posted 10-28-2005 09:19 AM         

"We're there - so let's try to finish the job." - What is your plan to 'finish the job?

"And it has been established that Iraq had nothing to do with 911." - What is your source for that information please?

"No WMD's have been found which were the reason to go to war." - Do you agree with former Pres. Clinton, when in 1998, he said Iraq had WMD's?

"The real question in my mind is - should we have been there in the first place ?" - Obviously your answer is no. So, do we let a mad dictator continue to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children?

Would you agree that to fight terrorism,,,,,you kill the terrorist?

Does it matter if I believed Clinton when he said that Iraq had WWMD's ? Maybe back then they had them - who really knows ?

The whole point is moot since neither you or I are going to change anything. Maybe we should start a new topic and ask everybodys opinion on how to solve the Iraq problem and send it to Washington - how about it AC ?

Oh, and about my source of information about Iraq's involvement with 9/11. Just every major newspaper and the findings of the 9/11 committee.

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posted 10-28-2005 01:35 PM         

This administration would be miles ahead of where they are now in terms of support if they simply admitted they screwed-up on the intelligence and that we now need to make the best of a bad situation as a matter of responsibility. But that will never happen, just like it never happened in the late 60's and early 70's in Viet Nam.

This is not a coalition we have in Iraq. After the British force, the third largest "coalition" partner are US contractors!

No empirical evidence has come to light that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. To the contrary, Sadam had no use for Islamic extremists and little or nothing in common with them. Sadam maintained air-tight control over Iraq and anything that threatened his control, be it tribally-based or religious-based was not tolerated. The fact of the matter is the only terrorist in Iraq are the ones who went in after we went in and created the chaotic situation. If we depart now all we will have succeed in doing is transplanting the terrorists from Afghanistan to Iraq. Colon Powell warned the Bush team on the pending Iraq invasion: "You break it, you have to stay and fix it."

The first thing we have to do is secure the borders, particularly with Syria. Last week I spoke to a couple of Marines at Quantico Marine Base who had just returned from the Iraq-Syrian border. They just shook their heads and said it was a complete mess up there and anyone who wanted to enter into Iraq could. If we don't get a handle on the insurgency it's pretty clear Iraq will dissolve into civil war or worse, tribal warfare. And that's not even taking into account the influence of Sunni-dominated Iran next door who would love to see a similar fundamentalist (American-hating) theocracy in power in Iraq

If we simply pull out, I think we'd be fooling ourselves that the fallout of the situation will remain within the borders of Iraq. It may well be that the "WMD" in Iraq are the clan-based divisions that threaten to explode. This administration has created one hell of a mess in Iraq that's going to cost literally billions and billions more dollars and countless more lives to fix.

The "war on terror" should have been confined first to finishing the job in Afghanistan.