the very thought of occupying a country, forming it according to your ideals and then expecting to be loved for having done so by the local population is just so … infantile. i can’t believe it.

I don’t see what can be achieved by a longer US presence in Iraq. The fringe groups in Iraq that do not have any support at all like Al Qa’ida in Iraq have been eliminated and now one has to deal with organizations that have a lot of public support like the Mahdi Army.

Because of the popular support these groups have, the Iraqi government can’t easily go after them themselves. With the help of the US army these groups can be curtailed, but the supporters then don’t accept the legitimacy of that.

This is extremely dangerous. Iraq can only fail as a democratic state if large groups of people in Iraq find their system illegitimate. That was never going to happen by going after Al Qa’ida. If there were no foreign presense in Iraq, then the power of the government is much more limited and compromizes have to be made.

The US presense allows the Iraqi government to implement unpopular laws for parts of the population. Some of these laws will be implemented because of US pressure. Tensions can grow and then if the US withdraws, Iraq will explode in violence.

Take e.g. the deal reached by the Lebanese government and Hezbollah. The US, of course, doesn’t like this deal. But Lebanon is not under US occupation, so the weak Lebanese governement had to make that deal to avoid civil war.

If the US had been occupying Lebanon, then the US military would have gone after Hezbollah. No deal would have been made. But then the underlying tension would still be there (Hezbollah has a few hundred thousand supporters), it would just be suppressed to the point where someone can say: “See, the Surge has worked, we have less roadside bombs now”. But at the same time: “We cannot withdraw now because then all that has been achieved will be lost.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070712.html

Many of these objectives have been satisfactorily met starting in june 2007, and culminating in the Petraeus report in september 2007 where you had over half of them fulfilled. Otoh yes we still need Iraqi government reforms, no one doubts that which is why ‘pulling out starting within three months’ is probably gambling with fire.

You know.. I find it incredible the lengths which partisanship has warped this whole thing upside down. Nation building strikes me as a very ‘Democrat’ sort of philosophy, whereas naively I would have thought ‘cut your losses and pull out b/c its too expensive and not our business or in our interest’ the sort of rhetoric I might have heard from protectionist rightist types.

Anyway.. im done talking about politics on a science forum =/

But I think the poster’s point is that listening to the voice of aging preppie John Simpson McCain III for the next four years would put the US to sleep, reducing the productivity of our economy and making us more vulnerable to attack.

PS – Haelfix has bought the spin. The Surge was not intended to do any of the things listed, it was supposed to get the Iraqi government to make the changes needed to resolve critical internecine political problems so we don’t have to commit our entire current military force to that single problem for the next 50 years. Further, no one in this race is arguing that we should “just leave now”, although the Bush administration did, in fact, have some troops “just leave” in the last month or so.

Whether we should or should not have gone into Iraq in the first place is, afaics, irrelevant to what policy we should conduct in the present and future.

I’m of the mind, ‘we broke it, we fix it’ and since the Surge has had some success (by this I mean both civilian, military and police casualties lessened, as well as overall less chaos) it does hint at the very least of a possibility that there is a nice endgame in all of this. Whereas just leaving now, likely plunges the state back into the abyss and ten years from now we will probably be back as part of some UN peacekeeping team or somesuch. Better to just finish what we erroneously started.

This is true. It is a historic moment.
But it is very very bittersweet moment too.
He lost the popular vote, lost the last 5/8 primaries (even south dakota), and the superdelegates handed him the nomination. He couldn’t win the majority of swing states and the traditional democratic states.
The SD’s could’ve chosen him back in january and saved us all the wasted time, money and heartache.
Obama will not pick a republican. are you serious about this? It is a pipe dream.
There is NO REAL CHANGE ahead people. wake up! his campaign is not about issues. it is about rhetoric. issues are periphery.

We are taking about a guy who has created a extreme left wing monster that he can’t control. There is no way senior Obama officials will ever advise him to pick a republican even Chuck Hagel. Hillary would have been MUCH more likely to pick a republican ( or at least a moderate democrat like evan bayh) as VP as she clearly stated in an interview on CNBC in march.

If Obama is such a uniter let him first unite the democrats. If he can’t do that how can he unite the country?

Given the fact that GWB and Ronald Reagan rank as the worst fiscal conservatives in the history of America, I think that traditional labels and party affiliation may go by the wayside of getting to the core issues of restoring America’s image in the world, restoring fiscal sanity to the federal budget, and restoring the American dream for working class Americans.

I think Hagel would be a very interesting choice.

e.

BTW, to allay some fears about Hagel: I suppose Obama would expect him to drop formal membership “as a Republican” and declare as an independent. He’d need to agree also not to run for President “as a Republican” in the future. Weird as it is, disturbing as is the risks are to many Democrats, think of the buzz factor for getting elected and the way it would change politics!