Originally posted by: Bowfinger
Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
Don't worry. The anti-war crowd will never admit to being wrong about Iraq. They'll keep spouting the same old rhetoric and sound bytes instead and will deflect, dissemble, and cry over split milk as they always have.
Clearly any success in Iraq just galls them right down to the bone. Despite all their protestations of being labeled "defeatists," the proof of that claim is clear for all to see. They are defeatists, plain and simple, and continue to be even as Iraq moves well past their hyperbolic spewage.
With all due respect, you're either a clueless fool or a dishonest partisan hack. You might have a point if you could show a significant portion of Iraq invasion opponents predicted violence would
never drop, but I'm confident you can't. That's a straw man and you know it. The real question is what does "winning" mean with respect to Iraq? Taking the cluster-fsck BushCo spawned and getting it down to only 10 times worse than before we invaded rather than its peak of 100 times worse? Woot! Bully for us! Let's pull out the troops and look for a new country to ruin.
No, I'm afraid "winning" in Iraq would require that we somehow obtain something more valuable than the cost: hundreds of thousands of dead men, women, and children, tens of thousands of Americans killed and maimed, upwards of a trillion U.S. dollars borrowed from our kids, a serious blow to America's standing in the world, $4 gasoline (due in great part to the instability we created), and an inflammation of anti-American hatred that is sure to haunt us for decades. In return we got what, exactly? The head of Saddam Hussein and an unstable puppet democracy that could crumble without us. That's not even close to a "win" in my book, but YMMV. The Bush faithful have turned lowering expectations into a lifestyle.
I think it's fantastic things are getting better in Iraq. I hope they continue to improve and that the Iraqi people succeed in establishing a stable democracy. Most of all, I hope we can bring our people home before even one more of them dies. Unfortunately, even that will never make our attack on Iraq morally right, nor worth the awful toll. We lost in Iraq the moment we started destroying the place based on innuendo and lies. Whatever good we eventually salvage from thst won't change that shameful fact.