-emptive military strikes against North Korea's ballistic missile program.
Is there still a place for people like Mondale in today's progressive DFL party?
As shown in Japan, and South Korea, the US military often doesn't leave after the original missions have been accomplished. Primarily, our military bases are in said countries today for (shock and horror!) military reasons. In Asia, for example, I would say that the US is there now primarily to counter the Chinese and to a lesser extent the North Koreans. My opinion is that we retain bases in Germany mostly for economic and prestige reasons.
I suspect the former situation will also occur in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, the lack of an official end date of troop deployment in the region, does not necessary justify and end to US military presence.
The Korean situation represents a perfect example of the fallacy of the Guru's cut-and-run arguments. If we had not stopped North Korea back in 1950-53, the whole of Korea would now be under the rule of the Kim regime. And presumably, the Kims would have an even larger slave/labor and resource pool with which to threaten the US and Japan. The 33 thousand (33,000) Americans that died in Korea during 1950-53 were not sacrificed in vain. They freed the South Koreans from tyranny, and from an even greater threat of a unified Korea under communism.
Under Guru's criteria, there can never be just wars, simply because their outcomes are uncertain and people may die.
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