Post #88

Subject: Somebody else has it exactly right….

Don’t ya just hate that!?! :p

Joe Scarborugh, http://joe.msnbc.com , has my respect. He is one of the few who ran for Congress and campaigned for term limits and promised not to seek re-election beyond what he felt was an appropriate term, and he didn’t. Joe followed his beliefs instead of clinging to power.

Unfortunately, Joe was wrong about the Iraq War. He thought it was in our national interests to remove the threat of WMD and Saddam. But now, Joe sees it is in our national interest to leave.

…from Joe’s MSNBC show, 'Scarborough Country,' May 29. My responses and additions – in [brackets]….

* * *

JOE SCARBOROUGH, HOST: America suffers through its deadliest month in Iraq in more than two years over the past 29 days. U.S. armed services are stretched to a breaking point, and the world is more dangerous today than at any time since the early morning hours of 11, 2001. And yet no one in Washington seems to know how to win this war, strengthen our military or make Americans safe. Why? Because once again, politics is trumping common sense.

Now, on the Republican side, congressional leaders have blindly followed the president, who continues to believe that the war on terror begins and ends in Iraq. He is wrong. It does not. But Iraq is one front in the war on terror. And despite what Bush haters say, we are in a war against Islamic extremists who want to destroy America and kill you and your family.

But that war has many fronts. We face threats from Iran, who‘s been at the epicenter of world terrorism since ‘79, from Afghanistan, where the Taliban is gaining strength and being given safe haven, from Pakistan, where Islamic extremists sympathetic to bin Laden are more likely than not to gain control of nuclear weapons within the next five years. And yet Mr. Bush and the Republican Party can only focus on Iraq, Iraq and Iraq.

You know, that strategy is the foolhardy equivalent of Dwight Eisenhower deciding that he was going to move all of our troops into North Africa in 1942 and either win or lose World War II on that front, regardless of the realities across Europe and the rest of the world.

Now, Republicans need to wake up and realize we are fighting a war against terrorism, not just a war against terrorists in Iraq. And we can‘t win that battle right now so long as Sunnis are blowing up Shiites, Shiites are blowing up Sunnis and both are blowing up each other. It is time to redeploy or troops to other fronts where U.S. power and might can make a difference. And right now, that place is not Iraq and Iraq alone.

Pat, we talked this morning about how the situation in Iraq keeps getting worse, and yet it seems like politicians in Washington, D.C., have their feet planted in cement and can‘t face the realities on ground, across the region and across the world. What are we going to do?

PAT BUCHANAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think what the politicians in Washington fear, Joe, is if they follow their convictions and vote to defund the war, the disaster in Iraq will become a calamity. But as we talked this morning, there‘s a lot of time bombs ticking. Olmert in Israel is going be, I believe, pitched out. His likely successor, Mr. Netanyahu, will do his best to engage Iran and to engage the United States in a war with Iran. Mr. Musharraf in Pakistan is really on the ropes politically. If he goes down, you‘ve got an Islamic republic with nuclear weapons. Karzai—he is the mayor of Kabul. The Taliban is making a comeback. In what Brzezinski calls the “arc of crisis,” Joe, nothing really seems to be going well.

SCARBOROUGH: And Pat, you know, you talked about some very interesting things. You talked about what was going on in Israel. You talked about a coming war with Iran, between Israel and Iran. It probably is going to happen. The United States is going to be dragged into that. You talked about Pakistan, what‘s happening there. You talked about Afghanistan.

BUCHANAN: Pakistan‘s the most dangerous county on earth.

SCARBOROUGH: Pat, you and I have been saying that for a long time. It is without a doubt the most dangerous country on earth. Even if Musharraf‘s not assassinated, he may be ridden out of town on a rail.

I want you to take a look, though—just today—this is the violence in Iraq just today, where we‘ve basically put all of our chips on the table. We moved into this one place in Iraq, while Pakistan, while Iran, while all the—I mean, it‘s amazing that all the troops, all of our investment—today, five Britons kidnapped from a government office. A minibus explosion killed 23, wounded 68. Pick-up truck explosion killed 17, wounded 55.

BUCHANAN: Right.

SCARBOROUGH: Forty were abducted at a fake checkpoint in Samarra. Of course, this past month, the deadliest month since November of 2004. Pat, we could put another 100,000 troops in Iraq, and Sunnis would keep blowing up Shia, Shia would keep blowing up Sunnis. Pat, why are we doing this?

BUCHANAN: Look, let me give you some numbers. We‘ve got 150,000 troops in Iraq. At the end of World War II, we had four million in Western Europe. We had 12 million under arms. We got an Army of 500,000 people. We got commitments to fight all over the world on behalf of 50 or 60 countries. The United States is playing empire with a wonderful little army, but it is small, Joe. You can‘t do it. We do not have the ability to build a nation and deal with an guerrilla insurgency of the kind we confront with the armed forces we confront right now. We just don‘t have it!

SCARBOROUGH: That‘s another example of our politicians betraying the American people, not being grown-ups, Don Rumsfeld saying that he was going win wars on the cheap, that we‘re going to be able to cut the military...

BUCHANAN: They genuinely fear—I fear that this thing‘s going come down and it is going to be awful. And if I were up there, even though I would have voted against going to war, I would have a very tough time voting with Ron Paul and Jimmy Duncan, who had the courage to go up there and vote with the Democrats to defund it because I fear what is going happen afterwards, Joe. I think when president says, You pull out, and this thing is coming down and it‘s going to spread all down the peninsula, he may be right.

[So, there ya have it – it is not in our interests to stay. America’s interests = ending the war and not leaving chaos behind. Stopping the bleeding so that we may respond with our military to other threats -- such as the on-going threat from Afghanistan. But the fear of ending George W. Bush’s Iraq War and the bad things that will happen has paralyzed our “leaders,” for-lack-of-a-better-word! :p]

[Yes, things will be bad – better to face the bad stuff now than another 5 years or 10 years or 20 years down the road when things will be worse and we will be weaker.]