I did it sooner than expected (despite your doubts)

[GWB]

In case you hadn't heard, we turned over Iraq to the new Iraqi government today - before the deadline. Not long ago everyone thought we'd never do it on time. Well what do you say now?

[astroglide]

FAG

[mikeyvegas]

Should have never been there.

[cardcounter0]

Are the 48 permanent military bases fully staffed and completely fortified? You are going to need them.

[daveymck]

I say you have dumped it of quick as the rate of killings has increased so much in the last couple of weeks.

Well done the Iraqui people I am sure are dancing in the streets overjoyed that they have gone form American rule back to American Puppet rule.

[ThaSaltCracka]

what are we suppose to be congratulating you for? You turned over power to a country that we should have never invaded in the first place. 800+ troops died, thousands of Iraqi's died, but hey, atleast the oil is finally running!

Now you think turning over power early means a success.... God, I can only imagine what its going to be like over there in the next couple weeks, I hope our troops will be safe, but I have my doubts.....

[andyfox]

"Well what do you say now?"

Not a good thing when the turnover had to be done early to counter possible terrorist disruptions.

Good op-ed article today in the L.A. Times on the "pseudo-state" of Iraq. We're going to have 1700 people in our embassy and 140,000 troops there. And we're paying the bills.

"Turnover" is not really the correct word.

[Dynasty]

[ QUOTE ]
Not a good thing when the turnover had to be done early to counter possible terrorist disruptions.

Good op-ed article today in the L.A. Times on the "pseudo-state" of Iraq. We're going to have 1700 people in our embassy and 140,000 troops there. And we're paying the bills.

"Turnover" is not really the correct word.

[/ QUOTE ]

It reminds me a lot of what the U.S. did in Japan and Germany. That really hasn't worked out too well. Now those countries are tough business competitors.

[GWB]

The Iraqi people are free of a murderous dictator. A democratic government has been set up and started operating.

Yet some of you guys just don't care about the millions of Iraqis who are starting better lives. It wasn't worth it? If this wasn't worth it, then I think you must say that the American Revolution wasn't worth it.

Look at the big picture, and the millions of people. It was worth it,

[sameoldsht]

[ QUOTE ]
The Iraqi people are free of a murderous dictator. A democratic government has been set up and started operating.


[/ QUOTE ]

Stop muddying the waters with facts, GWB. /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[paland]

[ QUOTE ]
The Iraqi people are free of a murderous dictator. A democratic government has been set up and started operating.

[/ QUOTE ]

Democratic?? Who voted?

[jokerswild]

Seriously, you probably would have supported the Vichy government. Of course, you probably don't know what that refers too.

[andyfox]

To compare Germany and Japan with Iraq is exactly the problem. Every time we went in to a third world country, we always compared it to Germany and Japan. Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Indonesia, Chile . . . All disasters for us and, more importantly, for their people.

I hope this one works out better.

[andyfox]

"The Iraqi people are free of a murderous dictator."

Undoubtedly. One hopes the Iraqi people will have a better future.

"A democratic government has been set up"

Set up is the key phrase.

[ericd]

Great job. After thousands of years of conflict, you were able to bring peace and democracy in a little over a year. What is your next target? Or should I say who will be lucky enough to benefit from your wisdom as well as the other caring people within your administration. I feel so lucky to have lived under your kind rule. However, I will have to vote against you since I cannot possibly handle all this good fortune.

[elwoodblues]

[ QUOTE ]
If this wasn't worth it, then I think you must say that the American Revolution wasn't worth it.


[/ QUOTE ]

The only way the American Revolution is even remotely akin to the war in Iraq is that in both cases America was involved. The American Revolution was worth it because it was a freedom that was fought for and won; it wasn't a freedom that was handed out.

[GWB]

[ QUOTE ]
The American Revolution was worth it because it was a freedom that was fought for and won; it wasn't a freedom that was handed out.


[/ QUOTE ]

So the Elwood Rule of freedom is:

You can only have your freedom if you can win it for yourself.

Of course we Americans had some help from the French, and then we helped them regain their freedom in WWII.

[elwoodblues]

[ QUOTE ]
You can only have your freedom if you can win it for yourself.


[/ QUOTE ]

Not at all. I was just pointing out, without saying it absolutely explicitly, that your comparison of the American Revolution with the Iraq war was asinine. I'll try to be more explicit in the future.

[ACPlayer]

Both the Americans in the American Revolution and the French in WWII were intimately and extensively involved in getting their own freedom. Helping someone achieve something is different than having it handed it to you (of course you may not understand, as we all know that in your business and political "successes" everything you achieved was handed to you!).

Note that the Iraqi's started fighting for freedom only after they were "liberated".

[adios]

......

[nicky g]

"Yet some of you guys just don't care about the millions of Iraqis who are starting better lives."

At least ten thousand Iraqis are dead. Unemployment is at 60%. Oil production, electricity production and water distribution are all struggling to reach prewar levels. Crime has gone haywire and people are afraid to leave their houses at night. Attacks on women have sky-rocketed. Bombs are going off throughout the country daily and al-Qaeda is running around murdering people willy nilly. State assets ahve been illegally privatised while billions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenue has been unaccountably parcelled out to Western contractos. An ex-Baathist who is alleged to have participated in the assassination of exiles before switching to the CIA has been put in charge and familiar noises are being made around the world that he will have to be "tough", "ruthless", etc. John Negroponte will no doubt reprise his Honduras role there and cover up any human rights abuses Mr Allawi's puupet government commits.

Hopefully things will get better. So far the costs of getting rid of Saddam have been massive.

[Cyrus]

Comparing occupied Iraq with occupied Nazi Germany is the current favorite spin of the Bush camp. Only it is as indicative of the Dubya incompetence and ignorance of History as anything.

sample retort (http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/)

[adios]

Not equivalent to the Iraqi insurgency but an insurgency nonetheless:
Minutemen of the Third Reich - history of the Nazi Werewolf guerilla movement (http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1373/is_10_50/ai_66157021)

Minutemen of the Third Reich - history of the Nazi Werewolf guerilla movement
History Today, Oct, 2000 by Perry Biddiscombe

AS WORRIES INCREASE about neo-Nazi and skinhead violence in Germany, it is worth remembering that this type of terrorism is a nasty constant in the history of the German radical-right. A case in point is the Nazi Werewolf guerrilla movement founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1044, which fought the occupying forces of Britain, America and Russia until at least 1047.

The Werewolves were originally organised by the SS and the Hitler Youth as a diversionary operation on the fringes of the Third Reich, which were occupied by the Western Allies and the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. Some 5,000 -- 6,000 recruits were raised by the winter of 1944-45, but numbers rose considerably in the following spring when the Nazi Party and the Propaganda Ministry launched a popular call to arms, beseeching everybody in the occupied areas -- even women and children -- to launch themselves upon the enemy. In typical Nazi fashion, this expansion was not co-ordinated by the relevant bodies, which were instead involved in a bureaucratic war among themselves over control of the project. The result was that the movement functioned on two largely unrelated levels: the first as a real force of specially trained SS, Hitler Youth and Nazi Party guerrillas; the second as an outlet for casual violence by fanatics.

The Werewolves specialised in ambushes and sniping, and took the lives of many Allied and Soviet soldiers and officers -- perhaps even that of the first Soviet commandant of Berlin, General N.E. Berzarin, who was rumoured to have been waylaid in Charlottenburg during an incident in June 1945. Buildings housing Allied and Soviet staffs were favourite targets for Werewolf bombings; an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans. Techniques for harassing the occupiers were given widespread publicity through Werewolf leaflets and radio propaganda, and long after May 1945 the sabotage methods promoted by the Werewolves were still being used against the occupying powers.

Although the Werewolves originally limited themselves to guerrilla warfare with the invading armies, they soon began to undertake scorched-earth measures and vigilante actions against German `collaborators' or `defeatists'. They damaged Germany's economic infrastructure, already battered by Allied bombing and ground fighting, and tried to prevent anything of value from falling into enemy hands. Attempts to blow up factories, power plants or waterworks occasionally provoked melees between Werewolves and desperate German workers trying to save the physical basis of their employment, particularly in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia.

Several sprees of vandalism through stocks of art and antiques, stored by the Berlin Museum in a flak tower at Friedrichshain, caused millions of dollars worth of damage and cultural losses of inestimable value. In addition, vigilante attacks caused the deaths of a number of small-town mayors and, in late March 1945, a Werewolf paratroop squad assassinated the Lord Mayor of Aachen, Dr Franz Oppenhoff, probably the most prominent German statesman to have emerged in the occupied fringes over the winter of 1944-45. This spate of killings, part of a larger Nazi terror campaign that consumed the Third Reich after the failed anti-Hitler putsch of July 20th, 1944, can be interpreted as a psychological retreat back into opposition, even while Nazi leaders were still clinging to their last few months of power.

Although the Werewolves managed to make themselves a nuisance to small Allied and Soviet units, they failed to stop or delay the invasion and occupation of Germany, and did not succeed in rousing the population into widespread opposition to the new order. The SS and Hitler Youth organisations at the core of the Werewolf movement were poorly led, short of supplies and weapons, and crippled by infighting. Their mandate was a conservative one of tactical harassment, at least until the final days of the war, and even when they did begin to envision the possibility of an underground resistance that could survive the Third Reich's collapse, they had to contend with widespread civilian war-weariness and fear of enemy reprisals. In Western Germany, no one wanted to do anything that would diminish the pace of Anglo-American advance and possibly thereby allow the Red Army to push further westward.

Despite its failure, however, the Werewolf project had a huge impact, widening the psychological and spiritual gap between Germans and their occupiers. Werewolf killings and intimidation of `collaborators' scared almost everybody, giving German civilians a clear glimpse into the nihilistic heart of Nazism. It was difficult for people working under threat of such violence to devote themselves unreservedly to the initial tasks of reconstruction. Worse still, the Allies and Soviets reacted to the movement with extremely tough controls, curtailing the right of assembly of German civilians. Challenges of any sort were met by collective reprisals -- especially on the part of the Soviets and the French. In a few cases the occupiers even shot hostages and cleared out towns where instances of sabotage occurred. It was standard practice for the Soviets to destroy whole communities if they faced a single act of resistance. In the eastern fringes of the `Greater Reich', now annexed by the Poles and the Czechoslovaks, Werewolf harassment handed the new authorities an excuse to rush the deportations of millions of ethnic Germans to occupied Germany.

Such policies were understandable, but they created an unbridgeable gulf between the German people and the occupation forces who had pledged to impose essential reforms. It was hard, in such conditions, for the occupiers to encourage reform, and even harder to persuade the Germans that it was necessary.

By the time that this rough opposition to the occupation had started to soften, the Cold War was under way and reform became equally difficult to implement. As a result, both German states created in 1949 were not so dissimilar to their predecessor as might have been hoped, and changes in attitudes and institutions developed only slowly. Thanks partly to the Werewolves there was no German revolution in 1945, either imposed from above or generated from below.