>> ^RedSky:

>> ^Yogi:
I know that leaving wouldn't be a perfect option however it's still the only option. Many many more people will die if we stay. We went through the same thing in Vietnam when people thought we should stay, it's wrong and we shouldn't. Although there will probably be some horrific deaths, there will be thousands more if we stay. We must leave.
To be honest, I'm beginning to think more and more that it's your mess, and your responsibility to fix it. Going into Afghanistan was just as ridiculous as going into Iraq. What were the odds that a slow, advancing military force was going to seriously disrupt a fluid cross-national terrorist organisation, let alone catch a single terrorist in its dragnet? Yes, the Taliban openly sponsored Al Qaeda but this doesn't change the fact there is no shortage of decrepit states and governments to which terrorist organisations can relocate like Somalia. It was obvious that if going in the objective was to topple a government, nation building would follow.
Yes, the US has a massive budget deficit and is in no position to fund wars, but equally I don't think you can morally justify bailing and seeing the people who trusted in your willingness to establish a semblance of a functioning state with human rights be rounded up and executed. Biden's plan of leaving a limited force to target terrorist activities will simply not be enough to prevent this. While the kind of parliamentary/ presidential democracy they're going for really has little chance of working because of the lack of pan-national trust and how dependant the political system is on patronage, I think a more decentralised model has a chance, and that's really what I think they should be aiming for.


I disagree, I don't believe it was ridiculous or a mistake. I believe it was instituting a war of aggression which is considered the greatest international crime under the Nuremburg principles. So what happens when someone commits a War of Aggression against someone else? Do we call for them to stay and clean up the mess? No that's ridiculous because asking a population to accept the rule of those who caused them to be in this predicament is laughable. We wouldn't force the Nazi's to stay in Poland and clean up their mess...they have to leave and pay them reparations.

Which is I think the best thing we can do, leave and let possibly the UN or Red Crescent work with Afganistan trying to figure it out while paying reparations. And invading army isn't required to clean up their mess when their presence is what's causing the mess.

People are comparing this directly to the Pentagon Papers. I was thinking they're not up to that groundbreaking simply because we've already had the Pentagon Papers...so we have something to compare this to. Never the less it's still important that this was leaked and is being reported on (Despite an editorial I read in the New York Times).

Hopefully this will give Obama the push he needs to get out sooner and end this very illegal War of Aggression. Which by the way a War of Aggression is considered by the Nuremburg tribunal as the supreme international crime because it includes within it all the atrocities that come after.

My problem with the current reform proposal is that it's mainly a windfall for the insurance corps. Do you really think it's going to be easier to make it better when they have -additional- hundreds of billions to spend?

I've pretty much given up on Obama. Everything he said he was for, that I cared about, he's caved on. Warrantless wiretaps, wars of aggression, torture investigation/prosecutions, single-payer healthcare...all gone.

The only remaining benefit to having elected him is that it kept Palin away from the office. But I'm starting to wonder just how much worse that would have been. At this point, I'm about ready to give up and just wait for the blood to start flowing...sadly, I'm old enough that moving to another country isn't very feasible (especially since Wall Street stole my bank account).

That last paragraph I agree with.

But Israel has made generations worth of enemies with this latest campaign. They started it by triggering the end to the cease fire. They don't live up to their end of agreements, such as allowing in a certain number of aid trucks. They certainly don't want peace or they could have tried to maintain the last cease fire. THey no longer deserve any sympathy. They certainly do no deserve any more $$$ or weapons to keep up their wars of aggression.

You don't think it odd that they publicly stated they were going to pull out all their troops by the time Obama stepped into office? Death from bombing and white phosphorous cannot be used as a political tool to shore up your party's support. The Israeli leaders might be just as bad as Hamas in terms of peace for its citizens.

As if war crimes of powerful and/or victorious nations are suddently going to be an issue. Noone would snatch Dick Cheney off an Air France jet. You might become a persona non grata, but that's it.

You're bound for some time in the joint if you rob a bank, but some ethnic cleansing, maybe a little genocide ... or how about a war of aggression? Noone's going to hold that against you, if you come out on top. It's just politics.

^He couldn't have said that, because that would have been an insult to the retarded. And I ain't kidding. How many retarded people have blood on their hands from a war of aggression?

The Bush administration sent thousands of troops to their deaths (and horrible disfigurements) for oil.

They also approved of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib torture policies. After all, who really thinks that Charles Graner and Lyndie England just thought up the ideas that constitute those horrific pictures?

They allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be run by a horse-show judge, then when disaster hit, they said "Brownie" was doing a "heckuva job." Then they sent the survivors to formaldehyde-laced trailer homes.

They outed a CIA agent because her husband said their purported cause for war was ill-founded. And when someone was finally brought to justice for it, Bush commuted his sentence. And who knows if he'll give a last-day pardon.

They are the first administration to openly start a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, then give every excuse in the world to explain that it wasn't about oil, which ended up being what it was about.

ETC, fucking ETC.

And people still think the idea of martial law is tinfoil-hat conspiracy? Maybe, but the idea is not unfounded.

Jefferson was a scholar, who believed in separation of church and state, and minimizing the power of the presidency.

Bush is an ignorant redneck, who believes in theocracy and maximizing the power of the presidency.

They both waged wars of aggression. Jefferson did not just against the Barbary Pirates, but also against the Native Americans.

Guam was acquired during the Spanish American war, I believe the US took the Marshal islands from Japan, though I think they're sovereign now.

My reaction was to them trying to boot the Marines out of their office suggesting they had no right to be there. I didn't see much on them just protesting the war or the aggressive recruitment tactics they used. I have no doubt they were either. The Daily Show is sensationalist, that's kind of what they do, and the report was on something most people find absurd, saying they had no right to have a recruitment office (not protesting the war, or aggressive/dishonest recruitment). I guess my stance on the whole thing is, i thought it was a douchey thing for them to do, just as it is when the armed forces uses aggressive/misleading recruitment tactics, it had nothing to do with patriotism.

I like how he says "Some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvanism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work." An interesting phenomenon indeed.