money and power is all DIck knows. He doesn't care about people. On the 5th Aniversary of his war, Dick was fishing off the coast in the Middle East with his oil rich Prince and cohort celebrating the high price of oil. Yipee!! He's danger in a baaaad way!

All I can say is karma.....

Bush + Cheney = SATAN

Reminded me of an Iraq veteran that has had a documentary made of his experiences "Body of War". While being interviewed his opinion of that clip was shown. His anger was at the fact that he did volunteer to go to Afghanistan to go after the actual culprits of 9/11(or so he was misled to believe). Not to Iraq to fight for all the wrong reasons. Their lies have cost so many, so much. How on earth can these monsters live with themselves?

As the "Manhattan Project" gave rise to storing enough energy to drop out of a plane and destroy hundreds of thousands of people I am certain we can figure out a way to store energy to provide light/heat/cooling/transportation for hundreds of thousands of people. The new quest to store energy is no longer about death. It is about peace.

Let's not gloss over what we hope to accomplish in Iraq.

Prior to the invasion Iraq was a realtively secular society (albeit with many human rights violations) who fought Al-Qeda and Iran.

5 years, 4000 dead and 2 trillion dollars later Iraq will be.......almost exactly like it was except with a different leader.

On second thought, maybe that end result isn't exactly worth the bargin price of $2 trillion dollars (in loans from China) and 4,000 dead US soliders.

For this amount of money and this many dead bodies, heck, we might as well take over the whole damn place at this point. 2 trillion dollars? A 100 year occupation strategy? Hell yes it better be the next state in the union!

Voyager, I think they've called that "collateral damage". I guess that how they'd classify the affected loved ones, families, homes, etc of our 4000, not to mention the destroyed hopes, plans, and dreams of the 25,000 seriously wounded.

This is getting down to the nitty gritty, isn't it? It's tough to think of my U.S.A. as making regime changes. That's on TV.

I am truly naive. Are you on the verge of suggesting a conspired "New World Order?" If this were so, it's plain that what was America will not be that again. The economy is shot, jobs are gone, our standing rate in education is at the bottom, as is healthcare, the borders are all but open, NAFTA is providing us with cheap disposable goods and contaminated foods filled with antibiotics and questionable medications. Maybe that's why Bush is so quick to "fasttrack" us to Dubai, Canada, Mexico, and give tax cuts to the rich. He's one of the Have-mores.

Since Reagan, there have been congressional majority of the same party as the president. None of the important issues, now critical, have been accomplished. So the question is, Clinton or Obama?

Gee, I wonder if the 1 million plus Iraq's who've died volunteered to be sacrificed for the schemes of a tiny percentage of the worlds population?

Was it even necessary? NO!

McCain says, "We cannot accept defeat!" Which means we're going to win something. What do we win?

I agree with the suggestion that corporate finance had as much to do with the war as oil. Remember when Bush talked to the oil people at a dinner? "You've heard of the Haves and the Have-nots. Welcome to the Have-mores!". Remember when David Gregory asked Bush, "What does Iraq have to do with 9/11?" And Bush shot back without thinking, "Nothin'!" I couldn't believe I heard that. Maybe we're there just marking time until investors have received the promised return on their money. I don't understand why politicians are not concerned about the 4000 lives lost. Just don't understand it.

I hope our allies - if we have any left - can help us get out. I'm afraid we're marooned there. Is that why there's no timeline agreed upon?

I think our presence is what has caused such violence and I want us out yesteryear. I hope the past eight years has taught us to really look at what we're asking for when we vote.

Soldiers volunteer to defend our country. As of Afghanistan, our soldiers in the middle east have been ordered to do nothing that defends our country. On top of that, most of the soldiers that are currently serving signed up for a 4 year tour of duty, yet they are being held in service past their tours because our administration has their heads so far up their asses about the war that recruitment is at an all time low. There is no one to replace these soldiers if their tour ends. But we can't initiate a draft, because if we do then people will really get pissed about the president and his administration and the local war support (what's left of it) would disappear faster than a misplaced wallet at a cleptomaniac convention.

What is needed to clean up this international mess is national aid. But we can't allow national aid because if we accept it then our corporate profits made in Iraq would need to be shared with other nations. Also if we accept national aid we won't be making the decisions by ourselves, and that won't do because Bush is the "decider" and no one but him should make the decisions about the middle east. We should know this because he talks with God, that or maybe Bush is a delusional whack job who thinks that he is the president/pope.

Personally I hope that whomever the next president is, he/she has the brains and the ethical strength to ask the nations who were once our allies to help us out of Bush's mess. It is going to require giving up a lot of perceived control (I say perceived because we never really had control), and swallow our pride about being a goddamn superpower nation.

What really irks me the most is that we've blurred the line between professional solider and civil servant. Blurred the line between professional US solider and a local police officer or even a NATO Peace officer. Our soliders are trained primarily to fight standing armies, not mediate local turf wars between neighborhood gangs.

The mess in Iraq is the result of a botched initial military strategy, true, but keeping them there for the next 50 years after the fact doesn't necessarily make it a MILITARY project. Yes, our screwups inadvertently led to the creation of rival LOCAL religious militas who began fighting each other. It sucks, but their killing each other really poses no threat to our country.

Another arguement is that if we leave (gasp!) Iran will take over Iraq. I say, "Let'em have it!" We're bankrupting ourselves spending $10 billion a month (that we don't have) trying to keep that place together and we're failing. We can't even get clean water and electricity to 50 percent of the country! Do we really think Iran will succeed where we failed? Probably not. And even if they did....great! If they can stabalize the region, whats' wrong with that?

We blasted the place to rubble. Even if by some miracle Iran was able to stabalize the country within the next 10 years -- I don't see how they could "use" Iraq as a tool against us in military terms. The place is trashed. Shock and Awe, baby!

Well, the loss of the oil might be a.....

Ah! It always comes back to the oil. We're so critically dependent on that flow of oil that a arguement could be made that we cannot allow Iraq's oil to fall into Iranian hands. I mean, if they decided to charge us $1,000 a barrel we'd be screwed.

Ya know, for $10 billion a month we could've built 1,000 solar and wind power plants and never had to worry about mid-east bullshit ever again.

That's what we get for putting two Texas oilmen in the White House.

I couldn't agree with you more, crob. This is exactly why we really have to "hold their fee to the fire", so to speak, when our politicians tell us we should go to war. We Americans must inject ourselves into government activity so we can know when we should go to war. This is not a dictatorship yet. We're in Iraq because we chose to do nothing when we were lied to. And again when we found out we were lied to about Iraq; then again when we were lied to about WMD; then Saddam Hussein; then ....

We must never allow such a thing to happen again to our warriors. Whatever we have to do.

We have "Lemon Laws" to protect consumers from being sold defective products....

....why not protect our soliders from defective deployments?

Saddam didn't plan 9/11

There are no WMD's

The current "war" in Iraq is between three local religious militas (gangs) and has absolutely nothing to do with the military interests of the United States of America. So what if religious milita A "wins" it's ethnic cleansing against religious milita B? Yeah, it sucks, but it's not worth 4,000 dead soliders; 25,000 maimed and crippled soliders or $10 billion a month. We came to that same conlusion with the geocide in Darfur, didn't we?

Iraq poses no military threat to the US at this moment because we've bombed them back to the stone age. It would take decades before they could even rebuild enough schools to teach their kids how to spell "nuclear" or "WMD" --- and about another 100 years of rebuilding before they could build one.

So isn't there some kind of Constitutional protection that shields soliders from defective deployment?

They volunteered to defend America from attacks both foreign and domestic -- I don't believe they volunteered to spend the next 45 years of their life in the Iraq Reconstruction Project and Civil War Management Internship.

Fighting Nazis that are invading Poland and have declared their intention to take over the world? Yes. Good use for soliders.

Standing around in downtown Baghdad supervising the reconstruction of a sewer main while in the crossfire between two local religious militas that are shooting at each other?

Nope. Pretty sure they didn't volunteer for THAT!

I think Cheney needs to be made aware that professional soliders are not the same thing as slaves. Using professional soliders as local cops in a 3rd world country to moderate a gang war between locals, man! That has got to be unconstitutional.

dick dick cheney

dick

Im sure a lot of these guys were'nt aware of Stop loss when they signed up.

heart attack..... heart attack.............heart attack........

"disposable income " and " conspicuous consumption " never sounded so good

I guess we shouldn't have our expectations too high expecting compassion from this man. Sad.

'Yes soldier your here because you volunteered to, you made the decision to fight in IraQ'

Ok then, I want to unmake the decision and go home.

'No soldier, if you try to leave we'll charge you with AWOL and give you a more personal war'