Re: Fred Thompson - War is lost!
Wanting
Dumbass Dumbya attacked Afghanistan to satisfy his equally-assholey
supporters that the U.S. was getting "revenge" on the 9/11 attackers.
Of course, Bush didn't admit that HIS security and intelligence
communities FAILED to coordinate and connect the dots that would have
thwarted the terrorist plans in the first place.
We're going to continue to pay the price for decades.
And Bush's "revenge" is now a bloody, expensive, and unwinnable
conflict!
But with our loss in Iraq, we're used to such fiascoes.
n...@epix.net
Our "loss" in Iraq? Man the drugs you're on must be great!
palin@tsniffsniff.net Laughing Dems
<n...@epix.net> wrote in message
news:ab5f0363-944d-4958...@p33g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
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Iraq was Bush's revenge for Daddam's name calling of Poppi Bush's 'Desert
Storm'.
James Fenimore
VOICES IN A MINNESOTA TOWN
'I'm confused. What is our objective?'
By Peter Slevin
Sunday, November 22, 2009
WINONA, MINN. -- Christina and Jesse Fladmark were married on Flag Day
last year at the band shell on the Mississippi River. They chose the
spot largely because Jesse, a soldier, draws strength from the nearby
war memorial.
Twenty months later, Jesse is loading military convoys in Afghanistan
and Chris is teaching math at Cotter High School, staying in touch
with her husband as best she can and counting the months until he
comes home. When she mentions his mission, people often say, "Why are
we even over there? They should bring everyone home."
"That's really hurtful, even though they are trying to be nice," Chris
Fladmark, 27, said over a Baileys and hot chocolate on a rainy
southern Minnesota night. "That's not how I or my husband see it."
How to see the Afghan war is a conundrum that stretches from Winona to
Washington in a nation deeply divided over the wisdom of the fight.
Opinion here, where Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) recently devoted an entire
town-hall meeting to the subject, echoes a new Washington Post-ABC
News poll that reveals widespread doubts.
As President Obama seeks a strategy for a war now in its ninth year,
just 45 percent of respondents said they approve of his handling of
the issue, while 47 percent disapprove. Fifty-two percent said the war
has not been worth its costs, a rise of more than 12 percent since
March.
"I pray," Fladmark said, referring to Obama's imminent decision about
whether to send more troops. "I pray that God will make that decision
for him."
Winona, population 27,069, is a blue-collar town where Walz came to
take a sounding. After teaching geography, coaching football and
spending more than two decades in the National Guard, he beat a six-
term Republican in 2006 largely because he argued that the Bush
administration was botching the Iraq war.
With another war gaining prominence now, Walz keeps returning to the
question of a Vietnam veteran who told him that Obama's dilemma over
sending perhaps 40,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan reminded him of
another president -- Lyndon B. Johnson -- and another choice.
"His question," Walz said, "was, 'Could we have gotten to a peaceful
Vietnam without the loss of 58,000 Americans? Could we get to a fairly
stable al-Qaeda operation that is less of a heavy footprint, that is
more effective?'
"I think they're asking me to challenge my assumption on that, and I
will," said Walz, whose Minnesota National Guard duty included a tour
in Italy in support of the Afghan fight. He contends that his
predecessor in Congress, Gil Gutknecht, failed in 2006 to grasp the
"intensity" of dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, and he predicts that
"the emotion on this thing will get to that point . . . by next year."
At Winona's busy new American Legion hall on "cheap burger night,"
Amanda Johnson is already there.
"We've been there so much and lost so many. We shouldn't be caught up
in somebody else's war -- especially when it's a guerrilla war,"
Johnson, 22, says while playing cards and drinking beer. "It seems so
senseless."
Across the bar, Richard Franzen Jr. says the battle to topple the
Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden and his followers made sense in the
angry weeks after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center.
"Now I'm confused. What is our objective?" asks Franzen, 38, a
printing company worker and Obama voter. "It just keeps trudging on
day after day, at more expense and more cost."
For many, Afghanistan remains the background war, less understood than
the war in Iraq.
"Afghanistan's got the bomb, don't they?" asks Jim Thompson, a Winona
house painter who thinks he heard somewhere that al-Qaeda is close to
acquiring nuclear weapons.
"If we pulled out of Afghanistan, it would be instantly overrun.
Pakistan would give them the bomb and they would nuke Israel, and that
would have an effect on the whole world," Thompson says. "So we have
to step in."
Army Sgt. Timothy R. Martin was disheartened to return from an Afghan
tour and hear Minnesotans say, " 'I didn't know there was a war over
there.' It made me feel that the last year and a half was a waste of
time."
"Do you remember 9/11? It could happen again," said Martin, who
remains a believer in the original mission. "As long as we're over
there, doing what we have to do, they're not over here."
At Cotter, a Catholic school where more than two dozen students and
instructors gather each day to pray for peace, one of the regulars is
teacher Michael Donlin. He doubts that Afghanistan will become a
democratic society or a reliable military partner, yet he fears a
hasty exit.
Obama, he thinks, is in a "terrible, terrible spot."
"If they're going to tell me they're going to stabilize the country,
I'm against it," said Donlin, 63, an Army veteran. "If they say we can
put these clowns on the run, I'm okay with it."
Jim Bambenek watched in the auditorium of Winona State University as
constituents warned Walz of "nuclear holocaust" and eternal shame if
the Americans pulled out -- and a deadly quagmire if they stayed. A
vet himself, Bambenek was so ambivalent about his own war that he
dodged the draft before becoming an Army photographer in Vietnam.
"There isn't a day goes by that I don't think about Vietnam," said
Bambenek, who choked up at the Walz meeting, disturbed by the thought
of more families splintered and more soldiers killed.
"If I had my druthers, I'd say we should get out of there, but there's
so much going on that could collapse the entire world," said Bambenek,
a retired commercial photographer.
Will Gibson is afraid that Obama is stalling as he looks for a
"foolproof plan."
"My personal sense is he's not determined to win it. He's trying to
find the magic solution rather than picking a side and going with it,"
says Gibson, 32, who runs Cotter High's international students
program. He describes himself as a John McCain voter who hoped for an
Obama victory.
Gibson's own view: "Go in there. Win it. Do it."
Imagining himself as a military wife, Gibson asks, "What if my husband
died in that month while you were thinking about it?"
Chris Fladmark is a military wife. Until she fell in love with her
husband, the war was remote and she counted herself among the
oblivious. She does not follow news of war and policy now, but for the
opposite reason in a conflict that has grown personal.
A recent phone call from Kandahar tore her apart. Husband Jesse
reached her at school and told her that a Minnesota soldier killed by
a roadside bomb was driving a truck that would have been his, had he
not been transferred two days earlier.
"I started bawling. My husband just about died," Fladmark says, who
felt guilty and thankful all at once that a life was lost and it was
not her husband's. She feels his frustration on the days when purpose
seems missing from his corner of the war, and his satisfaction when he
is making a difference.
"Sometimes I say, 'Just stop it,' " Fladmark said of the war. "Other
times, I say that we need it for good changes to happen and there's
pain necessary for good things."
Each morning, she reaches for a rosary and says 10 Hail Marys, praying
for the fighting to stop.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112101238.html
Wanting
On Nov 20, 1:19 pm, Wanting <lilhor...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Our "loss" in Iraq? Man the drugs you're on must be great!
=========
Oh, yeah ... IF THE U.S. EVER WITHDRAWS THE 100,000-PLUS TROOPS WE
STILL HAVE IN PLACE IN IRAQ ... then the war will be lost, correct?
Otherwise, those 100,000 will there until after your death, right,
n...@eprix.net?
And we'll be winners, under your DAFFY DUMB SHIT [palin] reasoning ...
whoo-whoo!