Why not vote Bush?

[Bond]

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

I know that somethings didn't go as planned or something along those lines.

What are you talking about?

F*ck you, we are going alone

No, there is and was a coalition of thirity-two countries.

Let's find a new issue other than Iraq to mindlessly argue about, ok?

[Neo]

Originally Posted by Bond

No, there is and was a coalition of thirity-two countries.

Each of which was indespensible to the war effort. Especially Albania - Or some country that sounds like it.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

I think by now we know Strangler that you hate the UN. I know that somethings didn't go as planned or something along those lines. But when you tell a "league of nations" the UN (that your on) F*ck you, we are going alone, it rings a bell to the other countries. They start thinking differently about the US. If any other country in the UN told them "Screw you, we are gonna fight that country without your support" other countries would look at that country, laugh, and never give support because they never requested support. But with Bush ya know, he goes alone and then says "Please send us troops even though we basically gave you all the finger back then"

There's a closed-minded person. You're looking at the issue from one perspective. Might I suggest you take a second to see the other perspective?

- "We're going to do what the UN was designed to do, and actually aim to help the condition of the world. Who's with us?"
- "Go **** yourself, US. We're not interested. We like the condition of the Middle East... it was good ever since World War I, when we screwed it up in the first place."
- "That's not right at all... somebody's gotta do it, and I'm not going to let the inadequacy of my shipmates keep me from docking on this plan to refurbish the East in the Middle."


There's a fine line between knowing whether it was the UN that betrayed the United States, or the United States that betrayed the UN.
That line, sadly and apparently, is Conservative or Liberal. And by God, we did "Liberate" Iraq.

[Bond]

Originally Posted by Neo

Each of which was indespensible to the war effort. Especially Albania - Or some country that sounds like it.

So we're allowed to say the coalition was indespensible, but the UN isn't indespensible? I see...

[Ace195]

Jonbo I'm gonna have to say the UN didn't want us to go in there because FOOD for OIL I mean if you look at what they were doing to the middle east they wouldn't want us to go there because they were ass raping those people

[Dylflon]

Okay. For once i'll be the one asking for a source. Somebody give me a link the proves this U.N.'s ass raping of middle eastern people.

[Ace195]

http://www.economist.com/agenda/disp...ory_id=2618260
And This

And This...

Between 1996 and 2003, the program generated over $63 billion in revenues for the Iraqi regime. With little oversight from the U.N., the Iraqi dictatorship was able both to circumvent and to exploit the oil-for-food program. It is suspected of selling its oil at bargain basement prices that benefited numerous middlemen while overpaying for various imports, which allowed it to reward suppliers. The program was officially brought to an end in November 2003.[3]

Read that..

[Jonbo298]

Originally Posted by Bond

Let's find a new issue other than Iraq to mindlessly argue about, ok?

Ok. Something besides Iraq. How about this post I made on the first page.

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

Oh yeah, and I'm not voting for Bush because he wants a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages. That pisses me off like you wouldn't believe because this is seriously becoming the 1960's/70's all over again except with one variation. I'm not gay but I feel everyone is treated equal. It's said in the constitution we are but yet Republicans think they can ban it because its "immoral". Leave it to the states to decide.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong but he's completely against abortion. I agree with the partial abortion ban but I don't want a full abortion ban. the first 3 months are fine becuase its the mother's child, NOT THE GOVERNMENTS CHILD.

And another reason. He doesn't want stem cell research. That pisses me off just as much as the same sex ban. Stem cell research is gonna bring promising things in the future but when you have an asshole who wants to block research that could one day lead to a cure for many diseases/forms of cancer, thats when I draw the line.

And I also agree that the Patriot Act is making the US look more and more like 1984. Bush took advantage of 9/11 by rushing this bill through congress within months after 9/11 which at that time all but one (black female I believe..can't remember name) voted for it without even reading the bill completely (thats my opinion but its basically true). If they took the time to read it, they would've said no to quite a few things in it but back then they were brainwashed, IMO.

and btw..I'm no political expert or anything. I skew some things by accident. Its human nature. Tear me apart

[Professor S]

And I do believe that I have been saying this about Oil for Food for well over a year. I don't want to say "I told you so", but well, when the shoe fits...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110004801

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0404182336.asp

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/I..._040420-1.html

A few more links for you Oil for Food pleasure.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

Tear me apart

I'll remember your proposal for another date. May I take a rain check?

[Jonbo298]

Originally Posted by Rumpelstilzchen

I'll remember your proposal for another date. May I take a rain check?

Ok

[Ace195]

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

"Please send us troops even though we basically gave you all the finger back then"

Just noticed this.. tired now about to go to bed but I have to say first. We never once asked for troops we simply said if you want to help in the rebuilding of this country and want to have anything here you will send troops to the region to support the effort.. If you notice there are no UN troops there there aren't any wearing the UN brand on their uniform there is strictly countries there that are supporting the US war effort and since they jumped in the UN has been saving face for lack of a better term by saying well lets support the ones already there..

[Stonecutter]

Why not?

Why is the better question.

http://www.exile.ru/195/war_nerd.html

Fallujah 2: Bush Bushwhacks the Marines

By Gary Brecher

Last time I took you on a nostalgia tour of our first year in Fallujah, from April 2003, when we blasted 20-odd demonstrators outside the local schoolhouse to March 2004.

Today I'll bring the story up to date by tracking our last four months in F-Town -- the wildest four months since Napoleon decided he was bored with Elba and hijacked a boat for the mainland.

On March 24, 2004, the US command in Baghdad announced that the 82nd Airborne, which had been in charge of Fallujah since we got there, would be replaced with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF), which was basically the 1st Marine division with attached air support. The 82nd had tried to play good cop; the Marines were going to crack some heads, convince the locals to stop messing with us.

The folks in Fallujah were just as eager for action as the Marines. One week after the Marines moved in, four "security contractors" driving through Fallujah were ambushed.

You probably remember what happened next. The four American corpses were kicked, beaten and finally hung up on a bridge. That wasn't just high spirits, that was strategy. The Fallujah insurgents wanted to get the Marines angry enough to come in blasting. The first ambush was just a way of setting up a way bigger ambush -- an old, old guerrilla tactic. Rumsfeld was on TV next day promising we'd "find and punish" the killers.

The Marines hit Fallujah hard on April 4.

It was a tough fight. The Fallujah insurgents have played it smart all the way, daring us to fight them on their own terms, in the crowded little dirty alleys they know by heart. It was a messy fight. Urban combat is just naturally gory and sloppy, and one thing this war's shown is that we're going to have to think hard about how to do it next time. War planners would rather not think about urban warfare. Their plans work much better in places like Utah or the Kuwait border: nice clean deserts.

Cities are like forests, and forest fighting is a mess. Commanders always hated it, tried to stay on open ground if they could.

Think about the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in the Civil War. Units get lost, cavalry (horse or mech) is useless, locals have a huge advantage.

In an urban war landscape, every window is a fighting position. When the Russians tried to take Grozny from the Chechen insurgents, they found out about the "vertical warfare" problem in city fighting. Most of Grozny was apartment buildings, big hulks nine or ten stories high. Advancing down the streets was like entering a canyon, where the enemy controls the high ground. Chechens on the roofs with RPGs blasted the first and last APCs, then finished off the stalled column without even working up a sweat.

The Marines were fighting well in Fallujah, but losing men for every street they advanced. And things were going even worse in the rest of Iraq. On April 6, we lost 12 Marines in a classic urban ambush in Ramadi, next door to Fallujah.

Then Bremer shut down al Sadr's newspaper -- now there was a smart move! -- and every Shiite slum in Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf turned on our troops. We were involved in urban combat on two fronts, a commander's nightmare. In two days, April 11 and 12, we lost 23 men.

The Iraqis who weren't shooting at us directly started kidnapping foreigners to take the pressure off the besieged cities. By April 12, they'd kidnapped a total of 40 foreigners: Japanese, Koreans, and even a Canadian. Imagine this liberal Canadian peacenik blogger trying to explain himself to the Jihadis who have him posing on his knees in some back room, with a big scimitar against his skinny throat: "I am NOT an American! I mean, I'm an 'American,' because like we always say, the US isn't the only 'America,' Canada is also American-" At this point they start sawing at his neck and he gets desperate, "Wait! You misunderstood! I'm Canadian! Lookit the big red maple leaf on my backpack! Listen to my accent, here: 'Get me OOT of here, Mommy!' -- you hear that 'oot'? Instead of 'out'? Aaagh!"

Bush decided to cave under the pressure. On April 11, Marines were ordered to accept a "truce" in Fallujah. The next week, Bush's people were desperately looking around for somebody they could make a deal with. On April 19, Bush's people announced that we had an agreement in Fallujah. The US would call off the Marine snipers (who were doing a great job picking off insurgents -- like I said, city fighting is a sniper's dream), and in return the people of Fallujah would turn in all "heavy weapons": surface-to-air missiles, mortars and machineguns.

Makes you kind of wonder what the garages look like in that town. Kids must get ashamed when they bring their friends over and there's nothing but a couple of RPGs: "Gee, Rashid, MY daddy has a brand-new SA-7 and a BMP-76 in OUR garage!"

The "heavy weapons" deal didn't work all that well. Gen. Kimmitt -- you know, the skinny guy who gets paid to tell Saigon lies at Baghdad press conferences -- said: "There's been some intangible progress, even though we did not see a tremendous number of weapons turned in."

I like that bit about "intangible progress." How do you get "intangible progress" with machineguns? A machinegun is pretty tangible. Love may be just a state of mind, but a machinegun -- that's pretty tangible. Another great line of Kimmitt's: "...we did not see a tremendous number of weapons turned in." Turns out that was kind of an understatement: "On Wednesday, [April 21],police officers [in Fallujah] delivered a pickup truck filled with rusty and largely inoperative weapons, not the modern equipment military officers had wanted."

One lousy pickup bed of stuff! That's worse than those ghetto "handgun buyback" programs where they try to get paid for a piece of pipe taped to a saw handle.

I can just see the scene: a bunch of disgusted, angry USMC officers watching this pickup pull up and getting a peek at the big haul: two British shotguns and some granddad's rhino-horn dagger. "So you're telling us THIS is what's been killing our men for a week?" "Oh yes yes! This is all! Fallujah now peaceloving unarmed city! Yes yes!"

It was so ludicrous even Bush's people had to face the fact that the only way to pacify Fallujah was to let the Marines do their job and take the city by storm. Even Rumsfeld admitted that the old men we'd made this phony truce with had no power over the insurgents.

On the April 24-25 weekend, Bush and Rumsfeld flew to Camp David for a videoconference with the Brass in Iraq on what to do with Fallujah. The Marines were psyched, finally sure they'd get the chance to do what they were trained to do.

This is the key moment in the battle for Fallujah, and I suspect for the whole war. And in the end, it came down to one simple fact: Bush chickened out. He or his handlers decided they couldn't risk casualties on the scale this battle would take while they were going for reelection. Sometime that weekend, they decided the Marines weren't going to get the chance to win the battle. They were going to be called off in favor of some cheap PR face-saving strategy. Monday, April 26 -- and as far as I'm concerned, this goes down in history as Black Monday -- the announcement came from Bush that "the US has opted to delay the Fallujah offensive...in favor of joint patrols" of Marines and local Iraqi security forces.

"Joint patrols"! That was it! Bush went on TV to tell the suckers that, "the situation in Fallujah is returning to normal." Well, if "normal" is leaving the enemy in possession of the city, letting them ambush any Marine patrol they want, then Hell yeah, Fallujah was as normal as it gets. He also said the joint patrols would make the city "secure." But to be fair, he did admit there were, and I quote, "pockets of resistance" still operating in Fallujah. Yeah. Like there are pockets of gambling in Vegas.

I wanted to spit on the TV screen.

So the battle of Fallujah was over, and we lost. The Marines were ordered to withdraw from the city. From now on they went in only as part of these ridiculous "joint patrols." Since then we've only attacked the city from the air, because that way we don't risk any casualties. Of course we also don't have a chance of dislodging the enemy, and we leave them in possession of the field, and we make our brave soldiers look ridiculous -- but I guess none of that is as important as PR for the election campaign.

Bush didn't even have the decency to mention the four dead contractors whose killers he and Rumsfeld promised we'd find and punish. Like all his big talk and promises to get tough, the dead were just plain forgotten. "Bring it on" -- yeah, sure. Until it might cost votes. Then he's all, "Call it off! Call it off!"

I thought that was the ultimate humiliation for American arms. But I was wrong. There was worse to come: these miserable ex-Saddam soldiers we stuffed into uniform and sent to patrol Fallujah under the command of an ex-Republican Guard general started to whine about having to patrol with the Marines. They said the Marines would draw fire, and that affected their safety. Poor babies.

This defeat -- this disgrace, more like it! -- has got our enemies all excited. "Fallujah" is a rallying cry now for Muslim crazies all over the world. It's like their Bastogne, their Alamo. It will go down in their histories as the turning point in the war, the moment when we faced off against them and we flinched first. And I'm not talking just about the war in Iraq, I mean the bigger, longer war we're supposed to be fighting.

The worst of it is, our troops fought brilliantly, damn it. No matter how ridiculous and contradictory their orders were, our Marines never flinched, never backed off, never showed fear.

It was our leader, our President, who chickened out, just like he did when it was his time to face combat in Nam 30 years ago. Once a chicken, always a chicken -- that's the lesson, I guess.

You know, in a lot of countries, politicians betraying an army fighting for its life in the field...a lot of times that sets off a military coup. Actually that might not be a bad idea.

Going to war in the first place: Bad
Not having the balls to clean up the mess he created: Deplorable.

[Bond]

1. You would still criticize George Bush if he went into Fallujah and hundreds of Marines died.

2. Should you really be talking about war, since you said it yourself you would never go?

3. That is the worst signature I have ever seen. It's David Ortiz anyway.

4. You used that website again... please read my previous post in relation to the last article you posted from that "newspaper":

This is from a guy whose e-mail address is war_nerd@exile.ru, who writes for "The eXile," a Moscow-based alternative newspaper, from a country that introduced the world to the wonderful KGB.

And look at this tasteless article:

This newspaper, and the morons that run it are .

[Crono]

Bond, I don't see your connection between that newspaper and Russia/the KGB. Sounds like you have some kind of hatred for mother Russia.

If the newspaper was German, would you make the same "connection" with the Nazis and Hitler?