Right here. Inspiring, isn't it? There's a goal the country can really rally around.
Personally, I hope he keeps making speeches like this. Now if only he could add "McCain Predicts Recession/Depression Over by 2018" and "McCain Pledges to Cap Gas Prices at $11/Gallon" to the mix.
C'mon, man. He's shaved 95 years off his original offer. That's a good deal in anyone's book, right?
ReplyDeleteMaybe by the time the Fall rolls around, McCain will have mastered the fine art of telling us what we want to hear, rather than the truth. Better yet, just advocate change.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's one way to look at it, Bill. Of course the other way is "It's not working, it's never worked, but we'll keep doggedly doing it." :-) Sometimes consistency is not a good thing.
ReplyDeleteHow about "let's clean up the mess before we leave?" I'm old enough to remember the last mess we made and left precipitously before cleaning it up. Remember the boat people? Remember the Khmer Rouge?
ReplyDeleteMy wife who serves in the Navy, and is currently stationed over in Iraq at TQ basically laughs whenever she hears "promises" of leaving. We aren't leaving, in fact, you might want to get used to the idea of having a base right in the middle of Iraq. It's more reality than you could even imagine....
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure we'll have bases in Iraq indefinitely: Like Okinawa, like Germany, like South Korea...
ReplyDeleteWe're even still in Cuba -- even though the Spanish-American war that got us there ended 100 years ago.
From a military point of view, it would inconceivable to give up on the chance to have another permanent base of operations in the Gulf. We're not going anywhere...
Bill, are you suggesting that the Khmer Rouge was a direct result of the United States pulling out of SE Asia, or a direct result of going in in the first place?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how the image of "cleaning up" applies in either case. I mean, unless when you go to clean out your garage you shoot items and/or set portions of it on fire. We're not talking about yard implements, cars, ladders or hoses. We're talking about the way of life for millions upon millions of people being disrupted.
We might argue that this version of disruption is better than the Baathist version. Better for whom? one might then ask. But I really don't think we can honestly make a case that there is any "clean" ending to this war. The only ending for the US is one in which we grab our chunk of the Cradle of Civilization, wall it off, ring it with guns, and hope that the Sunnis and Shi'a exhaust themselves.
If that's the definition of clean McCain, et. al. are longing for, then it seems like the cost of it in bodies and dollars has been unconscionably high.
e,
ReplyDeleteI'm suggesting that leaving in the precipitous manner (remember the folks clinging to the helicopter as it departed the embassy in Saigon?) that we did left some things undone. Now that the situation in Iraq seems to be improving (I didn't say it was perfect), sharp diplomacy is needed to make sure that we don't leave the kind of power vacuum we left in Viet Nam and Indochina in general, and we don't want to leave the message that, whatever happens, we won't be getting involved. I happen to believe that the latter message encouraged the Khmer Rouge in their reign of terror. I also happen to believe that we should leave something better than we found it. As far as whether we should have gone to Viet Nam or Iraq, those questions are academic next to the question of, right or wrong, we went, and now what do we do. The fact that some think we shouldn't have gone in in the first place does not automatically lead to the conclusion that we should just pull up stakes and leave. That's one of the lessons we should have learned from Viet Nam.