Glad someone is finally speaking sense. Let’s face it. The Iraq situation is as bad if not worse than Vietnam. Many knew it going in, that’s why we were against it.
November 17th, 2005 at 10:36 am
2 Responses to “I second the motion”
Diane Rheam was interviewing Sen. McCain the other morning on NPR. I caught about 10-15 minutes of the interview before I arrived at school, but it was pretty good. McCain really knows how to say the right things without pissing people off.
One question from a listener was something like, “Are the 2000+ deaths of our service personnel worth it?” He repied with, “Yes, if we succeed in bringing long-term democracy to the region; No, if we don’t succeed.”
Vietnam immediately comes to mind when I think of that quote. I don’t think anybody can justify (even though I wasn’t alive during that time period) the 50K+ casualties in Vietnam, especially when we didn’t succeed in our mission.
November 17, 2005 @ 2:39 pmSince I am of the Viet Nam age & served on active duty, though not in VN, I have to agree with Sen. McCain. Also, I had 2 brothers who served in VN & thought that helping was the right thing to do. Unluckily, VN was a political war managed by politicians with no aim to ever try to actually win a war, ask any VN vet. The only way to successfully, if possible, bring democracy to Iraq is to support them, It is very true that the Iraqi people must step forward & take much greater responsibility for themselves. Unluckily, when people have lived under repression for close to 40 years, it is hard to grasp that freedom can be a reality. If you read your history, there were terrorist acts in Germany up to 1949, even though the war had ended 4 years earlier. Germans had not suffered 40 years of repression.
Just as you or I, as individuals, must take control of our own lives, so must the Iraqi people take control of theirs. However, if we let the bully in the neighborhood determine our actions, we, as individuals, will be in the same shape as the Iraqi nation.
It is disgusting that the behavior we are trying to prevent in Iraq goes on in so many ghettos of American cities. There are so many people who would be thrilled to walk down a street without the fear of molestation or worse. Unluckily, there are many mini Saddam’s in America. As in Iraq, there are to many that think that we should do nothing about them!
November 30, 2005 @ 7:28 pm