Dilemma

I am surprised that there are no comments as yet. You don’t give us any alternatives. I agree that the surge won’t accomplish anything. It will mean years and years of continued costly involvement, and the loss of many more American lives. It won’t stop the sectarian violence, which is the biggest problem now. But we are morally obligated not to just pull out, as the Democrats want us to do. We allowed Bush to get us into this mess; we have to try to find some way to help Iraq stabilize and establish a workable government. We need to try to prevent a conflagration in the region that could well result from failure to achieve reconciliation in Iraq. Someone needs to take the power away from the Decider, who obviously is not capable of understanding the complexity of the situation, and implement the suggestion of the Iraq Study Group to involve the surrounding countries, including Iran and Syria, in efforts to find a solution to the problems in Iraq. Why doesn’t anyone listen? These countries have a bigger stake in the outcome than we do. But Bush doesn’t believe in negotiation. Instead, he seems to be hell bent on demonizing and isolating Iran, with the help of our media, and threatening another war we cannot afford. Now he is planning to spend billions more of our taxpayer dollars to arm the Sunni neighbors of Iran and increase the military aid to Israel, which could be the start of another arms race. It has even been suggested that we would support a military strike by Israel.

Perhaps we Americans deserve what we get. We gave Bush the power to make the decisions that have cost us so much in terms of lives, national debt, and the loss of trust and respect in the rest of the world. Now it appears that we will sit by and let him spend countless more dollars we don’t have, debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. The Democrats don’t have a solution. Even Obama, who says he would be willing to talk to leaders he disagrees with, said he would not hesitate to attack Pakistan if we knew the leaders of al Quaeda were there. So we attack another country? What would this achieve? What would it do to world opinion? We already are reviled by most of the Pakistanis. I was in Pakistan when 30,000 men volunteered to go to Iraq to fight the U.S. and were stopped at the border by Iran. Writing to our senators and representatives accomplishes nothing.

by Albert Wight (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 36 comments) on Saturday, August 4, 2007 at 4:30:40 PM