2a Articles

To begin I read an article where President Bush said the United States have averted failure in Iraq. There will be not rush to pull out our troops. He has ordered for shorter tours but denies the common request of faster withdrawals from Iraq. He plans to have a comparable size force overseas during his tenure as president. This leaves the rest up to the incoming President. The two biggest threats to America now are al Qaeda and Iran and according to Bush Iraq is the convergence point. Senator Clinton makes a valid point when she says, “he refuses to face reality”. Now the war has waned from a war to prevent brutal dictatorship and imminent danger of WMD’s to “an essential part of a broader struggle against Islamic extremism” Bush has dropped the term of deployment from 15 to 12 months starting August 1st and will stay home for at least 1 year. Bush also tried to quell the criticizers of the financial situation. Defense spending as a portion of GDP is at 4% far lower than 13% under Truman and 6% under Regan. Although according to Bush “this is still a large amount of money, but it is modest, a modest fration of our nations wealth.” The war is now in its 6th year and there is no plan for withdrawal by the current administration. And to add a little side note the national debt is at 306 billion.

To contrast this article I found one on a protest in Charlotte, NC searching for immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. The author states that it will either hasten or cause the deterioration of Iraq. The argument is that by removing Hussein and his administration we overthrew the entire country. The government fell and there is now a void to be filled. There is an obligation to rebuild the country because after all this is our fault. The country will collapse into a civil war with our immediate withdrawal. Iraq has not shown that it is able to sustain itself and now it is up to us to. The thought is that if the leader of the Shiite uprising named Moqtada al-Sadr really wants the US out then he needs to stop fighting American forces thus slowing down progress that has and or will be made because attention is then diverted to him. If we leave Iraq another dictator will take over and possibly pose an even greater threat than Saddam himself.

I feel that each of these articles are very well written. While every paper that is written is going to have some bias I feel that each article did a good job of posing both sides of the issue and comparing their argument with the other point of view. Obviously each author believes that the troops should be withdrawn and they should be left respectively. I think each poses excellent reasons to back up their point. I think the second article is written btter and more logically. We cannot pull out right away or the whole process will collapsa and all our work will be in vain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/washington/10cnd-prexy.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1207875899-jJrJ2woOHsk17sleV++JZQ

http://www.elon.edu/e-web/pendulum/Issues/2004/4_15/opinions/troops.xhtml