Immediate and Rapid Withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq Does Not Equate to Peace

[Yavin4]

I want to challenge the assumption that immediate withdrawls from both Iraq and Afghanistan equates to bringing peace to those nations. I beg to differ mightily. Peace would be the polar opposite to immediate withdrawal. In fact, it would lead to more violence and bloodshed.

Unlike Bush and the neocons, Obama is not a warmongerer. If an immediate withdrawal could be done without violence and bloodshed, he'd do it tomorrow. The man is dealing with trying to prevent another Great Depression, Swine Flu, Healthcare, Climate Change, etc. Do you think that he wants two extremely expensive wars because it's fun? He is trying to find the best way to exit from these wars without causing more violence and more war.

Do you really believe that if we left Afghanistan tomorrow then there would be peace and love in that country? Do you realize the hell that will ensue to the women of Afghanistan?

[notesdev]

1. War is Peace

Freedom is slavery

[Yavin4]

2. Trite

Too bad it doesn't solve any problem.

[notesdev]

4. Your reasons are very familiar

In fact, they sound EXACTLY like the rationalizing of the Bush camp.

[Yavin4]

8. I Guess Code Pink Also Is In The Bush Camp

Now the left-wing activist group is rethinking its call for a deadline to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The reason: After a week spent in Kabul talking to female Afghan leaders, the group now understands their fears that a resurgent Taliban would probably target women and girls who have made tremendous progress since U.S. troops routed the fundamentalist militant group in 2002.

"We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban," Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor. "So many people are saying that if the U.S. troops left, the country would collapse. ... A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider" a deadline for troop withdrawal.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/10/code-pink-fearful-of-setbacks-for-women-rethinks-call-for-us-troops-to-withdraw-from-afghanistan.html

[Curtland1015]

3. You do bring up a truth that many refuse to acknowledge.

Us pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan will stop OUR troops from getting killed, but those regions will not become wonderlands just because we leave them.

That doesn't mean I still don't think we should pull our troops out, but it's mostly for selfish reasons. I don't want OUR troops in harms way for no reason. But yes, those areas are in real peril whether we have soldiers there or not, unfortunately for the citizens that live there.

[Yavin4]

5. I Want To Leave and So Does Obama

The hard fact of the matter is leaving while causing the least amount of violence as possible. That's what Obama is trying to do. That's the peaceful solution.

[Odin2005]

6. Getting the rabid isolationists to realize that is the problem.

[PATRICK]

7. He still could be faulted

with not recognizing the trap as interfering with the best policy being done expeditiously but so far grim progress toward the right conclusion is being made. Responsible egress from the mess- abetted by most of the Dem leadership- might ease the withdrawal symptoms of the locals and preserve something in the long run. The rhetoric has been bent scarily to get is some impossible resonance with the Bush deliberate fiasco determinism. It has slowed and made less visible the promised "prudent" approach which was never the immediate withdrawal plank of the Kucinich agenda. I am not arguing the merits of any approach, but simply stating what we have and the importance of peace pressure ALL the way forward.

[SoCalDem]

9. We cannot impose peace.. We can (with enough money, time & soldiers) make war too tiresome & costly

to continue, but history shows us that people will fight against an occupation/colonization. We did it ourselves.

We have to figure out a way to not send military in , to "solve" issues that are best left to diplomacy & time.

If a country's populace is not willing to rise up themselves, to overthrow tyrants, we can no longer be the solution. This has not "worked" in a very long time.

We end up making more enemies, and the blowback is impossible to avoid.