Friday, April 11, 2008

Terminology in Iraq

Last night on Countdown a retired colonel who had served in Iraq took issue with Bush's definition of Iraq as a "front in the War on Terror." He claimed that it was a civil war which we are moderating.

I do not question his assesment, but we need to be a little more honest with ourselves than that. What we are doing in Iraq is not a war at all.
We are performing a military occupation of a conquered nation.

A civil war in the midst of that is complicating things, but we are occupiers.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous10:52 AM

    yes we are military occupiers of a once conquered nation. I'm not so sure we are really in control of it anymore. And I tend to agree it is a civil (tribal, ethnic, religious) war internally. Akin to Yugoslavia, once Tito died, it split up among various ethnic & religious factions and we all know how that turned out. Yikes.

    Frankly, while I agreed with BO's statement of it was a bad thing to do and we should not have, etc ad nausem, it is getting tiresome. Most of us can generally agree on that, but the real question remains, what to do in the future? I don't hear much detail on that (but that may not be possible right now from the candidates), except political posturing which is just that, hot air. I think that's where global warming really comes from.

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