Letters to the Editor
-
@John
You do not accuse a man like this of Betrayal! The people who sent him and hundreds of thousands of troops there, yes. But not one who has put his life on the line for so long and is on site.
-- John Nkomos
We should just ignore the fact that he is lying and that we are losing lives and money in Iraq because he is lying? Is that what you are saying?
-
If you come to D.C. to spin...
you should be called on your B.S. Bush always uses the military this way. He is a terrible glory sponge as was especially notable at the mission accomplished pageant. Shrubby was using Petraeas to be a shill that could not be questioned. MoveOn went straight at the B.S. ploy. Good for them. As a military officer Petraeus has earned our respect. As a political shill, not one iota. Blame Shrubby doing this to our military.
-
anon
Anon,
but what do we get out of it? everything you've said so far seems more like a burden than anything else. If there's no benefit in it for our country, why do we even want to be a superpower?
-
Limitless nothingness in anonymous brains
The US is a superpower huh? I guess that means that spending more on our military then the next highest spending 14 nations combined- before accounting for deployment costs in the hundreds of billions per annum, and accrual based costs in terms of veterans benefits again in the hundreds of billions- is insufficient. We should be spending double what the entire world is spending- neigh triple. We are a SUPERPOWER! Saaaweeeet! That word just rolls off the tongue doesn't it? And what's in it for us? Well, we get to kiss our entitlements goodbye in a decade or so. Old people will just have to tough it out and forgo retirement and medical treatment. The latter should ease the retiree burden anyway.
Oh yea, but there are terrorists and we had to invade. Get this through that plank of wood you call a skull: there was NO terrorist threat in Iraq before we invaded, to go with the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That fact is indisputable. It is furthermore the case that our invasion was not a mistake of intelligence but a case of trying to fit the intelligence around the policy. Oh yes, I believe I read that somewhere once.
Do you people have two synapses to rub together? I would be willing to bet that you know people that are going to have to depend on Social Security in your own family, but that doesn't register do it. Do you know why we have entitlements? Because people didn't like the site of their elders unable to produce for themselves dying in destitution and abject poverty. Honestly, this is embarrassing- you sir, whoever the hell you are- are an embarrassment.
-
Off topic...well, sort of
As I remember, Jerry della Femina once wrote a book called From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought you Pearl Harbor. Ironic reminiscences about the cleverness of advertising and advertisers, with the title taken from his attempts to sell Mitsubishi products to unsuspecting Americans. At the time, I thought he had the right take on the overall insanity of our commercial propaganda factories. If only I had known the purposes which his cleverness would one day come to serve. (Well, I did have certain suspicions, but I never thought that they'd actually come to pass.)
Anyway, now look at him. He's certainly turned a bit sour and wrinkled in his dotage, hasn't he? One hopes the country won't follow him all the way to the inevitable end of this sorry saga.
-
Generals HAVE to be politicians as well as soldiers. Anyone who says otherwise has never been an officer in the military.
"I spent thirty-three years in the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."
General Smedley Butler, Marine 1881-1940
General Butler retired in 1934. It suggests to me that this nonsense has been going on far, far, too long.
-
@Anonymous 9:42
Thanks for your service and staying in to support the troops. I want your troops to be safe and they are not in Iraq with the mission as it stands now. Just because many others and I want us out does not mean that we advocate a hasty, foolish retreat. Many plans have been offered and I prefer changing the political and military strategy to create, as senator Joe Biden advocated more than a year ago, a federalized, decentralized partition because it is already happening whether we want it to or not. That would save the most lives and give our troops a mission they can accomplish while reducing our presence substantially.
We don’t need a massive military to confront terrorism, just a smart one. You are also buying into the neocon/complex false argument that the task is so overwhelming and scary that we have to throw large forces and billions and billions of dollars at the “enemy.” Iraq has made the job much more difficult than it would have been, but we can weather the storm as long as we don’t let the boogeyman ruse prevail. The cold war lasted much longer than it needed to because when one side builds a larger capability the other side feels obligated to do the same. This bully confronts bully and violence escalates is not the solution for the future.
If you keep reading blogs like this one and the wise people who comment here, you will stop falling, like I have done, for phony, conning logic by people who clearly do not have your safety and those of your troops anywhere on their radar screens.
-
RE: I don't expect you to stop believing this
Paul Dirks,
"But the freedoms this country have and enjoy exist because its a desirable state in which to live and if we were to lead by example, the world would inevitably follow. But by thinking that we, by virtue of having a large military, have a right to control what goes on in the rest of the world, well then we're pretty much by definition, enemies of freedom."
The freedoms in this country have and will continue to exist ONLY because brave and decent men and women are willing to die to defend them. You make it sound like this state came into being simply because it was desirable...nothing could be further from the truth. It came into being when men who desired a better way of life decided to FIGHT to get it.
"Democracy and Freedom only come from the end of gun when you happen to be on the stock end of it." Hummm...I seem to recall that the French helped a fledgling country fight against the tyranny which it felt was oppressing it and aided it in gaining it's independence from a faraway King.
That was the United States of American in 1776! Good thing the French didn't think the battle wasn't worth getting into or we might still be speaking the King's English right now.