[Previous] View topic - Legitimacy of Iraq War Debate (split topic ......

 [Next] Pat Tillman Saw the Iraq War as Folly | Cato @ Liberty...

Some related posts from Technorati and Google.

Newshoggers.com: Via Steve Clemons, who is a signatory along with folk like Robert Jervis, Christopher Preble, Andrew Bacevich, Michael Cohen, Bernard Finel, Ted Galen Carpenter and .During your campaign for the Presidency, Americans around the country appreciated your skepticism of the rationales for the Iraq war.

[The Interpreter] Obama's foreign policy realism: I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

[The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan] Humility Or Humiliation - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: What I am opposed to is a rash war ”¦ I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

[Matthew Yglesias] Matthew Yglesias » Beer and Climate Change: The historical record (see the 1900 Galveston flood) says there is no correlation. Anyone the slightest bit skeptical will laugh that connection away.

[The League of Ordinary Gentlemen] hawks and owls | The League of Ordinary Gentlemen: But a couple thing keep tripping me up in this quest to expand and broaden my horizons.  A couple not-insignificant obstacles remain between any meaningful alliance of the dissident and movement conservatives.  Probably the most glaring is the hawk and owl divide – or if you prefer, the realist/neocon divide.  You see, to me no true conservatism can embrace the sort of hawkish, militaristic policies that the neoconservatives lay claim to.  These are liberal internationalist policies sprinkled heavily with right-wing machismo.  Conservatives are supposed to be wary of “statism”

[RealClearPolitics - Articles - Michelle Malkin] RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama Foreign Policy Looks Like Bush 41: For example, Michele Flournoy, a co-chair of Obama's Defense Department transition team, is president of the Center for a New American Security, which The New York Times observed last year "looks an awful lot like a shadow policy apparatus for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign." The center, in turn, has warm ties with Richard Armitage, another Republican realist who had grave doubts about going into Iraq.

[POLITICO Top Stories] The Political Mind: Iraq is a matter of judgment - Stanley Renshon ...: I do agree that an immediate pull out of all troops would have been bad, but Obama and others proposed a phased withdrawal based on conditions on the ground. If we had started removing troops according to a gradual timetable as Obama proposed, the Iraqis would be closer to the goal of independence than they are now, the Iraqi security forces would be stepping in to quell additional violence and routing foreign fighters, and our troops would be coming home heroes or deploying to Afganistan to fight the real terrorists who attacked us.

[City of Brass] towards a "realist" foreign policy - City of Brass: In 2002, you had warned that such an endeavor would yield "a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, and with unintended consequences." You pointed out the dangers of fighting such a war "without a clear rationale and without strong international support." As scholars of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, many of us issued similar warnings before the war, unfortunately to little avail.

[Lynn Sweet] Sweet blog extra. Obama: "No good options left" in Iraq. Doubts ...: We are winning and have always been winning in Iraq, I guess when you pander to media-generated versions of reality instead of LEADING and telling your country to the truth that Saddam's regime has been crushed, 5,000 members of al Qaeda have been caught/killed in Iraq and now we are training an Iraqi security force (all volunteer Thank you very much Mr. Rangel) to contain the remaining problems you have little to zero credibility with the people who have fought over there and follow the day to day progress much more closely than the "public opinion polls" of the situation.

[Rootless Cosmopolitan - By Tony Karon] Rootless Cosmopolitan - By Tony Karon » Blog Archive » Why the ...: And I have no doubt that if the Democrats were in the White House now, and given responsibility for managing the realm (not just Iraq, but the entire connected matrix of U.S. interests in the region), that they’d reach the same conclusion. That’s why Iraq is seen as such a catastrophe by the U.S. strategic establishment: The U.S. cannot win, but nor can it accept the consequences of retreat.

[BrothersJudd Blog] BrothersJudd Blog: YIKES, IS SHE CONFUSED:: But Bush's big mistake was not having a joint appearance with the Congressional leadership after the House and Senate votes, and getting Democrats up there next to him to say they supported the measure in full (i.e., that it was a continuation and a fulfillment of Congressional policy on Iraq since the 1998 regime change vote). That would have negated much of what followed, because then the Democratic party itself would have had to push back against the moonbat left.

[The Lede] If It Looks Like a Civil War, and Sounds Like a Civil War”¦ - The ...: If the former is the case, as GWB continues to assert, then the U.S. can continue to serve a useful role in trying to reduce the violence against the central government and support the government’s development of civil institutions. If on the other hand the latter is the case and the country is in a state of civil war, then the U.S. can play no useful role because it no longer has a legitimate government to support and defend but instead the future legitimate government will be decided by the struggle between the different internal factions.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, War Iraq, Iraq Reviews