Iraqi Shoe Monument... what a load of crap....

i found the matching foot btw...

Control of them or control of us???? Either way, it pretty much sucks.

It's pretty tough to skew a story about a shoe monument praising something as stupid as throwing a shoe at a world leader.

I haven't "bought" into anything. I am making my opinion known.

I don't think we need to finance half the damn world and basically have them show us the finger for it.

Define 'better'.

Few jobs.
Their power grid is worse than Saddam days.
They have water and sewage issues.
There is random gun fire, looting, rape, and madness daily in their streets.
Little to no real infrastructure rebuilt in regards to hospitals, schools, power plants, etc.
They have to worry about living in the wrong areas, or towns now based on religion.

With all those winning benefits coming after the war. Who WOULDN'T be happy with years in those conditions?!!? I can only imagine the insane amount of gratitude I would have while my family starved, I had poor education and health care, little power or fresh water, and bullets all hours of the day and night..

Oh that's right. They have 'democracy' now..

Someday, in Iraq, there will be monuments to GWB.

these are all fucking muslims. you can't expect any rational thinking out of them.

Makes you long for those days when people were gassed under Hussein's rule, or they were picked up tortured and beaten and never heard from again doesn't it? Yeah, getting rid of the people that did that was a terrible thing wasn't it?

Don't you think some of the fault for the "years in those conditions" lies with the Iraqi leaders and people for not moving forward on their democracy? Dragging their own feet as it were?

Let me ask. If you had lived under a dictator and a force came in (whether you wanted to recognize them as liberators or not) and gave you the "keys to the kingdom" as it were and said... here ya go... set it up... make your own way.

Would you as part of a population allow the shit to continue? Would you back the insurgents and the wahhabi and the shiites and the sunnis calling for just as much oppression as there was before?

Do you honestly believe that the problems in Iraq truly are 100% the fault of the GWB administration or can you lay a large part of the blame on Iraq itself for not pulling it's head from it's collective ass and stepping up to the plate?

Seems to me one of the first things the Iraqis should have done was control the one viable resource they had... THE OIL.... and sell the shit out of it and get some revenue coming in.....

Then they could have built the hospitals, the schools, the infrastructure that everyone blames the US for not supplying. They could have employed their own police force and said to the US... Thanks for the starter.. Now get the fuck outta here. We're good. What..... must we do everything to be considered as acceptable? Getting rid of asshat #1 and his boys wasn't enough? Yeah, the whole thing was done looking for the elusive WMD's but dropping Hussein in the process wasn't such a bad trade-off was it?

You need to turn down the volume on O'Reilly friend.

There were plenty of mistakes made by the Bush administration. If you are claiming there were not, and it is all the Iraqi and Kurds fault. You need to turn the channel off Fox News a bit more.

Start here
Bush's War
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

Bad Voodoo's War
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/badvoodoo/

Endgame
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/endgame/view/

and plenty of others here (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/) going into a lot of detail on the BULL SHIT of this war on the boogie man. A lot of it coming from the front line soldiers and people over there, and ex-Pentagon and defense people. I think I will trust them a bit more than GWB and the goose stepping storm troopers.

thanks for the links... one of them IMO summed up what I said pretty well.....

When Iraqis went to the polls in January 2005 the administration pointed to the election as a sign of success. But with an almost complete Sunni boycott of the election, the resulting government had, as one officer described it to FRONTLINE, "tenuous legitimacy."

In many ways it was the definitive moment in the Iraq war. "The die was cast once the Sunni Arabs did not participate in the elections. Everything that has followed that has been a logical consequence," Casey strategist Maj. Thomas Mowle tells FRONTLINE.

Sectarian violence in Iraq was growing and came to a head in February 2006, when Sunni insurgents bombed the golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra. "The Shi'a begin to fight back with the Sunni," author Lawrence Kaplan tells FRONTLINE. "And what was one-sided insurgency becomes a two-sided civil war."

So it's completely the fault of the Administration that the Iraqis didn't play along as hoped, right? Again... should we give them back Saddam, Uday, Husay and the Baath Party? Things were "better" then?

I'm not saying GWB did everything right... but come on... the whole fucked up situation was the fault of the administration and by default the US of A???

I have a hard time with that one.

Typically, I am not one for the blame game. I am not saying it is all GWB. I am not saying it was all the Iraqi and Kurds. Nor insurgent interference.

I am saying there is plenty of fucked up blame to go around, and based on the rosey picture of 'democracy' painted. There are bigger issues at hand then some fucking blue thumb.

You say that you are making your opinion known, but all I hear is Rush Limblaugh's
opinion being regergitated.

Iraq has democracy?? Then why do they keep voting for the US to leave and it hasn't happened?

They held their first elections under conditions where US troops were shooting at the
opposition party. Sunni's could not show up to a poll and vote without being gunned down.

And under this "democracy" Sadam was put on trial and the trial continued even
after two of his attorneys were murdered. You call that democracy?
I call that a "kangaroo court".

Dude, the Iraq war was a farce. Are you really this blind to the truth?

BTW.. I don't watch O'Reilly... he's an idiot.

I never said there were not mistakes. I have only said the mistakes were not solely theirs and IMO not so heavily weighted in that direction.

As a wise man once told me. There are two sides to every story, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That's where I find my opinion of it all. In the middle. That's why shit like a shoe monument pisses me off so much. Even though I celebrate their newfound right to make such a statement (one they never would have been able to make under their previous leader), I find it offensive to no end. I don't care that the guy threw the shoe at GWB. He's in jail, awaiting his day in court. I do find it as a big fuck you to the USA that the Iraqi gov't didn't go to the creator of the copper shoe and say... Hey... probably not the best of ideas.

I also don't watch Fox News. I get my news from many sources on both sides of the political spectrum and also internationally.

Having an opinion that would be considered conservative doesn't automatically make me a right-winger, just as I could say your stance makes you appear left-wing.

Rush makes a comment and then everyone else is sheep? I don't have the capability of making logical thought on my own? Gee thanks. I guess all that money for college went to shit then. Time to re-think my life.

The Iraqi's have made an agreement that the US troops should be out by the end of 2011. You are deluding yourself if you think every soldier will be out of Iraq by then. Combat troops, sure, but there will always be a US contingent in Iraq. Just like Germany, Just like Korea, just like everywhere else we go. We like to have bases allllll over the world. It helps when little situations come up. Easier to keep the hardware close to the trouble spots.

Democracy doesn't mean you always get what you want. Haven't you figured that out yet? I wanted someone to lead the country that cared more for the country and less for politics as usual. I got to choose between McCain and Obama. Damn.. maybe next time.

gunned down by US troops? Doubt that. Unless they were shooting at the soldier's first, I have a hard time with that one. Link away though. There's truth to everything you can find on the internet, right?

1- the judges in the case were Iraqis, not US. They made the decision on the case. Their country, their law, their choice.

2- I don't think Saddam should have been tried. I think he should have been shot when they found him. I think his trial was intended to show the Iraqis that even he would get better than he offered when he was the leader. Was there really any question that he was going to die once he was found? I mean seriously. Everything he was tried for was basically war crimes and genocide. You usually don't walk away from those types of charges...... kangaroo court or not.

All you are saying is a fair trial I guess? The outcome would have been the same. He did some horrendously bad things. He deserved the ultimate punishment they had under their law. Plain and simple.

Farce.... depends on who you talk to. Depends on what you are fed. Depends on what you believe.

As I said in a previous post, there are two sides to every story, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You believe the left, others believe the right. I find myself in the middle of it all.

The country was way better before, atleast the country wasnt destroyed like it is now

incorrect.
from nov 24, 2008
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/facul...raq-war-a.html

do you people do research or just make your own conclusions?