Managing a war is a bit different than managing a classroom.

I was raised in Missoula. Go Griz!

What if conditions on the ground dictate a 24 month presence? Which plan supercedes?

C’mon don’t be such a sycophant”

Good question. I guess I would trust that our military can accomplish the mission given to them. We all have deadlines. I met with my principal the other day and he gave me a list of programs he wants me to teach. I have about forty-five periods to teach my students 10 different programs. I think I can do it. I know I will have to make some adjustments on the way. Some programs will take longer than I expect to teach, others will take less time. Regardless, at the end of those forty-five periods the kids leave, and they better have the skills they are suppose to have. I would expect that our military is is even more capable of meeting a deadline.

How can you have a hard 16 month withdrawal plan that is based on conditions on the ground?

What if conditions on the ground dictate a 24 month presence? Which plan supercedes?

C’mon don’t be such a sycophant
neocon

I don’t root for America to win wars, in fact I despise war, but I despise people who kill innocent women and children in the name of oppression and theocracy moreso. There is just no way to morally excuse the actions of radical Islam and I will go to my grave advocating their demise, and if that includes war, so be it.

Also I think you have very distorted views of the administration that is based on propaganda and half truths. Cheney has given more personal money to charities than any other politician, period. Having been raised in Montana, I know of some people that know him personally, because of his Wyoming roots, and to a person they speak very highly of him. He could have stayed in the private sector and made twice as much money.

any, have a good night
neocon

I don’t think a more bloodthirsty and less-principled person walks the Earth. I didn’t agree with anything George W Bush did, but I have a grudging respect for how he snowballed Congress every step of the way no matter what. And he never backed down from anything. He got nearly everything he asked for except to privatize social security and to keep Terry Schiavo on life support. Dick Cheney strikes me as an opportunist who made a lot of money off of the wars. Whatever. Rumsfeld? Underneath all the bs there was probably something of a public servant there.

Colin Powell, however, is in a class by himself. How he can be such a bald-faced liar, so cowardly, and so vicious is amazing to me.

There’s talk of his joining Obama’s foreign policy team. Well, as a foreigner, I’ll tell you that I’m ready to give Obama the benefit of the doubt but if all he has to offer me is Colin Powell and a Fundamentalist Baptist reading of the Bible, I’d just tell him to go away, far, far away.

Who really knows? If he gets good numbers to work with in Congress, Obama won’t have to sling Colin and the Bible around too much. If the Houses are close then it’s the god-and-pony show with Powell and Obama. Joy.

I have my opinions but I like my money better. It I want to fly somewhere, I don’t have to take my shoes off at security. I may bring all the bottled water and Big Macs from the food court I wish to onto the plane. If the government wants to tap my phone they have to get a court order valid for 10 days which applies to cell phones as well as landlines and the judge would redact any personal information in the transcript. Furthermore, the judge would cancel the wire tap if after 10 days he or she sees no progress.

Income taxes are 10%. Capital gains taxes are 1%. And none of that’s changing if McCain is president or if Obama’s president. The USA will go along its merry way and that’s fine by me.

I’ve been long crude oil and commodities, short USD for a long while. It’s all good, brother.

You like rooting for the USA in wars? I say “knock yourself out”. It’s as good a hobby as any. Myself I follow most pro and college sports pretty closely. I like golf. I like boxing. I like to have a nice dinner and relax. I like to go fishing now and then. Everybody has his or her own trip. I happen to be indifferent to the “war on terror.” You’re a fan. I got no beef with you, friend.

- His plan to wihdraw all troops by March, 2008?

- Or his 16 month withdraw plan?”

Actually, it’s the same plan. You are just looking at it from two different points in time. If we started it now, we would be out in March 2010. If we wait until when and if he takes office we are looking at July 2010.

“- Or his plan to do a condition based withdrawal?”

Again, it’s the same plan. He has said all along that the rate we pull our troops out would be dependent on the conditions on the ground.

“- Or his plan to immedately withdraw and leave the Iraqi’s to suffer genocide in 2007?”

Considering he never said that, you can’t really count it as part of is plan. What he actually said can be found here:

http://www.barackobama.com/2007/07/20/obama_dont_stay_in_iraq_over_g.php

Not at all - I have sufficient data to know that Obama’s plan to have had us out by March of 2008 would have been a complete disaster. This is something which can be discerned even without knowing the exact facts, but of knowing the basics and applying that basic knowledge to the stored data regarding warfare…

A quote from Winston Churchill will give you an idea of what I mean here:

The Truths of War are absolute, but the principles governing their application have to be deduced on each occasion from the circustances, which are always different; and in consequence no rules are any guide to action. Study of the past is invaluable as a means of training and storing the mind, but it is of no help without selective discernment of the partciular facts and of their emphasis, relation and proportion.

Just so you know - a Truth of War is such a thing as “the morale is to the material as three is to one” and “there is no substitute for victory”. In Obama’s plan, both of these truths were to be laid aside without such laying aside being in accordance with some other necessary action.

In war, you don’t want to withdraw - that is a truth of war…but you sometimes may withdraw if the enemy is overpowering you and you want to extricate your forces before they are destroyed or because you want to withdraw to a better position to continue the fight.

In war you don’t want to stop short of victory unless your main strategic ends have been met - this is a very rare occurance in that you usually cannot attain your strategic ends short of victory, but Korea showed that you can bleed an enemy so badly that he’ll just want to stop, even though you don’t want to expend the effort to force him to surrender in the open field.

There was no way for the enemy to ever force our withdrawal, and there was no better position for us to fight it out than where we were going during the surge - Baghdad and Anbar Province. Moving the army to Kuwait or elsewhere would not have fulfilled any military purpose and would not have left us in a stronger position to defeat the enemy in the field against us.

So, a withdrawal would have been to give up the fight short of victory, and without having punished the enemy to the point where decades would pass and he still wouldn’t dream of trying conclusions again with us. Meanwhile, our withdrawal without having been defeated would have been spun into a crushing victory by the enemy and while we became demoralised by failure in Iraq, the enemy would become inspired by it…and while the enemy would remain vastly weaker than us, the difference in spirit between the two sides means that we would be forced to the defensive while the enemy recovered the initiative he had on 9/10, and we’d have paid a high price for this.

The actual timing of the withdrawal is a not just a political event, but a logistic event, too…we don’t just willy-nilly pull ourselves out…and given that I don’t know the inner workings of either the White House or Maliki’s government nor am I a logistics expert I simply cannot give an exact set of circumstances which would say, “time to go”…but I can tell when an ignorant fool has come up with a bad idea…and Obama came up with his on Iraq in January of 2007.