The insurgents are the ordinary Iraqis defending their country. The terrorists are the people from other countries who came to take potshots at convenient Americans. Both types are there.

Not that I think that's what Galloway was saying.

There is a large majority of insurgents that are coming in from other countries. This no longer makes them defending thier country, but idiots trying to play the ultimate game of "dirt clod war."

Marichiko is straining much too hard to find an evil, any evil, in what is really a great good: removing the threat presented us by bigots and religious fanatics -- which threat is the greater if it is raised up in a non-democracy. Nondemocratic social orders are prone to wars, wars by proxy (terrorist movements, deniable with varying plausibility by the ruling circles) and extremism. Fomenting democracies in the midst of this cauldron of troubles is the best chance we have of making Islamoterrorism go extinct. Is this really any harder to follow than rocket science?

If Marichiko keeps straining like that, she risks losing an intestine. The result may be good for making the roses grow, but beyond that... tsk tsk tsk.

I don't ever think of was as a 'great good'. At it's best, war is an unpleasant neccesity. Also, most countries which invaded other countries in the past 100 years did so to 'liberate' those countries. There are a lot of justifications, and most of them only seem to be believed inside the borders of the invading country.

Iraq is either a $200+ billion mistake based on faulty intelligence or the result of a conspiracy. The fact that we are attempting nation building is supposed to be a side issue to the real reason for the war.

The men and women who are making the sacrifices in Iraq today are doing so because they took and oath and trusted their leaders to use them as a last resort.

Will it be worth it? It will be while before we know. Was it a great good? If the entire Iraqi population could have voted for the invasion, would they have? We never gave them the chance to do so, and we will never know.

As for a great good, ask the parents of a dead child if the price was right.

That is not what we are doing in Iraq. Hussein was a tinpot dictator, but he was a secular one. He tortured people for purely personal and/or political reasons. The bigots and religious fanatics are the ones who are now preparing to write sharia law into the Iraqi Constitution.

Why, that's what the US has been doing for decades! Good point. We do need to work on improving our democracy.

"We (the USA?) never gave them a chance"? Sorry, Rich, that was all Saddam's doing, as you know perfectly well. Now why in Hell didn't you have the honesty to so state?

"Ask the parents of a dead child"? Ask our dead soldiers' parents. You, Rich, will be surprised, indeed, shocked and awed, at the affirmative responses you will receive. If you have the moral courage to essay it.

My commitment to human liberty is not rattled by casualties. Not by any casualties in any amount -- for I know what freedom is worth, and know whose blood is shed to water Liberty's tree. You, OTOH, seem to know something of the cost, but not of the worth. You could stand to take a leaf from my book. I doubt you have the courage to manage it, but it would rid you of the moral cowardice I see in your position here.

I believe liberty is every bit as good for Yusuf al-Iraqi as it is for Joe Sixpack. Liberty is good for humans, and last I checked, Iraq was chiefly inhabited by humans.

Will the Shi'ite majority become politically dominant in Iraq? Very likely. It will turn out all right as long as the rights and liberties of the Sunni, Kurdish, and Christian minorities are carefully safeguarded, checking and balancing any crudities, crassnesses, or oppression the numerical majority might be tempted to enact.

Is it yet guaranteed to happen this way? No, but I'll tell you what was guaranteed: that life under a strongman rule would continue to suck, between economic distortion (few dictators ever seem to understand economics) and oppression (dictatorships always oppress, to a greater or lesser degree).

I don't think you're looking into it deeply enough, Happy. To make Islamoterrorism go extinct, you need to eliminate all of its breeding grounds, which means all of the non-democracies in the Arabic-speaking world, and then further, in all the Islamic world. A large task, true, but not necessarily impossible, except to the mind that finds freedom too great a strain. Iraq was one such breeding ground, and the case of al-Zarqawi getting surgery from Saddam's Iraq, connected to al-Qaeda quite closely enough for me. And what country was it that harbored Carlos the Jackal, before snuffing him just before the 2003 invasion in case he inconvenienced somebody like Saddam by talking? Saddam's Iraq was in it up to their collective neck, people, and from first principles, not because we shot at them. We'd not have shot at them if they hadn't been in it already.

To amplify: there's no particular wrong in taking the weakest dictatorship down first, and it's already been shown ad nauseam that if our Middle East policy were solely about oil, such a policy would have been singularly ill served by our giving the Rumaila oilfield right back to Iraq just as soon as we could walk our boots and roll our tanks off it.

We want these nations to stop behaving like shitheads, and since we don't particularly wish to exterminate all their inhabitants, democratization sounds like the best bet. Will these democracies precisely resemble the US? Don't bet on it; these will always have an Arab accent to them, or their populaces will choke on them -- and go back to some shitheaded manner of society. I'd call that unacceptable, wouldn't you?

Monkey, that's a damned dishonest spin to put on our effort to fight against tyrannies. Just because we temporarily fail to fight against one tyrant does not make illegitimate removing and hanging another, and you know that perfectly well. I mean, how could it? The above example of leftist-think is a good example of just why I am no sort of leftist: their thoughts are stupid, and they do not satisfy. Also, I'm too old, and have grown up too far, to be a leftist, or be taken in by their cant, or their can'ts.

Level with me, can't you? Isn't this less because its being done at all than it is because it's a Republican doing it? The Democrats haven't presented a President capable of getting this done since Johnson, and he blew it. The record of the last two generations shows the Republicans, on getting this kind of chance, don't blow it. Who's got the winning record here?

I posit myself as a fairly neutral observer of this partisan wrassle, being of the Libertarian persuasion.

The US backed Saddam as long as we had a use for him. Why don't you have the honesty to admit this?

Nah, UG, you're the one who lacks the moral courage to ask. I am extremely proud of my career military father's 30 years of service to this country. I was angrier than hell that he had to go risk his life doing two tours of duty in 'Nam - a foolish politician's war, if there ever was one. I'd be angry if he had to go fight in Iraq today. My friend whose husband has orders to go to Iraq in October is angry. The E3's and E4's I've talked to who have had to do 2 or 3 stints in Iraq are angry. Try to get an active duty soldier to say what he thinks about Iraq for the record. They'll be a member of JAG standing just behind his left elbow to make sure he says the right thing.

Why don't you just crawl back into the pages of Soldier of Fortune with all those other gung ho nuts who never have seen combat? Were you with the tanks in the first wave of assault in Desert Storm? Were you in the jungle during the Tet offensive? Have you been in a fire fight in Iraq? Most soldiers who have seen actual combat don't write like you do. Tell us what branch you served in, what was your rank, and in what engagements were you under direct enemy fire. What campaign ribbons do you have, what military honors and citations? Tell us what its like to be on the "FEBA" and no fair copying out of someone else's memoirs.

I don't need to burst a gut. You provide more than enough manure around here.

I proudly bear two awards Navy Expeditionary Medal, as I've said before -- stupid of you to forget, isn't it? I've got nine years' more military service than you do, Marichiko, in the United States Navy. I served in the Naval Security Group and made Cryptologic Technician (Interpretive) First Class -- I made my living speaking, reading, and writing Russian. My first award of the Navy Expeditionary was for service in support of the Iranian hostage rescue mission, the second for secretive doings off the shore of a then-hostile nation, further north.

So I'm not going to crawl back into anywhere, you squealing little lightweight. You haven't done any of this, and I've got your number: you've got a flapping jaw and a foolish hatred for the United States and that's all, unless you count a correspondingly foolish love for tyrants as an asset. I wouldn't.

You actually show a ray of hope in that you "don't need to bust a gut." Good: stop doing what you don't need to, then. This will help you be something other than purblind and immature. I'd rather deal with a better Marichiko than the one I'm seeing.

In other words, you were a spook for the navy who never saw real combat. I rest my case.

Ah but I do: I recall our giving intelligence support to Iraq when they were shooting at Iran, with whom we ourselves were all but at war with at the time. This strategy worked pretty well, too: set one asshole regime to bleed another monstrous regiment of assholes, and you end up with both these troublemakers seriously weakened. We took the anti-American zip right out of Iranian policymaking -- military-age kids are terrorist-age kids too, and since neither Iran nor Iraq were any too brilliant at fighting that war, that demographic got bled white, particularly in Iran -- and that was just what we needed.

Set a gangsterish dictator to strangle a fanatical absolutist mullah -- tough to find the downside.

As an aside, why do you think that was an answer to the actual question I posed, Marichiko? Immaturity cropping up again? Sorry, but I have zero patience with unrighteousness pretending to righteous wrath. I have this minor flaw: I resent being lied to.

Think about that seriously for 10 seconds. Why do they hate us? Just like all authoritarian types you ignore what really happens to the people you play your games with.

Hey, hey, hey!

Lay off the navy or I'm gonna come over there and we'll have a real slap fight! :worried:

Mar only respects the military branch her dear ol' dad was in. Don't you know that? It helps to know where people are coming from, TS. I don't think she served in ANY branch, though.

Did I say anything against the Navy? No. My point was merely that UG seems to have been more involved in covert type operations rather than battlefield situations. I would have made the same comments if he had said he was a Russian language specialist and cryptographer for the Army or Air Force. The men who serve and have served in the Navy are as honorable and brave as any other members of our Armed Forces. I write of men (and women) who serve in the US Army and Air Force because these are the people I know first hand. My father served in the Army, as did a close friend of mine. My father's brother, my uncle Leland, served in the NAVY in WWII and saw action in some of the great naval battles of that war. I respected my Uncle Leland as much as I did my Dad. There is a large Army base where I live and the Air Force Academy is located here, also. The last I heard, there are no naval bases located in Colorado, in case no one has noticed.

Wrong on the first part, correct on the second. I did actually talk with a NAVAL recruiter back in the 70's and give serious though to enlisting with the Navy. However, I wanted to go in as an officer and they told me I needed to finish my degree before they would consider allowing me to enlist and go through officer's candidate school. By time I finished my degree, I had gotten married and my life took a different direction. :p