Comments on: Message to Obama: We Were Greeted as Liberators

By: minty

minty — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:22:00 +0000

Liberals make me head for a puke bucket.
Give your hate speeches to the many in Iraq that will vote; something they were not able to do before.

It is immensely gratifying to read about conservative support for the Iraqi people. Even after hundreds of thousands killed, and over 4 million Iraqis displaced as refugees, the neocon commitment to the Iraqi people is matched only by the care with which they planned Iraq’s future.
Conservatives like Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense, whose brother was a fanatical Zionist settler in the Occupied Terrorities.
And neocons like Marty Peretz, who just the other day wrote:

Whether the Gaza Palestinians can ever have a truly civil society is another question, the answer to which — given the Arab societies that surround them — is probably ‘no.’

As Lynn aptly notes, one side does indeed make one reach for a puke bucket. I can only imagine what disaffected Arab youth are reaching for right now.

By: Lynn

Lynn — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:53:24 +0000

There were WMD’s – what did Saddam kill the Kurds with, kindness? The downgraded yellow cake that was secretly shipped out of the country was not dangerous?
Liberals make me head for a puke bucket.
Give your hate speeches to the many in Iraq that will vote; something they were not able to do before.
The supporters of Saddam want us out; the Kurds still welcome our military.

By: Legolas

Legolas — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:18:47 +0000

David,

The fact is we were viewed as liberators and that is what McCain said would happen.

Repeating something over and over does not make it true. Polls of Iraqi civilians from various organizations as early as the 2nd half of 2003 do show a population which was optimistic about its future. But, they also show a significant portion of the population – depending on the question, in some cases a clear majority – held negative or ambivalent opinions about the invasion, and was skeptical of the motivations and continued presence of coalition forces.
Obama, of course, doesn’t support leaving “before the conditions on the ground dictate that it is safe to do so.”

By: David

David — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:30:21 +0000

To all of the commenters above who are detached from reality,
Obama mocked McCain about the Iraq war, he mocked him for saying we would be greeted as liberators, not for saying we were no longer viewed that way. The fact is we were viewed as liberators and that is what McCain said would happen. McCain had no way to know (at the time) that Bush would screw up the prosecution of the war (up to the point of the surge) nor did he have any way to know that the WMD argument would turn out to be bogus. Obama knows all of this, his comments are meant to paint McCain as someone in lockstep with Bush and he uses something that he SHOULD know is false but doesn’t seem to.
I was against the war, didn’t see the reason for going in, still don’t. But as stupid as it was to invade it would be catastrophic to leave before the conditions on the ground dictate that it is safe to do so. Anyone who calls themselves a humanitarian and argues against this reality is no humanitarian. Imagine we went in to Darfur to secure the peace and then set an arbitrary deadline for our departure regardless of the conditions on the ground. Would that make sense? It is an idiotic idea. A very dangerous idea that would unnecessarily put hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in jeopardy. I am amazed to hear so many Democrats say that this is a sound policy.

By: Legolas

Legolas — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:35:20 +0000

Exactly right, Jayhuck. This is a straw man argument.

By: Jayhuck

Jayhuck — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:53:00 +0000

Oh for Pete’s sake – I don’t think Obama’s point was that NO ONE was happy we were there, his point was that many, many people – perhaps a majority, did not view us this way.
Let’s not forget the reason we were sent there in the first place! Weapons of mass destruction or that Iraq had a part in 9/11 – both reasons which turned out later to be false. And how many American lives did these false reasons cost?

By: Ann

Ann — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:56:49 +0000

Saddam Hussein was not a terrorist who threatened our security.
Lynn David,
It is my understanding that he paid off the families of those who were terrorists that threatened both Israel and the U.S. He also was very slow and evasive in producing verification that his country did not have wmds. In light of his propensity of threats and invasions of other countries and that we were in a war with Afghanistan and other uncertainty, this posed a great threat that we could not toy with.

By: Lynn David

Lynn David — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:20:56 +0000

George W Bush eviscerated himself. You, like Bush, have blurred the reason we entered into Iraq. Supposedly our security was on the line from Hussein’s multiple WMDs. The Iraqi government’s links to terrorism were rather tenuous. Indeed, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was anethema to that for which al-Qaida stood. A dictatorship of terror is not of necessity terroristic outside its own borders.
Many of us saw how Saddam’s armies crumpled in the first Gulf War and then wondered how this rather incompetent leader could have been creating WMDs on such grand scales. It was only the “supergun” which he intended to fire at Israel and the biochemical attacks on some Kurdish villages which led to our doubt. Time and time again, inspectors came up with nothing, though their way was often thwarted. But beyond those none that has been alleged by the Bush administration has proven to be true. Saddam Hussein was not a terrorist who threatened our security.
Therefore it was not in our interest to invade Iraq, if someone should have been worried and invaded it should have been Saudi Arabia, not us. Yet this liberal was happy to see that statue fall. But this liberal also soon heard the calls in the succeeding months by Iraqis for America’s withdrawal.
Islam has a very political, self-determining aspect to the religion. It is incumbent upon those Muslims to determine their own fate. Thus if once truly liberated, to be occupied by and dictated to by a “liberator,” especially a nonMuslim liberator, becomes unconscionable to the Muslim mindset. That knowledge seems to have eluded the Bush administration. And so we have the last five years in which the evisceration of Bush was self-inflicted.