CTh:"it's nice to see some people have changed their mind, but so what? it doesn't help the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their lives there in the last four years. "
Hundreds of thousands? You no more know that number is true than I know that it isn't it.
I suspect at some point ethnic/religious war in Iraq was inevitable. Saddam certainly waged it against the Shiite and Kurds well before the US got involved. Whenever he died, unless his brutal sons were able to violently maintain control, "civil" war was likely going to break out, probably with Iranian intervention.
CTh:"most americans do not support bush on the war; they "spoke" in the november elections, and the result- bush escalates. oops, i meant to say he "surged".
"Surge" or "escalation" you and I both know that both terms are for propaganda purposes
And really, Americans spoke? Nearly 50% of the HoRs remains Republican and technically there are as many Rep Sens as Democratic Sens (49 a piece plus a make-believe-socialist and a should-be-a-Republican "independents")
Hardly a clarion call to end the war, esp since nearly half of the Republican losses were over corruption and most of the others were moderate Repubs soft on the war anyways.
The country is mostly opposed to the war the way the country is mostly in favor of gun control ie most Americans will tell a pollster what they think but the issues are not actually important enough for them to act stridently on. So no significant gun control and the war goes on because minorities like the NRA and the Adm are more active
I made a comparison of LBJ's war to Bush's war to one of my classes the other day and talked about Kent State in light of the VT shootings (you will remember then that "4 dead in Ohio" was a massacre--such innocent times compared unfortunately to today). I noted the Vietnam protests on campus and the lack of such today. One of my students said "Wait they are coming", I smiled and said well I won't hold my breath. Then I asked why the students (who themselves hadn't been protesting anything except disrupted laundry service as a result of Katrina) thought protests had been lacking. They didn't know. I said, CONSCRIPTION ie there isn't any.
Of course there is another major difference, LBJ's war ultimately killed over 50,000 Americans mostly on his watch (Nixon, albeit slowly, did end the thing) cf to the 3000+ who have died in Bush's war.
Most Americans do want the war to end, but not enough to force the administration to end it.
