Republican presidential nominee John McCain today predicted that most US forces would withdraw from Iraq by 2013, after having helped shape the country into a "functioning democracy".Amazing! Sounds cool!
McCain's remarks, given in a speech in Columbus, Ohio, represent a turnaround from his widely publicised statement that US troops could be in that country for one hundred years, and could blunt Democrats' efforts to portray him as favouring long-term US engagement there.
"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom," the Arizona senator said.
He described his hopes for the scenario in the country by the end of his first term in office: "The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering form the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension."
But ... just HOW are you going to achieve this happy state of affairs, Senator McCain? With our broken military? With the Taliban ascendant in Afghanistan and Pakistan? With Saudi Arabia funding the Sunnis and al-Qaeda? With Iran funding and supporting the Shiites? With the fighting factions within each of these militias? Just how will you do this?
Are you going to attack Iran?
Just how many wars are you planning to start?
Or are you planning to stay in Iraq because of Vietnam?:
But the truth is that it's always about Vietnam for John McCain. He has invoked avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam with a sort of religious fervor in every important debate about dispatching U.S. troops since he first entered Congress in 1983. As he put it in an Aug. 18, 1999, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he studies "every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam." In fact, a look at his record shows that he subjects every major foreign-policy decision to a Vietnam-derived test similar to the famed Powell doctrine, a test summed up by the McCain quote, "We're in it, now we must win it."
So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay.
If we never leave, we will never have to admit defeat, right?
So, are you planning to use nukes?
6 comments:
This election is about whether the world will survive. Period.
Not only that, but HOW we are going to survive as well. President Obama will have to fight every single step of the way back to solid ground. The entire country has been riddled with land mines deliberately set by the loyal Bushies.
Watch the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy's Smear Machine kick into high gear the SECOND Obama is elected.
Obama won't be able to do much, but at least he won't try to start WWIII.. or WWIV.. or whatever number we're on.
It's not about what Barack Obama is going to do, it's about what we are going to do.
I wanted to speak to the fact some think Obama will be able to fix everything and erase all the horrors the Bush administration has unleashed. But he won't. He'll be able to slow the inevitable slide into the abyss Bush and Cheney have started, but it will truly take we the people to stop it.
It really does rely on what we are going to do about it.
Let's build a new world of peace and liberty together. It will take us a few years but if our country ceases to make wars but seeks an end to war, we can do this.
Yes please.
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