Slow Learners - wrong to invade; slow to withdraw!

1. Our presence, I feel, in Iraq and Afghanistan is an irrelevance at best and a provocation at worst.
2. There is not nearly enough troops on the ground to stop the violence that, anyway, we initiated on the 19 March 2003. We were the criminal aggressors.
3. Our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan continue our very long history of invading and occupying other countries around the world. The sooner we reverse this unethical foreign policy and get out the better, in my opinion.
4. 16 years of killing Vietnamese and her neighbours failed to prevent our defeat, then. So far, 6 years in Afghanistan and 4.5 years in Iraq has failed to reverse our failures and defeats in those countries.
5. Former BBC war correspondent, Martin Bell on Radio 4's, 'BH' on 2.9.07 said that nothing further can be accomplished in Iraq and we should leave. His exact words, "There is nothing left to do there(in Basra) that can be done ... Blame laying is in order in view of the depth of the catastrophe ... The troops cannot be risked anymore than they are being risked. They are merely an occupation force. They are being shot at. There is nothing left they can do."
   
6. LibDem foreign policy is for a timetable to be published for a phased withdrawal from Iraq. What do they say about Afghanistan?
7. "We could have stayed there for another six months ... and killed a lot of people in the process, but what would that have achieved?" Lt Col Patrick Sanders, Commanding Officer, Basra Palace, quoted in 'The Independent', 5 September 2007