It will be trusted once it's the 51st state, and once this thread is out of the Kitchen Sink.

Click below and you'll see that there's no hard evidence that Saddam Hussein did anything wrong whatsoever. In fact he was probably scared of his own government. There's also no hard evidence that chemical weapons were in Iraq. Our military may have planted them. Maybe a cold war could have been considered to let our agents back into Iraq. Yet a cold war would have been a threat to life its self. If you can remember there were no negotiations with the way we spied in that place. Yet the stubburn managers of their government were probably getting nervous that war crimes could no longer be commited in the presence of American spies. The U.N. was not creative in anyway. Don't rest on another universe; the truth be in front of you. Should you be a political witch falling in love with the death machine. The War Crimes of Saddam Hussein

Wino's title for this thread is typically over-simplistic and reactionary, and clearly flamebait. However, I have found the typical left wing assessment of Iraq, on very specific levels, is equally over-simplistic and reactionary. The left will not acknowledge the legitimate threat that Iraq's behavior posed; yet the right is blindly defensive of the Bush administration's draconian, naive and foolish response.

I'll elaborate more when I am a bit more sober.

Always compromise.

Wexie - joelee started this thread, not Wino. It's joelee's thread title.

But I do love the sentiment, "I'll respond to Wino once I'm sober." :-)

I am always wary of threads that argue absolutes and in saying "Iraq Will Never Be Trusted" is something of an overstatement. There are certain factions in Iraq whose behavior makes them untrustworthy, but to say that as a nation state, they cannot be trusted is a race to hyperbole. We should take the full context of what the situation is on the ground vs what the article has put forward. There is necessary matter of assessing both the U.S. military's standpoint and then the stength of Iraqi civil institutions.

The WaPo article linked at the beginning of the thread that offered only evidence of a contingency plan for delaying what is the inevitable reduction of troops. The debate now is merely a matter of how quickly they are to be withdrawn. If General Odierno believes the time table is still viable to have only 50,000 troops on the ground at the end of 2011, then as much as I don't like that, I trust him. Keep in mind the article also cites the numbers peaked back in 2007 at 166,000, of which only some 96,000 troops remain.

As is par for the course, the remnant insugency is doing they only thing they know how to do: kill people, distabilizing target areas, and offering literally no other alternative, save death. It does not matter if it is Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), or the Jaysh al-Mehdi Malitia (JAM) and their Iranian puppet, Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical elements in Iraqi society from both the Shi'a and especially the Sunni side of the insurgency are relying on a sectarian divide to tear the country apart.

Because the Iraqis have problem children are we not to trust them? Not because of that, I'd argue. I'm more concerned with internal supression of political dissent--specifically in accussing anyone even loosely connected to Ba'ath of being still loyal to that regime, and therefore banning them from the elections--and corruption by the Dawa, the current ruling party. Nevertheless, I remain more confident in its fledgling civil institutions and would rather we train the army and police correctly, than leave prematurely. As long as the people have a say, then I will trust them to act in their interest. For the record I do not believe them ready to go it alone.

Finally, I have to say that when all this delaying is finally finished, I fully anticipate all the wrong people to take credit for any success the country may achieve, but I note that with the Bush administration gone, even Newsweek of all the media is changing their tune. Feel free to read the whole thing and try and tell me with a straight face if the revision of what has happened to Iraq is not under way.

Because they haven't found the 'ignore user' button, yet.

Or they're too drunk to differentiate between Wino and Joelee.

At what point did we as American citizens ever gain a right to wage war and shed any blood whatsoever? Our forfathers were extreme genuises who named the war of 1776 the War of Independence which really wasn't a war but only self-defense. All George Washington ever did was defend himself. Keep in mind that this place is a Republic.

I don't trust Germany. Can I start a new thread too?

I once heard someone say that Rik ate some yellow cake at a picnic where someone had a towel near their head at some point.

So, yeah.

Kalman