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No, we haven't done anything but secure some oil.
A success according to what? We haven't even done anything except create a mess for the Iraqi people in a preemptive, unconstitutional war. We can't have accomplished anything, because we don't know what it was we were supposed to accomplish in the first place!
It's easy to make something into a "success" when you redefine your goals every few months.
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."
LOL That's sadly true…
the whole thing is a joke
Are you free to criticize those of us who have given you your freedom with our lives and blood?
Do you march to the tune of a petty Hitler like Saddam Hussein?
From those of us who fight for your freedom; War is neither measured as success or failure.
For those of you who still believe that Iraq was invaded so that we could have all that oil, then I ask you why do you still pay over two dollars a gallon at the pump?
Do not ask yourselves if the fight in Iraq was justified, as the people of Iraq who now are choosing their own leaders and breathing free air. Ask their children who now go to school – Girls as well as Boys.
And as for me, I believe that if you are of the ilk who will always rely on someone else to fight for your freedom, then maybe you do not deserve to be free.
And THAT is my not-so-humble opinion!
Let me know when my liberties are threatened from a source other than our own government. I'll be glad to sign up to serve in defence against tyranny and oppression. I'd have to wonder when it was that my freedom was actually at risk here and at which point I might very well fight, either in legal or physical forms, whichever the setting called for.
So far as advancing liberty elsewhere, there are easier, cheaper, more effective and less hypocritical ways to do that than at gunpoint and with occupying military force. Ask the people of Iraq again in about 5-10 years. Hell ask the people of Afghanistan now. We've already been there almost a decade in the course of "nation building".
#1- I was not criticizing our military. Our military is doing a wonderful job doing what they are told, which is what they should be doing. It's the government that is the problem. The government got us into an unjust, unconstitutional war, ignored the proper rule of law, has killed thousands of our boys and girls for practically nothing, and why?
#2- Saddam Hussein was not taking away my liberties. We had absolutely zero right to go in there and 'stop' him. Iraq is a sovereign nation. If they wanted a Republic, they could have gotten one. Eventually, some young man would have risen up and overthrown Saddam. And if he didn't, well, that's their own fault.
#3- the ends do not justify the means. We overthrew a sovereign regime simply because we did not agree with their ideology. (Of course, the reason for that war has been changed manymany times, as Sun Tzu pointed out.)
#2 I agree in principle that a nation will tend to have the government it wants. In practice, there are sensible objections that should be raised to tyranny when it occurs abroad. This is largely because people like Saddam are, shall we say, unusually adapt at exercising the strong man tactics needed to maintain their power in their home country. There will not be some promising young man who will emerge to take the reigns of power and surrender them to the people because such a young man will be executed (and framed rather than martyred), exiled, or not created in the first place in a system designed to create loyal and fearful subjects rather than thinking and autonomous people. This is, in most cases, the reality. Democracy as an ideal is hard to come by in places governed by fear of the law rather than liberty through it.
#3 The distinction I might make as far as nation-building goes is that the last two times we did this (Germany and Japan) both countries had recent experience with a central and unified government, and some basic appreciation of what we consider basic human liberties (even if they both seriously and tragically repressed them during the War era). Iraq and Afghanistan have had no experience with western liberalism as a governing tradition, no serious central control which allowed their various factions to share power rather than to exploit it for their own ends, and most importantly, neither country and its people posed an intentional and international threat in the manner that WW2's aggressive war makers did (fighting Al Qaeda using military force where necessary is a separate, though still somewhat thorny, issue from the invasion of sovereign nations).
These are not fertile grounds in which to expand an ideology of democratic ideals like (classical) liberalism because there are no existing institutions on which to base those ideals. They don't have a history of educating their people or of respecting the institutions of power simply because of the values they inherit to us as a society rather than because we fear them. So it would be best to demonstrate these low-hanging fruits ourselves, to such places as these, as exemplars of the systems we deem so valuable as to transmit by force instead.
Absolutely
Saddam had WMDs and connections to Al-Qaeda. He sponsored terrorists all day long and murdered his own people. The Iraq War is a major success. We now have given democracy to people who have only known tyranny.
"I agree in principle that a nation will tend to have the government it wants"
-That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I guess the hundreds of thousands of people Saddam murdered wanted to die to.
Liberty speaks the truth. Any way of fuzzying up the realities of why we're involved in that region are dangerously complacent. We have no right, authority, or leg to stand on in tell any other country what to do so long as what they're doing does not impact us. Which it did not. Sometimes action like that is necessary, but the Iraq war was sold on a cheap notion of retribution and democracy building by an administration that had no respect for the gravity of their actions.
And there's rarely a "win" in war, usually one side either gets the other side to call uncle or wipes them out instead and there's only one side left to call itself "winners". Our military is a precious resource and our government has raped them of their promise to their country. They were sent in on a lie, abused, recycled, sent back several more times, and all this was done in the name of America giving a simple gift for a democracy-hungry nation that didn't exist, never asked for us, and now has hundreds of millions less people. Oh, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That was the Saudi's, America's best friend in the middle east–besides Israel–and one of former president Bush's best friends!
Firstly, no, Saddam did NOT have any Weapons of Mass Destruction. He had old Russian MiGs, old Russian tanks, and even older Russian missles. No nukes, No chems, No biologicals. So get that one out of your head right now. We went in there looking for even the smallest trace of yellow cake uranium and found nothing. Honestly, we would like to believe we have given the Iraqi people democracy but in truth alot of them are more frightened by the fighting now then they were when Saddam was around. They are getting blown up by three parties now instead of the usual one. And while I tend to agree that the world in general is a better place without Saddam Hussien I think we made a big mistake going in there. Also, to any reactionary who continually shouts that this war is about oil…. then WHERES the oil?!? If we went in there to "steal" all of the countries oil why aren't we shipping it here by the boat load…. it's all still going through OPEC and it's back up to $3/gallon… I wish this war was about the oil!!!
The opium trade is booming… black tar heroin vs black tar!
it depends what you mean by success. Military, obviously we won. We didn't lose any battles.
Our objectives when going in were to rid Iraq of Saddam. We did that.
End the link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam. The link is still debated, but whatever link there was it was detroyed.
Bring freedom to the Iraqi people. We did that.
So yeah we did win. But the liberal media will never say that. The fact is we accomplished what we went there to do.
Torture is such a strong word for what the United States used to do, more like forceful interrogation. I do believe torture is acceptable for some situations and is better than what the government is doing now.