Righties, I know, I know. In war, soldiers die.

Joe, since the board crashed last year, you know there aren't any posts from 2003 available. I wasn't here back then (not until only about last spring) but I can tell you that on the political forums I spent (and spend, but not as much now that I've found here) a lot of time on back then, there were liberals coming out of the woodwork tell us how we would be routed by Saddam's Republican Guard because we're not trained in the kind of street warfare that was going to take place. Now you can choose to not believe me. That won't make it untrue.

 

Name two.

 

I've been with the board since its infancy and I don't recall any discussion like that. I do, however, recall posters who saw through the administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to terrorists. I also recall many posters who thought the unecessarily war would hurt our country's international credibility, kill and maim thousands upon thousands of innocent people, kill thousands of our own soldiers and, oh yeah, cost the country untold billions that could be better spent on things like education, healthcare and homeland security.

 

tony, I appreciate you trying to step up and document Henry's assertion, since he evidently can't. However, if someone is going to state -- and I'm speaking in general, not to you specifically, because you didn't make the claim -- that "one side of the debate" believed that tens of thousands of soldiers would die in Iraq, you'd better be able to find some documented quotes, with at least a handful of them spoken by people who are elected.

For argument's sake, I'll stipulate that what you claim some Internet message-board liberals said is true. Hell, you might be able to find a Democrat in office somewhere -- so far, I can't -- who suggested that the Republican Guard would be too much for our troops to handle. But that is trumped by any one of these people, these war decision-makers, that were grievously wrong about Iraq. Pick any one:

The conservative vice president of the United States who was wrong about the insurgency being in its "last throes," the conservative former secretary of defense who was wrong about knowing where the WMD are and that the war would last "weeks, not months," the conservative secretary of state and ex-national security advisor who was wrong about "the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud," the conservative Iraq proconsul who was wrong about the oil revenues paying for the invasion, and the conservative president of the United States who was wrong about our soldiers being "greeted as liberators."

These are truly people that have no "grasp of the strategic or tactical situation" in Iraq. Our nation, and the world, will be dealing with the consequences of their ignorance and malfeasance for years to come.

 

Tony, I don't recall a single person on this board claiming we couldn't "handle" the Iraqi Republican Guard. I'll join the growing chorus of people asking you to prove your claim or shut up. It's one thing to express your opinion, which is encourage. It's another to make up stuff and then fade away without making any effort to back up your claim.

 

Read Chuck Hagel's speech on the original Iraq AUMF. None of it's about rolling up the Republican Guard. It's all about a warning to be prepared for what you're going to do once you've done that.

 

Did Hagel claim the Republican Guard would beat us? Certainly, if he predicted the ensuing chaos after the "victory," he's good. But I'm referring more to Tony's claim that people were running around saying we were going to lose to the Iraqi army.

 

Send in the pink army!

 

Thanks for volunteering Yawn. When are you leaving?

 

still waiting for a plan to get out of Iraq from the neocons.

chirp, chirp.

 

What's yours?