I don't even watch TV you boob. You haven't substantively responded once in this thread. You obviously don't read the posts you respond to. You sight the first Gulf War when conscripts in Iraq gaveup in droves and you don't seem to acknowldge that defeating a B.S. army of untrained conscripts who just want to go home is not the same as making people want to build a functioning democracy with thier long-time bitter ethnic rivals.

You are a sad old man longing for the "glory" of a war you never fought.

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A song that says it all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqITJFGyq4s

In Iraq there is a fair ammount of support for pushing out the occupiers by "murdering people with crude weapons". I guess thats sort of the same.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pi...t=250&nid=&id=

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A song that says it all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqITJFGyq4s

Ah, it's quite progressive of you to not watch TV. That's a very sure sign of your intellectualism as is your tendency to ignore most of my points, make ones, like the above, which really have nothing to do with the topic, and become insulting because I believe that you're spewing defeatist rubbish.

Excellent.

Return to your sanctum santorum of political thought, because Letterman's on in seven minutes, and I have to tune in, if that's ok with you.

It's hard to find a coherent point in this gobbledy-gook. Try replacing the elipsis with the period and using an occasional paragraph, too. As for Iraq being relatively prosperous and having a sizeable middle class, you must have some strange definitions. I don't call unemployment in the range of 30% prosperous.

You clicked the quote button then misquoted him anyway?

(my emphasis - the point being the past tense).
30% unemployment is the current estimate with other estimates ranging from 25-50%. No one is really sure what the numbers were like pre-invasion, pre-sanctions, or even pre-Gulf War. What we do know is that Iraq had a quite popular and free university system that was open to all Iraqis. We also know that there is a large and growing Iraqi diaspora (10% of the population) of mostly skilled workers spreading throughout the middle east, north africa, and europe and that the brain drain is a serious obstacle to stabilizing the country.


And as far as unemployment stats go, i would take them with a grain of salt. The US unemployment rate is officially just below 5%. However, the working age population (16-64) is just over 200 million people. There are only 146 million americans working. Certainly there are 14 and 15 year olds looking for jobs, and indeed they are counted by the BLS if they have jobs but not counted as unemployed if they don't. There are also people in their late 60's also working or looking for work. How many people pf traditional working age are underemployed, working part-time b/c that's all there is?

OTOH, If you're out of work for more than 6 months the BLS drops you from the unemployment figures. It's a convenient way to keep the numbers low.

That all means that 47million american adults are hangin' out at home watchin' Oprah because they're financially independent and don't need to work or they're participating in underground/casual employment situations or they're living off of whatever benefits are available to them or off of friends or family.

In places like France or Germany or Japan, a good portion of those people would be counted as unemployed.

I would put our true unemployment rate somewhere between 15 and 20%

The elipsis is used to indicate a continuous train of though...if you
have trouble following it, the problem may be on your part...that having been said, the point I was trying to make was this: Iraq was a relatively prosperous country under Saddam Hussein, even through
part of th Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's...but this war caused a major
debt in their economy, and was one of the reasons, from Iraqi perspective, for invading Kuwait...remember that Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil by so called 'slant drilling' that is, drilling
into Iraqi oilfields from the Kuwaiti side of the border...also remember
that when Saddam discussed this issue with US official April Glaspie
and explained the Iraqi side of the issue, and Iraq's possible use of force to remedy the problem, the official Us response from Glapie was that '...the US has no interest in getting involved in any conflicts between neighboring Arab states'...after Operation Desert Storm & the subsequent UN-imposed sanctions, the Iraqi economy suffered further blows, and now with Gulf War II, not only the economy but the Iraqi nation itsef has been shattered...I hope this
clarifies my earlier post...here is an article that gives some insight into post Gulf War I problems confronting Iraq:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gul...ar/index1.html

Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire C-SPAN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZ...utyes%2Ecom%2F

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A mainstrem media assessment of the total cost of the Iraqi war:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/militar...-wacosts_N.htm

With this in mind, also note that President Bush in the past week has dramatically reduced federal subsidies for the LIHEAP program, which assists the poor & elderly in paying home heating costs in the winter...many Pennsylvanians have been helped by the LIHEAP program.

It's filled with greedy cowards who don't understand crap and repeat what they hear on TV.

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dvd to iphone
dvd to iphone

An interesting article about our 'oil policy' vis-a-vis Iraq:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ope...overt_atte.htm