This policy is a failure. It’s time to find one that works. It is time to bring the military home from out 700 permanent international bases, bring all the troops home and spend their pay on domestic bases, and for once again build a strong national defense in America.

Focus the entire military hair trigger on domestic defense, outlaying from the territories.

Become /again/ the strongest nation in the world as we redevelop our prosperity under the original Constitutional order.

If our main goal in Iraq was to find him, wouldn’t we have his picture at every checkpoint and train people in what he looked like? Our main goal was NOT finding Zarqawi, just as our current main goal is not finding Osama bin Laden. We have other things on our minds.

That’s quite a claim. I guess it depends on your definition of “terrorist,” but I think Stalin has pretty much everyone beat. Genghis Khan. Some people have said that Che Guevara was responsible for 100 million deaths, but that includes spinoffs from Cuban communism and not direct or ordered murders, I believe. How many did Zarqawi kill?

“It is our culture that is being used as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda: Our sex industry, Hollwyood, newspaper cartoons, wealth, ect… Not our military presence in the Middle East.”

Have you looked at the reasons Zarqawi gave for attacking people? Murderers often like to brag about why they do it. He didn’t say that he didn’t like how our women don’t cover themselves or that we’re free, he said that he saw the Americans as occupiers in Saudi Arabia and he didn’t like our support of Israel. That’s what he told people when he recruited them to his cause, and in many cases, it worked because those people were upset about that as well. Invading Iraq makes that worse. You may be correct that our wealth spurs them on as well– only a wealthy nation could seem to build an empire.

Perhaps by building 14 permanent bases in Iraq and spending trillions on a war there gives these usually very poor people the impression that we’re quite wealthy, and we’re not spending our wealth in the most productive of ways.

I argue that we could have gotten Zarqawi sooner without the Iraq War– send in some mercenaries/bounty hunters and let them find him. No one said Zarqawi was a focus of the Iraq War. If it had been so, perhaps we would have found him sooner. Why not go after bin Laden if we’re focused on finding these terrorists? Everyone seems to have forgotten all about him. He seems to be having a great time over there in Pakistan (our ally!) hiding out and making videos.

I’m not an expert on the situation, so I don’t know if the surge is working or not. If it’s working so well, why did we have a higher body count of American soldiers killed last year than ever? Why are we having to pay off Iraqi soldiers to fight with us? Why do 80% of Iraqis say in opinion polls that they want us to leave immediately? It seems the surge has helped in some areas, which is understandable, but those troops are being pulled back beginning this year. Sure, if we keep an indefinite occupied force in Baghdad for the next 100 years, it may prevent some violence, but it also may spark some violence because the insurgents will see us as an occupier, and the civilians don’t want us to be there.

Saddam certainly was not secular. He was a Sunni. He repressed the Shiites and killed many, many of the Kurds, no question. No one’s arguing that Saddam was a good guy. But there’s also no question that he did not have WMD at the time we went into Iraq, and the UN inspector was telling us that. We preferred to listen to Chalabi, who had spent most of his adult life trying to get the US to topple Saddam. He had a reason to fib, and our politicians bought it.

One word:

Zarcawi

Guess you missed the news a year ago of us bombing the living shit out of him in that Date Palm field, north of Baghdad.

He, along with Sheik Khalid Muhammed, is perhaps the most murderous Terrorist in the history of civilization.

It was Zarcawi he sawed off the head of Nicholas Berg in 2004 in front of those video cameras. It was Zarcawi who ran the Al Qaeda insurgency in Iraq for 3 years, against the US and peaceful Iraqis.

We got Zarcawi. That alone makes the entire War in Iraq well, well worth it.

And Al Qaeda was recruiting throughout the Middle East long before we arrived. And they’re wrath was against the Saudi Royal Family, not the US.

Go back and read Bodansky’s book on Bin Laden.

At the same time, Gen Patreaus’ Surge was starting to kick in.

Al Qaeda has all but been completely defeated in Iraq, by US Surge Forces and the new Iraqi Army.

The only remnents remain in northern hide-outs, and even they are being weeded out.

But once again, you won’t learn any of this from Leftwing news sources, or even Anti-War Libertarians sites like Reason.com, LRC, Doug Bandow, TPW, Knappster and the like.

Just pure silence on the huge success of Patreaus and the Surge.

Doesn’t quite fit the “Bush bad/Republicans bad” template.

Since our current presence is being used as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda, it could therefore be said that anyone who aligns themselves in support of the Iraq War is actually supporting al Qaeda and terrorism. So, are you with the US or against us?

In essence, you could almost say that you align yourself with Al Qaeda, if you oppose the War in Iraq.

You could be an “Al Qaeda Boy” or in this instance an “Al Qaeda Girl.”