Originally posted by Aristotle
Kharum, it wouldn't matter who was President and it wouldn't matter what country was there.
I'm not sure what your point here is. No one has said it is a matter of who is President.

That's why I asked, because unless you actually want us to fail, your criticisms are misplaced.
What is your reasoning here? By what twisted feat of logic do you arrive at the conclusion that feeling the need to offer criticism is to be equated with desiring to see failure? If you observe someone performing a task and you would like to see that task concluded with the best results possible but the person is not performing the task in such a way that will achieve those results, then it would not be inappropriate to offer suggestions and even criticism, particularly if that person had already been informed that his particular method might not represent the best choice available.

Now is a time to be positive, not negative. The surest way for us to fail is for the US to get into a rush because whiners, Bush haters, and biased media want to portray everything as a failure.
Again, what is your point? No one was arguing that we should rush the job. I suggested that the US needs to reconsider the current course it is following but, just in case you weren't aware, pulling out of Iraq is hardly the only alternative to pursuing the current course. That said, the US really needs to consider whether or not it truly has the will to bring not only democracy, but a stable democracy to Iraq. Will involves more than shaking pom-poms and shouting, "All the way, USA!" If you want to preach about will, you should take it to the Administration and Congress. If the effort in Iraq fails it is not going to be the result of whiners, Bush haters and a biased media, it is going to be the result of a government which couldn't bring itself to commit to the price tag for bringing Iraq into the first world (which is what we have to do, as third world vassal states have been notoriously unreliable in the maintenance of democratic ideals).

But, given that the US went in with a significant underestimation of the amount of resistance that would be encountered after the fall of the regime and the number of troops needed on the ground, and given that the US went in with a significant overestimation of the degree to which the Americans would be welcomed as liberators and the amount of time that that would give them to get the country back on its feet, and given that the US has until now been slow in acknowledging its earlier miscalculations and acting to correct them despite the potential political costs, I feel rather justified in my skepiticism about the will of the US to carry this project out in any meaningful way.

But now that we are there, you need to put your Bush hate to the side as far as this ONE ISSUE (Iraq) is concerned and be supportive and positive.
Theodore Roosevelt says it better than I ever could: "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."