It's Bush's Fault!

[GandD 5,966]

Never mind that. Are your pillows filled with feathers or polyester?

Not feathers. I'm not sure, I thought they put cotton in them?

[Teddy B 17,252]

Not feathers. I'm not sure, I thought they put cotton in them?

I like the polyester myself, the feathers tend to stick you in the head.

I'm not sure about cotton, I know they have polyester, feathers and memory foam.

[Jacque67 7,328]

Never mind that. Are your pillows filled with feathers or polyester?

I have a feeling you're sitting on something that isn't so light or fluffy.

Silicon, I believe;)

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

The problem wasn't created when we pulled out of Iraq but when we moved in. That was the wrong move to make. What was the alternative to leaving? The same thing will unfold when we leave Afghanistan. And it will unfold no matter when we leave that place. We could have left 10 years ago, we can leave today or we can leave 10 years from now and the result will be one and the same.

You can leave slower and spend more time training an army and have it become more institutionalized, you can build more infrastructure before you leave, you can not announce a timetable well in advance and signal to terrorists, and all the other things that military advisers suggested at the time and have been saying in the interviews NPR has been doing in the last few weeks. The advice he was getting was clear: It is too soon to leave. He made the call.. It was the wrong call.

You know, the towers were bombed in the 90's and brought down well before we went into Afghanistan. Iraq invaded and annexed another country the first time.. That problem was already there and growing. Doing nothing was not an option. Should we have gone into Iraq a second time? No.. But then again we never should have left it like we did the first time.

Did we solve anything by arguing the past one more time? Blame whoever you want but here we are today.. What do we do now?

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

You can leave slower and spend more time training an army and have it become more institutionalized, you can build more infrastructure before you leave, you can not announce a timetable well in advance and signal to terrorists, and all the other things that military advisers suggested at the time and have been saying in the interviews NPR has been doing in the last few weeks. The advice he was getting was clear: It is too soon to leave. He made the call.. It was the wrong call.

You know, the towers were bombed in the 90's and brought down well before we went into Afghanistan. Iraq invaded and annexed another country the first time.. That problem was already there and growing. Doing nothing was not an option. Should we have gone into Iraq a second time? No.. But then again we never should have left it like we did the first time.

Did we solve anything by arguing the past one more time? Blame whoever you want but here we are today.. What do we do now?

The problem Iraq is facing today is not the same problem Iraq faced in the 1990's. Iraq may have largely been a rogue nation but it was stable. There was no AQ, no ISIS or other such elements in Iraq nor would Saddam have ever allowed any of that to happen there. We opened the door to Iraq for these elements in 2003. That much is pretty clear I think. And we did so without any need for it since Iraq had zero, zilch, nada to do with AQ attack on the US in 2001. Iraq posed zero risk to the US then - not sure that continues to be the case. And that's a risk we chose to create - and a risk we cannot really manage.

More time? How much more time? More training? How much more training? As much as we do in Afghanistan? Is that place going to be in any better shape when we leave? Of course not. And again, it matters not whether we leave today or in a decade - or if we had left a decade ago. And it also matters not whether the withdrawl is organized and announced and timed or not. Once we leave, the place will fall apart and whatever we pretend we achieved there will be gone. We won't be there forever. Everyone knows that. And the other guys have patience. Much more patience than we will ever have.

Below is a pretty good read on the issue. It's an opinion piece, of course, but it's a well educated opinion.

Ready, Aim, Fire. Not Fire, Ready, Aim.

President Obama has been excoriated for declaring that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for effectively confronting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. In criticizing Obama for taking too much time, Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” that “this ‘don’t-do-stupid-stuff’ policy isn’t working.” That sounded odd to my ear — like we should just bomb somebody, even if it is stupid. If Obama did that, what would he be ignoring?

First, experience. After 9/11 that sort of “fire, ready, aim” approach led George W. Bush to order a ground war in Iraq without sufficient troops to control the country, without a true grasp of Iraq’s Shiite-Sunni sectarian dynamics, and without any realization that, in destroying the Sunni Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Sunni Baathist regime in Iraq, we were destroying both of Iran’s mortal enemies and thereby opening the way for a vast expansion of Iran’s regional influence. We were in a hurry, myself included, to change things after 9/11, and when you’re in a hurry you ignore complexities that come back to haunt you later.

There are no words to describe the vileness of the video beheadings of two American journalists by ISIS, but I have no doubt that they’re meant to get us to overreact, à la 9/11, and rush off again without a strategy. ISIS is awful, but it is not a threat to America’s homeland.

Second, the context. To defeat ISIS you have to address the context out of which it emerged. And that is the three civil wars raging in the Arab world today: the civil war within Sunni Islam between radical jihadists and moderate mainstream Sunni Muslims and regimes; the civil war across the region between Sunnis funded by Saudi Arabia and Shiites funded by Iran; and the civil war between Sunni jihadists and all other minorities in the region — Yazidis, Turkmen, Kurds, Christians, Jews and Alawites.

When you have a region beset by that many civil wars at once, it means there is no center, only sides. And when you intervene in the middle of a region with no center, you very quickly become a side.

ISIS emerged as an extreme expression of resentment by one side: Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis who felt cut out of power and resources by the pro-Iranian Shiite regime in Baghdad and the pro-Iranian Alawite/Shiite regime in Damascus. That is why Obama keeps insisting that America’s military intervention must be accompanied, for starters, by Iraqis producing a national unity government — of mainstream Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — so our use of force supports pluralism and power-sharing, not just Shiite power.

But power-sharing doesn’t come easy in a region where kinship and sectarian loyalties overwhelm any sense of shared citizenship. Without it, though, the dominant philosophy is either: “I am strong, why should I compromise?” or “I am weak, how can I compromise?” So any onslaught we make on ISIS, absent national unity governments, will have Shiites saying the former and Sunnis saying the latter. That’s why this is complicated.

And this is a sectarian power struggle. Consider a Times article last week about how ISIS is actually being led by a combination of jihadists and disgruntled Sunni Iraqi Baathist Army officers, who were shoved aside either by us or Iraq’s Shiite-dominated governments.

The Times article noted: “After ISIS stormed into Mosul, one [shiite] Iraqi official recalled a startling phone call from a [sunni] former major general in one of [saddam] Hussein’s elite forces. The former general had appealed months earlier to rejoin the Iraqi Army, but the official had refused. Now the [sunni] general was fighting for ISIS and threatened revenge. ‘We will reach you soon, and I will chop you into pieces,’ he said, according to the official, Bikhtiyar al-Qadi, of the commission that bars some former members of Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party from government posts.”

Repeat after me: “We will reach you soon, and I will chop you into pieces.” That is what we are dealing with here — multiple, venomous civil wars that are the breeding ground of the ISIS cancer.

Third, our allies are not fully allies: While the Saudi, Qatari and Kuwaiti governments are pro-American, wealthy Sunni individuals, mosques and charities in these countries are huge sources of funds, and fighters, for ISIS.

As for Iran, if we defeat ISIS, it would be the third time since 2001 that we’ve defeated a key Sunni counterbalance to Iran — first the Taliban, then Saddam, now ISIS. That is not a reason not to do it, but it is reason to do it in a way that does not distract us from the fact that Iran’s nuclear program also needs to be defused, otherwise it could undermine the whole global nonproliferation regime. Tricky.

I’m all-in on destroying ISIS. It is a sick, destabilizing movement. I support using U.S. air power and special forces to root it out, but only as part of a coalition, where everybody who has a stake in stability there pays their share and where mainstream Sunnis and Shiites take the lead by demonstrating that they hate ISIS more than they hate each other. Otherwise, we’ll end up in the middle of a God-awful mess of duplicitous allies and sectarian passions, and nothing good we do will last.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/opinion/thomas-friedman-what-are-we-really-dealing-with-in-isis.html?_r=0

[GandD 5,966]

The reason we pulled out of Iraq is because that's what the American people wanted, for better or worse. He had constant pressure to wind down the war from both sides.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

The reason we pulled out of Iraq is because that's what the American people wanted, for better or worse. He had constant pressure to wind down the war from both sides.

Our continued presence would have done nothing to stabilize Iraq or prevent what's happening there now. It may have delayed it but not prevented it.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

Fine.. Here we are today.. What should we do now?

[GandD 5,966]

Fine.. Here we are today.. What should we do now?

My own small and militarily uninformed perspective is to do exactly what we're doing. Continue to be air support for the Iraqi army.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

My own small and militarily uninformed perspective is to do exactly what we're doing. Continue to be air support for the Iraqi army.

The worst thing we could do is put boots back on the ground in Iraq. Nothing good could come from that.

[Teddy B 17,252]

The worst thing we could do is put boots back on the ground in Iraq. Nothing good could come from that.

It's too bad that advice wasn't followed by ole Georgey. We are no better off in that region than we were 10 years ago, yet we're short 100's of thousands of lives.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

It's too bad that advice wasn't followed by ole Georgey. We are no better off in that region than we were 10 years ago, yet we're short 100's of thousands of lives.

We're short trillions of dollars, too. And we're actually worse off in that region than we were 10+ years ago. Not to mention the people in that region - they're really screwed.

[The Nature Boy 4,224]

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/513004-joan-rivers-dies-at-age-81/

[We Keep Receipts 9,238]

You asked, I provided. Anything else and you'll owe me a smoothie.

[Dan and Judy 614]

You can leave slower and spend more time training an army and have it become more institutionalized, you can build more infrastructure before you leave, you can not announce a timetable well in advance and signal to terrorists, and all the other things that military advisers suggested at the time and have been saying in the interviews NPR has been doing in the last few weeks. The advice he was getting was clear: It is too soon to leave. He made the call.. It was the wrong call.

You know, the towers were bombed in the 90's and brought down well before we went into Afghanistan. Iraq invaded and annexed another country the first time.. That problem was already there and growing. Doing nothing was not an option. Should we have gone into Iraq a second time? No.. But then again we never should have left it like we did the first time.

Did we solve anything by arguing the past one more time? Blame whoever you want but here we are today.. What do we do now?

The towers were bombed in the 90's, not brought down. They were brought down 9/11/2001 and we were attacking Afghanistan within 30 days.

The mission of the first gulf war was to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, George the 1st did a beautiful job of creating an international coalition

The mission was successful . And we left, and Iraq was relatively stable for the next 12 years. How do you think we should have left Iraq the first time?