Makes me wonder what could happen.

[simon2307]

[quote="TANEYTOWN"]The Iraq people are winning. The fact we have a strong hold over Iran is a win for the USA.[/quote]

I cannot recall the exact estimates, but in the region of of a million have died and 4.5 million have being displaced.

[Steve Roberts]

Steve Roberts, you're wrong we are winning there isn't anyone of any recored saying we aren't.

moveon or thee dailycost do not count.

stratford.com isn't a conservative site. It's a hard news site that deals in facts not ideology.
Look I deal in facts not again ideology. I enjoy going to places that give hard facts. Look I can understand how this whole thing isn't going the way you guys thought even 9 months ago. Things change & they clearly are. Time to get on board as winning should be what everyone wants.

Well i hope you get a big metal cup to put on the mantelpiece to show the folks you won.

stratford.com is a website about living in Stratford. The other one is run by a Conservative Republican and has various pricing structures detailing its intelligence. I trust you have premium membership.

You support the war Taney, you go and fight it. I still don't know what the war in Iraq is about. Certainly nothing to do with 9/11. Wasn't Afghanistan about 9/11? I don't know, maybe that one's about freeing women from slavery, I can't tell. I do know that 2 more young lads from the same regiment that my best mates son is in died today, making it 5 this week.

You carry on with your liberal baiting Teeny, shouting USA with all your might.

[andy]

Tanny, do you know any who has died in this war? I do.
Why aren't you out there doing your bit anyway?

[TANEYTOWN]

Yea, 3000 of our own. And millions killed by Saddam. Now he can't kill anymore. Freedom isn't free.Pretty happy George Washington & John Adams took the idea of having a few die to get free from England. And now happy we can all get along & I love England.

[TANEYTOWN]

SteveRoberts, were do you get you're news? Bet it's left leaning. And that's fare?

Hey, show me 100% prove that Iraq isn't getting better.

[Stuart W]

Sunnis and Shias alike

Are you sure this is necessarily a good thing?
Have you ever heard "I Got You Babe"?

[Stuart W]

a rummer

?

Now let me guess. A rummer.
One of those big, wide, quasi-miltary type vehicles, with a carbon footprint the size of New Hampshire, favoured by Miami drug dealers and the like, that's been converted to run off molasses (perhaps).

[Steve Roberts]

SteveRoberts, were do you get you're news? Bet it's left leaning. And that's fare?

Hey, show me 100% prove that Iraq isn't getting better.

I'll pass by your inability to spell simple words and tell you that I get my news from the same places as 99% of our population; the BBC,Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Mirror etc. I have no proof of anything and neither do you. But I'm certainly able to make up my own mind about things.

Now, answer my questions about Iraq and Afghanistan. And of course tell me why strafor is to be trusted more than any other organisation.

I wish I hadn't allowed myself to be drawn into a conversation with you, as I'm pretty certain it is pointless. Prove me wrong.

[Dangerbird]

I'll pass by your inability to spell simple words.

Irag

[Steve Roberts]

Don't know what you mean.

[Dangerbird]

didn't Bush claim victory over Iraq a month or so after the invasion?

and what's 9/11 got to do with Iraq?

[Ol' Time Phelan]

didn't Bush claim victory over Iraq a month or so after the invasion?

and what's 9/11 got to do with Iraq?

Yeah, I heard it was the jews and the CIA.

[fiona]

Yea, 3000 of our own. And millions killed by Saddam. Now he can't kill anymore.

So Bush took the job instead. Nice work if you can get it.

[Dangerbird]

From La Monde...........

536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon’s 2001 budget of $316bn, and that’s without factoring in “supplementary” requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the president’s global war on terror. Add in those soaring sums and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for “defence and related programmes... has jumped at an annual average rate of 8%... four times faster than the average rate of growth for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programmes (0.3%).”

1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the Bush administration totally off-guard.

1,000,000: the number of “missions” or “sorties” the US air force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, about 353,000 of them in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil purchases) have gone these last years.

509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a “terrorist watch list” compiled by the FBI. No longer is a Ten Most Wanted list adequate. According to ABC News, “US lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list” and Saddam Hussein was on the list even when in US custody. By February 2008, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the list had ballooned to 900,000.

300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Approximately 320,000 “report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds”. This, RAND reports, represents a barely dealt with major health crisis. The depression and PTSD will, the study reported, “cost the nation as much as $6.2bn in the two years following deployment”.

51,000: the number of post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end of 2007. The US now runs “perhaps the world’s largest extra-judicial internment camp” (1), Camp Bucca, in Iraq, whose holding capacity is being expanded from 20,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Then there’s Camp Cropper, with at least 4,000 prisoners, including “hundreds of juveniles” (2). Many of these prisoners were simply swept up in surge raids and have been held without charges or access to lawyers or courts ever since. Add in prisoners (in unknown numbers) in our sizeable network of prisons in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in offshore and borrowed prisons; add in the widespread mistreatment of prisoners at American hands; and you have the machinery for the manufacture of vast numbers of angry potential enemies, some willing to commit almost any act of revenge.

Though there is no way to tabulate the numbers, many tens of thousands of prisoners, at least, have cycled through the Bush administration’s various prisons in these last seven years, many emerging embittered. (And don’t forget their embittered families.) Think of all this as an enormous dystopian experiment in “social networking”, a Facebook from Hell.

5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans, issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing after Hurricane Katrina, still occupied by people who lost their homes in the storm almost three years ago. They have been found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes. Katrina was but one of many security disasters for the Bush administration.

658: the number of suicide bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than double the number in any of the past 25 years (3). Of all the suicide bombings in the past 25 years, more than 86% have occurred since 2001, according to US government experts. At least one bomber, who died in a recent coordinated wave of suicide bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul, was a Kuwaiti, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, who had spent years locked up in Guantanamo.

511: the number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary, grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the US army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006. According to the New York Times, between 2006 and 2007, those enrolled with convictions for wrongful possession of drugs (not including marijuana) almost doubled. For burglaries, the number almost tripled, for grand larceny/larceny it more than doubled, for robbery it more than tripled, for aggravated assault it went up by 30%, and for “terroristic threats including bomb threats” it doubled (from one to two). Feel more secure?

132: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of crude oil on the international market towards the end of May (4). Meanwhile the average price of a gallon of regular gas at the pump in the US hit $3.88, while the price of gas jumped almost 20 cents in Michigan in a week and 36 cents in Utah in a month. As Memorial Day weekend arrived, a time when Americans traditionally hit the road, the average price for a gallon of gas in the state of California crossed the $4 barrier. Just after the 9/11 attacks, a barrel of crude oil was in the $20 range; at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was at about $30. In other words, since 9/11, a barrel of crude has risen more than $100 without the Bush administration taking any serious steps to promote energy conservation, cut down on the US oil addiction, or develop alternative energy strategies (beyond a dubious programme to produce more ethanol).

82: the percentage of Americans who think “things in this country have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track”, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. This is the gloomiest Americans have been about the “direction” of the country in the last 15 years.

40: the percentage loss “on a trade-weighted basis” in the value of the dollar since 2001. The dollar’s share of total world foreign exchange reserves has also dropped from 73% to 64% in that same period. According to the Center for American Progress, “By early May 2008, a dollar bought 42.9% fewer euros, 35.7% fewer Canadian dollars, 37.7% fewer British pounds, and 17.3% fewer Japanese yen than in March 2001.”

37: the number of countries that have experienced protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush administration completely unprepared. In the last year, the price of wheat has risen by 130%, of rice by 74%, of soya by 87%, and of corn by 31%.

0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaida or similar groups inside the United States since 11 September 2001.

0: The number of weapons of mass destruction (the reason given for why invasion was neccessary) found.

[saint carl]

didn't Bush claim victory over Iraq a month or so after the invasion?

and what's 9/11 got to do with Iraq?

And he was right, because from 2005 the UN recognised the US and Britain as the occupiers of Iraq. That was officially when the "war" ended. Since then it is the establishment of a Government, not a war.

The attacks are misrepresented as a continuation of the war when in reality they are bewteen various factions within Iraq trying to gain power. Obviously outside "neighbours" have an interest in "helping" various sides that will suit their agenda. However, al Qaeda have never had a strong presence in Iraq either before or after the invasion for the simple reason that Iran and its friends feel that al Qaeda's views aren't extreme enough.

The only links to al Qaeda in the region were completely fabricated. No better example than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he had nothing to do with al Qaeda, in fact he hated al Qaeda again for similar reasons to Iran.

This is why this article is bullshit. It just throws out every enemy it can think of in a scatter gun loosely linking everyone to Iraq.

There is nothing to be won, it is a civil war.

If there is a "war" to be won it is in Afghanistan, however that isn't even close to an end and again our American cousins seem to have forgotten that for that war they had international support and that they have European and Canadian troops over there as well. Though again it's another convinience that the other countries get stuck in the hardest areas of most conflict.