We need to be thinking about this: What if it's 2012 and we AREN'T out of Iraq?

[Ken Burch]

The withdrawal date is already being fudged, and this administration, despite the antiwar feelings of the electorate, has accepted the right-wing myth that there are still good reasons for us to be fighting IN Iraq.

If we've reached 2012, and we're still IN Iraq, and rumors of escalation start getting floated(which they likely will, since low-level war never stays conveniently static)will this president DESERVE to be renominated by this party?

Clearly, everyone HERE knows that there's nothing more we can do in Iraq and that neither Maliki NOR Allawi can ever lead a really legitimate government...so how can we accept that there could POSSIBLY be any good reason to extend the fighting?

It's not like the voters here are demanding we stay. And it's not like anything progressive will be possible at home IF we stay.

I hope we get out before 2012. But what if we don't? Can ANYONE here defend staying? Is anyone here going to say "the war's ok if OUR party keeps it going"? Will you vote to renominate a president who keeps us in a war you know is pointless and wrong?

[Ken Burch]

1. Barack Obama has done some very good things.

And at this point, I hope he's renominated and re-elected. But why doesn't he get it that staying in this war can only destroy him?

[marshall]

24. Maybe he realizes some things are more important than him?

If it "destroys" him, perhaps he considers that a fitting sacrifice for the country's greater good.

I don't know, but I have to hope that Obama knows more than we do and that his decisions are based on information the public is not privy to.

[Ken Burch]

29. It's only for the greater good of corporate power that we're still fighting in the Middle East

We all know that the people can gain nothing from it and that the Arab/Muslim world will never accept our military presence as legitimate.

[Marsala]

2. Calm down. Obama is taking us out.

See http://www.juancole.com/2010/05/us-troop-withdrawal-in-iraq-on-track.html

We will be out of Iraq on schedule. Afghanistan, on the other hand...

[gravity]

3. Obama's problem is Afghanistan not Iraq

[AtomicKitten]

4. Well this prediction should invoke some trash-talk. nt

[bigwillq]

5. I think we will be out of Iraq BUT

still in Afghan, which is just as bad. END THE WARS NOW!

[Ken Burch]

9. Agreed.

Still, if we were still in Iraq in 2012, that would have to be, at least it seems to me, the "this has gone too far" point.

[Ken Burch]

16. A lot of people in this party (even here on DU) have essentially taken a

"I can put up with being in the 'Stan if it's sure we're getting out of Iraq" position. That was a compromise we never HAD to make (the public wasn't demanding we stay in Afghanistan either) but was rather the choice of our current president(it may end up being compared to JFK's VERY early support, going back to the first days of his Senate career, for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a choice that was never really about anything other than displaying "vigah".)

[damntexdem]

6. Hell, there aren't many even thinking "It's 2010 and we're not out of Iraq."

It's way past time, at least 7 years and 3 months past time.

[Ken Burch]

15. Too many of our leaders still accept the right wing line that we had NO RIGHT to win the election.

So they're scared to stand up to the right, even when it comes to the LEAST popular thing the right did between 2001 and 2009.

Why don't they get it that there is NO popular support for continued American wars against Muslims?

[southernyankeebelle]

7. So put another republican in and he'll invade Iran

[Ken Burch]

8. I was talking about the primaries, not voting Republican

It's not like we HAVE to settle for "Two wars, not Three".

The American people aren't demanding we fight ANY of these wars.

[Diamonique]

25. The primaries? Do you think a Dem is going to challenge Obama for the nomination?

[Ken Burch]

27. If the war gets escalated, we all know the war would start going worse

I can't believe the whole party would just sign off on another LBJ scenario, which is what not being out of Iraq by 2012 would be.

[pundaint]

19. We're not out of that woods with the republican we've got.

[rug]

10. They'll be renamed advisers and GDP will be handing out Palin scarecrows.

[Ken Burch]

13. Sadly, you're probably right.

Those who oppose staying in Iraq are the only ones who are TRULY loyal to this party. We are the only ones who see the danger and want to avoid the repetition of history.

Too many others lower themselves to the "it's ok when WE do it" fallacy.

[tekisui]

36. Yep.

They are already rebranding combat troops as advisers.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

11. so what is the REAL reason we are still in Iraq?

[Ken Burch]

12. There are several, from what I can see.

1) Oil, obviously.

2) The Democratic Party's post-Joe McCarthy fixation with proving they aren't "soft".

3) The fact that, like every other post-1945 government, this one has essentially accepted the idea that the United States is the natural ruler of the earth. Since aspirations to empire are always right-wing(and, in the end, white and Euro-supremacist), this is the saddest of all.

It isn't about any particular personality within the administration. It is about fear, arrogance, the notion that we have to look "tough" at all costs. You'd think that our current leaders would remember that "toughness" can never be progressive.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

14. what do the polls show about Iraq?

[CreatureFeature]

17. Unfortunately....

We have almost no control over our nation's foreign policy, recent events in Iraq clearly show this. For over half a century, our nation's foreign policy has been in the hands of a somewhat secretive group described in PhD. Carroll Quigley's (History Professor at Georgetown and Clinton's Mentor) book, "Tragedy and Hope".

Unfortunately, most people have been conditioned to ignore or attack information like this rather than investigate for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

[Lasher]

18. How about this: What if we're not out of Iraq 4 days from now?

During the campaign Obama said 16 months. 4 days from now will be 16 months from the day Obama assumed the presidency.

[Ken Burch]

37. It's beginning to look like "16 months" is this administration's "the boys'll be home by Christmas"

What terrifies me is that Obama's learned NOTHING from what happened to LBJ.

[saltpoint]

20. You won't be happy until Barack Obama is struck down by God.

The political arena is a hard-bitten and very realistic venue. In that very realistic venue, if Barack Obama wants to be nominated for a second term, he is very likely to be, IMO.

I don't see any challenge from either the left-leaning potential candidates or from the right-leaning potential candidates in the party. I think Dennis Kucinich is reading the same data I'm reading on a challenge from the left. I think Evan Bayh is similarly dissuaded from mounting a challenge from the right.

While that does not preclude an independent run by a current Democrat, the rationale for success is not strong enough to raise support, organization, and cash to sustain it.

World peace? I'm for it.

I'm also voting for Obama in 2012.

[Ken Burch]

28. Even if it means giving up on the claim that you're for peace?

Even if it means we're stuck in the same Truman/JFK/LBJ/Scoop Jackson shit for the rest of eternity?

You really need to think about that.

Please don't assume that you have to check your dreams at the door.

[saltpoint]

30. Now Ken. Don't try to persuade me that you don't know History.

I know you do. Your posts indicate an extremely high History awareness.

For much of the history of the world its citizens lived in conditions of uninterrupted warfare.

One still stands for peace. One still honors people who have fought and died for it, including a nation's unknown soldiers or its assassinated civil rights figures.

I don't associate the slang noun 'shit' with John Kennedy. I could also defend Lyndon Johnson's record on civil rights. If pressed, I could build a strong case for Harry Truman as well. You obviously don't see things that way, and that's fine.

The nature of dreams, Dr. Jung says, is that one never checks them at the coatcheck desk, but carries them always, awake or asleep, where they are manifest in one's day-to-day life. Sometimes they spring unbidden. But in any case you can't check them if you had to.

In Chicago, in 1968, many now-Obama supporters took Mary Travers' side on that flatbed truck over the policeman who held a pistol to her head.

[Ken Burch]

31. My comments on Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were on their FOREIGN policies

They were all mindless, paranoid hawks on those issues, and nothing positive came of any of their hawkishenss.

There was never a reason for us to be in Korea.

There was never a reason for us either to try to overthrow the Cuban Revolution by force(and, at the time, clearly against the will of the majority of the Cuban people) or to threaten to blow the planet to bits when the Cubans did what ANYONE would have done and got somebody else to help them make sure our country wouldn't try to restore the Miami exiles to permanent dominance(and remember, we can assume that the success of Bay of Pigs would have meant an eternally right-wing Cuba since the U.S. had never allowed them anything else).

And there was never a justification for LBJ to escalate in Vietnam after he'd absolutely promised not to, or for Scoop Jackson to try to force the party to stay committed to slaughtering Vietnamese civilians in 1972.

That's what I meant by "shit".

None of the good things those men did justified the fascist foreign and military policies they adopted(policies Bobby Kennedy died trying to end in 1968).

And it's good that a lot of DUers(I would really HOPE it would be all of them, though I can think of a couple DLC'ers we have here would wouldn't have)didn't want that Chicago cop to blow Mary Travers' brains out. But what does that mean in terms of what we were talking about?

How can we say we want peace and re-nominate a prowar administration?

If we do, won't the prowar wing of this party just keep control forever? We already know that nothing we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan can have any positive, let alone actually progressive consequences. And we know that accepting the toxic myth that the U.S. HAS to be "the leader of the world" can't bring anything non-reactionaries want to pass.

Obama didn't have to be a Scoop Jackson hawk to be elected. It would have been enough for him to guarantee to protect the U.S. from foreign attack.

And we don't have to support war now to get peace later.

Please, folks, show some self-respect. We don't deserve to be the junior partner in a center-right war government.

[saltpoint]

32. Ken. You can't use 'mindless' with those guys. You just can't.

None of them was 'mindless.'

You may have objections to their foreign policy. You would not be alone.

What the Travers / Chicago cop means in terms of peace is that a lot of people in the country -- a country very shortly to elect Richard Nixon to the White House -- sided with the cop.

Pressure can be brought to bear, and should be, by the citizenry, in whatever form that may take. From peace marches on the capital to folk songs by Mary Travers (when she was still with us) and others. By principled grassroots organizations whose members are the true blue glue.

Power is always, always, always a paradox. I didn't care for Scoop Jackson, but others did. I still don't care for him, and he's long buried. He was a compelling enough figure to win support, even if my personal support wasn't among that group of folks. Power isn't a clean-cut force. It has deep roots despite its outward displays.

There is less support on DU, is my guess, than most places for the notion that the U.S. as the world's policeman (!) is an antiquated distortion of world citizenship and should never have been embraced, or in any case, no longer carried out. Were I in charge of things, I would do away with event like the Gulf of Tonkin stunt but would retain the Peace Corps. There would be extensive other changes as well, quite more to the view of Margaret Mead, for example, than to the view of Dick Cheney.

[Ken Burch]

34. If not mindless, than far too deferential to people with stars on their soldiers.

I know that a lot of people in the country backed the police in Chicago in '68. That doesn't mean we should have accepted the idea that we need to defer to the kind of people who think cops should threaten folksingers with death in order to win.

When we are outnumbered, that's when we need to stand our ground more firmly and with less compromise than ever.

And yes, pressure can be brought to bear. But history has shown that prowar politicians can almost never be made to stop being prowar. Congress standing up to Nixon on the war in early '73 is a nearly-solitary fluke.

What we really need to do is to work for the election of people who are willing to put limits on their uses of force FROM THE START. Our military policy should be strictly based on defense of our own territory. The days when anything could be gained by sending troops to other countries are gone forever.

If we re-elect Obama with our troops still in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are giving up FOREVER on getting peace. That's the reality. No politician will listen to please to stop a war from people who voted for him knowing he was going to keep the war going.

We need to purge the ideas of Scoop Jackson from this party. They weren't good for us in the past and they have nothing to offer us now. And we need to say, clearly and firmly, that no country should "lead the world", but that, rather, the world should lead itself.

[saltpoint]

35. No one's arguing that we should have sided with the cop against the

folk singer.

Well, I HOPE they aren't, anyway. I'm not, in any case.

Agree on the Nixon-era fluke -- it was a time of enormous social fluctuation and it took all political entities in the political establishment a long time to process it. The good parts were co-opted. The assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were monstrous events, not just heart-breaking ones, which is not to say that their being heart-breaking is not bad enough.

Nixon himself was in over his head. Whether he always exhibited some tendency toward the distortion of power and citizenship and the paranoia attendant to that condition, I can't say for sure, but I suspect it, and when he landed in the White House, the only assessment I trusted was Hunter Thompson's keen look at Nixon's behavior. Thompson might have kept it at the level of abandoned citizenship, but he went straight for the ethical jugular and struck his target.

Agree also that the election of as left-leaning candidates as can be found is imperative. What is not very easy about that process is that there are only a few regions of the nation where such a candidate could receive popular support. Voters in North Carolina continued to send Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate, some of them not despite his playing the race card at every convenient turn but because of it. How was Harvey to defeat an entire region's cultural backlog bigotry AND Helms' impressive rightwing fundraising machine? And Harvey was no flaming liberal. North Carolina has pockets of open-minded voters, but it has a ways to go before it becomes Berkeley or Boulder.

I disagree that to renominate / re-elect Obama is a de facto surrender of the impulse toward peace. Critical mass was achieved in the late 1960s on Vietnam but it was no instant process. It still isn't, although it's important to note that the turnaround on critical mass on Iraq was far shorter than the SE Asian war under two or three presidents in a row.

Forgive me, but I'm on a bit of a Margaret Mead kick here lately, she who believed that peace was (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'a series of quotidian tasks performed in the here and now and in the day-to-day so that peace, as a value, is built into the expectations of our children.'

It seems to me that one may agree with Mead, accept the responsibility her expression demands, and still vote for Barack Obama over a dangerous nutbag like Mike Huckabee or Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.

[salguine]

21. Better think good and hard about it, because come 2012, we'll still be in Iraq.

[Jennicut]

22. I am not worried about Iraq.

Iraqi leaders don't want us there past the timeline. Will there still be some kind of presence there? Maybe. But it will be severely limited and combat troops are going to be drawn down.
Now, Afghanistan is something I would worry about.

[Forkboy]

33. No maybes about it. With an embassy the size of about 80 football fields....

...you can guarantee that there will be some kind of presence there for a long time to come.

[KansasVoter]

23. It is amazing that Obama stay in Iraq and people here are fine!

[Bjorn Against]

26. I can't believe so many people have fallen for Obama's rhetoric that he is getting us out of Iraq

Obama never had any intention of getting us out of Iraq, despite all his talk of withdrawal he has made it clear that he intends on keeping permanent bases in Iraq and he is going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 troops stationed at those bases along with who knows how many contractors. The notion that these won't be combat troops is laughable, the violence in Iraq is not going to end and both our troops and Iraqis will continue to be killed. Obama has never had any intention of ending the war, his only intention was to fool us into thinking the war is over.

We need people to protest this war, get out in the streets and let people know that you are still paying attention and you will keep protesting their illegal occupation until there is a full withdrawal.