Yes, but are you vomitting with depression, or rage? For me, it varies day by day.

I'm neither a depression or rage sort of fellow. I'll reserve the vomit for the right wing spin, and the vomit will be purely out of disgust.

I'm remembering someone (probably my dad) once told me: "If you're going to do something, do it right."

But we didn't, so now we're stuck.

there never was a right way of doing it in the first place. the entire operation was based on an ideology dependant on magic. the mistakes, in and of themselves, are irrelevant. every single move on the chess board leads to the same conclusion.

Like in Lebanon, civil war is going to happen whether we're there or not. To his credit, Ronald Reagan realized that and withdrew the Marines from Lebanon and let them have at it. Then the Israelis went into Lebanon to settle the Lebanese Civil War, and ended up having their army eaten alive for years trying to keep the peace, until they finally fled with their tails tucked between their legs.

Nowdays, Lebanon is pretty much at peace. The civil war is over. The economy is recovering to the point where Beirut, rather than being a bombed-out shell of a city, is once again the commercial capital of the (non-Israeli) Middle East, through which a large amount of commerce between Jordon, Syria, and Europe is conducted. None of this happened because American or Israeli troops were there. It all happened because American and Israeli troops *LEFT*, and let the civil war wind down to its inevitable end as everybody's honor got satisfied and, exhausted, they sat down and figured out a way to live together.

Iraq is Lebanon writ large. Peace isn't going to come to Iraq until we get out of the way and let them fight their civil war to the end and figure out how to live with each other without a dictator like Saddam forcing them to live with each other.

That's how I see it, as someone who lived during the Lebanese civil war...

-BT

valid arguments about the problems of international interventions in civil conflicts, but Iraq if just too populous and oil rich for an internal conflict to not have overwhelming international ramifications. A Lebanon can be ripped up all to hell, and the only significant concerns are humanitarian and Israel’s northern border. If an Iraq is ripped up, with fifteen million shiites pushed up against Iran’s border (oh, and by the way, why did Iran elect such a nationalist freak job? Oh yes, in response to the US and Britain flexing their muscles in the region, reminding the Iranian populist masses that the West is the great satan. Ahmadinejad, just like everything else in Iran, is our and Britain's fault. well, actually mostly Britain's fault, but we always get blamed after we try to fix their messes in the middle-east.), at a time when Iran is posed to become a real threat on the international stage, all the while sitting on top of a huge percentage of the world’s oil reserves, humanitarian concerns are not a luxury the world can afford.

If humanitarian issues were what I was concerned about, I would be bitching about Darfur, not Iraq. My concern about middle-east stability is not about my love of all god’s children. It’s about stability itself. And yes, that stability is all about oil.

"there never was a right way of doing it in the first place."

Well, for a start, having a plan beyond "they'll welcome us with open arms" following initial combat would've been, uh, smart.

smarter, but still idiotically stupid, and it would still be doomed to failure.

If you assume that the goal is really to bring democracy to the "freedom loving" people of Iraq, then you are correct in saying that there is no right way to do it.

However, if the goal is to create a perpetual and significant increase in the earnings of the military-industrial complex--Mission Accomplished.

I think at this point we all know the “bring democracy” rap was b/s. well, my theory is that there were some delusional neo-con theorists that actually believed their own crap, and others who saw the potential for a spike in the value of their military/industrial complex investments, who were either willing to exploit the profit potential of these theories in action, or in the least, in their desire for profits, manipulated their own logic to allow themselves to believe that the motive was not greed... when of course, it is greed that makes everything work.

But, I do not believe haliburton was hoping or betting on a profit producing insurgency. I think most of those guys, especially the neo-cons, really thought they'd show the left wing and the UN how smart they were, and that the markets themselves and democracy would instantly stabilize Iraq, cause a massive growth of the middle class, make shiites and sunnis love each other, and make Arabs finally understand and respect Israel’s right to exist. tards.