Mind you, we may have found WMD's. But, they could be in confidential classifications for a few decades or so before we hear about them.

Not only are there many brown eyes around, most of them are blind as well.  But they still have their voices and they are intitled to their opinions.  And no one has rescinded the right to stupidity, so rant on brother, lay down that rhetoric.  We get a giggle out of it.

I still have no clue how you figure I have brown eyes. I maintain they are green.

Believe it or not, Erath, this time I am NOT including you in the brown-eyed group, but once you understand the reference, you will realize that even green-eyed people can be brown-eyed on occasion. 

Just for future reference, Erath, saying you know "ONE soldier who..." sounds kinda like the old, "Some of my best friends are....(Fill in the blanks)"  The surge is working not because one village or another cheers the troops.  It IS WORKING because we finally got enough soldiers there doing the right thing to bring about VICTORY.  Eleven out of eighteen provinces are now under the control of the Iraqi security forces...the latest was once the worst stronghold of insurgent activity.  That statistic is the RESULT of the surge...enough soldiers in the place doing what they do best.  All the brown propaganda spewed by this article notwithstanding, we ARE winning, the surge is working and we are finally seeing our way clear to start bringing the troops home in significant numbers.  This is the way you keep score in a war.  Our guys come home with more scalps on their lodgepoles than the bad guys have on theirs. 

I get so tired of the hand-wringing, whining, crocodile tear-shedding from those "opposed" to the war.  Look to the history of war and wonder how the hell we managed to win this damn thing with one hand tied behind our backs.  Once again, the US military had to win a war against an armed enemy plus our own politicians and news media.  Fortunately, that ain't real hard.

I like the once again and the had to parts of that sentence.  You think we would learn to not haphazzardly get involved in such an intense situation without a proper course or strategy.  Hey, war powers are fun though, especially when used in those non-immediate threat scenarios.  I'm proud my senator supported my belief to stay out of an unnecessarily instigated war.  By the way, I don't care if you're tired of all the whining from those opposed to the war...because I'm tired of those defending it's necessity.  Deal with it.

Tally 'em up...that'll really stop terrorism .  Terrorists are like hydra, remove one and two more heads will pop up screaming "death to America" and plotting revenge.

Not if you use the whack a mole strategy. Each time a head pops up you pop it and you get fewer and fewer heads popping up. It worked in Israel when we let them use it. It is working in Iraq as well. Homicide bombings were the weapon of choice until the surge and when they saw that they were killing themselves and getting no result they quickly ran out of idiots in DuPont suits. Now they are back to car bombings and the frequency is dropping even when they get to live after the attack.

Terrorism has a play book and rules. Successful terrorism only happens if the terrorists can get the government to give up in the first five years. After that time period the terrorists lose.

5 years, huh?  That's when they just decide to throw in the hat?  I seem to remember one terrorist plotted WTC bombing in the early 1990s and then the big one in 2001.  I guess terrorists don't always like to give up attacking Americans.  I agree they should be fought, and we should use intelligence to fight their threats, but Iraq was not the best initiative for such an endeavor.

Nope that is when the cause begins to fall apart and they become more political than violent. They lose the will to fight.

Yeah, but when did we decided to fight back? I can attack you for decades but when you start fighting back is when the clock starts. The Soviet Union was attacked by terrorists and they fought back and in one year all terrorist activity stopped. We can’t use those tactics such as kidnapping the uncle of a terrorist and sending his body parts back by mail. Finding the wife of a terrorist and raping and killing her on camera and sending the film to the terrorists. We call such tactics barbaric, but in less than a year terrorists stopped messing with the Soviet Union until the invasion of Afghanistan where those tactics don’t work. The Russians are not using those tactics and are plagued by terror attacks now.

The only way to win against that form of terrorism is to declare war on them and hunt them down until they are dead. The Nancy Pelosi whack a mole strategy is what we are doing today and it is working.

We were attacked by AQ for 7 years before 9/11/2001 we are fighting them now and we have stopped their attacks on us. They are looking for soft targets because countries that don’t fight back give them the best chance to win. Old allies for AQ are refusing them open access to their countries unlike before. They tried to go back to Somalia and they were attacked by government troops as well as the US Navy. In less than a month they left looking for another place to set up a base of operations. With few safe havens and dwindling troops, they are on the run and knew it since 2005. The ones that are fighting now are the ones stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan. You don’t read the stories of fresh people running to join the fight any more. Now you read stories of them trying to stop roads being built because every time we build a road they have to move to safer ground, and they are running out of ground. The war is not won but we are winning. They are losing and they know it. Bin Laden knew that as soon as we begin to fight back he had a limited time. That is why his strategy was based on training people to go into countries and build their own networks. That is what AQ did for 10 years and when they attacked US on our soil with a real man in the white house his game ended. All that is left are the networks set up prior to 9/11 and each time they lift their head up they get whacked or arrested. Are there sleeper agents in America? Most likely but they are being hunted down. We get probed twice a year. What I mean by this is twice a year groups of people test our borders and other places within the US. August each year my city is probed and we have caught them each time. I read reports of other cities being probed and have spotted the pattern. Hajj and Ramadan we get probed. When they stop probing it will mean they found a weakness to exploit. So far so good. Outside the country we are dealing with them a bit more harshly or so I have been told.

So yeah, five years for terrorists to win or they lose.

We had to go into Iraq or we would have had a mess on our hands. AQ had shown up there in large numbers after we went into Afghanistan and the only country that would have them was Iraq. Shutting them down was imperative to our survival because once they got funding and protection from a nation state they would have been much harder to find and kill. Using Iraq as a magnet to draw out all the nuts kept them from wandering into the US. For or against the war is not the point, the war in Iraq was more than necessary.

Hey, Brown-eyes, here's a tally for you...last year in June there were three for four IEDs detonated in Iraq per day.  This year in June...3.  Total.  Know why?  Count the scalps on the lodge pole.

The summer heat gets to terrorists too with global warming .

There could be many other factors adding up to that decrease.  Terrorists attempting a modified approach or planning other attacks, newer dismantling technology and increased intelligence could all be other reasons on top of the troop presence.  I'm not denying the benefits of the surge to the region and our troops with the current/past state of things, but one should remember that IEDs were not simply put in place to fight off American troops.  Their effectiveness does run out over time regardless of how many troops we have in the region since the attacks/methods can become more predictable and the number of explosive devices is exhausted at rapid rate.

Gotta hand it to you, you are persistant. even when faced with facts you still look for loopholes in the argument. I enjoy people who use "there could be" in arguments about how Bush used bad intel. There could have been WMD, but that's not good enough unless its you the one saying it, right?

Charles, I simply ask you to remember that correlation does not imply causation.  Understand that numbers need to be collected strategically for useful data implying a direct relationship between troop presence and IED detonation.  I also said that I do not deny that the presence of more troops is assisting the the reduction of detonations.  Simply take a look at other factors, it's never as simple as you think.

INdeed, and Charles' point is still valid, is it not?

My point is simply, some people will take an argument and break it down to its letters and numbers just to prove they are not wrong even when they have already been proved wrong. But that's OK, as we all always say, everyone has the right to interpret things their own way, I only ask to not take ones opinion as absolute when presented with opposing facts.