"mrtravel" wrote in message
. com...
Tchiowa wrote:

You have to compare it with what is good. A zero deficit is not always
good. Further, comparing it with previous or subsequent administrations
is not necessarily an indicator of whether or not it is good. So your
question simply muddies the issue.

I didn't say it was always good, but at some point you can't continue to
overspend, and we have reached that point,

That's a judgement call on your part. Some, especially economists, might
with good reason claim that the threshold is (based on precedent) somewhat
higher, both from a standpoint of the current annual deficit as a percentage
of GDP/GNP or as compared to total national debt.

Personally, I'm far, far more concerned with looming ever-larger deficits
from the Medicare program, incurable without forcing the young to pay far
more for their elders' ills.


especially if your spending is partially due to a war

Even the most conservative of economists have never had much trouble in
advocating piling up deficits during wartime - especially since losing
causes a lot of debt to disappear in the inferno while (at least in the good
old days) victory allowed some recouping.


that you should not still be involved in.

Again a judgement call, in my eyes, the inevitable consequences (if worse
hadn't ensued) of our joint, collective (Remember the "Coalition") to finish
the affair at the end of Gulf War I.


In the BEST picture, the US State Department says that 2/3 of the Iraqi's
don't want us there. In nearly sense of the word, we are "losing".

I'd accept a rewrite, using your Freudian omission of "every" to say we are
not currently doing much "winning" (but then in a far more - at least in
political and international eyes - cause among the Afghans, we are not only
no longer winning, but losing ground.

I'm sure that in 1945, substantially more than 2/3 of either the Japanese or
the Germans would have preferred that we neither came nor stayed. We were
wise enough to understand that worse fiascos than paralleled our pullout in
1919 would occur in Germany and that in 1945, a large, ornery vacuum filler
would have welcomed our departure from two prospective additions to his
larder. Pulling out of Iraq sounds good but reality suggests (a) some type
of autonomous Kurdish state certainly likely to cause the fragile secular
government in Turkey to be overtaken by a more fundamentalist Islamic regime
dead set on devouring Kurds within Turkish Borders and in the Kurdish
fragment of Iraq, (b) a Shia section of Iraq achieved by shooting, bombing,
dissecting or transporting several million Sunni (mostly to desert sites
without food, water, or giving a damn), and (c) an Anbar/Anwar province,
beholden to Syria, filled with the surviving Sunni, and serving as a
training/recruiting/organizational HQ for Al Qaeda and related endeavors.

I have no little respect for Tchiowa, his mainsail reefed to run as close to
the wind from the right as he can claw, just as I've continued to ignore
those who target you for attacks that surpass even my hyperbole involving
idiots' mothers given to practicing commercial transactions in the form of
knee tremblers in dark, dank alleys. Unlike most of them, you're capable of
rational discourse and argument and know something of air travel, as well.
Both of you are hardy pragmatists, but in his case, the cynical edge has too
acutely sharpened and narrowed his perspective, while yours is dulled by
lack of exposure to anything beyond the Pablum of the modern media. But
compared to most of the posters here, ranging from the outright cretinism to
some obviously typing behind there backs with their arms encased in
straightjackets by the attendants of the institutions to which their parents
had them committed (or should have) when they realized just what
monstrosities to which they had given birth and sustenance.

Long ago, briefly, but not near briefly enough, and before it became so
bloodily serious as it did, I went to a war, liked nothing of what I saw,
and became convinced that it was unwinnable, not because we would not give
our very best, but that our allies, the locals in whose behalf we were
struggling, had a less than sincere commitment to the purpose we envisioned
as joint and merited. Then as now, we misjudged the folks whom we meant to
aid, not understanding that as a group or groups they were unwilling,
unmotivated and unlikely to make the sacrifices, compromises and
accommodations necessary to survive as a country.

I've become increasingly convinced that along with our prewar reliance upon
an Iraqi dissident movement as crooked as a desert sidewinder, a wartime
decision to disestablish the Iraqi Army, and an unwillingness to admit that
having disestablished that portion of the US military dedicated to
occupation and military government in about 1950, we didn't have the means
or the capacity to control circumstances. Add our (USAian) continued
incapacity to ever view any event, place or belief system in any perspective
but our own, and we were pretty muchly f*cked going in, and the odds of
success grew longer my the minute.

TMO