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We don't all hate Bush--He seems to have nice suits and shoes, which maximize the profound effect of his smirk and swagger, adding to his manliness...

I'll only make a few comments.

FIrst, we were welcomed as liberators by those praying for liberation - and fought against by those profiting from Saddam's insanity. Refer to my combat patch, and current location for any doubt on that matter - I strongly suspect no one speaking based on CNN reports has had any Iraqi men, women, or children offer him "grace and peace of Allah be upon you!" I have.

Second, no - every branch has most certainly not exceeded expected enlistment - in fact the Army (my branch) fell short again this year. They did however raise their expected enlistment figure from last year by 10%, and exceeded last year's enlistment target this year. Retention is also not as successful as DA would like. Regardless of the cause - people don't like war, especially when they're the one's being shot at.

Lastly, the casualty complaining is ludicrous - we lose roughly the same number of soldiers in garrison. Consider the figure of 2000 KIA from early 2003 to late 2005 - that's not a far cry from the annual loss of life across branches from accidents, natural death, homicide, and gross stupidity (DUI). In OIF1 my brigade lost 4 soldiers - between redeployment from OIF1 and deployment for OIF3 - we lost five times that many. OIF3 has brought roughly the same number of casualties as our time at home station between deployments.... From the standpoint of statistics - it's actually safer for some brigades in the sandbox than it is at home.....

http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/1405.cfm

Kal wrote:Our government wasnt particularly happy about that information being in the public arena so the man's reputation was poublically destroyed and he commited suicide shortly afterward.

I feel vaguely ashamed that I cannot remember the mans name.

David Kelly.

macktruckturner wrote:I'll only make a few comments.

FIrst, we were welcomed as liberators by those praying for liberation - and fought against by those profiting from Saddam's insanity. Refer to my combat patch, and current location for any doubt on that matter - I strongly suspect no one speaking based on CNN reports has had any Iraqi men, women, or children offer him "grace and peace of Allah be upon you!" I have.

Second, no - every branch has most certainly not exceeded expected enlistment - in fact the Army (my branch) fell short again this year. They did however raise their expected enlistment figure from last year by 10%, and exceeded last year's enlistment target this year. Retention is also not as successful as DA would like. Regardless of the cause - people don't like war, especially when they're the one's being shot at.

Lastly, the casualty complaining is ludicrous - we lose roughly the same number of soldiers in garrison. Consider the figure of 2000 KIA from early 2003 to late 2005 - that's not a far cry from the annual loss of life across branches from accidents, natural death, homicide, and gross stupidity (DUI). In OIF1 my brigade lost 4 soldiers - between redeployment from OIF1 and deployment for OIF3 - we lost five times that many. OIF3 has brought roughly the same number of casualties as our time at home station between deployments.... From the standpoint of statistics - it's actually safer for some brigades in the sandbox than it is at home.....

Thank you for your service and your unique perspective macktruckrunner. Your comments on fatalities is precisely why the powers that be shouldn't have lowballed us in the prelude to the war.

I’ve been away from this thread for a while because I’ve been out of the office lately.

cb360, bless him, has raised many of the issues that I would have raised.

People who think Rush is a good source of factual information are seriously deluded. People who uncritically repeat his “facts” are lazy, don’t care about the truth, or both.

Yes, I’m sorry to have to use such harsh words, but the anger that Rush has effectively channeled toward liberals (they are the sole cause of this great country’s decline, doncha know) has forced me to fight fire with fire.

Let me say this again. Rush doesn’t fight fair. He’s deceitful. The quotes posted at the beginning of this thread are proof of that.

He’s gathered (most likely his assistants have gathered) quotes from a time when Saddam was actively pursuing and using WMDs (early 1990s) and misrepresenting them as if they were somehow related and relevant to the time when the U.S. and the U.K. were desperately patching together “evidence” of Saddam’s supposed possession of WMDs in the early 2000s.

And Rush has the nerve to tell his dittoheads that liberals have no morals. Yeah, right.

Well, I’m a liberal, dammit, and I say it’s pretty frickin’ immoral to invade a country, kill between 10,000 and 30,000 of its innocent civilians (no one knows for sure) based on a bunch of lies.

How many of those civilians would be alive today if we had not invaded?

Remember, Saddam was a ruthless prick, and he routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed his political enemies. Yeah, life under Saddam sucked and has sucked for a long time.

But would he have outright killed 10,000 of his people since March 2003? Or killed 30,000? Hardly. He was a ruthless prick of a dictator, but after the first Gulf War, he was a contained ruthless prick of a dictator. And he had no WMDs, and was in no way even remotely on the verge of obtaining WMDs.

You think this is a War on Terror? Do you think we are killing terrorists over there? Most every one of those 10,000-30,000 dead innocent civilians had a sister, brother, mother, father or other relative who now has a damn good reason to hate the U.S. and the U.K. How many of them will now be sympathetic to the al-Qaeda recruiters?

This unnecessary, immoral, and ill-conceived war has screwed us over for a long, long time to come.

That's actually easy to answer. Here's the two main reasons:

1. The U.N. mandate under which the first Gulf War was prosecuted only covered ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait. There was no mandate to overthrow Saddam and occupy Iraq. Bush Sr., as the leader of the 34-nation coalition conducting the operation, merely did what the coalition was authorized to do.

2. Regardless of the U.N. mandate, Bush Sr. also heeded the excellent advice of his advisors, who warned him that overthrowing Saddam and occupying Iraq would be a huge undertaking that would require several times the number of troops used to win the war. It would also have meant a commitment of many, many years -- for which there was very little support in America. Bush Sr., in this regard, looks like a genius compared to his son.

we'll be here for several more years.