A Marine Corp Veteran of Vietnam Speaks Out

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Elaine_s_Cross

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They Are Thinking About Iran and We Can’t Even Take Baghdad by James Glaser
Februray 15, 2005

If it sounds to us like George Bush wants to now take on Iran or maybe Syria, imagine how it sounds to those people. They know that America can kill tens of thousands of their innocent civilians in a matter of weeks, even in a couple of days.

Both of those nations have been watching how a small band of Iraqi nationals have been able to take out thousands and thousands of American troops, killing almost 1,500 of them and wounding over 11,000.

Paul Craig Roberts writes for Antiwar.com about what we have done to the Iraqi people and his words tell us why both Iran and Syria now live in fear of America. Roberts writes, "You see, the facts that the US invaded Iraq on false pretenses, killed and maimed tens of thousands of Iraqis, shot down women and children in the streets, blew up Iraqi homes, hospitals, and mosques, cut Iraqis off from vital services such as water and electricity, destroyed the institutions of civil society, left half of the population without means of livelihood, filled up prisons with people picked up off the streets and then tortured and humiliated them for fun and games are not facts that explain why there is an insurgency. These facts are just descriptions of collateral damage associated with America “bringing democracy to Iraq.”

Right now both Iran and Syria are living in fear that the United States might want to bring “democracy” to there countries too. Iraq is right next door to them and there television coverage is not controlled like ours. They see the dead and maimed Iraqi infants and children every night. They see the dead Iraqi mother lying in the dried pool of her own blood.

Another reason that people in these two countries are frightened is that they have seen war, they know what it is. Here is America war is something honorable, where brave young men and women give their all for shiny medals and perceived glory in some foreign land. Americans can look at war like that because they have no understanding of the real horror of war.

Our country was shocked and devastated by the September 11th terrorist attacks on our country. Iraq has been having multiple terrorist attacks for almost 700 days in a row. Some of those attacks have come from a home grown insurgency, but most come from American forces. American forces who claim that their guns, tanks and bombs are there to bring the Iraqi people freedom and democracy.

The people in Iran and Syria know, no matter what they say or how many inspectors they allow, America can still attack them at any time. Iraq told the world they had no weapons of Mass Destruction, they wanted us to inspect their country. Now we know they were telling the truth, but we have killed tens of thousands of their people anyways.

Before we attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan we told the world we were going to for weeks. That gave Osama bin Laden and Mulla Omar the time they needed to plan an insurgency that is still killing American troops there to this day.

Before we attacked Iraq we told the world we were going to for months and that gave the Iraqis that wanted to, time to plan and implement an insurgency which is growing stronger every day.

Now we are telling the world that we are looking hard at both Syria and Iran. We make threats and demands. Right now both of these countries are studying what the Afghans and Iraqis did right and what they did wrong. These nations know that the United States can destroy their military in a matter of days or weeks, but they will make us pay in blood to take their countries.

If after almost two years we still haven’t been able to take Baghdad and could only have an election by putting 300, 000 American, Coalition, and Iraqi troops on the streets, they know we are vulnerable. Like most bullies, George Bush wants to taunt these two third rate powers. Once again he wants to take on a pitiful Muslim military, because he has nothing else going for himself. George thinks there is glory in his wars and he will go down in history as some sort of great leader, but the world knows that they have a bully that they will have to suffer for another four years. George Bush is our bully. He takes on the poor and the pitiful like all school yard bullies do. George gains us no respect. Sometimes a bully pushes the wrong opponent and gets his clock cleaned. That won’t happen to George, because he has our fine young troops out in front of him… way out in front. They are the ones who will suffer and die for George and that is a crime.
 
Elaine's Cross:
Right now both Iran and Syria are living in fear that the United States might want to bring “democracy” to there countries too. .
No the Islamofascists and the Baathist fascists are living in fear that the United States might want to bring “democracy” to there countries too. And they should!

The people in those countries are praying each day that we do.

And what you have been told, over and over and over again (that you don’t seem to hear) is that:
  1. this is going to be a very long war
  2. it is a war about keeping a way of life.
 
errr, 1. we took Afghanistan; 2. we took Iraq (which includes Bagdhad; 3. we are occupying Bagdhad and haven’t been kicked out. 4. we will leave Bagdhad of our own accord. 5. we will invade other nations responsible for sponsoring terrorists attacks against the U.S., and the sooner the better; 6. we can defeat terrorists and discourage others; 7. we have been fighting with one armed tied behind our back, we need to reinstate the draft and start using our weaponry and stop misusing our soldiers as policemen; 8. the C.I.A. needs to be doing a lot more than it is.

As a veteran myself, I am not afraid of ‘Realpolitik’ .
 
“Its a war to keep a way of life”

You keep going there Gilliam… good job! 👍 :rolleyes:

We Wage War to bring Peace: G.W. Bush

He who LIVES by the Sword perishes: Jesus

As an ULTIMATE LAST RESORT…and telling the TRUTH of why we go to war…war should only be waged to PERSERVE (LIFE)…NEVER to keep “a way” of Life…“A WAY” is nothing but a LifeSTYLE… and I dont buy into the drivel that those people are jealous of “our way of life”…thats such immature thinking… they hate us cause of our Foreign POLICIES…some issues they are correct on and some not…its NOT black & white… but anyone who thinks those people hate us cause we have air conditioning, freedom and dvd players… and thats why they blow us up is misinformed…that is simply ENVY…it takes MUCH MORE to build a HATRED to cause a human being to blow themselves up…not some American owning a sweet SUV with a Sony Playstation in the backseat… :rolleyes:
 
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gilliam:
this guy has no credibility, read what he has written:

jamesglaser.org/politics.html

I think he is trying to relive his Vietnam war protest years.
Strange!!! I seem to remember you saying how much you admired “Our” boys who fought in Vietnam and how much you admired them and how they were four square behind everything GB did. Or is that only the ones who agree with you?
 
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Norwich:
Strange!!! I seem to remember you saying how much you admired “Our” boys who fought in Vietnam and how much you admired them and how they were four square behind everything GB did. Or is that only the ones who agree with you?
That is very disengenuous of you. I thought better of you than for you to stoop to wild generalizations and misquoting of someone. I am very disappointed.

😦
 
Faithful 2 Rome said:
“Its a war to keep a way of life”

You keep going there Gilliam… good job! 👍 :rolleyes:

We Wage War to bring Peace: G.W. Bush

He who LIVES by the Sword perishes: Jesus

As an ULTIMATE LAST RESORT…and telling the TRUTH of why we go to war…war should only be waged to PERSERVE (LIFE)…NEVER to keep “a way” of Life…“A WAY” is nothing but a LifeSTYLE…

OK, tell that to your child as the Islamofascists drag them off to be with an Islamic family to learn Islam. That is one of the goals of our enemy you know, and one of the methods. You do know that, don’t you?
 
monkeydyne.com/bushresume/resume.html

I think the real crux of the issue with “conservative” Catholics supporting the Bush regime is that they have latched onto the idea of that the spread of American-style pluralistic democracy is good for every culture and nation. This notion was condemnded by Pope Leo XIII as the “Americanism Heresy.”

From what I have seen there is also this fixation on Biblical prophecy and Israel and Armageddon as promulgated by fundamentalist protestants, Tim LaHaye, et al. Why Bush, as a Methodist and former Presbyterian has latched onto this, I have no clue. For Catholics to fall for it is, well…the Americanism Heresy blinds them?
 
Elaine’s Cross said:
monkeydyne.com/bushresume/resume.html

I think the real crux of the issue with “conservative” Catholics supporting the Bush regime is that they have latched onto the idea of that the spread of American-style pluralistic democracy is good for every culture and nation. This notion was condemnded by Pope Leo XIII as the “Americanism Heresy.”

From what I have seen there is also this fixation on Biblical prophecy and Israel and Armageddon as promulgated by fundamentalist protestants, Tim LaHaye, et al. Why Bush, as a Methodist and former Presbyterian has latched onto this, I have no clue. For Catholics to fall for it is, well…the Americanism Heresy blinds them?

Your link there is full of lies, half-truths, and distortions, as well as opinions masquerading as facts.
As Catholics, we should search for TRUTH, and not rely on trash like this.
 
Elaine’s Cross said:
monkeydyne.com/bushresume/resume.html

I think the real crux of the issue with “conservative” Catholics supporting the Bush regime is that they have latched onto the idea of that the spread of American-style pluralistic democracy is good for every culture and nation. This notion was condemnded by Pope Leo XIII as the “Americanism Heresy.”

From what I have seen there is also this fixation on Biblical prophecy and Israel and Armageddon as promulgated by fundamentalist protestants, Tim LaHaye, et al. Why Bush, as a Methodist and former Presbyterian has latched onto this, I have no clue. For Catholics to fall for it is, well…the Americanism Heresy blinds them?

We learned a lesson on 9/11. Extremist muslims want us dead. Dress it up and spin it however you want, They would like to kill more americans.
 
Elaine's Cross:
They Are Thinking About Iran and We Can’t Even Take Baghdad by James Glaser

Februray 15, 2005

If it sounds to us like George Bush wants to now take on Iran or maybe Syria, imagine how it sounds to those people. They know that America can kill tens of thousands of their innocent civilians in a matter of weeks, even in a couple of days.

Both of those nations have been watching how a small band of Iraqi nationals have been able to take out thousands and thousands of American troops, killing almost 1,500 of them and wounding over 11,000.

Objection Your Honor:
1500 doesn’t sound like “thousands and thousands”. In fact a couple hundred of those were non-combat related. More Americans are killed by traffic accidents every day than are killed by IED’s in Iraq.

Paul Craig Roberts writes for Antiwar.com about what we have done to the Iraqi people and his words tell us why both Iran and Syria now live in fear of America. Roberts writes, "You see, the facts that the US invaded Iraq on false pretenses, killed and maimed tens of thousands of Iraqis, shot down women and children in the streets, blew up Iraqi homes, hospitals, and mosques, cut Iraqis off from vital services such as water and electricity, destroyed the institutions of civil society, left half of the population without means of livelihood, filled up prisons with people picked up off the streets and then tortured and humiliated them for fun and games are not facts that explain why there is an insurgency. These facts are just descriptions of collateral damage associated with America “bringing democracy to Iraq.”
Objection your honor:
I’m sure that a website called “Antiwar.com” is going to be chock full of great information that is free of any bias. Actually, the cutting off of water and electricity seems to be the work of Michael Moore’s “minutemen”, not the CPA. As for blowing up homes, hospitals and mosques, I’m sure the fact that many of these homes and mosques were being used as firing positions and weapons aresenals by jihadists might have had something to do with that. I don’t know of any hospitals that were destroyed. The “Institutions of Civil Society” as this writer refers to them also had a nasty habit of feeding people in plastic shredders and filling mass graves, as well as invading neighboring countries for purposes of conquest. Call me crazy, but I think the Baathists might have something to do with the unemplyment rate too, given that they’re killing people who dare to show up for their jobs of reconstructing the country. Also want to quibble with the term “false pretenses”. The decision to go war in Iraq was based partially on premises that turned out later to be incorrect. That is not the same as false premises. The Bush administration acted on the best information that it had at the time which said that Iraq had WMD. At the time, every intelligence service in the world agreed with him. To invade under false premises is to assume that he knew that Iraq didn’t have WMD but invaded anyway. That was most emphatically NOT the case. To fail to understand this distinction (as this writer and many of those in the leftist fever swamps fail to do) is to engage in sloppy thinking.
Right now both Iran and Syria are living in fear that the United States might want to bring “democracy” to there countries too. Iraq is right next door to them and there television coverage is not controlled like ours. They see the dead and maimed Iraqi infants and children every night. They see the dead Iraqi mother lying in the dried pool of her own blood.
The Syrian and Iranian Governments are afraid of the US. The population generally isn’t except to extent that is believes the government propaganda. I find it interesting that the writer apparently believes that the media in these two totalitarian countries is freer than the U.S.

Another reason that people in these two countries are frightened is that they have seen war, they know what it is. Here is America war is something honorable, where brave young men and women give their all for shiny medals and perceived glory in some foreign land. Americans can look at war like that because they have no understanding of the real horror of war.
America is starting to understand what real war is with this recent invasion. We haven’t know about it for a long time because our recent military outings have been over too quick because our military is THAT good.
cont’d below
 
Our country was shocked and devastated by the September 11th terrorist attacks on our country. Iraq has been having multiple terrorist attacks for almost 700 days in a row. Some of those attacks have come from a home grown insurgency, but most come from American forces. American forces who claim that their guns, tanks and bombs are there to bring the Iraqi people freedom and democracy.

Uh, you might want to check with the Iraqi people with that. Most of the insurgent violence has killed Iraqis, not Americans. Large swaths of the country are actually peaceful and doing well. I am unaware of Americans setting off IED’s or blowing up police stations.

The people in Iran and Syria know, no matter what they say or how many inspectors they allow, America can still attack them at any time. Iraq told the world they had no weapons of Mass Destruction, they wanted us to inspect their country. Now we know they were telling the truth, but we have killed tens of thousands of their people anyways.
Actually, it was the fact the Saddam didn’t want inspectors that led the rest of the world to believe that he had WMD. Saddam himself stated that he wanted his neighbors to believe that he had WMD and that is why he kept obstructing inspections. The Duelfer report stated that he retained the latent capacity to produce WMD once the sanctions were lifted. But for a fortuitous strike by the Israelis on the reactor sold to Saddam by France, Saddam would probably have had nukes by the late 1980’s.

Before we attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan we told the world we were going to for weeks. That gave Osama bin Laden and Mulla Omar the time they needed to plan an insurgency that is still killing American troops there to this day.

Yes Americans are still dying in Afghanistan. But not as many as are the Taliban. Even those countries that opposed invading Iraq have troops in Afghanistan (i.e. Germany).
Before we attacked Iraq we told the world we were going to for months and that gave the Iraqis that wanted to, time to plan and implement an insurgency which is growing stronger every day.

It does take time to build up a military force, which this writer apparently doesn’t know about. As for insurgency getting stronger, I think that it’s kind of hard to guage that. Stronger than before we took out Fallujah, eliminating about 1500 of the jihadists? I don’t think so.
Now we are telling the world that we are looking hard at both Syria and Iran. We make threats and demands. Right now both of these countries are studying what the Afghans and Iraqis did right and what they did wrong. These nations know that the United States can destroy their military in a matter of days or weeks, but they will make us pay in blood to take their countries.

Who is telling the world we are looking at Iran and Syria? Even if we wanted to mount military operations against these countries, we would be unable to do so. Syria is starting to be condemned by other countries in the region for its persistent occupation of Lebanon. The mullahs in Tehran have more to fear from their own population than they do from the U.S. I am unsure what “threats” we have made to these countries. “We stand with the Iranian people in their quest for freedom” is a threat? Is demanding that Syria not bump off Lebanese politicians too big a demand?
cont’d below
 
If after almost two years we still haven’t been able to take Baghdad and could only have an election by putting 300, 000 American, Coalition, and Iraqi troops on the streets, they know we are vulnerable.
As General Abazaid put it, “There is nothing militarily that the insurgents can do to push us out of Iraq. We are here to stay” After two years, we still HAVE Baghdad. In fact here was an election there recently, if you recall.
Like most bullies, George Bush wants to taunt these two third rate powers. Once again he wants to take on a pitiful Muslim military, because he has nothing else going for himself.
GWB took a huge politcal risk and alienated a lot of the world with the invasion of Iraq. I don’t think he was doing it for self-aggrandisement.
George thinks there is glory in his wars and he will go down in history as some sort of great leader, but the world knows that they have a bully that they will have to suffer for another four years. George Bush is our bully. He takes on the poor and the pitiful like all school yard bullies do. George gains us no respect. Sometimes a bully pushes the wrong opponent and gets his clock cleaned.
So now the writer is a budding psychologists? You know a writer is really reaching when they start trying to project some sort of childish psychological profile onto their opponent. The ONLY reason that GWB invaded Iraq was that he is a bully? I’m sure that he could have picked easier targets in less volatile regions of the world than Iraq if that’s all it was about. Since we’re going psychological, I’m going to guess that this writer got beat up by a lot of bullies when he was in school. 😃
That won’t happen to George, because he has our fine young troops out in front of him… way out in front. They are the ones who will suffer and die for George and that is a crime.
Most of the troops seem to be just fine with trying to help rebuild Iraq and troop morale remains high. I guess that’s why the military vote went 75% to 25% for Bush in the last election. Remember this writer just spent the first paragraphs trashing our troops and accusing them of wantonly raping and pillaging the countryside, now he calls them “our fine young troops”. Our troops are risking their lives to help the people of Iraq, and this guy sits at home and calls what they are doing a “crime”. I’m glad we don’t rely on people like this to protect our freedom.

Elaine’s Cross,
Please, next time find a writer that actually makes sense. I could pen a more coherent anti-war screed than this guy. He gives peaceniks a bad name.
 
Inri, while I must admit that I don’t always agree with Mr. Glaser, I find, with all due respect, his arguments much more on target and believable than your attempted refutations. At least IMO he is dealing in reality as opposed to Mr Bush and his delusional supporters.
 
Elaine's Cross:
Inri, while I must admit that I don’t always agree with Mr. Glaser, I find, with all due respect, his arguments much more on target and believable than your attempted refutations. At least IMO he is dealing in reality as opposed to Mr Bush and his delusional supporters.
:hmmm: and who is delusional… :rolleyes:
 
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