Sad day for America

Hopefully not. Hopefully this president will stay the course and not lose the war by cutting and running.

Joseph Botwinick

 

Yep. Just like Viet Nam. We should get our troops out asap if we aren't going to let the military handle this and we are going to continue to try to win "hearts and minds." What somebody in DC doesn't seem to understand is that you fight to win the war first and then worry about rebuilding and trying to win hearts and minds. You can't do both at the same time and have either one be successful. Sooo, as long as our CIC is still willing to appease the enemy (like that Al Sadr fellow who should have been dead and gone 2 years ago) and as long as you are going to have our military fighting the same battles over and over again and you are not going to put enough forces in there to do the military thing and do it to win and are going to play pattycake with the muslim leaders in the region, then, yes, by all means, bring the troops home. Bush just DOESN'T get it. He's so far gone into la-la land, he never will.:BangHead: :tear:

 

Vietnam was also a civil war. We didn't want to win Vietnam (what would we do with it?), we wanted to make the South Vietnamese win it. This time, I'm not sure if we care who wins out of the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, as long as it's not al Qaeda.

I think there is some cause for more optimism now that we have people from the Iraq Study Group - people who have some depth of vision, who care about the world and not just the US.

 

Plus, Daisy, the president is starting to listen to foreign policy folks other than the neocons.

President Bush will not "cut and run" but it is pretty clear that he is up to changing course.

 

It's a good sign that he realizes that doing the same thing over and over again, will not produce different results.

This was a massive and expensive error. But getting out without compounding the problems will be a delicate and tricky business. Please God, let the partisan bickering abate while we figure it out.

And bless all of our leaders with the sense to work together.

 

Ho Chi Min asked us for help fighting against the evil dictatorship(s) of the french . . . and then the english . . .

This time we liberated the underdogs . . .

Quite a bit of difference.

:BangHead:

:saint:

 

The Vietnamese War of Independence, 1946-54; the US decided it didn't like colonial empires like the French and gave the communist Vietminh aid in booting them out of Indo-China. Then the US changed its mind and decided it hated communism more than it hated colonialism.

 

Going back further, FDR helped Ho against the Japanese occupiers of Indo-China from 1941-45; Ho was upset and puzzled as to why the US then turned against him in the late '50s