‘Mission Accomplished’ By The Numbers.
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May 1st, 2007
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USS Abraham Lincoln had just completed the longest sustained deployment in the history of the US Navy: Mission Accomplished
The US and it’s allies had just overthrown a brutal dictatorship that had ignored and circumvented the will of the UN and the world for more than a decade: Mission Accomplished
The US military took over more land with fewer casualties (both allied and enemy) in a shorter period of time than any time previously in the history of mankind: Mission Accomplished
Major Combat operations WERE over: Mission Accomplished.
Ollie looks like an uneducated,knee-jerk liberal who knows next to nothing about the military: Mission Accomplished
Have major combat operations ended in Iraq?
Yeah, man. The last 4 years have been just minor combat operations..
Shorter Pedro: I was in the service and you weren’t so there. You guys can’t even talk about Halo II, as far as I’m concerned!
Attack of the Thirty Percenters!
At least you are smart enough not to try to rebut the points I made ollie, thats something.
Dude, you haven’t made a cogent point since last summer.
USA USA DAMN THE CONTEXT AND THE CONSEQUENCES US FUCKING A
The US military took over more land with fewer casualties (both allied and enemy) in a shorter period of time than any time previously in the history of mankind: Mission Accomplished
I think I understand Pedro, finally, on this subject–it’s all about stats and record-keeping to him. If he thinks of the war in terms like this, in terms that sound like fucking football commentary, then of course he can’t understand the genuine human cost of this misadventure.
Duros you are confusing your inability to understand something with it being cogent…
Next time I will use smaller words for you, m’kay?
At least you are smart enough not to try to rebut the points I made ollie, thats something.
There’s no need to rebut a shit-eating grin. It sort of rebuts itself.
What’s nice is that now even the morons are starting to realize what a total f*cking disaster Bush’s war has been.
That leaves the liars and the psychos. Which one are you, Pedro?
Bin Laden -still on the loose
Iraq – U.S. Casualty rate per at One battalion per month
Afghanistan – Terror attacks on U.S. and NATO forces up %53
Misshun Ackompolished, Dugger!
Jurassic Pork has the best synopsis of this. Without comment.
And in that regard, I think it encapsulates Peedro’s points as well.
Best lesson my grandfather ever taught me: “Treat it with the contempt that it deserves”.
Gotta couple of small words for you too, bu-ddy.
bin laden on the loose? Where?
we are losing 1200 men a month?
If you go from 1 attack to 2 attacks, what percent is that?
yea Ollie, your grandfather learned you well….treat facts with contempt.
You will go far in the left wing of the american political system
Wow, pedro. Just wow.
So deposing Hussein while allowing Iraq to slide into bloody chaos is “Mission Accomplished” in your eyes? Just the sort of ill-informed, shortsighted bullshit we can expect from the right wing.
You guys practice the politics of instant gratification: a few photos ops, a few feel good slogans and you’re done. To hell with the consequences.
Longest deployment ever! I guess those sailors were eager to get home, huh? Too bad they had to be delayed an entire day so Bush could stage a publicity stunt with a jet. Then when called on the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, Bush lied about it and said it was all the sailor’s idea, when in fact it was the White House.
At least he wasn’t calling them away from searching the rubble of a US city that time.
No paul, you just don’t understand the military very well. This isn’t suprising, cause you watch movies for a living, so let me explain.
You see, things in the military tend to be a bit more straight forward and less “nuanced” than things in Hollywood. When the military is given a job, it usually has a clear “objective”. This is good, cause then you can actually determine whether or not you did the job that was asked of you. Liberals don’t like this, because it puts too much “pressure” on people to “succeed”.
So, if the US Military is asked to topple a vicious dictator and return that countries government to its people, and they do it….Mission Accomplished!
See not so hard eh?
bin laden on the loose? Where?
Well, if we knew that, asshat, he wouldn’t be on the loose, now would he?
And you say I don’t understand things.
Do your receptionists give out referral cards to all your patients for a free 2nd opinion?
So, if the US Military is asked to topple a vicious dictator and return that countries government to its people, and they do it….Mission Accomplished!
See not so hard eh?
So our troops can come home then, right? We must be done. What’s the problem with being out of Iraq by October, then?
Eh?
Treat it with the contempt that it deserves.
What Pedo forgets is that Mission Accomplished realy was a punctuation mark on the Bush’s plan for the war. As far as the Bush administration was concerned, their plans ended with toppling Hussein. After that, it was up to the Contractors.
Good point, midder. My question remains.
**Pedro must be on the other line with the RNC for an answer.**
Sorry midder, I forget that you lefties mind read, you have built in lie detectors and can apparently discern all Bush administration objectives without even asking them…
New Job duros…we are now helping the iraqi’s maintain security while they take control of the country.
Of course the bigger question is: If the democrats now believe this is a lost cause a la Harry Reid, why wait until October? Shouldn’t they be demanding an immediate pullout? Eh?
Don’t deflect, Pedro. What you describe is an occupation. Bush said this “surge” should show some sort of progress in 3 months. Not so much.
How will we know when this “new mission” is accomplished?
When the iraqi government says “thanks for your help, we’ll take it from here…”
Actually, I have been answering questions and laying down facts, you guys are the ones deflecting…lets see Ollie: Non-responsive. Duros, sending me to his favorite gay (not that there is anything wrong with that) pron site.
So duros why aren’t you clamoring for total withdrawal RIGHT NOW?
Pedro, I don’t clamor.
I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt. But after this long, it doesn’t really seem that the Iraqi gov’t is gonna step up anytime soon. So why are you so opposed to benchmarks?
You do want our troops to come home sometime soon, don’t you?
(I don’t know why it says gay in the header. I got it from someone else.)
I tried clamoring once, but I got a nasty rash.
yea, I do. Unfortunately, except for the Iraqi’s telling us that they don’t want us there anymore, I can’t think of a “benchmark” that we can use.
Let me turn the question back to you…Don’t you think giving a date certain that we are going to leave gives an advantage to our enemies?
If by benchmarks we can agree a stable government with well entrenched police/fire/military that can control the sectarian or radical islamic violence then I would agree…I suspect that is all that the bush administration is hoping for…
Oh, and try a little Calamine lotion…no charge for the consult…
I don’t believe it gives an advantage to the enemy to the extent that Bushies says it does. I don’t think we (meaning our forces) should “run out the clock” either.
I thought that when the Iraqis said they don’t want us there anymore, we could leave. No?
f by benchmarks we can agree a stable government with well entrenched police/fire/military that can control the sectarian or radical islamic violence then I would agree…I suspect that is all that the bush administration is hoping for…
Hope alone ain’t gonna cut it. Nor is throwing more meat at the problem. And that seems to be all we’ve been using thus far.
France offered us a place to train Iraqi police/fire/military away from the distractions of corruption, kidnappings, murder and, you know, shit blowing up, but we turned ‘em down.
I’m just not sure how committed we (meaning Bush)are to that end.
No charge for the consult…
Dude, I’m still getting a 2nd opinion. =D
Pedo, don’t you think having an incompetent boob, who has failed time and time again during this occupation, as commander in chief gives a huge advantage to our enemies?
Frank will call me a sycophant for saying this, midder, but I sure as hell do.
Advantage nuthin’. He’s a fucking enabler.
“Treat facts with contempt”
You misspelled “twats”.
“Don’t you think giving a date certain that we are going to leave gives an advantage to our enemies?”
How so? What advantage are you talking about? The old canard of their “waiting us out”? You’ll have to be more specific if you want an answer.
At the same time, let me ask you, does it not also give our potential allies in Iraq an advantage? At present no one in Iraq wants to be associated with the Occupiers, even if they are on the side of creating a stable liberal democracy there. Being associated with the US can be a veritable death sentence for some, while others might simply refuse to help us out of a sense of nationalist pride. HUssein may have been a tryrant but at least he was our tyrant. (And i’m not saying such nationalism is rational, just that it’s a force we have to contend with).
Now if we announce a date of departure, these moderates and nationalists who might otherwise help us could point to the date and say, “See the Americans are leaving, they do not want to dominate us for decades to come. They are here to set up a government, restore peace and leave.” With the assurance of our departure, moderates can reach out to nationalists and others and begin to work toward building an Iraq that is not perceived as being under America’s thumb.
In other words, the sooner we set a guaranteed departure date, the sooner Iraqis will stop looing at us as a foreing occupier bent on subjugating Iraq for its oil. Now if you don’ think that’s a factor in the insurgency — be it an active or passive hostility — you’re fooling yourself.
Get rid of that hostility on the part of moderate iraqis and you have a chance of enlisting them in the fight against the insurgents and al-qeada. If we set a date to leave, the insurgents lose one of their biggest propaganda claims: The the US wants to dominate iraq forever and all good sons of iraq must resist them.
That’s a real advantage for us and for iraqis themselves.
The advantage would be exactly as you describe…waiting it out. Knowing you aren’t going to have to fight US marines would be a big bonus.
I think you overstate things when you say no one wants to be associated with us…that is patently untrue. Check out Michael Yon’s website for some on the ground and outside the green zone reporting on how the iraqi people react to us….
The insurgents never needed a propaganda claim…remember 9/11? We weren’t in Afghanistan or Iraq then…its a canard
oh, and paul, if we leave Iraq will become a killing field the likes of which we have not seen since the lefties forced us out of vietnam…
Oh please pedro. You and the rest of the right wing echo chamber has given absolutely no logical reason why the terrorists would gain some advantage by us setting a date for withdrawal. You say they’re going to wait us out, as if there’s been some slow down in the violence, as if the insurgents are laying low, lulling us into a false sense of security or something. From my perspective, the insurgenst don’t seem to be waiting for shit. They are acting, quite brazenly, right now. So to suggest that the insurgents are some how waiting for something is just ludicrous on its face.
At the same time, you are totally ignorant of the historical context from which this entire conflict has emerged. Some right wing moron came up with a snappy slogan “We weren’t in Afghanistan when 9-11 happened” and it had its intended effect on you: You totally shut off your brain.
9-11 didn’t just happen in a vacuum you dolt. Radical Islam has had one propaganda claim to stir the hate and fear filled to their side: The West, lead by America, is trying to subjugate, occupy and destroy Islamic countries and peoples. They have been saying this since at least the 1970s. We have done little to dispel this interpretation of our actions in our dealings with the middle east and our invasion of Iraq is, for the radical Islamists, the ultimate confirmation of our intentions in the Middle East.
Tell the Iraqi people that we have no long term ambitions to remain in Iraq and then give them visible signs that we will be withdrawing and we have the chance to undermine and disprove decades of radical islamic propaganda: At the precise moment our plans for hegemony seemed most evident, we did the exact opposite of what radicals said we would do. I think that would go along way towards undermining the radicals ability to spin their bullshit. Everyday, week, month, year etc. that we stay in Iraq, for every permanent base we build, we will be reinforcing decades of suspicion and appear to be doing exactly what the radicals always said we were going to do.
As for the Iraqi people’s support of the US forces, a unch of feel good photos on some dudes website doesn’t a counterinsurgency make.
If you look at the current violence in Iraq and look at the
polls of the Iraqi people. They don’t want us there any longer. We are seen as occupiers, we are seen as part of the problem.
Moderates in Iraq can’t get any traction because their enemies can readily accuse of them of being puppets of the American occupiers and this resonates with Iraqis across sectarian lines
now:
I have no doubt that the violence in Iraq will probably get worse if we exit, but don’t sit there and tell me that anyone right now in Iraq is waiting to start killing until after we leave. Please. Do you even read the news anymore pedro?
The point is that in the time between when we announce our withdrawal and the time it actually takes place, it it’s a year, let’s say, would be enough time for some kind of political solution to be found, a solution that can’t be found now because no one, on any side, trusts US period.
The war is lost militarily pedro, it can only be won politically. Our setting a timeline for withdrawl is the onyl thing now that can create the conditions for that to happen.
So the islamic radicals start off with a false premise designed to let them increase their power base, a premise with absolutely no factual backing and allowing them to rationalize all sorts of violent acts from destroying our buildings to stoning women….then it is up to us to “disprove” the propaganda by….doing nothing to stop their acts of violence?
Am I getting this convoluted leftists logic right so far?
As far as the radicals not waiting us out yet, of course they aren’t you mental midget, we haven’t told them when we were leaving yet! Currently we are running up a surge of men, which is having its desired effect of pacifying many of the worst places in Iraq (I’ll let you google it yourself, I am tired of punching in random numbers when I link…)So maybe YOU should be reading the news
The lefties want to see another cambodian killing field that they can wash their hands of, the conservatives actually believe that people are valuable and don’t buy the leftists (and 4 year old children’s) argument that “we made the islamic fundamentalist do it!”
So the islamic radicals start off with a false premise designed to let them increase their power base, a premise with absolutely no factual backing and allowing them to rationalize all sorts of violent acts
Right. Kinda like that “smoking gun=mushroom cloud” and “Hussein and Bin Laden were BFFs before 9-11″ crap that we heard in 2002.
Typical, presented with facts you turn to babble and incoherence.
Remember, pedro, what matters most isn’t what we think we’re doing, it’s what they think we’re doing and how they choose to spin it. Perception is everything here and we’ve done a lousy job of managing that perception. Even if you want to believe that the US foreign policy has been an utterly benign and positive presence in the Middle East over the last 30 years, radical Islam is an atavistic response to larger forces of globalisation that are widely perceived in the rest of the wrold not as neutral cultural/economic/technological process but as Westernization. It’s perceived as a threat to traditional values — hmmmm, where have I heard that phrase used before — with a Western, particularly US face. We didn’t do ourselves any favors by invading Iraq and given the radicals the opportunity to spin it as actual concrete evidence of the vague cultural threats that they’ve been harranguing about for decades.
So aagin, you simply have no idea what you;re talking and would prefer to subsitute some bizarre version of history that suits your ideological bent for an actual awareness of how the US and its interests act and are perceived in the world.
To confuse an actual awareness of the historical forces shaping the world with the idea that “we made them do it” is the height of idiocy. To suggest that withdrawing from Iraq is “doing nothing” is equally inane. An announced withdrawal would create the conditions for the political settlement that is the only way to move forward in iraq. It is the first step to doing the only, real, concrete thing that has a hope of ending violence. Building walls around Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods then bombing the fuck out of them, is not a plan for bringing the country together.
Of course, now you want me to beleive that the insurgents haven’t begun to “wait us out” yet because we haven’t announced a withdrawal date. From this logic, I gather that as soon as we do they will lay down their arms and start the waiting. Well, pedro, if we announced that we were going to leave entirely at the end of 2008, and the insurgents acted as you susggest, that’s an entire year of radically reduced violence during which time we could continue to train Iraqi troops while working towards a permanent political solution, a political solution made all the more possible by our announced withdrawal. Wouldn’t that be a good fucking thing?
As it stands now the surge is a joke. By “pacifying many of the worst places in Iraq” do you mean Baghdad, which is the only place in Iraq where the surge is being carried out? Just semantic slight of hand is typical of the right wing and it obfuscates the facts which clearly show that Baghdad is not being pacified. The bombing continues, attacks on US soldiers are up and the Iraqi government is falling apart. The surge has done nothing to achieve any of the goals we’ve set for it.
Bush has been in charge of this war from the beginning and everything he has tried has failed. Everything. For crying out loud, all other reality-based reasons aside, isn’t fucking time we try something different?
The lefties want to see another cambodian killing field that they can wash their hands of
Absolute bullshit.
I find it rather amusing that the right, from Bush right on down to Pedro, can know exactly what the insurgents are going to do. How the fuck do you know they are going to “wait us out”? I keep hearing the same thing from you guys, over and over. How do you know what our enemy is going to do next? All y’all have been so mind-numbingly wrong thus far, it kinda doesn’t instill confidence in your prognostication abilities.
The only person running out the clock is George W. Bush. If he can keep our troops in Iraq until Jan. 2008, then “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!”
It all makes sense now. When Bush says the enemy is going to wait us out, he’s talking about the electorate of THIS country. Because he, like our friend Pedro here, honestly believes that Democrats are blood-thirsty baby eaters, bent on world domination and an end to our way of life.
We are Americans, sir, just like you. We want an end to hostilities. That’s where we seem to part ways.
He’s just trying to transfer the blame for the killings, Duros. Bush removed the governmental control that seperated the factions and replaced it with um, contractors? now righties like Pedo know it’s all falling apart and they are looking for someone to blame for Bush’s mistakes.
Ha, ha, ha, ha…”radicals start off with a false premise”…ha, ha, ha…
1953 Iran
It’s not like we’re actively trying to undermine Iran, or ignoring their entreaties for peace.
I mean, Iran took British hostages, right? They clearly are the problem here, not U.S. policy.
1963 Iraq
It’s not like we’re trying to take their oil.
Afghanistan, anyone?
There’s always the sticky issue of continued U.S. support for that beacon of Democracy, Saudi Arabia. The home to one of the region’s most oppressive governments, not to mention Bin Laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers.
The U.S. practice of using military bases to spread military, economic and political control.
All this and I haven’t even touched on the disastrous influence of the U.S. and hard right Israelis on the region (blocked peace talks with Syria, Israel’s unofficial nuclear arsenal, the occupied territories, Lebanon, Sheba Farms, etc.).
Maybe next time I’ll eviscerate the Vietnam (another illegal invasion) and the “lefties” canard.
Fish.
Barrel.
Shoot.
Too easy.
Maybe next time I’ll eviscerate the Vietnam (another illegal invasion) and the “lefties” canard.
I can’t wait.
frameone says”Even if you want to believe that the US foreign policy has been an utterly benign and positive presence in the Middle East over the last 30 years”
Translation from leftist speak to english:
“Its the joooosssss……the jooosssss….!”
Pedro, you are such an ass.
Jeezus keerist, pedro.
From babble to incoherence to utter insanity. Seems to be the trajectory of most conservative thinking these days …
I have a good idea that conservatives should be able to get behind- let’s make the Iraq fighting force a “no blacks allowed” fighting force.
Edge of your seat, eh, Frank?
Where do you want to start, the suppression of free elections in 1956 meant to reunify the country? The military, political, and financial support of a corrupt puppet government? The Tonkin hoax? The My Lai massacre? Nixon’s failure to end the war in 1969? The decision to escalate (or “surge”, if you prefer) into Cambodia and Laos? The Cambodian bombing which elevated the Khmer Rouge from a radical fringe group to a powerful, murderous national force? Maybe you want to discuss disastrous domestic missteps like Kent State? What about Nixon’s own belief that the only way to win in Vietnam was with a massive strike destroying the irrigations systems and waterways in North Vietnam, causing enormous flooding and the deaths of hundreds of thousands (forgetting any long term consequences, such as disease), or to use nuclear weapons?
Shall I go on? There’s plenty more.
Just Google “Pentagon Papers” or any of the thousands of sites about the long and sordid history of the U.S., France, Japan, and many others in Vietnam. Not that any amount of reality will trump your “expertise”,” naturally.