Hi Perry,

I don't think the "stay the course" folks mean to keep doing what they've been doing (I sure hope not!), but rather to keep working towards the objective of leaving Iraq as a better, more democratic place than it was before the war.

I was dead against the war but now it is what it is.
I don't see much in the way of progress towards making Iraq a better place than it was before the war, but I don't think that pulling troops out is going the help that cause in any way.
On the other hand, some strategy somewhere has got to change, and fast. I have no idea what that would be, but I do know that pretending that things are really in the hands of the newly established "government" is poppycock.

One thing seems obvious to me, and that is the current group of "planners" have proven their incompetence beyond any shadow of a doubt and replacing every single one of them wouldn't hurt a thing and likely would help immensely.
Many U.S. corporations have collected billions yet their objectives remain undelivered. But the spigot controlling the gravy remains wide open. Don't you wish you could have a few contracts like that in your life?

cheers


>Without getting into the argument of whether it was known if weapons existed, if it was wise to attach any credibility to a source known as "curveball", etc, lets focus on the fact that we have created 2 messes, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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>Once again, lets not get into the discussion of how no one disagreed with going into Afghanistan and eliminating Al-Queda and the Taliban. But that many will argue the point that resources were pulled from just that mission to focus on Iraq, thereby creating 2 failed missions.
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>Let's focus on the present. With the document sent by the Iraqi embassador to Bush describing the state of anarchy that seems to exist in Iraq now, what do you see occurring different should we continue down the same path we are now?
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>That is the problem many have with "stay the course". The present course is a failed course.
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>I remember my first IT job. A nighttime computer operator on a mainframe. There was a remote operation that processed payroll. I was at the console the first night they were processing payroll after new payroll tax rules went into effect. I was watching the console when they submitted the first job for payroll. It crashed with an "SOC7" error. Standard error on IBM mainframe that is similar to a VFP "data type mismatch" error. The console went silent for about 5 minutes. Then for the next 15 minutes, the same job was submitted every minute. It appeared the programmers thought that they could change the outcome if they continued down the same road, just faster.
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>The situation in Iraq has degraded since our occupation. What can we possibly hope to accomplish by staying on the same road?
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>>Santorum's an idiot. However, Saddam Hussein went out of his way to make people believe he still had the weapons. That's been demonstrated over and over.
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>>We shouldn't leave Iraq until we're finished there, and not a moment before.