Showing below up to 35 results in range #101 to #135.
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"A permanent Gulf regional security dialogue could emerge that includes Syria and Iran, and the United States could undertake a role as regional security guarantor. Preliminary discussions should lead to a more intensive dialogue with Iran in which security assurances and nuclear programs are discussed."
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"The message to those in search of elegant solutions is simple: This is a war, stupid! And what are the options in a war? One can fight to win. One can surrender to the enemy. One can panic and run away. These are the options in Iraq."
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"The irony is that the Dems' delusions and calls for surrender only make it more difficult to end the violence and defeat the terrorists now. Why should militias disband when America may be about to head for the hills? Why halt their suicide bombings when they seem to be pushing America to flee?"
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"In war, you accomplish your goal, which is winning, or you lose, or you arrive at a stalemate and await further developments. Exiting, without having won or achieved stalemate, is losing. When you face inferior forces and a further threat from their emboldened allies, exiting is also a mistake.
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"When we were having trouble in Bosnia, why didn’t we ask for help from neighborly Serbia? When we were trying to help El Salvador democratize, why didn’t we ask for help from the Sandinistas? When Kennedy was having trouble with Cuba, why didn’t he ask for help from the USSR? The only alternative to the surrenders on offer by the Democrats and by the “realist” Republicans is a renewed determination to win."
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"Before last week's election, only 40% said the war was a good idea and 55% called it a mistake. Yet disapproving of how the war is going is different from demanding an immediate end. Most polls on that question show ambivalence, with Americans frustrated but realizing that chaos and slaughter would follow if we left before Iraq is stable."
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"Iraq is not an unwinnable war: Rather, as the data just cited show, it is a war we have chosen not to win. And the difference between success and failure is not 300,000 more soldiers, as some would have it. One-tenth that number would make a large difference, and has done so in the past. One-sixth would likely prove decisive."
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"In Iraq, American policies have steadily undermined the Iraqi people's confidence that the United States has either the will or capacity to provide them the security they need and deserve. So they have turned to their own sectarian armed groups for the protection the Bush administration has failed to provide. That, and not historical inevitability or the alleged failings of the Iraqi people, is what has brought Iraq closer to civil war."
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"It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies."
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"But if "sectarian violence" means anti-American Shiites killing anti-American Sunnis, and vice versa, how much sleep should Americans lose over Bush's "failure" to stop it? That may sound cold, but the killers are free to end their violence whenever they like. Really, the only thing Americans should worry about regarding Iraq is quitting prematurely and emboldening terrorists."
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"Instead of looking for a face-saving way to lose in Iraq, President Bush could finally demand of his top advisers a strategy to succeed: provide the US force levels necessary to achieve even minimal political objectives. This could begin by increasing US troops in Iraq by at least 50,000 in order to clear and hold Baghdad without shifting troops from other parts of Iraq."
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"If Iraq is abandoned, the credibility of America and the West is lost. Iran's hopes of regional hegemony are assured. The Americans will have cut and run after enduring less than one-twentieth of the casualties they suffered in Vietnam; and from a battle more consequential, for it is against an Islamist enemy that is rising, instead of a Communist enemy in decline."
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"The only real hope of restoring order in the short term is to send American reinforcements. Unfortunately, pacifying the entire country would probably require 400,000 to 500,000 troops, an obvious nonstarter. A smaller number — 25,000 to 50,000 — might suffice to control Baghdad, but, in the current political climate, it seems unlikely that even that many will be sent."
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"When the troops on the ground say they believe in the mission and want to see it through, when they say that withdrawal will embolden the terrorists and endanger the Iraqi people, how can anyone take seriously the anti-war pronouncements of Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes?"
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"The Islamist movements that wait to cheer our withdrawal are not militarily strong, but they are good at what they call "the management of savagery", and they know that the West's attention span is much shorter than their own. It is a pity that we seem so determined to prove them right."
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"The notion, commonly expounded by Rep. John Murtha and other advocates of redeployment, that American troops are the main irritant causing the violence in Iraq is demonstrably untrue, as it does not explain the fact that the recent crisis results from Iraqis killing each other wherever U.S. forces are absent."
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"We must kill - not capture - Muqtada, then kill every gunman who comes out in the streets to avenge him. Our policy of all-carrots-no-sticks has failed miserably. We delivered Iraq to zealots, gangsters and terrorists. Now our only hope is to prove that we mean business - that the era of peace, love and wasting American lives is over."
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"For sure, plenty of mistakes have been made and need to be corrected. But that does not mean the strategy of remaining in Iraq until the insurgency is defeated should change. The security of the region and the world depends on it."
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"Like earlier Americans, we have to choose between resolve and retreat, with no guarantees about how it will end. All we can be sure of is that the stakes once again are liberty and decency vs. tyranny and terror -- that we are fighting an enemy that feeds on weakness and expects us to lose heart -- and that Americans for generations to come will remember whether we flinched."
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"Simple withdrawal, with or without a timetable and surely under fire -- although American forces could probably cope with that -- would have the disadvantages of the first option, without the putative benefits. Iraq would almost surely become even more violent, with massacres of scores or even hundreds being replaced by massacres of thousands, and various regional powers straining to secure their own buffers and clients."
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"If we no longer have the stomach for this fight--and it's going to be ugly, with few sterling VIP Iraqis who will make us proud--then we should at least be honest with ourselves. Leaving Iraq will not make our world better. We will be a defeated nation. Our holy-warrior and our more mundane enemies will know it. And we can rest assured that they will make us pay."
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"No adult can possibly believe that secret talks (of which there have been many, throughout this administration) could isolate President Ahmadinejad. For us to ask for such talks will be seen in Tehran, and throughout the region, for what is is: retreat. And a great part of the credit for bringing us to our knees will go to Ahmadinejad, who has been guaranteeing this outcome in very forceful terms."
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"The power of the people can prove more powerful than any army or any band of ruthless terrorists. That is why we must continue the work our troops have pursued so nobly thus far in Iraq, which the terrorists themselves have called the war's central front. Terrorists know that when democracy can thrive in Iraq, terrorists will have lost once again."
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"Does [Ed Rendell] seriously believe such a retreat would not be seen as surrender and weakness, playing into the hands of jihadists, who would be emboldened to keep on fighting until they dominated all of Europe and then come after America? This is why liberal Democrats cannot be trusted to run the foreign policy of the United States."
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"While consolidating bases is a short-term way to reduce troop requirements, fielding more adviser teams will eventually allow more Americans to come home. American troops embedded with the Iraqis they train usually require less support than conventional units; many rely on the Iraqis for food, shelter and basic defenses. Green Berets in 12-man teams have already replaced entire battalions of conventional forces in some Iraqi cities."
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"The cause of Iraq's dramatic death toll is easy to diagnose. There are not enough good guys with guns to keep the bad guys at bay. The United States and its allies need to send more troops."
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"The administration deserves credit for the strides it has made in training the Iraqi army. But for now we have to do much of the holding ourselves for it to be effective. That simply requires more manpower."
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"The majority of Iraqis may be irritated by the presence of foreign forces, but most realize that a premature withdrawal would create hideous problems for the country. This majority includes Sunnis as well as Shiites and Kurds."
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"We'll be out of Iraq, one way or another, over the next few years. Rushing the process because of American impatience would make a bad situation even worse."
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"At best, the course we're on has no end in sight. At worst, it leads to a terrible civil war and possibly a regional war. This plan offers a way to bring our troops home, protect our security interests and preserve Iraq as a unified country."
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"We are all aware of the dangerous Middle East conditions the United States faces today after five and a half years of President Bush's leadership. So let's consider what the world might well look like if, in his remaining two and a half years, he were to follow the recommendations of his critics."
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"But, however badly America may have conducted its post-war plan for Iraq, it would be a shameful dereliction of duty if it were to leave because voters, in Connecticut or elsewhere, lose heart."
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"America won that war because the objective wasn't to understand the Nazis, or to reach an accommodation with them; the objective was to win the war. Anything less in this war — against an equally evil and unrelenting enemy — will mean defeat for the United States and for freedom everywhere."
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"By now it should be obvious that the "light footprint" approach has not worked. It has increased, not decreased, resentment of the United States because Iraqis are aggrieved by the breakdown of law and order. Yet there appears to be no serious rethinking of this flawed strategy at either the Pentagon or the White House."
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"It is not easy to persuade people of all this; to say that terrorism and unstable states with WMD are just two sides of the same coin; to tell people what they don't want to hear; that, in a world in which we in the West enjoy all the pleasures, profound and trivial, of modern existence, we are in grave danger. There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win and it is happening now in Iraq."
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