George Bush: Worst American president in history

[Carlene 12]

Porn is a sure thing. When Mantra Films becomes publically traded, I'm there. :biggrin1:

I agree, even though I hate to admit it. But some really high dividends will salve my tight-ass Christian conscience. I can give more to the church, right?

[beachgirl 2]

He'll fizzle out alright and then when things go to hell in a hambasket I will be here to remind everyone, I promise you.

[Wheetsin 714]

You mean things haven't done that already?

Ok, you be here to remind us. And as you sit there typing your message, we'll be envious because WOW, you really have a lot of spare time.

[GeezerSue 7]

He'll fizzle out alright and then when things go to hell in a hambasket I will be here to remind everyone, I promise you.

Hell in a handbasket is a FUTURE threat?

mysherrijo...how is this president protecting you now? What is he doing for your life, your career, your children, your security, your retirement? I ask because he's not doing squat on my behalf...and I wonder what his supporters--the few who are left--think it is that he's doing well.

[Carlene 12]

He'll fizzle out alright and then when things go to hell in a hambasket I will be here to remind everyone, I promise you.

Not sure how much worse things can get, but we look forward to hearing from you, nonetheless.

[BJean 16]

I'm like Betsyjane. I come here instead of eating. In fact, I hate it when there's a post about food. Like "hambasket" boy, makes me hungry!

[bitteroldhag 0]

This bears repeating DO THIS!!!! Go to the Google Search Engine.....type in the word FALIURE and see what you get! I love it!

I googled failure and google has an explanation for George Bush being on top of the list. It's always good to read what Google has to say.

[bitteroldhag 0]

Which faction do you mean when you say "If Iraq wants us there"? From an article from the AP just a couple of months ago...

BAGHDAD, Iraq – In a bid to stop sectarian bloodshed, Shiite and Sunni religious figures met in Mecca, Islam's holiest city, and issued a series of edicts Friday forbidding violence between Iraq's two Muslim sects.

It is uncertain, however, whether the edicts, or fatwas, will find resonance among the country's Sunni and Shiite militants whose tit-for-tat attacks have created a deadly cycle of violence that gains momentum and brutality daily. Previous attempts to reconcile Iraq's rival sects have failed to stanch the violence.

There is no unified Iraq. It's like saying, "If the Irish Catholics want us there, we will help them overthrow the Protestant government." I don't believe the USA has any business getting involved in a religious tug-of-war between two Muslim sects. And I think that when the chips are down, both the Shiites and the Sunnis hate Americans (unclean heathen Infidels) far more than they hate one another.

Man, it gets boring telling you that you are right all the time Carlene, but you are. Most people are overlooking that the Iraq war was sold to Americans based on fallacies. I teach fallacies in Comp. I, and so I was suspicious as hell from the beginning. I was not for the war because, unless you can produce reasonable evidence of wrongdoing, you shouldn't go to war. The Bush administration couldn't do that and kept changing the question of why we are at war. I can't remember exactly what kind of fallacy that is, but it is one. I'll have to look in my notes. I'm sort of tired because the neighbor puppy stayed with me last night, sleeping in my bed, or I should say squirming, and I didn't get much sleep. Then I had to have some tests to determine why I had a mini-stroke which interfered with my sleep further. Anyway, if one looks at common fallacies, one can see that the Iraq war was sold on the basis of fallacies. I never like that.

[bitteroldhag 0]

Iraq Is Vietnam - And You'd Better Believe It

By John Graham

t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Tuesday 19 December 2006

I was a civilian advisor/trainer in Vietnam, arriving just as US troops were going home. I wasn't there to fight, but I hadn't been in country a week before I learned that the word "noncombatant" didn't mean much where I was posted, fifty miles south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that then divided South Vietnam from North. I got the message when a sniper's bullet whistled past my ear on the main highway twenty miles south of HuŽ. Joe Jackson, the burly major who was driving, yelled at me to hold on and duck as he gunned the jeep out of range, zigzagging to spoil the sniper's aim.

Snipers or not, in 1971 it was the US government's policy not to issue weapons to civilian advisors in Vietnam, even to those of us in distant and dangerous outposts. The reason was not principle, but PR - and here begin the lessons for Iraq.

Sometime in 1969, the White House, under siege from the public and faced with unrelenting facts on the ground, quietly made the decision that America couldn't win its war in Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger didn't put it that way, of course. America was a superpower, and it was inconceivable that it could lose a war to a third-rate nation whose soldiers lived on rice and hid in holes in the ground. So the White House conceived an elaborate strategy that would mask the fact of an American defeat. The US would slowly withdraw its combat troops over a period of several years, while the mission of those who remained would change from fighting the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to training the South Vietnamese to carry on the fight on their own. At the same time, we would give the South Vietnamese a series of performance ultimatums which, if unmet, would trigger a total withdrawal and let us blame the South Vietnamese for the debacle that would follow. This strategy was called "Vietnamization." Implementing it cost at least 10,000 additional American and countless more Vietnamese lives, plus billions of dollars.

It was a rigged game from the start. All but the wildest zealots in Washington knew that the South Vietnamese would not and could not meet our ultimatums: an end to corrupt, revolving-door governments; an officer corps based on merit, not cronyism; and the creation of a national state that enjoyed popular allegiance strong and broad enough to control the political and cultural rivalries that had ripped the country's fabric for a thousand years.

During the eighteen months I was in Vietnam, I met almost no Americans in the field who regarded Vietnamization as a serious military strategy with any chance of success. More years of American training could not possibly make a difference in the outcome of the war, because what was lacking in the South Vietnamese Army was not just combat skills but belief in a cause worth fighting for.

But none of that was the point. Vietnamization was not a military strategy. It was a public-relations campaign.

The White House hoped that Vietnamization would keep the house of cards upright for at least a couple of years, providing what CIA veteran Frank Snepp famously called a "decent interval" that could mask the American defeat by declaring that the fate of South Vietnam now was the responsibility of the South Vietnamese. If they didn't want freedom badly enough to win, well, we had done our best.

To make this deceitful drama work, however, the pullout had to be gradual. The plan (Vietnamization) had to be easily explained to the American people. And the US training force left behind had to be large enough and exposed enough to provide visual signs of our commitment on the 6 o'clock news. Pictures of unarmed American advisors, like me, shaking hands with happy peasants would support the lie that Vietnamization was succeeding.

Living in the bulls-eye, we understood the reality very well, especially when, as public pressures for total withdrawal increased in 1971-1972, most of the "force protection" troops went home too. That left scattered handfuls of American trainers left to protect themselves. As the very visible US advisor to the city of HuŽ, I was an easy target for assassination or abduction, anytime the Viet Cong chose to take me out. I kept a case of grenades under my bed, I slept with an M-16 propped against the bedstead, and I had my own dubious army of four Vietnamese house guards who I hoped would at least fire a warning shot before they ran away.

In April 1972, North Vietnamese forces swept south across the DMZ, scattering the South Vietnamese Army defenders and driving to within six miles of HuŽ. I and a handful of other American trainers and advisors could only watch as a quarter-million panicked people gridlocked the road south to Danang, in a terrifying night reverberating with screams and explosions. We knew that any choppers sent to save us would be mobbed by Vietnamese eager to escape. I'm alive because American carrier jets caught the advancing North Vietnamese just short of the city walls and all but obliterated them.

Now we have the Iraq Study Group Report, advising that the mission of US forces shift from fighting a war to training Iraqi troops and police. The report calls for the US to lay down a series of performance conditions for the Iraqis, including that the Iraqis end their civil war and create a viable national state.

I've lived through this one before.

Deteriorating conditions on the ground will soon force President Bush to accept this shift in mission strategy. It is Vietnamization in all but name. Its core purpose is not to win an unwinnable war, but to provide political cover for a retreat, and to lay the grounds for blaming the loss on the Iraqis. Based on what I saw in Vietnam, here's what I think will happen next:

The increased training will make no difference. It could even make things worse, since we will be making better fighters of many people who will end up in partisan militias. What the Iraqi military and police need is not just technical skill but unit cohesion and loyalty to a viable central government. Neither can be taught or provided by outside trainers.

When US troops pull back from fighting the insurgents, most Iraqi units will lack both the military skills and the political will to replace them. More soldiers and police we've trained will join the militias. Violence and chaos will increase across the country.

As the situation continues to deteriorate in Iraq, anti-American feelings will increase. Cursed for staying, we will now be cursed for leaving. Iraq will become an ever more dangerous place for any American to be.

At home, political pressure to get out of Iraq completely will increase rapidly as the violence gets worse. The military force left behind to protect the US trainers will be drawn down to - or below - a bare minimum, further increasing the dangers for the Americans who remain. Military affairs commentator General Barry McCaffrey issued this sober warning in the December 18 issue of Newsweek: "We're setting ourselves up for a potential national disaster in which some Iraqi divisions could flip and take 5,000 Americans hostage, or multiple advisory teams go missing in action."

Nothing destroys troop morale faster than being in a war you know is pointless. At this same stage in Vietnam, drug use among Americans became a serious problem.

Our ultimatums and conditions won't be met. As the situation gets worse, whatever remains of a central government in Baghdad will be even less able to make the compromises and form the coalitions necessary to control centuries of factional and tribal hatreds. The civil war will spiral out of control, giving us the justification we need to get out, blaming the Iraqis for the mess we've left behind. Then we will face the regional and global ramifications of a vicious civil war whose only winners will be Iran and al-Qaeda.

US leaders may decide, as they did 37 years ago, that we must again create a "decent interval" to mask defeat and that the PR benefits of that interval are worth the cost in lives and money. If they do, however, they should not - like the Iraq Study Group - lie to us that such a strategy has any military chance whatsoever of success.

John Graham shipped out on a freighter when he was sixteen, took part in the first ascent of Mount McKinley's North Wall at twenty, and hitchhiked around the world at twenty-two. A Foreign Service officer for fifteen years, he served in Libya during the revolution and in the war in Vietnam. In the mid-seventies, he planned nuclear war strategies for NATO, then served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator John Glenn. At the United Nations in the late 1970s, he was deeply involved in US initiatives in Southern Africa, South Asia and Cuba. When he left the Foreign Service, he took a job lecturing on cruise ships. On his first cruise. with 550 people on board, the ship burned and sank in the Gulf of Alaska. His lifeboat lost in a violent storm, Graham was finally pulled to safety and to a new sense of purpose for his life. Today his speeches, workshops and books - all part of the non-profit Giraffe Heroes Project - have helped thousands of people solve tough problems in their communities and beyond. He is the author of Stick Your Neck Out - A Street-Smart Guide for Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond, from Berrett-Koehler.

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[BJean 16]

Bitteroldhag: You hit the nail on the head about the fallacy of why we went to war and why we stay there. Thanks.

I am sorry to hear you have suffered a mini stroke. A TIA? My MIL had a couple on Monday and we're going through some tests, etc. with her. Can you believe she hasn't been to a doctor in 40 years? Bizzare, but true. She's an introvert and just always managed not to get seriously ill. She's 81 and may finally need blood pressure meds or Heprin to keep her blood from clotting. Gotta be the genes. Also, she is about 5'8" and weighs 110. You can imagine what she thought about my fat a$$. Hate to tell her about the meds I take.

Hope everything turns out well for you and you get back to sweet restful sleep soon!

[BJean 16]

Bitter: I'm not familiar with DailyKos. Can you enlighten me?

I have been saying for years that Iraq is another Viet Nam. Everyone thought I was nuts and argued with me. But some of us who lived through it know the similarities and the consequences. All I can think of is the people... used as pawns and sacrificed for what many Americans choose to believe is freedom. If only it were true.

Reading John Graham's essay brought back so many vivid memories and his story is totally right on. I thank you for sharing it.

[BJean 16]

P.S. It SHOULD be interesting to everyone, not just us old farts.

[Carlene 12]

Man, it gets boring telling you that you are right all the time Carlene, but you are.

Could you put that in writing, sign it, and have it notarized for me, please? My kids will never believe that someone thinks I'm right part of the time, let alone ALL the time...LOL

[Carlene 12]

Iraq Is Vietnam - And You'd Better Believe It

Wow! This man knows whereof he speaks!

[bitteroldhag 0]

Bitter: I'm not familiar with DailyKos. Can you enlighten me?

I have been saying for years that Iraq is another Viet Nam. Everyone thought I was nuts and argued with me. But some of us who lived through it know the similarities and the consequences. All I can think of is the people... used as pawns and sacrificed for what many Americans choose to believe is freedom. If only it were true.

Reading John Graham's essay brought back so many vivid memories and his story is totally right on. I thank you for sharing it.

DailyKos is a liberal website that I read because some of it isn't absolute crap though much of it is. I hope I don't get sued for putting this essay on this site, but I thought it was important. Actually it is from another website which is noted in the title--truthout.