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Home » Nation building and the war on terror: not contradictory

Nation building and the war on terror: not contradictory

The New Neo Posted on by

In an Ann Althouse thread about how she was turned off by Obama’s saying “you’re not listening” to critics accusing him of changing his Iraq stand, my attention was caught by a pro-Obama statement in the comments section:

And he’ll refocus the war on terror on fighting terrorists instead of nation building.

This idea that the nation-building involved in the aftermath of the Iraq War and the fight against terrorists are mutually exclusive doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s not either/or; they are linked.

As time went on, Iraq became a front in the fight against terrorists and al Qaeda itself, and the struggle there has been instrumental in the latter’s losing strength and support. Nation-building was not undertaken for its own sake, either; the theory was that establishing a government in Iraq that would be an ally, and markedly more democratic than almost all the countries in the Middle East, would be a step in the direction of changing the environment in that part of the world in a way that would make terrorism less attractive.

There is no indication at this point that terrorist are stronger, or have more support, than they did prior to the war in Iraq. Nor do critics such as the commenter above cite any such evidence. They merely state the proposition as a tautology. In fact, although polls in the Arab world are especially unreliable for the reasons stated here, what evidence exists seems to point to the contrary:

There is, however, one poll result—confirmed by straightforward questions asked by many different pollsters over the past four years—that Washington should find useful: across the Arab world, support for terrorism has decreased substantially among all people (except the Palestinians), while unfavorable attitudes toward the United States have remained unchanged.

We can’t assign causation here; the polls are mum on that. But the data certainly doesn’t indicate that the Iraq War has hurt the public relations part of the war on terror, which is a significant factor. And although it hasn’t helped attitudes towards the US, it hasn’t hurt.

Ah, but what about Pakistan? Yes indeed, al Qaeda is still there, hiding out in the tribal areas. But the war in Iraq has not kept us from doing anything about that; the political niceties involved in dealing with our “ally” Pakistan have.

Here’s a pretty good take on the situation. If anything, what we’ve learned in fighting the terrorists in Iraq can only help us in Pakistan rather than hurt us, even though the carryover might be limited because the political, social, and geographic terrain is so different.

This Althouse commenter makes another point:

Obama may have said this one day or that another day about what he’d do with the troops in Iraq, but one thing that he has never shown is any understanding whatsoever of the tremendous upside and positive effects of having a stable, prosperous, and democratic Iraq, for the region, for the prospects of a middle east peace, for us, and for rest of the world. He’s not getting that, nor are the vast majority of his followers.

In addition, Obama showed tremendously bad judgment on the surge. But you’ll never hear him or his followers addresses that fact—-which is far more important than any shades of nuance in his Iraq position, which was already so nuanced and caveated that he can point to having said almost anything on the subject—except that the surge would work.

Comments

Nation building and the war on terror: not contradictory — 110 Comments

  1. And he’ll refocus the war on terror on fighting terrorists instead of nation building.

    The Afghan and Pakistani states are weak in the border areas. Al Qaeda would not be able to base itself there otherwise. Building up state control of those areas would exclude al Qaeda.

    I might add that the current Administrations view that the US “doesn’t do” nation building was the original cause of the post-invasion fiasco in Iraq. Ignoring the problems did not solve them.

    Is this guy really boasting that Obama will copy the current Administrations original mistakes, whilst ignoring the lessons it has learned?

  2. The Democrats current preferred battlefield, Afghanistan (which I do not doubt they’ll abandon once they find it politically expedient to do) is in fact a far greater nation building problem than Iraq has ever been or for that matter could ever be. Decades may pass before the task of building a stable nation is accomplished in Afghanistan. It appears to me though, that there is little choice in the matter. It’s just another thankless job the US must do.

  3. Getting out of Iraq to “refocus” on Afghanistan is today’s parallel to withdrawing troops from Vietnam and then, after that’s done, cutting off Vietnam.

    That’s the plan.

    After all, while there is a valid national interest in maintaining a presence in Iraq, who cares about Afghanistan? Other than the Taliban?

  4. I take “getting out of Iraq to refocus on Afghanistan” to be another pretense like “We support the troops.”

    Those who oppose the Iraq War don’t care about Afghanistan and they don’t care about the troops. They care about concealing their uniformly anti-American, anti-military agenda.

  5. I have a writing instructor, an old hippie whom last Tuesday told the class he has a friend that is a Vietnam veteran who fought on Hamburger Hill. He said that the Army kept sending soldiers up the same hill with full notice that the troops could never take it and that his friend was traumatized by having to carry a gravely wounded friend back to the aid station with the guys entrails hanging out of him. So traumatized in fact, that his friend was unable to speak for a couple of years upon his return and to this day can speak only 10 words.

    My hand went up.

    “Whoa, whoa whoa”, I said. “First of all, the Army didnt send those guys up the hill knowing they couldnt take it, it was just a tough hill to take; Second, Its a wonder how you are able to relay how your friend became traumatized in such rich descriptive detail when this same trauma left him unable to say more than 10 words since.”

    blink, blink.

    “Im just throwing that out there.”

    I could see that last point register. A small spark of recognition. Then it was gone. Irrelevant. His version was more interesting to tell and popular to recount among the majority of people he teaches. “Well”, he said, “I guess you know what your taking about. ” Then he continued with class without further explanation.

    The narrative is all that counts

  6. er,

    notice = knowlege.

    You see my writing classes arent doing me a bit of good.

  8. If we didn’t nation build in Iraq we’d be slammed for being insensitive to rehabilitation and reporations. There is no correct move that a conservative can make in liberal eyes. The game is called heads i win tails you lose.

  9. This idea that the nation-building involved in the aftermath of the Iraq War and the fight against terrorists are mutually exclusive doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s not either/or; they are linked.

    neo I agree these are different issues but those who playing the game of Iraq war trying hard to make you believe Iraq myth and what the doing it a great job should promote them “Medal of Freedom”.

    The fact about nation building in Iraq it’s exactly opposite.
    IRAQ, A NATION OF WIDOWS

  10. I’m not sure why you say, quite unfairly, Neo, that Obama’s “followers” won’t address him being wrong on the surge, when I, an Obama supporter (though not by any means someone who sees him in such glowing terms as some of his supporters do) have said in the very comments section of your own blog that I thought the surge was likely to be our last best hope of helping to stabilize the disaster that is the Iraq war. It was and is a repudiation of the policy of the Bush Administration for the first several years of this horribly mismanaged and ill-conceived adventure. And, yes, Obama was wrong about it, but on balance I still find him far preferable to his opponent.

    One doesn’t need to think a politician is infallible to support him.

    As for nation-building — I think most of us realize this was the goal of the neocon project in Iraq — to help to remake the Middle East in a more liberal democratic mold. And yes, it was and is in the interests of the United States to help promote such change in the Middle East. Where we disagree, quite strongly, is whether or not the Bush Administration’s prosecution of this policy, and the Iraq war as a tactic, was in fact an effective means towards this end. I would say that it most certainly isn’t. The complications inherent in invading another country were drastically underestimated by the neocons, in my view, and their idea that it would be a cakewalk, and once we decapitated the regime it would suddenly blossom into a Jeffersonian democracy was quite naive, in my view. Furthermore, the tensions we’ve caused through our intervention, the fact that countries now no longer fear our military might as they once did — the total cost is immense. Sure — the *idea* of democratizing the Middle East is a great one, but the tactics — I have never thought it had a shadow of chance of being a net positive for the United States.

    Having said that, however, we have to make the best of a bad situation, so of course any patriotic American has to hope for the best possible resolution of this mess. And so, I thought Petraeus’ surge strategy was the most likely to have the best chance of success. But Petraeus himself has never said in public whether he thinks the invasion itself was a good idea… he has pointedly refused to state an opinion on the matter — for good reason. Because there are many strong reasons to think the approach was a terrible one to achieve the ends which it was supposed to achieve.

    Yes to Petraeus: still, no to the Iraq war.

  11. Mitsu,

    You said:”The complications inherent in invading another country were drastically underestimated by the neocons, in my view, and their idea that it would be a cakewalk, and once we decapitated the regime it would suddenly blossom into a Jeffersonian democracy was quite naive, in my view.”
    Does this mean you beleive all cultures are not necesarily condusive to Democracy? So what is your view of the massive influx of immigrants into Western Europe from Muslim countries?
    I guess I am a semi-Paleocon. Which makes me both question this war yet feel the way the left has fought against it to be almost treasonous.
    If I only looked at the part of your comments that I quoted above I would suspect you should question the current state of affairs in the Western World concerning unrestrained immigration to Europe and America. Yet somehow, I suspect I would be wrong in that assumption, since the left tells us we are to pretend that unrestrained immigration will not turn the host countries into something more like the countries the immigrants left from.

  12. I thought the whole plan was to build (re: nation build) a free ME country to piss off the other Arabs so that they rebel for classical liberalism… and against the nutty radicals..

  13. the fact that countries now no longer fear our military might as they once did

    So…which countries feared our military before this? Iraq? Saddam jerked us off for years between the two Gulf Wars, just because he didn’t think we’d use our military against him again. Between blow jobs, Clinton regularly threatened Saddam, who ignored him. Why? Because he didn’t think Clinton would actually do anything, other than launch a few cruise missiles, and that was no biggie.

    Furthermore, your statement has the logic of a Moebius strip. We should not use our military against enemies because if we did, they would no longer fear that we would use our military against them. Huh?

    The complications inherent in invading another country were drastically underestimated by the neocons, in my view, and their idea that it would be a cakewalk, and once we decapitated the regime it would suddenly blossom into a Jeffersonian democracy was quite naive, in my view.

    We successfully house-trained the Germans and the Japanese, each of which worshipped cruelty and barbarity. Two more unpromising groups of SOBs would be hard to come by. By comparison, the Arabs are a good bet.

    But Petraeus himself has never said in public whether he thinks the invasion itself was a good idea… he has pointedly refused to state an opinion on the matter – for good reason.

    You bet it’s for a good reason. Because it’s not his place to express an opinion on the Commander-in-Chief’s earlier decisions; he’s a serving officer, and is required to remain apart from domestic politics. Many officers traditionally did not even vote. It would be wholly improper for Petraeus to express any opinion on a decision already made. His job is to carry out his orders, and when asked to provide his opinion on contemplated courses of action, not to give post-mortems on decisions already made.

    Even if, as it seems, you know nothing about the military, surely this should be obvious: avoiding politicization of the military is key to avoiding the banana republic syndrome. It’s why Truman sacked MacArthur, and rightly so.

    Think about it. If Petraeus publicly announced that Obama’s “plan” reflected pig ignorance about military matters and would get lots of Americans (and Iraqis) killed, you’d be incensed, wouldn’t you? I would, and yet that’s exactly my opinion.

    Here’s a little experiment you can try at home. Publicly criticize a key decision made by your boss. Then come back and report to us your take on how well the unemployment insurance system works.

  14. Hi jon,

    In the old days, conservatives were the ones who were skeptical of nation building, military adventurism, etc. Quite a few paleocons like yourself opposed the war— John Mearsheimer, for example, who was a supporter of Bush in 2000 and has long been a bastion of conservative foreign policy thought.

    >Does this mean you beleive all cultures are not necesarily
    >condusive to Democracy?

    What I believe is that democracy is something that has to evolve relatively naturally within the history of the culture it arises in. We can certainly try to aid the forces of democracy in various ways, but to imagine we can easily remake a civilization which is very far from having the civil institutions and habits needed to foster an organized civil society in a democratic sense through a decapitating military invasion — that I believe is naive, yes. I am not saying the Middle East can’t eventually evolve — of course it can — but it’s a complex problem that has to happen primarily from internal pressure. When the European colonial powers abandoned their colonies, they attempted to set up democratic institutions and most of them were toppled and replaced with dictatorships quickly thereafter. It takes quite a while for societies to evolve democratically, it’s a subtle process, and it has to come primarily from within, in my view. Yes, we can help, through setting an example, through supporting democratic forces, and in many other ways — and perhaps in some cases, through military intervention — but to underestimate the complexity of a democratic evolution I believe is a recipie for failure.

    As for immigration, I don’t know of many liberals who are in favor of completely unrestricted immigration. The difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue is simply one of scale — liberals feel immigration is less of a problem than conservatives do. I think it should be obvious that a certain amount of immigration can be absorbed, and too much can be destabilizing. The question really comes down to: how much?

  15. Occam:

    >We should not use our military against enemies because if
    >we did, they would no longer fear that we would use our
    >military against them.

    I’m not sure why you are being so obtuse. Obviously what I am saying is not that one ought never to use the military, but 1) to use it only when there are compelling reasons to do so, and 2) if you use it, go in with overwhelming force, to win. What was called the Powell Doctrine — which I wholeheartedly agree with. The Iraq war failed to meet either criteria. As a result, we botched the invasion, did a laughably small amount of planning, and we look incompetent and weak. Prior to this war we had had a series of impressive victories … starting with the Gulf War, which I supported. Because of how poorly this war was planned, we now look far weaker than we did before.

  16. Mitsu, if you supported the surge, then you’re being consistent and I apologize. Most liberals want to do everything by halves and pussyfoot around. I fully agree that if we are to use our military power, we should do so in a full-blooded – and not half-hearted – way, or not at all.

    Still, we’re now discussing tactics, rather than strategy (strategery?) and philosophy. Are you saying you would have supported the Iraq War if we’d gone at it in a better planned and full bore way from the outset?

  17. “Because of how poorly this war was planned, we now look far weaker than we did before.”

    That is an utterly innane comment… Saddam’s regime is dead, and except for the Iranians everybody else is playing dead, or more precisely, they’re preoccupied operating their cash registers, while the Iranian’s are praying that the American/Israeli alliance is distracted and neutralized long enough by the left until they can build their nukes, then at the very least blackmail the world for the return of the mahdi guy; A new generation of free people in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, have been empowered for the long-term future, unless the incompetent liberal left and radical left/fundamentalist muslim alliance succeeds in their political agenda, in which America is finally manipulated out of Iraq and the black Afghan hole; Then watch the Sunni gangsters, with the backing of Saudi oil money, return to power to wreak their havoc again… Remember the war between Iraq and Iran? While the sunnis and hezbos deserve one another, America bestowed a huge and generous blessing on the innocents of that area, as well the ingrate idiots who are still way too in control. Mitsu, you’re not going to stop parroting the stock dem simpleton lines until you’re finally old enough to know better, but some people never grow up…

  19. In the old days, conservatives were the ones who were skeptical of nation building, military adventurism, etc.

    I have to wonder how dense people can get.

    Did you learn nothing from what happens when you do things like neglect Afghanistan all throughout the 1990s.

    duh.

    think

  20. … I thought the surge was likely to be our last best hope of helping to stabilize the disaster that is the Iraq war.

    So far so good. Up to this point I agree. Except for the disaster part. Sure, there were probably blunders. Blunders are to be expected in any war; every major war has had its blunders, especially in the beginning. Other wars, notably the US Civil War, had commanders that took awhile to find the man who could do the job. Once Lincoln found Grant the war was over. But the writer immediately glosses over the above statement, which is essentially positive, with the following:

    It was and is a repudiation of the policy of the Bush Administration for the first several years of this horribly mismanaged and ill-conceived adventure.

    Hyperbole abounds. Exaggeration is one of the main tactics of some anti-war debaters. So are blanket statements with no illustrations offered to back them up. All major wars can be seen as a series of blunders by both sides. The side who wins is the side who learns from the blunders to prevent true disasters, such as retreating out of Iraq would be, such as a nuked-up Iran will be.

    As for nation-building – I think most of us realize this was the goal of the neocon project in Iraq – to help to remake the Middle East in a more liberal democratic mold. And yes, it was and is in the interests of the United States to help promote such change in the Middle East. Where we disagree, quite strongly, is whether or not the Bush Administration’s prosecution of this policy, and the Iraq war as a tactic, was in fact an effective means towards this end.

    An analogy:

    Joe says to Bill, “The house is on fire! Quick, give me the key to the pump room.”

    Bill replies, “No way, first we have to discuss your blame for this fire.”

    “We don’t have time for that,” yells Joe, “We’ve managed to put most of the fire out but we need the water from the pump house!”

    “Not a chance, Joe. After all, in my opinion you horribly mismanaged the alarm system. Your policy was ill-conceived from the start.”

    “But the house is going to be destroyed,” Joe points out exasperatedly.

    Bill replies, “There you go, trying to blame me for your disaster.”

    I would say that it most certainly isn’t. The complications inherent in invading another country were drastically underestimated by the neocons, in my view, and their idea that it would be a cakewalk, and once we decapitated the regime it would suddenly blossom into a Jeffersonian democracy was quite naive, in my view.

    More dwelling on the commentor’s wise hindsight. Even if it is true, why throw away the baby with the bath water? Where’s the logic in that?

    Furthermore, the tensions we’ve caused through our intervention, the fact that countries now no longer fear our military might as they once did – the total cost is immense. Sure – the *idea* of democratizing the Middle East is a great one, but the tactics – I have never thought it had a shadow of chance of being a net positive for the United States.

    Such commentors never bother to explain how THEY would have changed the doleful paradigm that was the pre-Bush Middle East, a region dominated by West-hating despots using terrorist proxies to commit acts of war, whose regimes invariably came to power and rule afterwards by force of arms. Now the US has a chance to gain two, if not the staunchest of allies, at least an Afghanistan and Iraq not actively hostile to the US.

    The commentor seems to desire that other nations “fear our military.” But the commentor will have to explain how cutting and running in Iraq and inevitably, Afghanistan, will engender fear of our military before the commentor’s carping can be taken seriously.

    Having said that, however, we have to make the best of a bad situation, so of course any patriotic American has to hope for the best possible resolution of this mess. And so, I thought Petraeus’ surge strategy was the most likely to have the best chance of success. But Petraeus himself has never said in public whether he thinks the invasion itself was a good idea… he has pointedly refused to state an opinion on the matter – for good reason. Because there are many strong reasons to think the approach was a terrible one to achieve the ends which it was supposed to achieve.

    Yes to Petraeus: still, no to the Iraq war.

    After all of the above, we are left with a puzzle as to what the commentor’s actual policy preference is. Does “no to the Iraq war” mean that the commentor would abandon Iraq? Or keep on cleaning out the enemy? No wonder the commentor is enamored of Obama – ambiguity is also his forte.

  21. I’m not sure why you are being so obtuse. Obviously what I am saying is not that one ought never to use the military, but 1) to use it only when there are compelling reasons to do so, and 2) if you use it, go in with overwhelming force, to win. What was called the Powell Doctrine – which I wholeheartedly agree with. The Iraq war failed to meet either criteria. As a result, we botched the invasion, did a laughably small amount of planning, and we look incompetent and weak. Prior to this war we had had a series of impressive victories … starting with the Gulf War, which I supported. Because of how poorly this war was planned, we now look far weaker than we did before.

    The commentor claims the invasion was “botched.” In fact the invasion of Iraq was beautifully executed and accomplished its purpose, which was to topple Saddam and his regime. A case can be made with hindsight that the occupation, up to Petraeus, was botched but not the invasion.

    The commentor believes there were no “compelling reasons” to invade Iraq. A lot of folks believed otherwise, including a pre-Bush Congress and various prominent individuals. Below is a link to a Congressional law, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, signed by President Clinton, calling for the toppling of Saddam and another link to opinions about Iraq and Saddam from several notable persons.

    It’s a lot of fun to see what people like the Clintons, John Edwards, Dan Rather, Nancy Pelosi, Madeleine Albright, Howard Dean, John Kerry and Sandy Berger thought about Saddam and Iraq, especially the statements made before Bush II’s Presidency.

    http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.4655.ENR:

    http://www.freedomagenda.com/iraq/wmd_quotes.html

    Saddam is dead, the Ba’ath Party is defunct, the enemy is being systematically destroyed in Iraq but the commentor believes this makes the US “look far weaker.”

  22. There is no scenario for Iraq, including not even invading, that would have stopped the left and their media cronies from bashing this administration on a relentless basis.

    Think about it. We have friendlys plopped down at Iran’s front and back doors and the left only sees disaster?

    The left gets its policies the same way Antarctica got its name.

    Like i’ve said before. “A world where hindsight proves utopia was always at hand, but for stubborn people making decisions in the present”.

  23. Just because Obama has supported the FISA compromise, doesn’t mean I will ever support it.

    If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq with the exact same rhetoric, i would have opposed that as well.

    Just ’cause I don’t support “your” war doesn’t mean I’m anti-war.

    The first Gulf War achieved its stated goal and wasn’t mismanaged by neocons. It wasn’t preventive. Comparatively it wasn’t even that blunder filled. Kuwaitis actually did respond in a dancing in the street and flowers sort of way.

    You guys should take notes.

    You assume the middle east today would be worse for us. Who knows. Iran might be quiet, not rapidly trying to acquire Nukes. Saddam might be contained. 4000 thousand Americans might still be alive and a trillion dollars not spent. Osama, with the resources concentrated in the right direction might have been dead a couple years ago, and terrorism controlled but not eliminated (a goal that can never be achieved, even if the whole world goes to war).

    I liken neocons to bug exterminators with flamethrowers. Sure they’ll do the job. But then you got to rebuild and mourn your dead.

  24. This is stupidity beyond measure. The “shooting war” and “nation building” are different sides of the same coin. They must go hand-in-hand, carried out simultaneously. See here.

  25. The main difference between Iraq and Afganistan is that Iraq had the experience of effective, while brutal state, and its population is basically accustomed to the rites of nationhood, while Afganistan is completely tribal. Exactly this urged Britain give up its attempts to impose on it a colonial rule and abandon the territory, leaving it to tribes. So I agree: nation-building in Afganistan is a grave challenge, and it would be a miracle if USA succeeded where Brits failed.

  26. population is basically accustomed to the rites of nationhood, while Afganistan is completely tribal.

    I hope others tell the same about Iraq and Iraqis when they posting here, looks we got some one his mouth spelt some truth about Iraq!!

  27. Sooner or later we had to deal with Saddam. And if we did not do some nation building in the aftermath of an invasion there would be a vacuum that would be filled by some really bad people.

    The position of the left seems to be that we make demands of other nations but we do not back up the demands, we promote democracy and human rights but do not give them the tools to establish democracy.

    It is inherently contradictory.

    Now that the left has decided the Afghan war is the good war, will they stick with it? Or will they just drop some bombs, bounce the rubble, declare victory and run away? My guess is they lack the conviction to stick with it and carry out the mission.

    As for Iraq, we do not know what we would be looking at in Iraq today if we had not invaded in 2003. It could very well be worse and we could have been forced to deal with Saddam anyway. Just look at his history.

    The American people are tired of it all, no doubt. I think they are almost as tired of the war about the war as they are the war itself. But in time, if Iraq stabilizes, the attitudes toward the war itself might well change. The war in Korea which was much bloodier is a good example of how time and distance can change attitudes.

  28. And the idea that the world does not fear our military is absurd. Tell that to the Iranians, they are acting more than a little nervous over there.

    Our navy and our Air Force could destroy any country without putting any soldiers on the ground. But the days of firebombing cities are over. That is what people understand. They know that our military might be something to fear, but the chances that we will actually unleash that force is remote.

  29. Terrye,
    if we did not do some nation building in the aftermath of an invasion there would be a vacuum that would be filled by some really bad people.

    This is by a witness worked with US after the aftermath of an invasion of Iraq:

    “The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.

    some nation building

    where the black economy rules absolute and the idea of the nationstate as we like to think of it is just a mere notion. Where alliance to the local tribe, clan, and economic strata is far more important than alliance to ideas, be they state or ideological. And all this facilitates a black economy, where smuggling and trading in the black market beats the hell out of legitimate business. Donde est la dineros? Who profits from this development?
    where the black economy rules absolute and the idea of the nationstate as we like to think of it is just a mere notion. Where alliance to the local tribe, clan, and economic strata is far more important than alliance to ideas, be they state or ideological. And all this facilitates a black economy, where smuggling and trading in the black market beats the hell out of legitimate business. Donde est la dineros? Who profits from this development?

  30. And the idea that the world does not fear our military is absurd. Tell that to the Iranians, they are acting more than a little nervous over there.

    You’re asking the wrong question. It isn’t about fearing our military.

    It’s about fearing whether or not we’ll use it.

    This country has crippled itself and is emboldening the most danagerous enemies we have.

  31. The Left does not believe in the existence of state sponsors of Islamic terrorism or non-Islamic terrorism. To them, terrorism is a law enforcement matter and is best handled by the system of justice and its police organs. And that’s it, folks. That’s all there is.

    How else to explain that comments from their politicians, policy wonks, and bloggers on sites like this which pretty much are in denial of The Islamic Republic being a sponsor of Islamic terror? The usual line is Bush made it all up, or “blowback,” or some other excuse.

    If it takes four years of Obama to finally expose that way of thinking as dysfunctional, then so be it. I’m resigned to it. It will be a painful lesson for those in The Middle Muddle who got suckered by that Sirens’ Song. The Far Left will never change. Occasionally, you get refugees from the Far Left, like yours truly, but nowadays it’s pretty hopeless over there.

  32. I am in complete and total agreement with Muslim apostates who declare that Islam is incompatible with human rights, individual liberty, a capitalist meritocracy, and womens’ equality. So, nation building that leaves Islam and Islamic Law (Sharia) in place in some form or other leaves the virus in place. When you have Western lawyers like Noah Feldman serving as consultants for how to embed Sharia Law in the Iraqi Constitution, you know that the virus has even infected the West.

    I think eventually the West will finally wake up to the incredible evil of this virus and will take the necessary measures to eradicate it. But, the longer this can is kicked down the road the more sanguinary the process will be.

  33. Vince P., that’s a fair point. There are two main obstacles to that fear. They are (pick your order) fecklessness (lack of will) and physicial limitations (limits of capability).

    Fecklessness comes out of unwillingness. As to lack of capability: that too comes out of unwillingness. Remember the “peace dividend”? We cashed that dividend three times over. We can fix it, though not instantly. It will take about six years, if Congress will be reasonable with the money.

    We took down Saddam’s government far faster than anyone believed possible. Establishing order took longer, partly because it took time for people there to recognized that our enemies were forces of Terror for whom Terror is Strategy and Law, not just a tactic (see Bobbitt). And partly because we didn’t understand the job. We understand it now. This adaptability scares people. Not everybody. Not every politician, not every warlord, not every dictator with bloodsoaked claws. The people who are scared by our adaptability are those who have seen it turned against them and those who have the imagination to foresee that event–the strategic thinkers.

    We generated new capabilities in Iraq and we demonstrated old ones. The current logistics bottleneck in cleaning and returning equipment to CONUS or to prepositioning bases is a peacetime bottleneck; you can bet it would be released, at least in part, if we needed to move forces to act elsewhere.

    But we also demonstrated
    national fecklessness born of factionalism in our government–factionalism whose virtue has been blown all out of proportion by (here it comes) the party of bread and circuses. (Although modern TV reduces the need to stage circuses, the frequent unrealistic and irrational proclaimations of certain congresscritters can fill whatever void remains.)

  34. What the last seven years has not just suggested, but actually demonstrated, to the world is this:

    * The US remains the only nation with a big and powerful enough military to project its will forcefully anywhere in the world.

    * With enough provocation, it will do so.

    * But it will not do so without regard for the populace potentially affected: there will be civilian casualties, but the US will not aim for civilians, will in fact go very far out of its way and put its own people in grave danger to try to avoid harming presumed innocents.

    * It will also spend a great deal of its own treasure on attempts to rebuild what is destroyed in a conflict in which it’s involved, even if the destruction is not primarily its own doing.

    * Its military will unflinchingly obey even those rules that make engagement drastically more arduous and dangerous than normal, and civilians, including women and girls, have virtually nothing to fear from an armed American presence among them.

    * The US won’t do anything perfectly, but it will continue to do something, and to change what it tries, for longer than (I think) anybody would have believed possible if the Clinton years or even the Bush I years were the yardstick.

    Obama seems to want to negate all these lessons, as if they have no diplomatic or preventive value. If I thought he believed what he says, I’d think him a fool. But I think he’s intelligent enough, which makes him a panderer and demogogue instead. In any case, he’s not the person I want in the White House.

    I think of the “we look weaker now” argument as if we’re a muscle-bound bar bouncer who’s been getting by on our appearance of strength for too long. Somebody actually starts throwing punches in the bar, and our posturing isn’t making him back down; we have the choice of either actually throwing him out of the bar, even if it means we have to show people how much effort we have to put into the task, or standing there going, “Hey! Hey you! Stop that!” with no effect, as we’ve been doing until now. If we throw the bum out, getting some bruises for our trouble, the next person to throw a punch now knows in advance that we can do what our appearance advertises. If we don’t, the next person to throw a punch shrugs and goes for it. Yes, actually using the military for its primary purpose risks revealing its (few) weaknesses – but not using it risks entirely destroying our credibility in foreign affairs.

    (Are we the world’s police? Shoot. I hate that question, because we’re not, but we’re the only ones who could be. This is the big flaw in my “bar bouncer” analogy: we have no right nor obligation to involve ourselves in every bad thing, but when it’s in our national interest, which I agree with Bush includes removing an illiberal regime and attempting to foster a more liberal one in a strategic region, we ought to and sometimes must.)

  35. We do look extremely weak now.

    Not because of the affirmative policies we had, but because the Democrats have declared war on the defense of the country.

    All of our enemies can see this.

    They know that as long the Democrats insist on fighting every component of our defense, that we’re a sitting duck.

  36. My great fear, Vince P – not so much from an “imminent attack” perspective as from the perspective of “How many bleeping times are we going to have to re-do this?!” Every time we have to throw the guy out of the bar, we risk those bruises. The less force we actually have to use, the better – but you get to use less force overall by demonstrating at critical times that you’re both able and willing to use it.

  39. “Furthermore, the tensions we’ve caused through our intervention, the fact that countries now no longer fear our military might as they once did – the total cost is immense”

    Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden could not be reached for comment.

    As far as Saddam Hussein being kept “in his box”…Oil for Food, French and Russian violations of the Arms embargo, attacks on U.S. aircraft and other ceasefire violations…what box was that, exactly?

  40. Just ’cause I don’t support “your” war doesn’t mean I’m anti-war.

    I never implied those opposed to the Iraq War are pacifists. What is it called when a debater debates a position not taken by an opponent? It’s called the ‘Straw Man’ tactic.

    The first Gulf War achieved its stated goal and wasn’t mismanaged by neocons. It wasn’t preventive. Comparatively it wasn’t even that blunder filled. Kuwaitis actually did respond in a dancing in the street and flowers sort of way.

    Apparently the commentor believes in war but only with the proviso that the population of an enemy nation must approve of the war. It’s very simple: If the population would not dance in the streets with flowers, then the commentor would not go to war.

    You guys should take notes.

    We are taking note and we see inconsistency and blindness – as expressed in the sentiments below.

    You assume the middle east today would be worse for us. Who knows. Iran might be quiet, not rapidly trying to acquire Nukes.

    And pigs might fly. The enemy is only emboldened to further atrocities and faster nuclear development by acquiescence.

    Saddam might be contained.

    Saddam would be happily torturing hapless victims, embezzling funds from UN coffers, sheltering terrorists and digging up buried centrifuges to process yellowcake into nuclear devices today if not for Bush and the hated neocons.

    4000 thousand Americans might still be alive and a trillion dollars not spent.

    To be against any war because of the casualties that might result or the money cost is to be against ALL war since no war can be casualty-free or without monetary cost. But the commentor is NOT a pacifist – oh no.

    Osama, with the resources concentrated in the right direction might have been dead a couple years ago, and terrorism controlled but not eliminated (a goal that can never be achieved, even if the whole world goes to war).

    The commentor apparently believes that Pakistan would allow divisions of US Marines to move into the remote areas of Pakistan where bin Laden hides if only Bush had not deposed Saddam. But the real issue, if other remarks of the commentor are taken at face value, is whether the tribal population sheltering bin Laden would “dance in the streets with flowers” at such an hypothetical event. The illusions these folks operate under are almost amusing when they are not appalling.

    Terrorists will never be “controlled” as long as hostile regimes are allowed to shelter, foster and sponsor them. If such support was not given by rogue states terrorism might just shrink to a manageable level and become the ‘law enforcement’ problem that some anti-war folks are so fond of calling it.

    Carterism taken to it’s ultimate conclusion: Continue ineffective diplomatic negotiations with hostile regimes who foster and utilize terrorists as proxy warriors and hope for the best. The US was presented with 9/11 precisely because such fairytales became US foreign policy under Carter and Clinton.

    I liken neocons to bug exterminators with flamethrowers. Sure they’ll do the job. But then you got to rebuild and mourn your dead.

    Apparently the commentor would have been a pacifist during WW2, a war that cost the US many times over in money and casualties than the Iraq War has or is likely to. And no rebuilding of Europe and Japan either, because the commentor does not like the idea of rebuilding at all. The reader can only conclude that the commentor would have left Japan and Germany in smoking ruins after WW2.

  41. Occam,

    IF the war had been properly planned, as many people both within and outside government were pushing for in the run-up to the war, and we had gone in with a much larger force, capable not only of defeating Saddam’s weak military but stabilizing the country in the aftermath of the invasion, the war would have gone from an obvious and total disaster to simply something that I think was a mistake in terms of priorities. In that case it would meet my second criteria for war, but still not meet my first (that there be an absolutely compelling case to go to war in the first place). I still believe that stabilizing Afghanistan and maintaining steady pressure on Al Qaeda should have been and should have remained our top priority. Toppling Saddam was, in my view, a war of choice, something we were not forced into doing but thought would be a good idea because we (that is, the neocons) thought it would be a relatively easy way to start a democratic domino effect in the Middle East. I believe their optimism was misplaced. War, even with the best of planning, is a terribly unpredictable affair, and once you start it events can quickly spiral out of control. That’s why you should never go to war unless you have to — going to war as a part of an idealistic foreign policy strategy I believe is foolhardy, and even worse when you’re so afraid to make people think it might be “hard” that you prevent your own government agencies from doing the appropriate planning (there were whole departments which wanted to do recovery planning who were told by the Bush Administration not to do it, because to prepare for contingencies would have been to admit that the war might not be a cakewalk — which went against the Administration line at the time).

    War is a serious business and you ought to take it seriously, in other words: sure, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

    So yes, if the war HAD been planned well, at least it would have removed one of my major concerns — but no, I still would not have supported it as it still would have had many of the other negative side effects, such as making it more difficult to deal with Iran and North Korea, moving resources away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, aiding Al Qaeda in their recruitment efforts, etc. But of course — given that the war is a fait accompli, I am very much in favor of doing whatever it takes to stabilize the situation over there, which is why I supported the surge. I recall when Belgravia Dispatch first proposed the idea in his blog (he is a conservative who voted for Bush twice, the second time reluctantly, but finally turned against him before the 2006 elections) I wrote that I thought it was a good idea. He later decided not to support it because the surge was too small in his view — I also agree, it should have been larger, if possible — but I still think Petraeus is a genius and a tactically elegant commander, and so I support him wholeheartedly.

  42. Mitsu, I don’t see the point of criticizing the tactics of something you consider a strategic mistake. If you consider the overall strategy flawed, no tactics would change that, since there is no right way to do the wrong thing (the wrong thing as you see it).

    And as far as tactics go, every war abounds with a profusion of blunders, miscalculations, oversights, misunderstandings, and lost opportunities. Indeed, that profusion of errors practically defines war.

    The Civil War, as pointed out above, was far worse. I’ve just finished reading several histories of WWI, which was basically a blunderfest on every level from diplomatic to geopolitical to strategic to logistical to tactical.

    Btw, to put our 4000 dead in five years in perspective, France lost 300,000 killed in the first four months of WWI. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

  43. Mitsu,

    If you won’t do a thing until you can do it without making mistakes, you won’t do many things in life. In war, the winner is the side that made the next-to-last critical mistake. If you don’t recognize this (see von Clausewitz), your understanding of war is like a mountain herder’s understanding of oil tankers. I wouldn’t want to rely on the mountain herder, however good a man he might be, to pilot a tanker into its berth and I would not want to rely on your understanding regarding the use of war as an instrument of policy.

  44. I just have to laugh at how you said “Iraq became a front in the war on terror” as if there were terrorists there to be fought when we invaded.

    Iraq became a front in the “war on terror” because American troops are there. It’s easier to kill Americans in Iraq than in America.

  45. >Mitsu, I don’t see the point of criticizing the tactics of
    >something you consider a strategic mistake.

    Making mistakes is not a black and white affair, in my view, Occam. There’s making a mistake, then there’s making a huge mistake that will have much worse repercussions than it would otherwise have. I’m not sure why I should avoid criticizing the tactics of a flawed strategy. It’s sort of like saying, yes, you shouldn’t drive your car off the road, but if you’re going to drive it off the road, you might want to avoid driving it over the cliff at the same time. Some mistakes are more easily recoverable than others.

  46. Mitsu, OK, fair enough. I don’t subscribe to that view, which to me seems like dropping a cherry bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 7 – i.e., superfluous and pointless – but that’s a matter on which reasonable men can differ.

  47. My father, who spent three and half years in trenches in WWII as a commander of mortar platoon, resumed his war impressions so: “War is a monumental mutial incompetence”. He was rendered as the best commander in his regiment, but felt being completely unprofessional: he has only 9 classes of school and 3 month of officer courses behind.

  48. Sergey, my father spent 30+ years in the military, who came up through the ranks and retired as a senior officer, used to say that any plan that assumed the enemy was stupid – or that everything (anything?) would go as planned – had better include a lot of body bags.

  49. Needless to say I am not suggesting that war, even with the best of plans, is ever going to go according to plan. In fact, that is precisely what I AM saying, is that war rarely goes according to plan. Therefore it is prudent to *prepare* for a many contingencies as possible. What I am critical of in the Administration’s prosecution of this war is precisely that they assumed it WOULD go according to plan, and they actually stopped efforts to *prepare* for contingencies. There’s certainly no way to predict with accuracy the outcome of a war, but there are certainly better and worse ways to prepare for the various possible outcomes. I am simply saying that I believe the war should have been done with a lot more assuming that things would NOT go as planned than it was.

  50. You can’t prepare equally for every contingency; you must consider the likelyhood and cost of individual failures.

    Rumsfield was slow to recognize that the occupation would require a major change in tactics, but when the change occurred it was decisive. It could have been much worse.

  51. Mitsu:

    And everyone else, too.

    “No plan survives the first contact with the enemy”…H. von Moltke, 1872??

    The best a General Staff can do is to line every one up for the kickoff. After that, it’s up to a series of quarterbacks. Hence, another quote:

    “Troops and NCOs study tactics, Generals study logistics.” The best plans in the world are useless without supplies and/or alternatives and/or quick thinking improvisers.

    Again, a good analogy is our Civil War and Lincoln’s search for a winning strategy AFTER the initial war began. Starting with McClellan, the North was lead by a series of Guys Named Joe, until Grant (in the West, a secondary theater) and Sherman (also in semi-exile) were noticed by a desperate Honest Abe (about to loose the 1864 election to the incompetent pacifistic ex-General McClellan).

    As we say, the rest if history. Tactics and strategy changed, CASUALTIES WERE ACCEPTED, The North under Grant did not invade Virginia and retreat, Sherman went through Georgia like a dose of salts, and the tide turned. In less than two years, the Confederacy was no more and their states were under Federal Occupation.

    And chattel slavery was no more.

    I advise a re-reading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

    So…what should happen after the balloon goes up? “L’Audace, L’Audace, toujours L’Audace”.

  52. mitsu,

    You are fishing on that last post. njcommuter is right: you cannot prepare for every contingency, because you don’t always know how the enemy is going to adapt to the situation. You learn from the experience of seeing how the enemy adapts. And you adapt accordingly.

    So, what you are saying is that if you cannot plan for almost every contingency, then you should not commit to battle. That is nonsense. Besides, one of the hallmarks of the U.S. military, in every war, has been the ability of its officers and noncoms to be flexible and learn from not only our own mistakes but by what the enemy does right. Give the enemy some f***ing respect too. Human beings are not automatons that you just program for permutations of a template.

    Obviously you lack something a few of here do have: military experience.

    Bottom line: if you objected to the war on strategic grounds and for geopolitical reasons, then it most certainly is rather ridiculous to nitpick on the subject of tactics and doctrine.

    Some of us here supported the war from the start, and we all have had our quibbles with how various phases of it were executed. However, we did not know that the Baathists had in place a PLAN to wage the only kind of conflict that they had any chance at all to succeed in getting us to quit: a guerrilla war. They knew, from the experience of how our people responded to the way the war in Vietnam was presented by the MSM, that a lot of the nation would lose the stomach for the fight. So, they just had to hang in there and wreck enough mayhem and get enough good coverage from our Fourth Estate, and hope that the American people would clamor for our withdrawal. It didn’t work, but it almost did. It was very close. Running concurrently with the Baathist insurgency were the Iranian operations and the Islamic terror groups. All of these groups took note of what our vulnerabilities were and tried to exploit them.

    While the enemy was adapting we were adapting too. It is unfortunate that prior to the surge our successes in battle were not being accurately and openly reported to our people, because it is not fair to say that we were losing. The enemy was indeed losing the fight, but was scoring political and propaganda points. We had better troops, better equipment, better training (have insurgents ever been better riflemen than ours?), better technology, and very smart leadership. In every war we have been involved in from the founding of the nation we have lost battles. But we have also learned and adapted – and eventually overcome.

    Please take my word for it, as it comes from one who has both military experience and was once a member of the Left: the Left knows jack s**t about military affairs, how to fight, and how to evaluate strategic and tactical methods and metrics. In fact, on my days on the Left many years ago I NEVER MET A FELLOW LEFTIST WHO, LIKE ME, EVEN HAD EXPERIENCE IN HOW TO USE A FIREARM.

  53. >So, what you are saying is that if you cannot plan for almost
    >every contingency, then you should not commit to battle.

    I never said any such thing. I simply said that this war was poorly planned. Even most neocons today admit that the Bush Administration did an awful job of planning this war. The Army itself, in its official history of the Iraq War, severely faults the war planning efforts of our senior leadership. Unless you believe wars can never be poorly planned, I think it is not only a perfectly rational position to assert this war was poorly planned, but it is an assessment shared by most military analysts today, perhaps save some commenters to this blog. One of my relatives, a longstanding Republican analyst in the Pentagon, also faults our military planning and predicted the war would go very poorly as a result. He was ostracized within the Pentagon — even though people now privately admit to him he was right.

    I come from a family with a military history. My father, a Japanese-American immigrant to the United States, was an Air Force intelligence officer. My ancestors were samurai, in Japan. I have tremendous respect for the military and a healthy sense of admiration for the necessity of a strong military but also a sense of caution about how it can be used poorly. I am not some anti-military leftist. I care deeply about how we use our military and I believe we have a responsibility as a nation to use our military prudently and effectively. I do not believe that was the case here.

  54. (I should say, my relative is a longstanding Republican, and a civilian military analyst in the Pentagon, to clarify.)

  55. Well, the problem with Iraq strategy was we could easily have substituted it for say Libya at one time, a state that directed terrorist attacks against the U.S and U.K. targets. Intelligence reported even more thwarted attacks.

    Those failed policies of sanctions, and UN intervention and measured military response favored by the left didn’t work and finally we had to resort to a full scale invasion…

    Oh wait, we didn’t. Libya renounced development of terrorism and WMD development. It was taken off the terrorism watch list before Nelson Mandela.

    But terrorism needs those rogue state killed to be controlled right– oh wait, so I assume we’re talking Saudi Arabia since the 911 hijackers were principally Saudi, from a country Bush literally walks hand in hand with, whose religious education system taught hatred.

    I never say the right won’t accomplish the goal, just that they are so messy and expensive. And by messy, I mean bloody.

    I still find it fascinating that while Iran was actually helping us combat the Taliban behind the scenes, President Bush made the essence of neocon demonizing utterance in the axis of evil statement. How shrewd –NOT. That was a big hint about how things would be handled.

  56. Vince P – aaargh, that’ll teach me to write under the influence of jetlag. I don’t know what I was trying to say either… but boy, did it seem important at the time. Oh well.

  57. Peter:
    “Iraq became a front in the “war on terror” because American troops are there. It’s easier to kill Americans in Iraq than in America.”

    Peter, how long did it take in months for the US death toll in Iraq to reach 3K?

    We’ll be standing by for you answer.

  58. mitsu: “Toppling Saddam was, in my view, a war of choice, something we were not forced into doing but thought would be a good idea …”

    All wars are wars of choice. We weren’t forced into any of our 20th century wars. We certainly didn’t have to fight in WWI, Korea or Vietnam, or Iraq in 1991. Sure, we were attacked in WWII, but the US itself was never seriously threatened. Germany and Japan could not have invaded and occupied the US; they didn’t have the troops and we could easily have spent all our resources building two massive fleets and domestic defenses. If we had agreed to end our oil embargo against Japan, we could probably have negotiated a peace treaty with them in short order after Pearl Harbor.

    War is forced on a country when it is seriously invaded, as when Germany invaded Russia in a sustained attempt to conquer it. The US hasn’t experienced anything like that in well over a century. However, even then, fighting is a choice. It was brave of the Belgians to fight the Nazis, but they could have simply surrendered their country instead of resisting the inevitable. The US could have simply accepted Confederate secession and avoided the Civil War. The War of 1812 wasn’t necessary if we would have been willing to accept a certain number of US sailors being drafted into the British navy from time to time, and the Revolution wasn’t necessary either, if you’re willing to accept a certain amount of tyranny.

  59. mitsu: “… going to war as a part of an idealistic foreign policy strategy I believe is foolhardy, and even worse when you’re so afraid to make people think it might be “hard” that you prevent your own government agencies from doing the appropriate planning (there were whole departments which wanted to do recovery planning who were told by the Bush Administration not to do it, because to prepare for contingencies would have been to admit that the war might not be a cakewalk – which went against the Administration line at the time).”

    Can you post links or cite sources for that claim? I never heard the administration claim it was going to be easy, and to the contrary, I have heard Bush repeatedly say it was going to be a long, difficult endeavor.

    If you could link articles, speech transcripts, or whatever, where the administration claims the invasion and rebuilding of Iraq was going to be easy, I would be interested in reading them. I would also be interested in the evidence for your claim that the administration prevented planning because it was all going to be so easy.

  60. Hi lumpenscholar,

    This is something that is extremely well-known and has been widely reported by many sources; I can’t even recall the number of articles I’ve read including interviews with Administration officials told not to conduct post-war planning. I recall reading a long interview with an official who had begun extensive planning for post-invasion Iraq who was told to put those plans on hold by the White House… I’m surprised you haven’t read any of these.

    However, if you’d like links to a few articles, here are some I dug up just now:

    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_09/009469.php

    http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/18/state.dept.iraq/index.html

    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june08/iraqreport_06-30.html

  61. Many are firm in their belief that Bush blundered in the handling of Iraq after the invasion. I’m not so sure. It all has to do with a very simple calculation: The fewer US troops deployed the fewer US casualties incurred – up to a certain point, at which it becomes counterproductive in terms of casualties.

    It seems that US troops have been able to defend themselves in Iraq – I don’t remember any account of US troops being overrun or defeated in battle. Reading between the lines it sounds as if Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going for that happy medium of just enough but not too many. Iraq may be noted by future historians in that such a major war, replete with nation building, was conducted with so few American casualties.

    Since the sixties the Secretaries of Defense have been given a lemon: an ever decreasing military in terms of personnel and an increasingly independent high military command. Congress funds hardware because military hardware means jobs and jobs insure incumbents get reelected. Increases in personnel don’t give the politicians the same reward because it creates little economic activity compared to hardware.

    Rumsfeld was the first to try to make lemonade out of it, with his philosophy of smaller, theoretically more mobile battle units. My guess is that fewer American lives were lost in Iraq than if a much larger deployment had been used.

    And Rumsfeld reined the military in, or tried to. That created friction and frustration, so we get the third person accounts of so and so said this and so and so said that, a type of high level gossip that many are fond of wallowing in, especially biased journalists.

  62. Officers go up for promotion every so often. If passed over twice–and there are fewer slots as you go up so there are always more competitors–they are retired.
    Enough think it was unjust that they have (their) story to tell, and some of those expand it to more general issues.
    When reading this stuff, figure that there is a good chance the author was passed over after a couple of decades’ hard work and sacrifice. If that were you, how would you be likely to view things?

  63. Officers go up for promotion every so often. If passed over twice—and there are fewer slots as you go up so there are always more competitors—they are retired.
    Enough think it was unjust that they have (their) story to tell, and some of those expand it to more general issues.
    When reading this stuff, figure that there is a good chance the author was passed over after a couple of decades’ hard work and sacrifice. If that were you, how would you be likely to view things?

    Richard, I think I would be angry. I was in the military just long enough to realize that injustices occur there just as they do in other walks of life. The brass make their share of bonehead promotions, Wesley Clark being a prime example. Ricardo Sanchez is another. Probably some good people were passed over in their favor.

    And I’ve no doubt that Rumsfeld was difficult to take; he seems to be a person who seldom bothers justifying his decisions to those who work for him. Of course this means they will draw their own conclusions, ascribe motivation, mind-read intentions and all manner of speculation – the High Command equivalent to barracks bitching. But the fact remains that casualties were kept low and I think we have Rumsfeld’s early policy and Bush to thank for that.

  64. Well, the problem with Iraq strategy was we could easily have substituted it for say Libya at one time, a state that directed terrorist attacks against the U.S and U.K. targets. Intelligence reported even more thwarted attacks.

    Those failed policies of sanctions, and UN intervention and measured military response favored by the left didn’t work and finally we had to resort to a full scale invasion… Oh wait, we didn’t. Libya renounced development of terrorism and WMD development. It was taken off the terrorism watch list before Nelson Mandela.

    But the commentor is wrong. There WAS an invasion – into Iraq. Let’s examine the sequence: The US destroys Iraq’s army in a few days, takes over Iraq and puts Saddam into hiding. So Revolutionary Leader Gaddafi, who was recalcitrant during Saddam’s 13 year mooning of the world, sees that Saddam’s days are numbered. At this point he wants to make amends, gives over his nuclear capability, not to the UN because he knows the UN is crooked from end to end, but to Bush and Blair, and disavows terrorism.

    I ask the apologists: Can’t they see that the one thing might have to do with the other? I wonder what Gaddafi will do if the Mullahs acquire their nukes? Or if Iraq is abandoned? Whoops – there goes another reformed terrorist.

    But terrorism needs those rogue state killed to be controlled right— oh wait, so I assume we’re talking Saudi Arabia since the 911 hijackers were principally Saudi, from a country Bush literally walks hand in hand with, whose religious education system taught hatred.

    I’ve always wondered why were there so many Saudis in the planes. After all, terrorists come from all over the world. There’s terrorists from just about every Middle Eastern country. Why would bin Laden choose so many Saudis? Well, perhaps to obtain the same sort of reaction exhibited by the commentor. The US/Saudi alliance galls bin Laden. Does the commentor actually believe that the rulers of Saudi Arabia sent the hijackers?

    I never say the right won’t accomplish the goal, just that they are so messy and expensive. And by messy, I mean bloody.

    Let’s see … there’s Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao – all pretty “bloody.” Am I forgetting anyone? On the right we have … who? Hitler? But the Nazis were the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Sounds a bit lefty, doesn’t it?

    I still find it fascinating that while Iran was actually helping us combat the Taliban behind the scenes, President Bush made the essence of neocon demonizing utterance in the axis of evil statement. How shrewd —NOT. That was a big hint about how things would be handled.

    Bless President Bush for calling things what they really are. It was like a breath of fresh air. But the peaceful Iran was busy “helping” the US, so the bad US has to apologize for that awful insult uttered by President Bush. It’s the subconscious double standard I’ve alluded to before in regards to another commentator with the same attitude. It’s ingrained within the psyche of most apologizers. Iran’s Supreme Leader gets to call Bush and Americans Nazis but President Bush has to watch what he says.

  65. Your theorizing is about as good as any random individual without actually knowing people’s minds and motives. Though you do go on and on ad nauseum about the commentators thinking this or that. I certainly can’t remember giving these elaborations on my thoughts. Too bad I didn’t actually say this or that.

    So, btw, I’ve already pointed out, I thought the first Gulf War was the one not mismanaged by neocons. So, if in fact that was the reason that motivated Gaddafi, I’m fine with that too.

    As far as the rantings of Ahmadinejad versus Bush. Well, we can only be responsible for what our country leader represents. But I like that you liken Bush’s bravdo and imbecile comment as being somehow tit for tat, as if that is his purpose as President, to make just as stupid a comment as other stupid leaders regardless of the damage.

  67. One thing the right never explains while they are demonizing is how we get America patriots during various conflicts? The American football player who was killed in Afghanistan is a good example — a patriot creation of 911 who would have gone on with pro ball otherwise.. There’s nothing wrong with that. .

    But the right’s blindness is that somehow American foreign policy is an innocent dove and there is very little interest in understanding how we contribute to the formation of terrorism in the first place. Because apparently the creation effect can’t work for enemies. Well they do link left policies to practically anything bad, I’ll give them that.

  68. Furthermore, if the result of the first gulf war motivated Libya in a positive way, this neocon war led all the rogue nations (most likely N. Korea as well) to keenly desire WMDs

  69. Logern: No one believes

    “But the right’s blindness is that somehow American foreign policy is an innocent dove ”

    Whatever gave you that idea? What.. because we’re not 24/7 denouncing the US that means we think we are infallible?

    WHat you did is nothing more than engage in the typically shallow Leftist relativism.. becuase obviously if the Left is SOOOOOOOOOOOO concerned with US misdeeds that must mean everyone else isn’t.

    there is very little interest in understanding how we contribute to the formation of terrorism in the first place.

    Let me ask you this, Do you know who Qutb is? Please give us the courtesy of an honest answer.

  70. Furthermore, if the result of the first gulf war motivated Libya in a positive way, this neocon war led all the rogue nations (most likely N. Korea as well) to keenly desire WMDs

    North Korea had already established their nuclear program in the 1990s and were well on their way to a weapon by then.

    Somehow you’re missing from your analysis the fact that Bill Clinton’s bombing of Iraq in Operation Desert Fox and Bill Clinton’s bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 resulted in Saddam’s determination to support terrorism against the West and the US. And also sealed the allianced between the Taliban and Al Q. Up to that point, the Taliban was increasingly uneasy about Al Q being on thier lands and creating so much international pressure on them.

    The Taliban truly wnated to establish their vision of the pure Islamic state and viewed Al Qaeda as a distraction from that..
    But after we bombed Afghanistan …

    AND DIDN’T FOLLOW UP WITH ANYTHING

    … the bombing only served to have the Taliban give its support to Al Qaeda. From there the 9/11 planning started.

    Weak actions against Islamic Terrorists only makes it worse.

  71. Your theorizing is about as good as any random individual without actually knowing people’s minds and motives. Though you do go on and on ad nauseum about the commentators thinking this or that. I certainly can’t remember giving these elaborations on my thoughts. Too bad I didn’t actually say this or that.

    Perhaps the commentor could give an example of something I ascribed to the commentor that the commentor did not post. Where exactly did I misinterpret the commentor’s offerings?

    So, btw, I’ve already pointed out, I thought the first Gulf War was the one not mismanaged by neocons. So, if in fact that was the reason that motivated Gaddafi, I’m fine with that too.

    The commentor is getting his wars mixed up. Gaddafi didn’t make amends because of the Persian Gulf War(“the one not mismanaged”). Gaddafi continued his treachery until Saddam was destroyed in the Iraq War, which was 13 years later – the Persian Gulf War had nothing to do with it.

    As far as the rantings of Ahmadinejad versus Bush. Well, we can only be responsible for what our country leader represents. But I like that you liken Bush’s bravdo and imbecile comment as being somehow tit for tat, as if that is his purpose as President, to make just as stupid a comment as other stupid leaders regardless of the damage.

    Unlike the commentor I believe a good leader calls things what they are. I doubt the President’s “axis of evil” phrase was prompted by the Supreme Leader of Iran’s insults in any “tit for tat” sense. I doubt Bush pays much attention to such prattle – the folks in Iran are forever name-calling, after all. I simply wanted to point out an obvious double standard in the unfair vilification of the “axis of evil” phrase and by extension the double standard in most apologizers’ perceptions about Iran and the US in general.

  72. Hmm, I can’t figure out what is blocking my next post. It’s hating something in post as it’s not showing up at all.

    Subject “The Libya Model” Also, an answer to vince p.

  73. test

    Even though I erred on the war timeframe, the Libya model was the motivator for Kaddifi. This you can look up, as I can’t paste anything I’ve written.

  74. Vince P. in short, whether it’s Farc, A-Q or someone else, the lineage of extemist thought isn’t important. Good Policy is for the average non-lunatic where the environments exist and breed at best “looking the other way” or sympathy.

    For instance, the slippage on torture policy hurts those who would assist us. Neo went on about good examples not having an effect on would be terrorist, but i cry foul. It is not for the various Al- members that we set standards.

  75. I can’t post full posts, so that will have to do, as I am not going to retype everything out in this box.

  76. “The Libya Model”

    “T h e e ffect, acc ording to a nalysts, wo uld be to re create the eco nomic and diplomatic embargo slapped on Libya in the 1990s. Iso lating the pa riah state eventually per-suaded Lib yan lead er Col. Mua mmar Qad dafi to seek a return to the international fold.”

    Also:

    “The essence of the Libya model is to proceed through “reci procal unilat eral measures”–independent actions taken by pa rties to the negotiations to reach their shared objectives.

  79. On the Greta V blog at FoxNews someone complained about the blog eating their commetns.. lookat the response:

    Comment by Roni
    July 15th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
    no post greta
    July 15th, 2008 at 7:42 pm

    this is the worse friggin blog in all pc programs-you can post a dam comment one minute then nect minute you cant.
    ==============

    You can pretty much post what you want; however, WordPress won’t allow any words that have an ‘a’ followed by two ’s’ without modification….like as*ociates or pas$ed.

    Any word that can be broken down into a curse word gets flagged and it won’t allow you to post. Try modifying those words and you should be alright.

  80. Subject “The Libya Model” Also, an answer to vince p.

    The commentor has mention the so-called Libyan Model.

    The Libyan Model:

    In concert with US allies apply economic and political sanctions.

    Tighten up the sanctions as time goes by.

    When the violator agrees to stop nuclear development and terrorism, begin the negotiations.

    Proceed in a step by step manner, lifting sanctions as progress is made by the violator until the violator is no longer a threat.

    Institute a full diplomatic relationship with the violator because the violator has agreed to permanently stop developing nukes and engaging in terrorism.

    In Libya’s case, Libya also agreed to take full responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.

    This also seems to be the strategy followed by President Bush with Iran.

  81. But the right’s blindness is that somehow American foreign policy is an innocent dove and there is very little interest in understanding how we contribute to the formation of terrorism in the first place.

    There is this disheartening tendency among many folks to gloss over the fact of the immense harm the terrorists do. It’s like they need something or someone familiar, accessible and tangible to blame for the horror. The terrorists are so abstract, so different and so far away. Maybe this makes it difficult to focus on them. We never see blame placed on the thugs who actually DO the murder. Oh no, it’s always the “right’s blindness,” or stupidity, immorality, etc. We must assume that those who espouse such views believe that Americans on the left are blameless in this flawed, inaccurate worldview.

    It’s like a courtroom in which the a squinting judge, who can’t make out the murderer in the docket, turns and pronounces someone else who happens to be nearby as guilty.

    The US Creates Monsters Meme is a favorite. The US created Saddam, Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden; we’ve seen them all ascribed to America – name the Middle Eastern despot or rogue regime and someone is sure to show up and declare they were created by America.

    Is Iran a dangerous problem? It’s because the US didn’t encourage dissidents in Iran. Bush’s arrogance and stupidity let the dissidents die on the vine.

    Is bin Laden a vile creature? Well, America created him and so what bin Laden did on 9/11 serves America right.

    This meme easily extended by the ‘blamers’ to Israel. They are forever claiming Israel causes the terrorism coming from Palestine.

    America to these people, at least the right-wing part of it, is a satanic figure who goads peaceful folk such as Saddam, the Mullahs and bin Laden with insults and arrogance who then turn on their right-wing overlords in a rage of indiscriminate but understandable and forgivable murder.

    The Universal Double Standard is fully ingrained in their psyches. The terrorists can do any horrible act and they are blithely forgiven … that is if the terrorism is acknowledged at all. President Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, on the other hand, is seen by them as an insult to Iran for which Bush should apologize.

    Foreign policy to these folks is not an instrument to protect the national interests, national security, ideological goals, and economic prosperity of the US but rather a benign tool to create peace by exemplary example. This messianic approach to foreign affairs philosophy only creates more havoc. Obama, a messianic figure, is a perfect fit to their worldview.

    Musing: If only Bush had been in office in 1979 instead of Carter. Imagine if Iran’s Mullahs had taken over Iran without holding the embassy employees hostage in ’79 and the embassy was still somehow there. What would happen if the Mullahs were to take the employees hostage today?

    I think Bush would ask Congress for permission to take military action against Iran and I believe after much wrangling it would be granted. And then I think the hostages would be released by Iran. Carter could have done the same, but didn’t. He’s spent the years since trying to justify that feckless and catastrophic lack of character. We are paying now for what Carter didn’t do.

  82. Well, I’m sure we’d have an argument, for instance, if we were in early America

    Example: colonists move into a plains area in the process of going west, build a small settlement, and live peacefully for 3 years, and are suddenly viciously attacked by Indians that 3rd summer.

    Me: What caused this?

    You: Some of these tribes are vicious

    Me: True, but we have been moving into their lands.

    You: Yes, that’s true, but these people have been settled here for 3 years. This was out of nowhere, you can’t explain that.

    Me: Well, I don’t know.

    You: The best thing to do is to take them out at their settlement. It’s self defense. Securty!

    Me: Well…

    Actual situation: Indians live in a particular region and follow the buffalo each hunting season outside their settlement. For three years, they have gone East or West on what they consider their territory because that’s where the buffalo go, but this time they had to go South and find interlopers who have already killed much of the buffalo herd, the main source of much of their winter survival. So, they react as they did.

  83. Well, I’m sure we’d have an argument, for instance, if we were in early America

    Example: colonists move into a plains area in the process of going west, build a small settlement, and live peacefully for 3 years, and are suddenly viciously attacked by Indians that 3rd summer.

    Me: What caused this?

    You: Some of these tribes are vicious

    Me: True, but we have been moving into their lands.

    You: Yes, that’s true, but these people have been settled here for 3 years. This was out of nowhere, you can’t explain that.

    Me: Well, I don’t know.

    You: The best thing to do is to take them out at their settlement. It’s self defense. Securty!

    Me: Well…

    Actual situation: Indians live in a particular region and follow the buffalo each hunting season outside their settlement. For three years, they have gone East or West on what they consider their territory because that’s where the buffalo go, but this time they had to go South and find interlopers who have already killed much of the buffalo herd, the main source of much of their winter survival. So, they react as they did.

    Pretty good. Better than the commentor’s earlier stuff. I kind of like this analogy, even though it’s inaccurate in it’s equivalencies. And it has the added fillip of a slap at America’s history with the Native American theme. The commentor is showing his mettle.

    But it really doesn’t do to equate the same moral virtue to the terrorists as the Native Americans, the motives of the two groups being so different, the one being vile in it’s essence, the other being somewhat noble. And there have been more than one tribe: for instance, the Germans and the Japanese. Most of these tribes, instead of being colonized by us have been left in full control of their own territories, have even prospered after defeat and had our help for that. For awhile we kept these tribes from being annexed by an opportunistic tribe and still contribute to their defense so they may prosper peacefully under their own teepees. No tribe is our permanent enemy.

    The terrorist tribe has no particular hunting grounds, but secretly hunts in all territories. And their “hunting season,” which is year-round, isn’t for buffalo. We are not interested in sending “colonists” to settle in the nations that employ them or any of the “plains area” owned by their bosses.

    There’s a particularly troublesome tribe, fanatical in its determination, who has been using the terrorist sub-tribe to commit atrocities and that is in the process of building a giant arrow that threatens our very existence. This tribe calls us Nazis, chants “Death to America” in their war dances and speaks publicly and brazenly of “a world without America.” This tribe hates many other tribes, who are friendly and party to treaties with us and also openly threatens them with extinction. Given the tribe’s stated intention of annihilating us, the giant arrow they are building is worrisome.

    Our chief, along with the chiefs of several prominent tribes, has extended an offer of much wampum to them but they have rejected similar peace gifts before and probably will again. Other tribes have tried in the past to negotiate with them over the Giant Arrow issue but they have only used negotiations for time to further the development of the giant arrow, even bragging about it afterwards.

  84. You know, speaking of having a different President, even though I’m not a conservative I’d rather have had Reagan by a long shot post 9/11 than Bush. If Reagan had gotten us into Iraq, it would have been at the right time, for the right reasons at least. Possibly even in the last 5 years if Saddam had really made an imminent threat..

    (a comment on a Nytimes post made me think of the following) Bush is accused of “cowboy diplomacy“, but that’s an insult to the good cowboys (of old classic westerns).

    Reagan may sound the same as Bush, but I’d really be surprised if he would closer emulate the type of cowboy hero character values he would have been familiar with and Bush and team are sorely lacking. For instance, Good Cowboys don’t shoot first. They don’t start the gunfights. They are reluctant to do battle, but if so, will be the first to go, and ask for volunteers. They are the ones acting sensibly and getting the facts when everyone else is out to hang someone on rumor and innuendo. They fight Indians, but they are the first to recognize Indians as individuals. They respect the sacred burial grounds of the Indians where others tromp merrily.

    These, in general, are American values to me as well. Being reluctant to shoot first can get you called a commie, or terrorist these days. If you don’t want to torture someone you’re some sort America hating wimp. Um, screwdriver that.

    I suspect if Bush had dealt with Pearl Harbor, we would have managed to botch up WW2. Nazis would still command popularity. We probably would have destroyed Berlin fighting with the Russians over it.

    Reagan was Teflon. Bush is like a sponge that gets dirty.

    *of course there were some bad stereotypes in old westerns, but generally the cowboy hero actually represented good values.

  87. You know, speaking of having a different President, even though I’m not a conservative I’d rather have had Reagan by a long shot post 9/11 than Bush. If Reagan had gotten us into Iraq, it would have been at the right time, for the right reasons at least. Possibly even in the last 5 years if Saddam had really made an imminent threat.

    Thirteen years went by after Kuwait, Saddam gaining in strength and reputation as time went by. The commentor would have added another 5 years to make 18 years total time. We just carted off 550 metric tons of yellowcake Saddam had squirreled away. How much more may remain hidden is anyone’s guess. One of Saddam’s scientists led us to where a centrifuge was buried, ready to spin us all into oblivion as soon as it was dug up one opportune day. As far as I’m concerned the No WMD In Iraq meme has been thoroughly discredited. But the commentor would have given Saddam more time when time was all Saddam needed.

    (a comment on a Nytimes post made me think of the following) Bush is accused of “cowboy diplomacy“, but that’s an insult to the good cowboys (of old classic westerns).

    Reagan may sound the same as Bush, but I’d really be surprised if he would closer emulate the type of cowboy hero character values he would have been familiar with and Bush and team are sorely lacking.

    For instance, Good Cowboys don’t shoot first. They don’t start the gunfights. They are reluctant to do battle, but if so, will be the first to go, and ask for volunteers.

    Thirteen years of patience in the face of Saddam’s dangerous truculence but to the commentor this forbearance doesn’t count as a reluctance to do battle. And we have asked for and received many volunteers in this war. The Iraq War is fought entirely by volunteers, the same as in Afghanistan, but folks occasionally like to trot out arguments used against the Vietnam War as if the US had a draft these days. O how they long for those glorious days of blissful abandonment of Vietnam.

    They are the ones acting sensibly and getting the facts when everyone else is out to hang someone on rumor and innuendo. They fight Indians, but they are the first to recognize Indians as individuals. They respect the sacred burial grounds of the Indians where others tromp merrily.

    I recognize the Supreme Leader of Iran is an individual – an individual who seeks a world without me, the commentor or most who read this – an individual who along with his predecessors has been conducting warfare against the US since 1979, even though the US has never had the slightest designs on his nation’s “sacred burial grounds” or any other portions of that godforsaken country called Iran.

    These, in general, are American values to me as well. Being reluctant can get you called a commie, or terrorist these days. If you don’t want to torture someone you’re some sort America hating wimp. Um, screwdriver that.

    There was no reluctance by Saddam – he marched into Kuwait without hesitation and spend the years after his defeat not living up to a single post-war agreement. And there has been little reluctance on the part of Iran “to shoot first,” they having started the gunfight in 1979 – a gunfight that continues to this day with the killing of US soldiers in Iraq. I wouldn’t call the commentor a “Commie” or a “terrorist.” No, the commentor is merely a sympathizer of a terrorist sponsoring regime, what the Soviets termed years ago as a “useful idiot.”

    I suspect if Bush had dealt with Pearl Harbor, we would have managed to botch up WW2. Nazis would still command popularity. We probably would have destroyed Berlin fighting with the Russians over it.

    The Nazis could only command “popularity” in Germany – they were not too popular outside Germany. As for Berlin, it turns out the US didn’t have to fight the Russians over the free part of Berlin, West Berlin. But Germany, including Berlin, is a free democracy today because the Russians knew the US would fight them if they tried to take over Germany. Regretfully, with the world populated by too many like the commentor, the Supreme Leader and other like-minded despots have few such constraints.

  88. Um, it appears this other commentator that is not me, would enjoy bankrupting us with his invasion campaigns on as little pretext as possible. If the justification is as simple preformulation or even thoughts (intention) of “possible” chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, no one is safe.

    At any rate, we go way beyond acting against imminent threat in this context. And that does not act in the security interests of the U.S. Not for the sane anyway.

    I figure you choose to believe Saddam when he said something you agree with, but not perhaps when he said they lost track of munitions and such things. The neocons cherry picked their evidence for the war, that is clear. Here to.

    Yes, the military is a volunteer, in the sense that you sign up voluntarily to go wherever the President sends you whether he’s competent or not. And you can’t quit. And with stop.loss, you can’t even quit when you thought you were going to quit. And after 6 years, a fair number are staying in for career purposes, but if not at least another 4 years is due. And officers get that indefinite reserve status, which means they get out but may be called back. And, of course, the distribution of recruits is from all classes of society. Well, not really. It seems to be skewed towards those with fewer initial opportunities, when you really start looking at it. But pay no attention to that.

  89. Iran has been attacking the US since 1979 and Logren says we need a pretext.

    I expect such nonsense from people who still blather on about “neocons”

    Theirs is a strange world

  90. C’mon, Vince p. I haven’t even gone into risk assessment arguments. You know, odds of getting struck by lightning versus car accidents versus terrorism or threats from Iran and Iraq.

    Neocons arguments are completely out to lunch and can only be cottoned by the blind fools or idiots. I don’t know why I even waste my time.

    Amen-a-jab is no Hitler, Neither is Saddam. Terrorism is puny compared to nuclear standoff in the cold war. Get a clue. Find a useful hobby.

  92. Well, I throw that around like people who throw around “terrorist sympathizer” or some such terms. Who knows what that means? Are you a Democrat, or a liberal or actually phoning in tips to Osama? Unless you mean you object to abbreviations?

  93. Um, it appears this other commentator that is not me, would enjoy bankrupting us with his invasion campaigns on as little pretext as possible. If the justification is as simple preformulation or even thoughts (intention) of “possible” chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, no one is safe.

    At any rate, we go way beyond acting against imminent threat in this context. And that does not act in the security interests of the U.S. Not for the sane anyway.

    I figure you choose to believe Saddam when he said something you agree with, but not perhaps when he said they lost track of munitions and such things. The neocons cherry picked their evidence for the war, that is clear. Here to.

    Yes, the military is a volunteer, in the sense that you sign up voluntarily to go wherever the President sends you whether he’s competent or not. And you can’t quit. And with stop.loss, you can’t even quit when you thought you were going to quit. And after 6 years, a fair number are staying in for career purposes, but if not at least another 4 years is due. And officers get that indefinite reserve status, which means they get out but may be called back. And, of course, the distribution of recruits is from all classes of society. Well, not really. It seems to be skewed towards those with fewer initial opportunities, when you really start looking at it. But pay no attention to that.

    I think the commentor is correct in his estimate that everyone is jeopardized if rogue states nuke up but if civilized, non-hostile states have nuclear capability it should not cause the commentor as much worry. Does he think that India or Pakistan is a threat to the US? IF they have threatened the US with extinction I have not heard about it.

    The commentor seems to believe that Saddam mislaid nuclear fuel centrifuges and 550 metric tons of yellowcake. He should keep in mind that Saddam had a habit of shooting underlings who dared to displease him. It seems naive to believe these items would have been misplaced by Saddam. Or perhaps the commentor is of the opinion that the US should have waited for Saddam to use these devices before taking action. Either way I do not agree.

    The justification for toppling Saddam is at the Whitehouse website. The Congressional authorization is on record too, an authorization that the Congress has been free to rescind at any time. The commentor might also want to read an earlier law passed by Congress and signed by then-President Clinton which called for Saddam’s toppling.

    http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.4655.ENR:

    The commentor might want to see what the Clintons, John Edwards, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger had to say about Saddam before the dreaded neocons and Bush took over and made everybody hate Saddam and want to topple him. The commentor should keep in mind that all these opinions were offered way before Bush ran for President. A nice thing about the internet is that it all but obliterates the old ‘Memory Hole’ that folks used to count on to cover their tracks.

    http://www.freedomagenda.com/iraq/wmd_quotes.html

    A question for the commentor: Does he think the Congress, the Clintons, Albright, Edwards and Berger were neocon cherry pickers?

    Finally, I’m still not understanding the commentor’s point about the lack of military volunteers. There’s no draft anymore. No one is in the military that didn’t want to go into the military – so what is the commentor trying to imply? And I think the commentor is again in error on some basic facts. Would the commentor provide some links to where he gets his information, especially that folks in the military are “skewed towards those with fewer initial opportunities”? I believe the commentor is wrong in that assertion but I would be willing to examine fresh evidence.

  94. Well, I’m having trouble posting again.

    I’ll try increments:

    ~

    Well, Bush once opposed nation building and extending armies around the world. Seems he changed his mind.

    As a candidate for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush insisted that, if elected, he would not allow U.S. military forces to engage in “nation building.”

    No way would he follow President Bill Clinton’s foray into nation building…

  96. Then there’s Dick Cheney on the merit of occupying Iraq in the first Gulf War.

    “The bottom line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: not very dam* many.”

    Guess he changed his mind too.

    If saying one thing and doing another is a crime, your guys are guilty also.

    If Bush and Cheney feel different today, does it really mean that much? I don’t think so.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/09/28/cheney-in-92-how-many-_n_66305.html

  97. As to military volunteerism. Numbers really don’t tell the whole story. The elite and wealthy, regardless of what motive some of them choose to come into the military (patriotism, boredom, adventurism, political aspirations?), are definitely freely choosing.

  98. W h e r e a s, yes, one can argue all others choose freely, but a 19 year old young man with a high school education with a newly p r e g n a n t young wife looks at that safe p a y c h e c k, housing, and the healthcare more like an a d d i c t looks at c r a c k. Is he really thinking much about riding in an a r m o r e d p e r s o n n e l carrier 9 months later hoping his head doesn’t get b l o w n off? Virtually, the bottom would drop out if the military wasn’t propping up r e c r u i t m e n t with all sorts of incentives from education to r e e n l i s t m e n t b o n u s e s. Next to none of this stuff is meant to appeal to the well-off. They are d a n g l i n g the candy for those with lesser resources.

    Well, you can get someone like McCain or Bush by letting them fly jets. There’s that.

    I don’t know, maybe that’s fair. What do you think? Sounds a bit sketchy to me.

  99. This post starts at 6:05am and follows in parts: had trouble posting.

    Still not sure what word it didn’t like but it was in that last part apparently

  100. Off topic, but I’m about done posting anyway. I think McCain & Obama are both supporting a surge of some sort in Afghanistan.

    Realistically, given the terrain and the border situation, I’m having trouble imagining troops keeping boots on say, a remote mountain pass, and since the border is already problematic…

    It doesn’t exactly sound promising.

  101. I went to the commentor’s first link which turned out to be a Helen Thomas article. The problem with articles in which writers’ claim so and so said this and so and so said that is that one usually has no public record with which to check the writer’s assertions. More than once I’ve been disappointed in the accuracy of a writer on those occasions when I’ve been able to check the public record against a particular writer’s assertions.

    A case in point is a recent Congressional hearing in which Doug Feith testified. Dana Milbank of the Washington post wrote an article which was highly critical of the behavior of the Republican committee members and Mr. Feith during the hearing. But when I viewed the video of the complete hearing I found an event very different than what Milbank described.

    Both the highly critical article and the C-Span video of the hearing are linked to at the Feith website so that readers can judge for themselves. I read the article and viewed the video and found the article to be grossly misleading.

    http://www.dougfeith.com/index.html

    Ms. Thomas’s article refers to remarks Bush allegedly made about Mogadishu – not Iraq. I think the readers can easily understand how then-candidate Bush’s alleged opinion about Mogadishu, even if accurate in Ms. Thomas’s characterization, has little to do with President Bush’s actions taken in a post-9/11 Iraq many years later. Yet many unsuspecting readers, perhaps ignorant of the historical sequence and trusting in the veracity of Ms. Thomas, will be swayed by such trivia, just like the commentor.

    So, in my judgement, the Helen Thomas article linked to by the commentor proves nothing except that Helen Thomas apparently dislikes Bush and his administration.

    In the other link posted by the commentor we find Cheney talking about various factors which led President Bush’s father to leave Saddam in power after Saddam’s defeat during the Kuwait invasion. All the Cheney remarks prove is that the US is institutionally reluctant to commit lives to “nation-building,” an understandable sentiment with which I happen to agree. At that time no one had any way of knowing that Saddam would reward such leniency with 13 years of treachery. And these remarks by Cheney were uttered before 9/11, an event which changed(or should have changed) certain paradigms concerning the ‘diplomacy-without-teeth-and-hope-for-the-best’ approach to hostile rogue nations.

    I suspected the commentor’s earlier assertion that folks in the military are “skewed towards those with fewer initial opportunities” would be unable to be verified by any hard data. He glosses over his lack of confirming data with an awkward, self-serving statement: “Numbers really don’t tell the whole story.” Such hedges are common when apologizers are asked to provide proof for their misconceptions.

    The commentor chose instead to dream up a hypothetical in which he compares military recruits to crack addicts. The commentor goes on to decry the offering of benefits by the US military as if furnishing benefits to service members is some kind of scam. This is his proof, such as it is. I find such cracked equivocations to be common among the apologizer set.

  102. But you can’t really refute the analogy I see. If you could, you would of done so. I guess I made a mistake using “crack” I guess that was a bit over the top. A scam is the wrong term; more like bribes. You imply “scam” because it makes your argument better, but not truthful. No sense repeating what I wrote, I can always quote it when you twist it for your own purposes.

    Also, if a study doesn’t ask the right questions, it’s a bit faulty is it not? Doesn’t matter how thoroughly it sifts through data. Studies are wrong every day. It’s actually how science makes progress. They are wrong a lot. Eventually, there is bulk of studies that show mostly one thing or another. One study does not a fact make.

    Otherwise, I see you obfuscate another issue. Of course, when Bush criticized nation building in the Balkans, he was only meaning that particular instance was wrong. How ridiculous is that assumption? But he does nation building in a complex situation as well, it’s then the right thing. Bah hah. You can’t hide this second bald faced distortion either.

    Did they or did they not flip flop? It’s a simple question.

    By the way: At that time no one had any way of knowing that Saddam would reward such leniency with 13 years of treachery.

    Maybe you should extend that courtesy to a few others. That of not knowing the future. You think, little buddy?

  103. BTW, I warn you, that you can argue until you’re blue in the face if you wish to about the fairness of our current recruitmentment.

    Even though a draft/lottery system is unarguably fair and fairer than the current by far. (Well, that is, when there isn’t corruption and favors.) You might as well argue the sun isn’t hot.

    Whether it’s the best way to run the military is another question. But you know, if you’re going to send people to die, you want to consider fairness. Or maybe you don’t! We’ll see.

    Also, get back to me soon about the bush cheney stuff.

  104. But you can’t really refute the analogy I see. If you could, you would of done so. I guess I made a mistake using “crack” I guess that was a bit over the top. A scam is the wrong term; more like bribes. You imply “scam” because it makes your argument better, but not truthful. No sense repeating what I wrote, I can always quote it when you twist it for your own purposes.

    The commentor now says that military benefits are “bribes.” I would agree that military benefits are in the nature of incentives, just as most other large employers offer incentives to attract prospective employees. It’s another clear example of the ingrained double standard so common to the apologizers – in their viewpoint the US military is not allowed to offer incentives that are common to any employer attempting to attract workers.

    Also, if a study doesn’t ask the right questions, it’s a bit faulty is it not? Doesn’t matter how thoroughly it sifts through data. Studies are wrong every day. It’s actually how science makes progress. They are wrong a lot. Eventually, there is bulk of studies that show mostly one thing or another. One study does not a fact make.

    I have no idea what “studies” the commentor mentions. I certainly did not mention any but merely asked for some hard evidence that military personnel are “skewed towards those with fewer initial opportunities.” I’m afraid we will all wait for a very long time for such evidence to be cited by the commentor to support the commentor’s misconceptions about the make-up of US military personnel. The commentor parrots false assertions and then glosses over these false beliefs when challenged, which is standard operating procedure for the apologists.

    Otherwise, I see you obfuscate another issue. Of course, when Bush criticized nation building in the Balkans, he was only meaning that particular instance was wrong. How ridiculous is that assumption? But he does nation building in a complex situation as well, it’s then the right thing. Bah hah. You can’t hide this second bald faced distortion either. Did they or did they not flip flop? It’s a simple question.

    I don’t deny Bush as a candidate before 9/11 might have spoken against nation-building in the Balkans and Mogadishu but all that changed, as it should change for all of us, in the face of 9/11. In fact I rather admire President Bush for changing his approach after presented with such a horribly large atrocity as was 9/11, especially since that infamous event also changed my own mind about the foreign policies of the past.

    By the way: At that time no one had any way of knowing that Saddam would reward such leniency with 13 years of treachery.

    Maybe you should extend that courtesy to a few others. That of not knowing the future. You think, little buddy?

    But what “few others” could the commentor talking about? Courtesies can always be extended but not to the extent of putting the whole of America in jeopardy.

  105. …Yes, yes, sending non-U.S citizen immigrants and soldiers on food stamps…Hmm.

  108. Yes, the military is about national service to the country. I’m glad you think it is like a corporation. That’s sarcasm.

  109. BTW, I warn you, that you can argue until you’re blue in the face if you wish to about the fairness of our current recruitmentment.

    The commentor keeps mentioning the unfairness of military recruitment but never offers any facts or data to justify his opinion. Perhaps recruitment policy IS unfair – if it is I would appreciate some facts to mull over. Having seen military recruitment firsthand I have observed no unfairness in any aspect of it, but anecdotal evidence is the weakest of proofs – I was but one person in an immense organization. Unfairness could have easily happened without my knowledge. But I can’t change my opinion without something other than another opinion to go on – there has to be some kind of reality involved, something more tangible than unsubstantiated argument.

  110. …Yes, yes, sending non-U.S citizen immigrants and soldiers on food stamps…Hmm.
    corrections: soldier families on food stamps.
    Well, see my post above your current one about the military.
    Yes, the military is about national service to the country. I’m glad you think it is like a corporation. That’s sarcasm.

    The military is definitely not a corporation but it is an employer and it seems unfair to deny the military the same right to recruit employees as is extended to other employers.

    The commentor has thrown out a couple of phrases, “non-U.S citizen immigrants and soldiers on food stamps,” but not to the extent of offering any point. Even mere opinion is preferable to cryptic, unexplained remarks.

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