War Popularity

L

lizziedog1

New member
One of my favorite movies is Patton. I like the opening when he is trying fire up his troops. I like the part of his speech about how Americans hate to loose. I don't know the exact words off hand, but basically we as a nation can't stand loosing and loosers. I wonder how accurate his assessment of the American psyche was?

World War Two and the first Gulf War seem to have been popular amongst most Americans. One thing they have in common is that we won. We were victorious without much doubt. Vietnam and the current wars seem to cause a lot of controversy. Could it be, that real or imagined, we seem to be on the loosing end. Is it possible if the outcomes of these wars were like the ones we won that public support would be more unanimous? Is what Patton said true? We as Americans just can stand the thought of loosing.
 
I'm all for declaring a victory and packing up. Too many articles recently about active troops in Iraq wondering what they are doing there.

Got Saddam? check
No WMDs? check
 
We're still trying to shove democracy down the throats of people that are more interested in killing each other over differences that are thousands of years old.
 
We are in the middle of a religious war. We lost before it started.

Bush should have known this, but when you only have enough brain power to operate your legs it is really hard to see these obvious situations.
 
My support of a war has little to do with how much it costs, how many people are killed, or even whether I think it can be won. All I care about is: Does the US need this war to defend itself? If the answer is "yes," then all the other factors are moot. If the answer is "no," then I'll oppose it. What the majority thinks doesn't affect my opinion.

I supported the invasion of Afghanistan in order to hunt for Osama. US foreign policy is insane, but that didn't give Osama an excuse to attack random Americans, most of whom probably didn't even know what has been done in their name. And if another country sent a fleet to attack the US, I'd be completely in favor of bombing those ships out of the water. But it was obvious to me from the very beginning that the (second) Iraq war was not about WMDs, and I think now that most Americans have caught on to that.

I think the Iraq war lost popularity once people woke up and realized they'd been lied to. Only Bush's "true believers" and those who have been thoroughly Hannitized still think that Bush is an honest person who was merely "mistaken" about Saddam's WMDs. And of course, many people just don't like to admit that they were fooled.

I think articles like the following are helping more people understand the real reason why Iraq was invaded. It had nothing to do with oil:

"The spies who pushed for war"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

"Israel Shares Blame on Iraq Intelligence, Report Says"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36694-2003Dec4?language=printer

Israeli intelligence services and political leaders provided "an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities," raising "the possibility that the intelligence picture was manipulated," wrote Brom, former deputy commander of the Israeli military's planning division.
Click to expand...

"White man's burden"
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/...&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical
Click to expand...

The last link is to the well-known Israeli paper Ha'aretz. I have an ethnic Jewish background myself (mother's side), and I realize that most Jews in the US opposed the Iraq war, but that doesn't change the fact that Bush, Cheney, and many others in their administration put the interests of Israel before that of the US (probably for religious reasons in the case of Bush and Cheney).
 
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