http://www.kerrystreason.com/sf180.htmHe shall rot in hell
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Pwn this s0x0r
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He said he'd do it. If he doesn't, then kick his ass. WTF is your problem?
Meanwhile, the current president has not ensured that the army that you claim to love so much is adequately equipped with body armor and armored vehicles. Reserve forces, who are not trained as well as regular soldiers, are getting injured and killed all the time. So many soldiers crippled, with lost limbs and other devastating injuries. And then the president has the temerity to underfund veteran's services. Apparently he doesn't care much for soldiers when they're fighting, and he doesn't care much for soldiers when they're done fighting.
Meanwhile, the rate of casualties keeps increasing.
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It's criminal that the US government is spending so much money on Iraq yet not directing it towards key areas like protection for troops and rehabilitation services for former troops. Not to mention the fact that 37 companies that have been granted lucrative contracts in Iraq are either direct or indirect subsidiaries of Haliburton and its associated companies (though they're also doing a lot of work without payment at the moment). Although it's impossible to quantify in any reasonable sense at the current time, some economists are estimating that George Bush senior, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and a whole shedload of their friends and associates stand to make something in the region of $12bn from these contracts over the next few years. I'm still checking into the veracity of these claims but so far I've pulled up information from 6-7 different sites that cite different evidence to support these claims.I've never accepted that the Iraq war was 'just about oil' but certainly there's a lot of money to be made from Iraq at the moment and it looks as though the Bush clique are going to be the ones who profit.
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> these contracts
Many of which were no-bid contracts. What a scandal. You award short-term no-bid contracts in an emergency. They just handed out long-term no-bid contracts like jellybeans, for no good reason. Meanwhile, companies that could have fulfilled the contracts for less money were excluded.
Also, more work that the military traditionally hadled itself is going to private contractors. Somehow, it costs the government just as much.
Meanwhile, the cost of the war in Iraq (to the American government) is well over 2 billion dollars a month. Meanwhile, the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure are falling apart.
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It's ludicrous. The country's infrastructure is falling apart yet instead of flying in engineers to reconstruct it, they're flying in geologists and oil people to take soundings on the hundreds of unworked oil fields.
Two of my US friends are in Iraq now and one of them told me online about a week ago that a detachment from his unit had to provide protection for a group of geologists who were going out to 'survey' an area near where they're based.
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Er, I was talking about the infrastructure within America falling apart.
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Oh sorry, you're right of course it is. But the infrastructure in Iraq is also falling apart and although it's being worked on, it's taking second place to other concerns which benefit a tiny number of (already obscenely wealthy) Americans rather than either country as a whole.
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In some ways, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The Iraqis are equipped to repair the electrical transmission infrastructure, at least for the short term. They've been doing it for a long time. Instead, there are American contractors rebuilding everything, and they can't get it together until they put all of the pieces together. So instead if Iraqis having reasonably reliable power available quickly, they had to wait a long time to have rather more reliable electrical serivce (at least, when it's not being sabotaged by insurgents). It's just not a good way to win friends.Iraq is becoming a client state if Iran. A civil war seems inevitible. It will come apart. Why do the Kurds need to share a country with two at-war factions? And splitting up is not necessarily a bad thing, but it would have been a lot less wasteful if we took that into account in the first place.
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Plans for dividing the country were drawn up amongst the British and US governments back in 1991 but then everything just ground to a halt and Saddam was allowed to carry on running HIS country HIS way, albeit under harsh economic sanctions (which may have been subverted anyway and which caused more suffering for ordinary Iraqis than they ever did for Saddam).
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i have nothing to say to you.I think everyone else did a good job already.
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why... tell me why!I'm not a Kerry supporter but I'd support anyone opposing Bush (like it matters, me being a member of the world that isn't a part of the US "Empire" )
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> me being a member of the world that isn't a part of the US "Empire"
Yet.
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that kinda seems like a waste of the internet.
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In reply to:I'd support anyone opposing Bush When the US electioneering started, I stated adamantly that if I was an American, I'd be voting for Kerry. By the time the actual elections came around I'd learnt enough about Kerry to know that I could never conscionably vote for him. Since there's no way that I could conscionably vote for Bush either and since spoilt ballot papers simply don't mean anything in America, I'd have been really screwed and I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision.The single main reason I wouldn't vote for Kerry? The fact that he is committed to removing troops from Iraq. Coalition forces should never have gone into Iraq in the first place but now that they're there, you can't just pull them out. Even though I am against their presence in Iraq because of the completely trumped-up excuses that were used to get them there, you can't just abandon a country once you've destabilised it in the way that Bush and Blair have done.
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see and that is where it gets complicated, there is no handbook on how to properly remove troops.
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It's a phenomenally difficult question and I don't pretend to know what the answer is but pulling them all out immediately is definitely NOT it.
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yeah this is not a situation any country should be in.
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It's a bit like raping someone and not taking your dick out to quick, incase you make it worse.Or maybe it's like shitting in someone's yard and not sticking aroud to pick it up.hmmmmmm, such a paradox