[Sethomas]

Regardless of whom you're addressing, all the good news from here on out wouldn't sway me from thinking that this attack was a mistake. It would, however, give me hope that maybe long-term damage isn't going to be as bad as we have good reason to expect it to be. I didn't make this thread as pointless bitching, but rather to explore the strong possibility that this is to become a long-standing state of affairs. The strained military, the foreign occupation, the absurd amount of debt we're accruing. I'm going to be honest and say that I don't know for myself that a pull-out in the near future is the best option with the cards we've been dealt, but it does strike me for now as the less terrible of our options.

One of the aforementioned defenders of the idea I described threw out the number "twenty years", referring to our presence in the middle east. Four years has put us into a debt that's going to multiply and perhaps destroy the next generation's economy.

The one thing that does make me wonder, though, is how optimistic the administration was at the outset. They obviously believed that the war would come so easily as to garner the respect of the American people and keep the GOP in power. It worked in 2004, but not in 2006. I'm not comfortable with either alternative this implies: the administration really is as incompetent as we think (which I've wondered about), or its intentions are more perverse and this is really going to fall back into their hands in some way unforeseeable to me.