Iraq War Supporters

[Black Dog]

Under the deal, the two sides agreed on a mechanism to consider amending the constitution after it is approved in Saturday's referendum. The next parliament, to be formed in December, will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to a referendum.

AP

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So why are they voting on a constitution they can just turn around and change (and vote on all over again) down the road?

[Shady]

So why are they voting on a constitution they can just turn around and change (and vote on all over again) down the road?

You mean like the American Constitution?

[Black Dog]

So why are they voting on a constitution they can just turn around and change (and vote on all over again) down the road?

You mean like the American Constitution?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nonsense.

The men who met in Philadelpha in the summer of 1787 were the winners of a protracted revolutionary struggle for national independence -- not the leaders of a collection of squabbling ethnic and religious factions, many of whom spent years in exile and then rode back into their native land on the backs of foreign tanks. The framers of the U.S. constitution expelled an occupying army. The founders of the New Iraq are guarded by one.

The reason for the sudden about face on the constitution (which was to have been locked in without amendments for a period of eight years) is that the push to get a deal done pushed the Sunni's off side; now the U.S is scrambling to bring them back by offering them this concession, a move which render s the whole referndum essentially useless as anything more than a tool for stirring up more resentment among the already disaffected (and violent) Sunnis.

[err]

Under the deal, the two sides agreed on a mechanism to consider amending the constitution after it is approved in Saturday's referendum. The next parliament, to be formed in December, will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to a referendum.

AP

So why are they voting on a constitution they can just turn around and change (and vote on all over again) down the road?

Sign the deal, because it's not binding, but at least we'll be able to hold it up and pretend that it is.... and show the American public how "we've built Democracy in IRAQ"....

[Shady]

The men who met in Philadelpha in the summer of 1787

How many times has the U.S. Constitution been changed since the summer of 1787? Case closed.

[Guest eureka]

Any Constitution can be changed. No Constitution before this has a built in provision to allw for changes if one party to the "consensus" does not like what has been agreed to.

This Constitution says that this is the law but not necessarily the Law.

[Black Dog]

The men who met in Philadelpha in the summer of 1787

How many times has the U.S. Constitution been changed since the summer of 1787? Case closed.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Uh...no. See, the simple fact that the Iraqi constitution will be changed within months of its passage renders the referendum moot, as the document the people are voting for now is not the one they'll eventually get. The process allowed (and the Iraqis had requested) a six-month postponement of the deadline. The U.S, however, wanted a deal done. That haste and the subsequent concessions (none of which have addressed the key issues such as the creation of a southern Shi'a superregion and decentralized control of Iraq's oil wealth), have cast the legitimacy of the whole process in doubt.

What makes your analogy even more facile is the fact that the U.S.Constitution was drafted and subsequently amended by a stable government that was largely representative of the people who elected it, not a set of squabbling, violent sects with deep-seeded tribal and religious loyalties that transcend any spirit of nationalism.

[Shady]

What makes your analogy even more facile is the fact that the U.S.Constitution was drafted and subsequently amended by a stable government that was largely representative of the people who elected it, not a set of squabbling, violent sects with deep-seeded tribal and religious loyalties that transcend any spirit of nationalism.

Well, your premise is a little over-the-top, however, yes, there are large differences between Iraq of 2005 and America of 1787. So why do you think the Constitutions and political process should be exactly the same? I believe the term is enthnocentric.

[Black Dog]

What makes your analogy even more facile is the fact that the U.S.Constitution was drafted and subsequently amended by a stable government that was largely representative of the people who elected it, not a set of squabbling, violent sects with deep-seeded tribal and religious loyalties that transcend any spirit of nationalism.

Well, your premise is a little over-the-top, however, yes, there are large differences between Iraq of 2005 and America of 1787. So why do you think the Constitutions and political process should be exactly the same? I believe the term is enthnocentric.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You should probably consider those differences you speak of before putting forward such a patently silly comparison.

[Shady]

You should probably consider those differences you speak of before putting forward such a patently silly comparison

Maybe you shouldn't be so ethnocentric in your opinions toward other cultures. The biggest difference between Iraq's constitutional process and America's constitutional process is that Iraq is allowing all groups to participate. I'm sure there would have been some slight disagreements on the behalf of the native population and the slave population in America, if they would have been allowed to participate. Definitely a little "squabbling" as you call it.

[Black Dog]

You should probably consider those differences you speak of before putting forward such a patently silly comparison

Maybe you shouldn't be so ethnocentric in your opinions toward other cultures. The biggest difference between Iraq's constitutional process and America's constitutional process is that Iraq is allowing all groups to participate. I'm sure there would have been some slight disagreements on the behalf of the native population and the slave population in America, if they would have been allowed to participate. Definitely a little "squabbling" as you call it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

"Ethnocentric"? Based on words you put in my mouth? I have made no judgement on how the Iraqi process should go, but simply stated your comparison of Iraq's constitutional process with that of the United States is a poor one. You somehow interpreted that as meaning I expected the two processes to be idenitical, when I said no such thing.

As for your contention that the Iraqi process is somehow more inclusive, well, that's debatable at best, but really neither here nor there (I'll refrain from pointing out the squabbling that did occur in the United States between the federalist and anti-federalist camps). In Iraq, we have a process where two groups hold the hammer over the third, a process brokered by the U.S. ambassador in and resulting in a fluid document, the result of which likely being the decentralization and de facto break up of the country on sectarian/ethnic lines.

In other words, the key difference between the two processes is that one was guided by certain elites to balance competiing interests and prevent the formation of a system of regional confederacies, the current Middle Eastern version is a winner-take-all scramble. The fact that no one at the negotiating table in Iraq is all that concerened with things like pluralism or equal rights (after all, how does one maintain equal rights when a patriarchal, old-time religion is codified as the source of all law?) seems to escape the right wing.

[Shady]

I have made no judgement on how the Iraqi process should go

Wow, congratulations on some top-notch lying. You absolutely did make judgements on how the Iraqi process should go. My America/Iraq comparisions came after you had made your orginial ethnocentric comments related to the constitutional compromise I had posted. See original post:

Iraqis Reach Breakthrough Deal on Charter

AP

Your response:

So why are they voting on a constitution they can just turn around and change (and vote on all over again) down the road?

My response:

You mean like the American Constitution?

So let's remember, my American/Iraq comparison came after you had stated your ethnocentric opinions regarding the Iraqi constitutional process. Please stop lying liar. Thanks.

[Black Dog]

Wow, congratulations on some top-notch lying. You absolutely did make judgements on how the Iraqi process should go. My America/Iraq comparisions came after you had made your orginial ethnocentric comments related to the constitutional compromise I had posted. See original post:

Wow in addition to being intellectually dishonest, you're also a jerk wad with shoddy reading comprehension skills. A dynamite combo.

So let's remember, my American/Iraq comparison came after you had stated your ethnocentric opinions regarding the Iraqi constitutional process. Please stop lying liar. Thanks

First: you have in no way shown how my inocuous comments as to the flaws in the Iraqi constitutional process are evidence of "ethocentrism". In truth I doubt you even know what the word means, let alone be capable of explaining how pointing out the obvious flaws in the Iraqi process (flaws that are evident to Iraqis themselves) is evidence of some ideas of ethnic superiority. Certainly the quote you cited is no evidence of such.

Now if i were to make a judment on how the process should go, I would, off the top, say it would be best if all parties had a common goal, and were willing to address and compromise on those issues that are preventing that goal from being reached. The Iraqi process is simply an arena for the various ethnic/sectarian and religious groups to jockey for position to determine who will benefit most from the new Iraq: there's no common goal, no vision of the "new Iraq" that each group can endorse. Just a winner-take-all scramble in which no one is willing to offering any significant concessions to their foes. Calling such a stew a recipe for disaster (including political failure and outright civil war) isn't ethnocentrism: it's plain common sense.

[cgarrett]

back to the original post...

hilarious!!!

thanks for the post, ironside!

the cost of the iraq war to the american people is, of course, ridiculous. isn't iraq the second most rich oil country in the middle east? shouldn't iraqis be paying for this?

well, of course these questions are rhetorical. us and uk oil firms i suspect are firmly planted and moving oil far before any bread trucks arrive and using that oil to pay for the rebuilding would cut into their extreme profits.

this is a good study on the subject of iraq oil and war:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2...aniesiniraq.htm

[dollar]

5000+ awols

2,000+ tons of uranium shells used in Iraq

any debate between Bush and the real soldiers and bush would get knocked to the floor fast and hard

History Lesson For Military Superpower

Opponents fight one type of war, our military fights another type of war, there is a military stalemate and eventually the U.S. returns home. Is anyone learning anything?

By Stewart Nusbaumer

Frankfurt, Germany -- There is an awful truth stalking America -- one too uncomfortable for Americans to speak, even to think, and too dangerous for the mainstream media to report.

Americans spend $450 billion annually on defense, which is nearly as much as all of the world’s military budgets combined, yet our astronomically expensive military cannot catch a 6’5” Arab in a small corner of the world? Our awesomely powerful military can blow up the world, yet it can not subdue a few dizzy fanatics setting off crude road bombs that has spiraled into a full fledge insurgency? We have the most expensive and most the powerful military, but can it do anything?

I’m thinking this while zipping through Germany on a super smooth train -- unlike our roller coaster kidney mixers crawling at camel speed. I’m looking out at a prosperous and secure Germany. There are not gutted-out cities here, not abundantly abandoned factories, not legions of homeless and armies of criminals, not a depopulation of the impoverished heartland as in America. And there is not a public that would elect as president an ignorant nut case. Germany has moved on, but it learned from its horrible mistake. And today Germany is being rewarded for learning from its history.

Meanwhile America is moving backwards. It refuses to learn from its ugly past, so today it is in another ugly mess. The disaster in Iraq was clearly foreseeable, it would have been avoided if Americans, especially George Bush and his handlers, respected history. But George Bush doesn’t like history. History is confining, history talks of limitations and says, “Don’t do that!”

In Vietnam our troops blew up rice patties and then the Vietnamese attacked us from the jungle. We defoliated the jungle and they attacked us from rice paddies. We blew up both the rice paddies and defoliated the jungle and they attacked us from the village. We leveled the village and they attacked us from the city. When we arrived in mass, they dispersed; when we departed, they massed again and then attacked. U.S. strategy had our highly mobile military racing all over Vietnam, often to where the enemy was not -- until we fell into their attack trap. Frustrated and tired, eventually we gave up and left Vietnam.

And did America learn? Did our military change? Take a wild guess.

What Was Not Learned

According to the mainstream media, the primary lesson of the Vietnam War is that Americans should not spit in the faces of our returning soldiers, a bogus lesson since Americans never did. On the other hand, little is said about the lesson of not getting our soldiers faces blown off in a useless, immoral war. The bogus is everywhere in America, the crucial is hardly heard. The American media doesn’t like history either.

Learning genuine lessons requires studying history, which superpower America won’t do. So today in Iraq a limited if not primitive military force is applying asymmetrical warfare and has stymied the world’s most powerful military. The Iraqi insurgents avoid our massive firepower, the U.S. searches for them mostly unsuccessfully. The guerrillas rely on stealth mobility while the all-powerful U.S. depends upon advanced technology. When our troops attack, the Iraqis disperse; when our troops leave, the insurgents return. The Iraqi opposition is not fighting our type of war and the U.S. military refuses to fight their type of war. The result will be a military stalemate. In military stalemates, however, the visiting army almost always loses.

Unwilling to burden the continuing cost in blood and money, both of which are huge for our expensive military machine and our vulnerable modern soldiers, the U.S. will quit this endless stalemate. But Iraqis will remain, it is their home. It is their country, not our country. And the discredited local government installed by the departed United States will fall like a stack of cheap Vegas cards.

All this is written in history, the history that all Superpowers refuse to read. After our defeat in Vietnam, the Soviet Union rushed to defeat in Afghanistan, now we are on our way to defeat in Iraq, possibly Afghanistan. Superpower militaries don’t change how they fight wars even when losing wars -- hey, they have super power!

The awful truth that Americans do not face and the media is uninterested in discussing is although we spend a fortune on defense, although our military has the most sophisticated and expensive weaponry in the world, although our troops are the best trained, our military is lousy at fighting today’s wars.

Osama bin Laden and his crew run free in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Security and order was never established in Iraq, now the country is in total chaos. Forces with little money and crude weapons outsmart our military leaders, fighting wars our military cannot fight, wars our arrogant, bloated, corporate-led military leaders refuse to fight. And when defeat is confirmed, when our troops return home in defeat, our generals will again, like after Vietnam, blame those “traitorous antiwar demonstrators,” our “liberal media,” those “back-stabbing politicians,” but never their outsmarted selves.

Of course the U.S. military has tinkered with its war strategy. For a while now the hot buzz words have been “special operations,” but for those who seek to challenge the U.S. on the battlefield, all war is special operations. While we talk they act. The Pentagon has made changes in troop training, but nothing to alter its cherished “way of war.” Yet our conventional war is successfully circumvented by our opponents -- well, Saddam Hussein didn’t in the Gulf War, but the world watched the slaughter and again learned the lesson not to fight a conventional war against the U.S. military. There is new equipment, but more sophisticated and expensive -- great for defense corporations’ profits, but lousy for fighting the unconventional wars of today.

We have quarter-billion dollar B-1 bombers sitting in Kansas, yet our soldiers in Iraq do not have simple armor for their vehicles. The Army’s 10th Mountain Division was ill prepared to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan, sluggish and disorganized. Some Marines are already on their third tour in Iraq, which will exhaust and degrade our elite corps. Soldiers speak of not understanding how to win a war where there are no boundaries and the enemy is unclear, their officers say push on. And Americans ask, why are our soldiers dying? Answers from Washington have stopped coming. It is Vietnam II, or history ignored again.

When the U.S. finally leaves Iraq -- after massacring thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis, after insuring the country degenerates into a vicious civil war, after earning the disrespect of nearly the entire world -- Americans will then evade these awful facts as it evaded the awful facts of Vietnam and the media will rush to a new disaster in the world which makes the avoidance relatively easy. And the U.S. military will return to training the best soldiers in the world and equipping them with the most expensive hardware imaginable, while the generals return to planning a new invasion of some Normandy. And in history, everyone will read about the terrible mistake Germany made, and how the Germans learned from their terrible mistake.

Perhaps all of us, elected representatives, military generals, regular citizens, need to take a trip to Germany and learn not what Germany did but what it is doing. What it is doing is not doing the awful that it once did. When will superpower Americans learn that?

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules...rticle&sid=1189

what we have here is stupidity

5000+ awols says alot

truth gets out soon ill be banned for telling the truth but anyways i have a million isp and names to use

Bush is a monkey

AMerican war supporters are as dumb as a door knob

debate on