"A War We Just Might Win"

Great Debates
41

Personally, while I don’t find the OP’s piece very compelling, I don’t find this refutation compelling either. Its ironic to me that so many here shape their certainty (not near certainty, but absolute certainty) that the war is lost and no good outcome is possible on such OP Ed type pieces, on the the say so of journalists or of fringe generals…why decrying the same thing in the other side when they do the same with journalists of their own political persuasion or fringe generals who say what THEY want to hear. Both sides pointing at the other sides generals or journalists and dismissing them solely based on the fact that they aren’t saying what they want to hear.
Personally I think its all bunk. Myself, I’m awaiting the word from the guy actually tasked with assessing the situation…a report that, at least in theory we should be seeing in September. Seeing journalists who are supposedly liberal saying we might win the war is, to me, about as compelling as seeing a Republican Senator or Congressman who is suddenly and deeply against the war and is speaking out against the administrations bungling. I want to hear from the experts, not from either some journalist (ANY journalist) or some weasel like dog breathed politician.

I think that on both sides of this issue many people have taken such a position that they simply can’t see any other way than their own. Iraq MUST fail because they have been saying it must, listening to people telling them it must, and watching events unfold in Iraq through the filter of their own perceptions…i.e. everything they see confirms their own position. Anything that doesn’t has to be a distortion, lie or an anomaly that can simply be dismissed as it doesn’t fit with the mantra. The same goes for the other side. Iraq MUST succeed if only the US has the resolve, etc etc. Again its a mantra and no other course is possible, no other conclusion acceptable. The facts all fit because they have been filtered through the mantra (my dad is a perfect example of this thinking), and anything else is, like the other side, a distortion or lie by The Liberal Media™, or its an anomaly that can be dismissed.

For me, I’m going to wait and see what the experts have to say …and make my determination without the help of idiotic journalists or politicians of either stripe telling me what to think.

-XT

42

I strongly second the suggestion that anyone interested in this piece or in the authors of it read the Glen Greenwald post linked to above.

These guys are complete douchebags. Here are some of just the titles of their work, which give an impression of how scathing their criticism of Bush and the war in Iraq has been over time:

O’Hanlon:

“Prepare our Cities for War with Iraq” – December 2002

“A Time for War” – February 2003

“Was the Strategy Brilliant?” – April 2003

“A Relatively Promising Counterinsurgency War: Assessing Progress in Iraq.” October, 2003

Iraq’s Timely Vote – February 2004

A Skeptic’s Case For the Surge – January, 2007

Pollack:

“The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” – September, 2002

“Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq” – December, 2006
Wow, the situation on the ground must really be different to make these two come around to see progress in Iraq.

Do you believe? Say quick if you believe. Clap your hands!

Keep fucking clapping.

43

Just because you don’t avail yourself of the facts, don’t assume that others behave likewise. You could try the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, if you don’t like the summary of the numbers at Daily Kos. Or you could search for any of the vast array of sources on the interweb tubes to find out more information.

Why are you waiting from word from the Bush administration to form an opinion of the matter? Why would you regard the opinion of Bush’s most recent General as unbiased and without agenda? Why are they waiting until September? Why is this still such a head-scratcher for you?

I can see that if you are willing to not think about it, but are just awaiting the most recent update from the Bush administration, that you might not get that other people are more interested in finding out what is actually going on and basing their opinions on that. But you should thus recognize that your disparagement of them is worthless.

I think you should wait another six months to form your opinion. That should be just enough time.

44

More pablum to feed the unwashed – that’s all that’s contained in the OP:

The NYT’s New Pro-War Propaganda

Read that and come back and tell us just how “liberal” these two a-holes were about the war.

45

That’s a nice rhetorical trick, to concede that the GOP has been wrong all along, in order to be ‘balanced’ when you say that the Dems are wrong now (just like you’ve been saying for the past five years).

You were wrong for the past five years. Admitting it now doesn’t make you right this once; it just indicates your judgment on the war has a terrible track record. It’s ‘See, now I finally realize I’ve been wrong all along, so THIS time, when I point my finger at the same people I’ve been pointing it at all along, THIS time, I’m right!’

Not gonna fly. Sorry.

Besides, we’ve been over this ground in whole bunches of threads. We’re going to leave Iraq eventually. Things there will continue to get worse until we do. The longer we stay, the worse things will be the year after we go.

Sometimes things are so fucked up that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t un-fuck them.

46

Knowing XT, I suggest you give him six more months after that. And then another six…lather, rinse, repeat.

And to think a couple of years many of us actually congratulated for joining the reality-based community…

47

He left out the part about having to destroy the country before liberating it.

I’ve said for a bit now that Bush should just pull a Nixon and say “We are now going to declare victory and leave.”

48

How many Friedman Units is it going to take, xtisme?

Six years this has been going on, and the goal posts keep moving. The plan is to extend it through the next election, then it’s someone else’s problem.

Notice I didn’t say someone else’s fault. this is George Bush’s and the Republican’s war, and there is no way he can get away from that truth. They got us here, and have no idea what to do now. “Stay the Course”, “Surge”, “Wait until September”, all code words for “We don’t know what the fuck we are doing.”

49

The fact that O’Hanlon and Pollack have been consistently wrong about Iraq in the past doesn’t influence your opinion of how much credence to give their most recent analysis? These guys clearly have never had a very good grasp of the political situation in Iraq or the military challenges we face there, so their opinion on the matter is essentially worthless.

The problem with putting all your faith in General Petraeus is that he’s not merely “the guy actually tasked with assessing the situation”. He’s also “the guy who’s been running the show for the last six months”. When giving an assessment of the situation in Iraq, he’s also giving an assessment of his own performance. Even if he’s a scrupulously honest man (and, at the moment I have no reason to think otherwise) self-audits are unreliable. If you want an honest assessment of a situation it needs to be done by someone with no vested interest in the outcome.

50

Oh, and BTW, for the OP and/or anyone interested in what is really happening in Iraq, you might want to click on a few links in this post of mine.

Note that those are just yesterday’s headlines.

Yep, things couldn’t be rosier in Iraq…in fact, I’d love for any of you still supporting this carnage to take a stroll through what’s left of downtown Baghdad…without a Marine unit or two and gun-ships all around you of course.

Sadly, I’d bet you wouldn’t be posting here again. Or anywhere else for that matter.

51

There are a few problems with this statement.

The opinion on which xtisme is waiting is not a judgment about the war, but the more limited assessment regarding whether the Surge has possibly succeeded or possibly done some good. When that professional assessment has been presented will be the time, in the opinion of xtisme, to determine whether to cut our losses and leave or attempt to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

xtisme, in this thread, is not arguing whether the Iraq war was good or bad, simply that getting worked up over a couple more pundits is useless.

Your contention that General Petraeus is merely one more administration/partisan hack, while I am sure you believe it deeply, does not appear to be the general consensus of most oberservers regardless which position they hold regarding the overall war. (I know there are a few partisan zealots who hold that he is just one more Bush guy, but that is not the general consensus among the majority of watchers.)

They are “waiting until September” because that is when they said they would make the assessment for the Surge. This is not to say that one cannot make one’s own conclusion based on some selection of data, in advance, but since the plan was targeted to September, it is quite possible that a premature assessment will be in error. Anything from a particular operation that is planned for August to the reaching of a critical mass in the alignment of Iraqi allies that is currently unreported or underreported, or a host of other issues could change the situation between now and then.

Do I accept the rosy pictures from the Administration? No.
Do I suspect that there will be a fair amount of spin to make the September report rosier than is justified? Yes.

However, neither of those issues are the ones that xtisme presented and your dismissal is pretty much an attack on a scarecrow.

52

Well, now, Red, that was yesterday! You apparently don’t understand or simply cannot grasp the miraculous properties of The Surge (new! improved!). For one thing, it transformed a couple of relentless cheerleaders for war into “vocal critics” of longstanding. Its kind of like jumping in the Wayback machine and changing your grandfather’s mind. Or something.

But you’re missing the point. Now that this miracle has transpired (Lourdes, eat your Sacred Heart out…), these two critics of the war (yes, they were, see above) have seen the light, that can only mean that there is a light to be seen! It means that a massive conversion of opinion is underway at this very moment! Tomorrow, Cindy Sheehan (a longstanding proponent of the war and fierce supporter of President Bush) will become even more supportive!

The facts aren’t the problem, the problem is our misperception of the facts! Sure, they only have an hours electricity per day, but they don’t have to be afraid of Saddam, they only have to be afraid of everybody else, which is much, much more democratic! The power of life and death doesn’t sit with a despot, but with* everybody*! The milestones, the failures, none of that matters, it is only the will to win that matters! If Custer hadn’t lost his will to victory, he would have kicked Crazy Horse’s ass!

I expect to hear quite soon that persons previously pressing for impeachment are clamoring to rescind that pesky 22nd Amendment, and elect Bush (Praise the Leader!) President for Life.

53

But the OP is about those pundits! It isn’t as though they were dragged in from out of the blue into a thread about Iraq in general. Sam Stone started this thread specifically to debate O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s article arguing that things are rosy in Iraq.

54

Exactly. I will further amplify this part ‘limited assessment regarding whether the Surge has possibly succeeded or possibly done some good’ to include ‘or done any good at all’ as this is a quite probable outcome in itself IMHO.

Exactly. And much more efficiently said than I did. My thanks.

-XT

55

How many more “professional assessments” is it going to take, Tom? How many have come and gone? How many of them were flat-out lies? And finally, why would they be truthful now?

Just look at their latest stunt: U.S. drops Baghdad electricity reports

I mean, really, these people have ZERO credibility with me – and, as their record shows, for very good reasons. So, once again, why give it to them now when all the reality-based news* – or “metrics” to use new speech – coming out of Iraq indicate nothing but a worse clusterfuck than even last year at this time?

ETA: *Again, just read the links I alluded to in my prior post.

56

I think you are misunderstanding my point. I don’t give ANY credence to the position of the journalists in the OP…so no, them being consistently wrong doesn’t influence my opinion of them one way or the other. Zero multiplied by any number still remains zero after all.

I would broaden this to include most if not all journalists…and further, I’m not real keen on taking the opinions for this kind of stuff from politicians either. Especially not now, not when the issues have so polarized the respective camps. I know that you say in your next paragraph that you have some issues with Petraeus, and perhaps they are even valid, but I’ve always respected the man…and I will at least wait until his report comes out before judging it one way or the other. And it will certainly be a major factor in my own continuing assessment of the situation in Iraq.

I can understand though if YMMV on this.

-XT

57

How the hell do you devine that? He says “Its ironic to me that so many here shape their certainty (not near certainty, but absolute certainty) that the war is lost and no good outcome is possible on such OP Ed type pieces, on the the say so of journalists or of fringe generals…” (bolding mine), and then says “Myself, I’m awaiting the word from the guy actually tasked with assessing the situation…” I don’t see any circumscribed discussion of the Surge (and thinking about it further, don’t see how it is particularly relevant to the discussion whether he meant the surge, the war or the past week).

No, he’s doing that and suggesting that other people rely, for their information, on nothing more than pundits who spout baseless opinions that happen to coincide with their own (see the first quote above again).

Well, I hate to be outside of the consensus view regarding the war in Iraq. Perhaps he is a man of deep integrity, but he is simply not in a position to give an unbiased opinion of the matter (see Pochacco’s post above). However, anyone watching for the past six years has plenty of experience with the veracity and quality of information provided by anyone connected with this administration. Frankly, if they don’t say something completely cohesive with the administration, they are kicked over the side.

No, that is the month that Republicans, who are aware of the actual consensus view on the war, started floating as the time to get a report (probably because they were trying to find another way of saying “in six months”). Petraeus has said that September is not a deadline for anything, and has said “Come September, I don’t think we’ll have anything definitive in September (although) certainly we’ll have some indicators on the political side in Iraq.”

Sure. They’re carefully collecting the data. Except see above quote from Petraeus. Really, what channel are you watching for your news?

I’m sure my dismissal was of the idea that we should wait for anything, and that we should expect Petraeus’ report to be some kind of unbiased and agenda-free report. I’m not at all clear what your dismissal is, except to say that it is ignorant of some of the facts.

58

I do not have “issues with Petraeus”. As I say in my post I have no reason to think he’s not an honest man. What I do take issue with is putting faith in self-audits. It’s poor metric even if all parties involved are honorable.

59

This is simply irrelevant to my point.

The OP was based on a claim by a pair of pundits who either did or did not lie about their bona fides as war opponents.
xtisme dismissed both the claims of the pundits and the claims of those opposing the pundits as irrelevant in regards to actual information.
Hentor the Barbarian, attacked xtisme’s position through the filter of the general opinion of the war. (Not a horrible action and one that is commonly used by both opponenets and supporters of the war in numerous threads.)
I simply pointed out that the attack on xtisme’s position in this thread missed its mark.

Challenging any statment of mine based on a view that “this war was a bad idea” or “this adminstration is filled with fools and liars” is rather silly, given that I agree with both positions–however I also prefer that actual discussions be based on the words of the participants and not simply descend into attacks on assumed positions.

60

The pundits of the OP are basing their claims for the war’s “winnability” on the current Surge. The issue was specifically raised regarding the September assessment–based on the Surge.

I was just hoping to keep the thread from being derailed, but that is probably not possible in the current climate with the current participants.