Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Iraq & Afghanistan Bush On Iraq: "Just Be Patient"

June 2003: Bush Urges Patience in Search for WMD

June 2004: Bush Urges Patience with Iraqi Plans at G8 Summit

Jan 2005: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq as Election Nears

June 2005: Bush Urges Patience, Long View on Iraq War

Aug 2005: Bush Calls for Patience on Iraq Mission

Nov 2005: Bush Urges Patience with Iraq Training

March 2006: Bush Calls on Americans to Show Patience with Iraq

June 2006: After Iraq Visit, Bush Urges Patience

Aug 2006: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq, Speed in Lebanon

Oct 2006: Conceding Missteps, Bush Urges Patience on Iraq

Nov 2006: Bush Urges Patience on Winning Iraq War

March 2007: Bush Pleads for Patience in Iraq War

May 2007: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq

June 2007: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq

July 2007: War In Year 5; Bush Requests Patience

Aug 2007: Bush Pleads for More Patience for Iraq War Efforts


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Of course we need to be patient in fighting this war. Our enemy has been patiently fighting it off and on ...

Could you be more specific on who our enemy is? I mean are you suggesting it is Muslims?

this statement appears to be quite racist in their content and tone. you have slandered an entire faith, and all who beleive in it.

would you speak the same way of all Jews? would you make blanket statements about christians? Would you be happy if i made a similar statement about all americans?

i hope you meant something different Senator. if you did mean it we have nothing left to say to each other.

I would ask you to withdraw it or to re-phrase it more precisely.

I am stepping in, as Moderator, to keep this discussion from going off track. I have edited one comment, and will be doing so to the responses to keep this from becoming explosive.
NWP

Bush urges & pleads... Well, I'm gonna do that too. I'm going to join NWP and urge people to calm down the rhetoric, nasty references and the nasty blanket statements applied to large masses who don't deserve it. Cool it!

Do y'all recall this bit from the guidelines (gawd, I'm tired of preaching guidelines to such intelligent people!! ) that says:


Do ya?

Earlier I posted a comment about who we are fighting in Iraq. We are fighting a small group of Islamic fundamentalists.* Not Muslims but Islamic fundamentalists. The two can easily be confused with one another. The Islamists, as I said in the Fastest Way to End the War thread, are Muslims who believe in the actual teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH**. He taught that Allah had given him the religion of Islam and that the world is to become an Islamic world. That is the basic tenet of the religion of Islam, that Allah has ordained that the world will be Islamic. The Islamic fundamentalists believe that and have, ever since the founding of the religion, sought to spread the religion by conquest as the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH**, did. The Islamic fundamentalists have patiently sought to conquer the world for Allah. They have been at it for about 1400 years. To defeat them we must have at least one tenth of the patience that they have shown. So Pres. Bush's requests for patience are a drop in the bucket compared to the patience our enemy has shown.

*The size of the Islamic fundamentalists is open to debate. A conservative estimate is that they are 10 to 15% of the Muslims worldwide. With 1,000,000,000 Muslims worldwide that would mean about 100,000,000 to 150,000,000 Islamic fundamentalists.

**PBUH is an acronym for Peace Be Upon Him which all Muslims say after they say the name of the founder of the religion of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH.

Thank you for the clarification, Senator!

You are most welcome, NW!

Now I get to make some comments as a Ranter! It's interesting that I get to agree with comments from both sides - I believe that Annifey's original point is well made. The President has been urging patience throughout the process despite having mucked it up at every stage of the operation - from launching an ill-considered war to begin with. How long are we to have patience with his leadership (or lack thereof)? How many muckups can be tolerated?

On the other hand, I also agree with Hatrack's point that "the enemy" has been quite patient. If we focus on the real threat to the United States (and the Western World in general) (would that the President had done so), we are in a long-lasting conflict, if low-level. I would not go as far back as the Crusades to explain it, but I think the point that "Islamic fundamentalists have patiently sought to conquer the world for Allah. They have been at it for about 1400 years" is correct. The factions we are fighting now trace their philosphical roots to the origins of Islam and the original schism between Sunni and Shi'a. They may have a skewed worldview, but then, nearly every world religion has gone through similar periods of conflict.

Focusing just on recent history, the current conflict has been brewing for decades, and, unlike our leadership, the terrorist leadership has had a long-term goal since at least the 1980's. We have been sidetracked, in my view, by giving them far more credence than they deserved, since they were a ragtag, fringe, criminal group without significant resources. By treating them as some monolithic world-threatening enterprise, and by taking our own skewed perception to the extreme and invading a nation for ill-conceived reasons we have provided them with momentum that they had lost completely by the end of 2001. Had we not allowed our focus to turn from Afghanistan in the first place, and kept our energies directed to the real threat, we could have had it contained years ago.

I have patience for a longer-term conflict, and recognize that our generation will be suffering the ill effects of this conflict (both the bane of terrorism, and the Iraq war) for the foreseeable future. I have, however, lost patience with our feckless leadership long ago. How many times can someone demonstrate their complete incompetence before they get fired? Apparently, the President believes indefinitely.