Unlimited effort for questionable victory

This is provided as a link for where I am going to lift a quote from Dubyah to talk about. I obtained this quote from CNN (see here).

Dubyah wants to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Never mind that what he did was open up with both barrels on the rabbit before he shoved it in there, he expects to reach his hand into the hat and retrieve a warm breathing rabbit back out. Sorry Dubyah. When your hand reached in it found a festering corpse and now you refuse to pull your hand back out and show the American people just what your hand has grasped ahold of.

Dubyah says "No war has ever been won on a timetable and neither will this one." Yeah, Dubyah, but "Unlimited time for questionable victory" (I quote myself) does not necessarily lead to victory. That kind of leadership starts sounding like LBJ (also from Texas) and Vietnam. We do not do what is necessary and only "stay the course" because it avoids defeat. Just how long did us take to fight all of WWII anyway?

We can hold our breaths like a child and all that is going to happen is we are going to turn blue in the face. These are the facts. America loves her volunteer Army. The volunteer Army is stretched thin and the longer this conflict goes on the thin Army we already have is going to become thinner. We hardly pay them men and women for the sacrifices they make in peace time, but now we ask them to accept substandard pay for "above and beyond" service. You are going to find it increasingly difficult to continue to field the level of effort required from our Armed Forces without resorting to the draft.

It is not unreasonable for us to start demanding that Iraqis start taking up the yoke for themselves. If they like what we have to offer they are going to have to understand that we can not do it for them.

They can either "stand up" for what we offer, the American version of freedom, or they can "sit back" now and be forced to stand up at the point of a bayonet for one of the alternatives. As much as we might like to, we can not force feed anything down the throat of the Iraqi people. If they want what we offer they have got to take on some the burden for themselves. We offer them freedom but perhaps they do not value the freedom we offer. Perhaps they think it is a nice idea but they are unwilling to die for it?

I understand the risks of abandoning our efforts in Iraq. But the truth of the matter is that if the Iraqis are unwilling to stand up for themselves we're just wasting our efforts. We may have to leave chaos in our wake but perhaps we should have thought about this before we embarked on this journey? (And just who was at the wheel when we started out on this journey? Hmmm?)

Look, Dubyah, you are in charge of this operation. If the operation is failing it is either due to your leadership after we got in there was lacking or because we should not have went in there in the first place.

Dubyah is telling the truth when he states that without our presence things could get really nasty. Does America want to resort to the draft? Perhaps if we resorted to a FAIR draft it would be palatable? Truth is that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time. We should have just stuck with Afghanistan being the front lines. But bygones are bygones and we followed Dubyah into this quagmire. Dubyah is the one asking for unlimited effort without a timetable so he is the one calling it a quagmire.

Perhaps it is not wrong to start signaling the Iraqis that more will be expected of them if they value what we offer. We've tried it Dubyah's way and perhaps it is not wrong to start expecting him to start delivering some results. I do not think an endless stream of body bags with no success in sight as being "results".

And perhaps we need to start thinking about plan "B". If despite our efforts this thing is going to dissolve into a civil war, just which side are we going to be on? Do we just allow the Iraqis to fight it out without taking sides? What if other world powers start supporting one side or the other? Hey, this thing is complicated. We should have thought about this before we opened Pandora's Box.

You know, if we had just kept the front lines in Afghanistan things would not be as complicated as they are right now. Iran, Saudi Arabia, the French... darn near everyone was behind us. Dubyah was so sure he was right in leading us into Iraq nearly on our own. He was not content with Afghanistan he had to stretch the rubber band almost to the breaking point by leading us into Iraq whilst the majority of the world condemned us for doing it. Now he expects us to stand behind him while he fumbles around in the darkness.

Turn on the flashlight Dubyah. Unlimited time for questionable results does not cut it for me anymore. I am willing to listen to alternatives. As Dubyah himself said (lifted from MSNBC see here) "It's one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly even at times of war."