Maybe I'm just a little dense sometimes, but I didn't understand your post last night. Now I understand what you were getting at, and it's an excellent point.

Here's a link to the ad along this theme (with an unmistakable jab at Obama) that's been running a couple of times a day, here in purple New Mexico. In the text, the WaPo claims it's for the General Election, but the NM Republican primary is like a month away, so I'm thinking that he's really paying for it using primary funds.

Otherwise, I haven't looked at tons of polling, but I have noticed that Iraq doesn't come out as most people's top issue and I have seen some data that shows the Dems mostly favor immediate withdrawal, the Republican go heavily toward "as long as they're needed" and the independents seem to like a timetable.

So much has passed since the beginning of this campaign, but without wishing for the fighting to stay worse and our soldiers to be in more danger, it may be a little hard to get this issue back on the radar with the moderate, mainstream, election-deciding voter.

Hi,
New to the boards here. Just wanted to say LisB Everything you posted is great, and I agree with you 100%

Great point, LisB. McCain's "100, 1000, 10,000 years" theme ("but not if Americans are taking casualties") illustrates that what he has in mind is a permanent occupation, which we can end when we're ready to -- not a "war" which we'd "lose" if we pulled out.

Of course, if we ended the occupation, we'd lose the "empire" the neocons have so cleverly acquired for us in Iraq.

As far as staying in Iraq, I wish that someone would challenge McBush when he says that we've been in South Korea, Germany, Japan for decades. We got established in those countries to provide a buffer against invasion from neighboring countries. Our presence in South Korea is a buffer against North Korea. We built our presence in the western Germany as a bulkhead against the Eastern Bloc. In Japan, we provided a bulkhead against Chinese aggression following Japan's defeat. In those three cases, we were/are providing protection against outside enemies and our presence was welcomed. In Iraq, the forces are internal and our presence greatly complicates the issues.

Someone please ask McBush to address this. Ask McBush about the success of fighting a war on the enemy's home court. How did the Soviets do in Afghanistan? The US in Vietnam? The US in Iraq? The British in India? The British in Africa? In war, the home team eventually wins.

"Stay the course". That slogan reveals all about what has happened and where McCain is coming from.

It does not take into account that once you have discovered that you set out on the wrong course, that staying on that course just compounds the original mistake, and turns it into sheer willful stupidity. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind". That is how George W. Bush behaves, and how John McCain is promising to behave.

Perhaps it is a guy thing, you know; having a problem admitting that they are lost and being willing to ask for directions and turn around if needed. For the record, I am a man.

Do not take John McCain's surrender ploy too seriously. He knows that it is not that, but it is a great hot button word that hurts the pride of macho Americans.

The reality is, that if you engage in a home invasion, and you meet strong resistance from the real owner of the house, getting your arse out of the house that you had no right to invade is not surrender; it is backing away from compounding your original folly.

Um, as far as Islamofascist goes, Obama has already talked about that - I remember him mentioning that it was time to stop that in a speech a month ago at least.

Where do you see the invasion and "war" ending and the occupation starting?

About three and half weeks in when the statue of Saddam fell. Iraq's army wasn't defeated. Most of them simply melted away after a decade's worth of leafleting and high level contacts by the US military. Even General Odom has testified that we promised for years that if and when push came to shove we'd let them live and keep them in uniform and employed if they'd refuse to fight for Saddam. That's why there was no huge battle in the streets of Baghdad 5 years ago. Then Rummy and Cheney broke those promises and fired half a million heavily armed men and put them on the street with no way to support their families.

You couldn't have asked for a better method of inciting an insurgency. Now we're paying 90,000 ex Sunni soldiers $10 a day not to fight us. Just before Maliki attacked his fellow Shiites in Basra the Sunni tribes were ready to call a strike, a work stoppage of cooperating with Americans against the few crazy Al Qaeda wannabes in the country for breaking that promise and cutting off those paltry paychecks in Anbar because the jihadis have moved to Mosul.

We invaded, occupied and destroyed their country. We've arrested them without charges, imprisoned them without trial, tortured and abused them breaking our laws and int'l law in the process. The Bush Administration claims we have the right to do this against non uniformed enemy combatants ignoring the fact that this kind of brutality by the British against our own non uniformed combatants - the minutemen - and the population of
the US is what turned a majority of US citizens against Great Britain in our own Revolutionary War.

You mean as soon as we defeated the Iraqi army, mission accomplished, etc.?

Exactly, but not exactly. Hardly anything is clear cut. What started out as

(a) a war of defense from WMD threats to our security, became

(b) a war of liberation from a horrible dictator (selecting one from the dictators that ran Saudi Arabia, Myamar, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran, etc.), and then morphed into

(c) a war for democracy.

In this last war, who are we warring against? Who is the enemy? The insurgents? The opportunistic local al Qaeda franchise? (Did we know that al Qaeda means "the base"?)

That's the problem. You really can't have a war for something, because a war implies an enemy, someone to war against. Instead what we have is an occupation that ends when Iraq becomes a democratic republic. When did that transition occur from a war to an occupation? As with all labels (war vs occupation), there really is no single jump, just a messy transition.

At the start, we had a war against an army. Within a few years or so, we had an occupation. It's silly to ponder exactly when. It's more useful to see that there has been a transition.

McCain doesn't see.