"but what are we going to do about it"

>>>I say we SURGE the hell out of 'em.

"The geo political ramifications of the Neo Con experiment with democracy are far more serious than they ever imagined, and far more complex than they now realize."

>>>Ohhh, I think they realized it a long time ago. But since America is NOT their country of choice, I don't think they gave a shit.

Cizungu,

And what gets me in all of this is how could this situation not at least have been partially predicted? Bush is certainly no rocket scientist, but some of the people who were around him at the time are very sharp people....Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Cheney. Anyone ever hear of Yugoslavia? The only one in his cabinet who apparently balked at this whole thing was Powell. Did these people just get lost in their idealism, were they way too trusting of Chalabi and the INC, or a combination of the two??

pointing the finger isn't going to solve the problem..... so dems lets hear some real soltions

I don't know if there is a solution, Gix. Maybe find ourselves a Shah of Iran type guy who won't bow to Iran and won't allow these Shiite militias to run all over the place. Of course, he's going to have to have some real power....probably beyond what a "democracy" gives him.

what if iraq becomes a success............ and the people of iran see that the ways of the old have led them nowhere but isolation and economic starvation..... And the people of iran will yern for what the iraqi's have.... Freedome, economic prosperity, tourism industry you name it.....

Personally I think this was the goal for iraq.... To show the extremist what could be if they just put down he guns and rhetoric and do whats best for there family and there country......

This is why Al quada is fighting us in iraq this is why iran is fighting us in iraq(not the sole reason) but they know a succesfull iraq will shurley undermine there power and authority....

So lets finish what we started and lets show the arab world what they could be.... In all honesty most of the work has been done...... we just need a consistant steady pressure from all sides LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER etc...... to tell these extremist that there way is not accepatble.....

These non biding resplution and political posturing is (and lets be honest with each other) is giving our enemy hope....

The only hope they have left is that we remain divided and quit........ otherwise they know they have lost

Good question; I think the answer lays--wait, whoa. Wait a second... let's backtrack a sec here:

Now if that isn't a faulty premise, then I'm Descartes on crack.
They may have been somewhat intelligent, but they were never sharp. They had no discernment, and made bad judgments all the way down the line. They were a pack of blunt motherfuckers--sledgehammers.
Cheney never was the Wise Man dripping with gravitas charged by Bush Senior to supervise Junior; he's been a Unitary Executive fanatic since the 80s--he was already trying to sell that joke during the Iran-Contra scandal:

In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.

President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.

(...)

Most of Cheney's colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of "disdain for the law."

Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution "does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power."


Rumsfeld is an old, tired Cold Warrior, and he was obsessed with his shiny new concept for the military: a smaller force, smart and responsive, a light footprint in Iraq after some shock and awe, cuz godamn! does a big air campaign look good, all of this encompassed by the so-called Rumsfeld doctrine. He was only good at buzzwords; aside from that he mostly bloviated impotently.

Wolfowitz is a hardcore neocon: the perfect blend of idealism ("they'll greet us with flowers") and cynicism (the WMD pretext, fabricated in order to justify a war they had been "planning"--that is, fantasizing--since the late 90s) for maximum unreality.

As for Rice, she's a specialist of the USSR, but of not much else.

And they lie, they lie. Lying is inherent to politics, but these boys an' girls have taken fabulating to a whole new level.

Why do we have to do anything about it? They are going to get guns, countries are going to make deals we don't like. By the time you stop it there will be a better gun to get and another threat looming.

Just track where, when and who were involved so you have an idea what's going on around you. The imformation on who is rubbing shoulders is far more important than the transfer itself.

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When Saddam and his posse were "kicked out", they left behind a buttload of weapons for anyone to use. Why would Iran need to supply Iraqis with weapons when they have enough as it is? I still haven't seen genuine proof that Iran is helping Iraqis "terrorize" Iraq (as stupid as that sounds).

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That's what I'm talking about