Lawrence Wirth's List: Iraq

• U.S. government continues to pour precious human treasure and vast financial resources into this ugly war without end, it is all but ignoring deeply entrenched problems that are weakening the country here at home
• The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right.
• The United States cannot
• Other nations can provide health care for everyone
• Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

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• Informed Comment

  • Juan Cole is a professor of middle eastern history at Michigan
• War turns Republics into dictatorships.
• Congress turned that responsibility over to Bush, gutting the constitution
• a military dictatorship achieved not by coup but by moral laziness
• he is the ultimate Divider, and leaves burning buildings, millions of refugees, and hundreds of thousands of cadavers in his wake

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• nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems

  • Thanks again Republicans. Nice job.
• A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction
• The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one

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• in Senator Obama we have a real alternative, the most inspiring person to run for the presidency in my lifetime, not to mention someone who (unlike McCain and Clinton) was right about -- and told the truth about -- the Iraq war from the start.
• The real reason (if you want to call it that!) that we went to war was because a very silly little man -- Bush -- wanted to appear big, tough and in charge and revenge 9/11 by hitting an "easy" target to teach "those people" a lesson
• The reason for continuing the war is that... we are at war! We're still fighting in Iraq... because we're still fighting in Iraq
• McCain has changed from talking about the war to being defined by it, from telling a lie to becoming the lie
• McCain is ready to do what Robert McNamara describes in his book on Vietnam: continue a war for political reasons after he knows it is lost
• The reason McCain is willing to knowingly lie about the war in Iraq is this: McCain worships at the shrine of military sacrifice for its own sake.
• In a McCain presidency the United States faces disaster
• McCain's America will be a weakened America at risk and with fewer friends than eve
• The fact that McCain has -- in the course of one campaign -- turned from an honorable American legend into a compromised shill for the far right, the religious crazies, the neoconservatives, the warmongers and corporate America -- he even wants to lower corporate taxes in wartime while the middle and working class serve and die! -- is astonishingly sad

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