U.S. occupation in Iraq is like Civil War, WWII, not Vietnam(apparently)

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I mean, really, if Iraq is the Civil War, then we have Lee's surrender. The problem is that we have a Klan with roadside bombs and a Shia community we can't just write off to sharecropping for the rest of the century. And of course our Civil War was, like, a civil war, in which the beaten Confederacy would just be reabsorbed into an existing democratic system it had always been part of anyway -- no such luck or custom in Iraq, obviously.

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 04:17 (seventeen years ago) link

(The Klan's role and doings during the earliest years of Reconstruction are about as good an analog for the Iraqi insurgency as you could ask for, right down to the assassinations.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 04:26 (seventeen years ago) link

they were fighting for their economic lives - which just happened to rest entirely on the preservation of slavery.

yup, industrialization vs 18th-C agriculture & all that

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 05:12 (seventeen years ago) link

still, let's start going thru the possibilities of any other "just war" that the neo-cons need to ref to justify a bullshit occupation...

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 05:19 (seventeen years ago) link

Ya know who's is going to direct the Iraqui insurgents' equivalent of Birth of a Nation? Suri Cruise. Mark my words.

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 05:28 (seventeen years ago) link

it's only a matter of time till they get around to using the american revolution - geo w is geo w!

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 05:43 (seventeen years ago) link

which is: war is easy, it's reconstruction that's near-impossible to dictate

Truer words never ~~spoken~~ typed, etc... and your point about the KKK OTM.

Btw, everybody, take a glance at Schama's 'Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution'.

― M. White (Miguelito), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 13:38 (seventeen years ago) link

also, along with the previous war tidings, y'all know that we're under attack from islamofacists, trying to get all up in you respective areas and marry your daughters, right?

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 14:25 (seventeen years ago) link

The US has already been in Iraq longer than it was in WW2, and unless it gets out within the next year the whole thing will have been going on longer than the civil war, too.

― Hello Sunshine (Hello Sunshine), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 15:05 (seventeen years ago) link

Bush speech: Hitler/Lenin comparisons; Guide to Beating and Killing Hostages.

― Urnst Kouch (Urnst Kouch), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 17:17 (seventeen years ago) link

The problem I have with them saying, essentially, "Hold tight. Let's stick together and win this one. It's important and all wars are hard," is that THEY haven't done anything to inspire confidence. They apparently prefer ideology to patriotism, placing tax cuts for the very few above listening to senior military brass and eschewing any standard of accountability. I'm not convinced that staying the course will get us anything and I'm relatively sure that the whole thing is simply a way to appeal to their base with regards to November as opposed to a real attempt to turn public opinion around.

― M. White (Miguelito), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 18:54 (seventeen years ago) link

you can drop the qualifiers there, since you're accurate.

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 18:57 (seventeen years ago) link

"Lenin and Hitler"?

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Wednesday, 6 September 2006 21:09 (seventeen years ago) link

maybe he meant John Lennon.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 21:21 (seventeen years ago) link

no one secedes and fights a bloody four year war over tariffs or whatever other bullshit

But the Revolutionary War was supposedly about taxes, right? RIGHT?!11

― Cunga (Cunga), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 21:49 (seventeen years ago) link

The bill of particulars is carefully laid out in the Declaration of Independence, after the self-evident truth business is wrapped up in the first couple of sentences. Most of the Declaration is about the various specific complaints of the colonies against King G3.

― Aimless (Aimless), Wednesday, 6 September 2006 22:17 (seventeen years ago) link

I'm debating whether we should withdraw from Iraq entirely, or if we should occupy the oilfields and leave the rest of Iraq to it's own devices.

Does our involvement in Iraq constitue a just war? In a sense. Our military is trying to do the right thing over there, protect civilians and keep the peace, etc. We're certainly not CONDUCTING this war the way we conducted the war in Vietnam (indiscriminate bombing, and let God sort 'em out). The problem isn't that the war is unjust. The problem is that the war will never end. War in Iraq is a way of life.

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Thursday, 7 September 2006 00:26 (seventeen years ago) link

40,000 in 3 years? The Vietnamese WISH they had it so easy.

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Friday, 8 September 2006 01:59 (seventeen years ago) link

lenin isn't really in the same league as hitler but he's pretty indefensible in his own right.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Friday, 8 September 2006 23:25 (seventeen years ago) link

I'd like someone to please bring the Tunguska Event into this discussion.

― M. V. (M.V.), Saturday, 9 September 2006 02:41 (seventeen years ago) link

give it a bit, it'll happen

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Saturday, 9 September 2006 04:56 (seventeen years ago) link

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