WOW. A lot to respond to here.

You want to make the Iraqi people suffer. Without going into the matter of making people we're supposedly rescuing from tyranny suffer, how could we do that in ways we haven't already used? As I said in a post back on that other thread we met in, neither Bush nor McCain is prepared to enlarge the armed forces because they won't raise taxes. We are already running a massive deficit, so it's unlikely they could possibly borrow much more. The only inexpensive way to do this would be a massive bombing campaign, which would discourage everybody BUT the bad people. As the Brits in 1940 and the Vietnamese in 1970 showed, you cannot win a war by bombing alone. You need boots on the ground. Bush wouldn't put them there, and I don't see how McCain expects to if he won't raise taxes. The Surge is ending because the military feels that it MUST pull the troops out or face massive morale problems.

As to turning the country over to the Turks, all that would accomplish would be to start a war between the Turks and Iranians (and very possibly the Russians, too), which we'd be drawn into one way or another. I said back in 2002 that if we went into Iraq, we had to be prepared to go into every place in the Middle East from Kabul to Algiers. We weren't then and we aren't now. We, as a nation, are simply unwilling to fight a WWII-level war. And that's as much the fault of Bush and his people as anyone else, because to them tax cuts are more important than winning wars anyhow. What the fuck -- THEY aren't getting shot at in Baghdad?

Let me try to put it as simply as I can: if this is a war for civilization, which is what Bush said back in 2003, then let's FIGHT it like it's one. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt didn't whine about taxes. He made them even higher, borrowed whatever he needed, subordinated the economy to the war COMPLETELY, put in place a system of inspectors to make sure nobody was getting fat on the sly (he said that for him, war profiteering was a form of treason) , etc., etc., etc. And he beat two first-class powers in less time than Bush has failed to beat a fourth-rate one.

I TOTALLY agree with what you say about military contractors -- TOTALLY. And in WWII, that sort of shit didn't happen. And yeah, take the profit out of the war and it will quickly be over. But I think you ought to look at whose party is being supported by the war profiteers.

But what I do NOT hear is McCain saying he'll do anything different from what Bush is doing. He wants to cut taxes MORE, which means LESS money to beef up the armed forces. I haven't heard a peep out of him on military contractors, and I think that's because they're big contributors to the Republican Party and he doesn't want to alienate them. In sum, I don't see him as representing a way out of the problem, because he won't attack the root causes of it, which are that we are unprepared as a nation to fight wars that we cannot win quickly and/or on the cheap.

Obama has called for increasing the size of the military, as has McCain, but unlike McCain he has talked about raising taxes which means he understands the need to PAY for it. As for Iraq, he sees, as I think most people do, that very few in this country are willing to pay the REAL price of winning it, including John McCain, so let's collect our chips and split. Iraq should never have been invaded in the first place, as long as the guy who did us the real dirt was alive and living in hope in Afghanistan. So let's stop throwing away the lives of the best men and women this country has to preserve the reputations of a rich punk and his neocon advisers.

You may disagree with that, but I think it's a lot more honest than to say that we must win, but we're not going to do what obviously has to be done to secure that win.