Quote from AK Forty Seven:
Yep.Unlike Bush at least they are telling the public we will be at war with Iran if the GOP candidate wins
Thousands of Americans lives will be lost,there will probably be a draft,trillions of dollars will be spent,huge price increase of oil if The GOP wins 2012
I doubt they will end up doing anything. The options are unappealing, and it is far from certain they would be effective. If it was simple, the Israelis would have already done it, no matter what obama said.
I understand that the candidates are trying to appeal to the national security wing of the party, but they need to make it clear where they stand on the Bush/neo-con doctrine of preemptive attacks and using war as a tool to force democracy on the middle east.
To listen to that debate, you would think they learned nothing from the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Some, like Santorum, seem eager to repeat the mistake.
The latest neo-con spin is that Obama somehow "lost" Iraq, first by failing to force a coalition government on them, then by failing to negotiate a satisfactory status of forces agreement that would have allowed U.S. troops to remain indefinitley. There is some basis for both claims, but they assume that Bush or someone else would have accomplished both objectives, which seems dubious to me. Plus, it assumes we want to have a large military presence in iraq indefinitely. Maybe if we eliminated our presence in places like Germany, Korea or Japan we could afford it or maybe we could have taken control of the Iraqi oil fields and used some of that to pay for it, but Bush and his crowd did neither.
It would have been interesting if the debate had gotten into some real issues like this, but they were too busy trying to catch the candidates out or make them look bad.
