Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Bush: State of the Union
Vincent Vega said:
I don't think you can compare the situation in the Balkan states with the structures and situation in Iraq or Afhanistan.
For these countries it was much easier to adopt democracy, in Iraq and Afghanistan many of the people don't even want democracy, since they have other structures.
And don't forget, if the S-For or K-For troops left the Balkan states, there would be civil war within weeks again.
That happened other the past few years. Whenever one of the armies in one region tried to loose the ties, i.e. reduced the presence to see whether the people will live together peacefully, they had to come back within hours because the could see immediately how the violence there increased again.
Still I was not against taking actions in the Balkan area, I thought they were even more important.
As I think that it would have been by far more important to intervene in Darfur than in Iraq.
You see, in the Balkan the Nato could achieve a lot more by the bombardement of a few weeks, and the deployment of the S-For and the K-For.
In Afghanistan, tell me, where are they making prodress?
Every report from there just told that the situation in the south got just worse over the last few months. Soldiers even said they were safer in Iraq than in the south of Afghanistan.
In the Vietnam war NVA and Vietcong just went over the border to Cambodia, and recovered from their battles. Now the Taliban are going over the boarder of Pakistan and are recovering there. The coalition forces don't make any progress there.
Even though the peace in the Balkan states is not the strongest, it's still much better than in Iraq. People there are preparing for a civil war between Sunnis and Shiits, incited by the al-Quaeda. The US soldiers aren't the main target anymore.
People are leaving the area, or live in fear of dying every day. So the situation didn't improve really for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for every dictator like Saddam less, but not in the way that a country says: "We are going in there, now, and if you don't like it, be it.", with the illusion the masses will stand in the streets with flowers because they have waited for US troops to come for so long, only to discover that this isn't like that, and then there is no sophisticated plan of how to adjust the strategy.
With the GDP, that's a nice thing, but think of the definition of GDP. That is the value of every good and service produced within a country. And the value created by the military supplying industry is huge.
One economist even said, considering the indirect costs, the Iraq war already cost $3 trillion. With very high costs for the wounded and crippled-for-life soldiers.
GDP is the best way to measure the financial cost of any endeavour. The best way to understand the cost of World War II to the United States financially is took compare the cost of the war to GDP then. By the end of World War II, the US national debt which had prior to the war only been 10% of USA GDP, was now 150% of GDP.
The Iraq war has cost over $400 Billion dollars to date, and could eventually cost up to 2 Trillion dollars. That is the highest estimate that has been reported. Thats only 15% of current GDP and its spread out over a 10 year plus period amounting to less than 200 Billion dollars or less than 10% of what the annual federal budget is.
In the peacetime of the 1980s, the United States was spending 6% of its GDP every year on national Defense. Defense spending combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today amount to around 4.5% of GDP, 25% less than the level of defense spending during the peacetime of the 1980s.
In both Bosnia and Kosovo, the number of NATO troops in each country has significantly dropped from what the levels were in Bosnia in 1996 and Kosovo in 1999. There are currently less than 20,000 NATO troops in Bosnia today, there were over 60,000 in 1996! So the process is working, and eventually few if any troops will be needed in both countries!
Bosnia and Kosovo while they are more modern area's and societies, went through a vastly more deadly conflict that was had been seen in Iraq. Nearly 10% of the population in Bosnia was murdered. If nearly 10% of the population in Iraq had been killed, you would have a death toll after four years of 3 million, not 60 thousand. Despite the more modern history, the worse devistation and fighting between the ethnic groups made it more unlikely that a stable democratic situation could arise in Bosnia than even Afghanistan or Iraq. And just like in Iraq early on, the ethnic groups all voted for their own ethnic leaders in Bosnia leading to the same criticism that there was no democracy in Bosnia at all.
Afghanistan has made more progress over the past 5 years than in any other foreign occupation in that countries history or in the decades since the 1979 Soviet invasion. The death rate has dropped signicantly, education especially for women as vastly improved, more roads, electricity, and water is available to much of the population than ever before, and there is now a democratically elected government. The improvements in these area's for Afghanistan have been enormous. It often gets reported that 4,000 people died in Afghanistan in 2006, but they neglect to clarify that more than half of them were Taliban fighters.
The increase in fighting in Afghanistan from 2005, is largely the result of NATO forces moving into area's in the south where it had never been before rather than some brand new surge of Taliban numbers inside the country.
I might add that progress in Afghanistan is hampered by the fact that FRANCE and GERMANY won't send their troops to the trouble area's of the south, as well as send more troops to Afghanistan in general!
In Iraq, the vast majority of attacks 75% to 80% according to the US military are still against the coalition, even though the vast majority of casualties are suffered by the Iraqi population. That is because a single attack against defenseless civilians always will yield far greater casualties than a single attack against the military, which may not even result in casualties.
90% of the sectarian violence in Iraq happens within 30 miles of Baghdad and is primarily the result of Al Quada and certain insurgent groups as well as the Maidi Shia militia.
Most Iraqi's are either indifferent or work with coalition forces in Iraq. Only a minority actually support the insurgency against the coalition and nearly all of this support comes from the Sunni majority area's of the country. 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces are relatively peaceful.
The coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 had just as much authority to do so with UN resolution 1441 as the coalition that used military force to remove Saddam from Kuwait in 1990 did from UN resolution 678. The UN resolutions authorized the invasion and subsequent UN resolutions like 1483 authorized the occupation. The UN would never vote to authorize an occupation it felt had been brought about through illegal means, a perfect example being Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
I never supported Bush or the war, but like many others, the fact that he decided that increasing the troops was the solution to what is obviously not going to get any better just made me shake my head in disgust. 
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I'm counting on Webb to steal the show.
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