thunder wrote:
I'm afraid it's a crap shoot and answers are a little above my pay scale
but some suggestions if I were king.

Fire Rumsfeld. He seems to be the root cause of many of our mistakes.
Shinseki was right. We need more boots on the ground.

Hey! Didn't you just hear NOBBY a minute ago saying that no generals had
ever asked for more troops, and if they did, it was because they had an
axe to grind?

Personally I thought they should never have put Rumsfeld in as Defense
Sc'y; he's too inclined to believe his own bull****. But why would a
President who doesn't believe he himself ahs ever made a mistake find
fault with this?


... It will entail a
draft, but so be it. We are asking too much from our too few soldiers,
some of whom are on their third tour.


We need more manpower. I don't think a draft is the best way to get it,
but it may be necessary anyway a few years down the road.

Another thing we need is international consensus. After Sept 11th, we
had the overwhelming support of the world. We need to regain at least
some of that, we need cooperation in tracking terrorist networks, and it
may be possible to gain allies to send more troops into Iraq...
obviously we'd have to do something very differently, but here's a way
to kill two birds with one stone.


Fire Halliburton. The job is clearly too big for them. Instead of hiring
American firms to accomplish the rebuild, we should be hiring Iraqi firms
with Iraqi employees.

Agreed.

But you have to realize, Halliburton is one of the reason why the
Bush/Cheney Administration launched this war. It wasn't about terrorism,
since there weren't any in Iraq, it wasn't about WMDs since there
weren't any of those either, it wasn't about Sept 11th since there are
no proven links, and if it was about oil then we've made an extremely
bad... blatant incompetently bad... guess about how much the oil would
cost.

This war is about funneling HUGE amounts of money into the pockets of
Bush & Cheney's cronies, money that their campaign funds will get a cut
of, which will make them (and their allies) almost unbeatable. It has
been a tremendous success in that regard, so why should anybody expect
Buch or Cheney to talk about failure?



Senator Biden makes some good points:

Yeah but everybody knows that Democrats are homo-loving America-hating
libby-rull traitors. Senator Biden was a deserter, there's a statue of
him in Hanoi, and he gets his funding from Al-Queda!

DSK