According to Biden, we need to cut the talk about courage and, instead, designate an objective. But in doing so, we need to acknowledge that there is no military solution to Iraq. This speech, given with regard to the Reid’s proposed joint resolution, is a passionate talk that gives you a strong sense of who Biden is, at least with regard to Iraq.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1op8vwF5UA[/youtube]
Since the end of the cold war, America's image to the world has changed from that of gardian to the role of bully. Our policies have allied our country with dictators and totalitarian regimes to use our military to destabilize the middle east, not to promote peace and well being. Our image as a people, our place in the global economy, and the very belief in the value of democracy has been severely damaged by the obsessive actions of the war zealots in power. This can't end well.
We as a nation need to change this bad image. We need to find leadership that can remain true to the spirit of the constitution. We need leaders that are in touch with the people and their needs.
What we really need is to re-establish the good image of our nation to the rest of the world. Instead of sending the army in to force democracy on a country, we should become the shining example of freedom that we once were, to stand as a model that others will want to emulate.
I'm waiting for Biden to say of McCain;
"Every sentence he utters has a noun, a verb and 'POW'!"
Wow, great speech! I wish we'd have heard such passionate resistance to Bush's moronic invasion back in 2002 or 2003, but I'm glad to we're finally seeing something. I keep wondering why the Bushites thought nation-building would be easy. A stable democracy requires (among other things) a government composed of trustworthy institutions and a population that believes those institutions are fair and just. Otherwise, aggrieved people simply take justice into their own hands. But neither of these things magically spring into existence following decades of repressive dictatorship. Trustworthy institutions take years, even decades, to build and the trust of the population can take even longer to earn. Did the Bushites really believe this could be done in Iraq in six months at a cost of $100 billion, or were they just lying to everyone?
Interestingly, presidential candidate John McCain wants American voters to believe his "experience" would make him a better president than Barack Obama, yet experience — namely, people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Tenet, Powell, etc. — is what created the mess America is in today. Indeed, those people relied on their experience to deceive the public. In many ways, it was their primary weapon. They didn't have any real evidence against Saddam, so they pulled out their experience and told us that we should trust them because they knew more about the situation than we did. Clearly, experience can cut in two directions: honest people can use it to do good, dishonest ones can use it to do evil.
When a neo-con says they are behind you 100 percent, DON'T bend over to pick up the soap.
Niklaus wrote, "Since the end of the cold war, America’s image to the world has changed from that of gardian to the role of bully."
Sadly for the world (including the U.S.), there are many Americans in positions of power who believe that America, as the world's only remaining superpower (at the moment), should be a bully. They forget that, in the long run, failure will always come to bullies, while success goes to those who play well with others.
Further on the subject of nation-building in Iraq…is it not self-evident that nation-building is not a military function? Armies are neither trained nor equipped to create national political institutions; thus, are incapable of doing it either effectively or efficiently. They are obviously the wrong tool for the job. This is especially true of *occupying* armies, and even more especially true of occupying armies whose cultural identity is completely alien to that of the occupied population. The notion that the U.S. military — an organization composed of western, mostly-Christian soldiers from a First-World economy, virtually none of whom can communicate in Arabic — can effectively perform nation-building in Iraq is ridiculous in the extreme. Yet guys like John McCain insist we must keep U.S. troops there for the next hundred years — a timeframe that any rational person would recognize as being a clear admission of inefficacy. If it takes U.S. troops a *century* to create a stable democracy in Iraq, then we should find another group to do the job.