“Surrender” is saying “Hey, look you win, you get the country and we will do whatever it is you want because you beat us”. Is the redeployment of our troops to other areas where Al Qaeda is actually operating surrendering? Seriously. How can redeployment be viewed as surrendering to the terrorists? Furthermore, how can redeployment to other areas be viewed as “cut and run”? There are a number of politicans that want to leave and not even redeploy. That is cutting and running, but putting the troops somewhere else to bring more terrorists to justice is not cutting and running. It’s going on the pursuit. To me, this is much more aggressive than sitting tight and waiting for more terrorists to come to Iraq.

Re Comment 6:

Yeah, we lost because of the press and because of the pinko commies. Had nothing to do with terrible leadership and a president who was more paranoid than Hunter S. Thompson…

Re Timetables:

What the hell ever happened to goal-setting anyhow? Is forethought too much to expect from this administration? Set a time-table. Make a fault tree diagram (for me, it’s “failure mode effect analysis [FMEA]). If things are going to plan leave, if something comes up, extend the deadline, adjust accordingly. How hard is this? This is rudimentary project management here folks. Rudimentary. I think this is my biggest beef with the administration’s handling of this war. There seems to be very little forethought.

http://htfdidthishappen.blogspot.com/2006/06/time-for-john-murtha-to-moveon.html

It’s a post in support of Diana Irey, who is running against John Murtha in PA-12. She may not have a chance, but then a lot of people (myself included) thought the same thing about Ned Lamont. (No snark intended.)

While it is a very grey area now, history will clear it up.

As to whether 9/11 changed “the threshold for what the US would tolerate:” who exactly gave us the right to determine which countries are tolerable and which are not?

As for post 19: we’re fighting a war whose “primary goal” is to “establish a middle class?” We are?

As for “other means of addressing terrorism:” you fight terrorism by attacking those who attacked you, by tightening homeland security, and by providing an example to the rest of the world why a democratic society is worth striving for. Not by attacking a Muslim country which had nothing to do with the attack on us.

Every country in the ME is an oligarchy.

By having a society without many tiers of social success, there is no thought of any form about ‘relativism’. If there is no social relativism, there will never be any cultural relativism, and the ME will continue terrorism.

Establishing a successful middle class in Iraq is the primary goal. The effects will be dramatic and ripple forth for the next fifty years. If not, (as it was a gamble), then terrorism will continue, an the means of conducting terrorism will become more deadly.

There was no other means of addressing terrorism out there, except trying to keep knocking the ball out of our court, with no room for error.