The “some reason” being that it had no bearing on the factuality of Allawi’s assessment. If that’s the best retort you can find to prop up your denial, perhaps it’s time for you to reconsider.
There is no “overlooking” - where do you see that? Which is the “cut and run” crowd you refer to, anyway - the people using the term to try to shut off discussion of any alternative approach, or the people who recognize that the results of the current approach can only worsen?
Yes, there is a reason for the Administration and its supporters, and dupes for that matter, to deny that there is a civil war. If they ever admitted it, the remaining pretexts for keeping our people in the middle of it, threadbare and held by a shrinking minority though they are, disappear.
Based on the poll numbers you’ve ignored, what it will get them is elected. What it will get *us * is a way out of this mess before the Iraq War Memorial gets more names added to it.
Allawi’s statement is not a “fact”, but an opinion. There simply isn’t any objective defintion of what constitutes a civil war. I personally don’t consider it a civil war because the opposition doesn’t control any defined territory. However, the sematic debate about what to call the situation in Iraq is besides the point. Call it whatever you like. The issue at hand is whether the withdrawl of US troops will cause an increase or a decease in the level of violence.
I included that quote from your cite to point out that Allawi had, at the time, political reasons for wanting to portray the conflict in the worst possible light. But even if we put that aside, why is his opinion “fact” and contrary opinion not “fact”? Tell us why you think it’s a civil war, don’t just give us one guy’s opnion.
David Simons: I didn’t mean to imply that Murtha was calling for all US troops to withdraw tomorrow (that is physically impossible), but I can see where you might have read it that way. Change “pulled out tomorrow” to “pulled out as soon as possible” in that post, and my argument is the same. And note that even the majority of Democrats are not calling for that since only 13 of them in the Senate voted for “pull out within 1 year”, which is a longer timeframe than “as soon as possible”.
Of course it could be argued that there is no difference between the positions of Murtha and GW. Both are for leaving Iraq as soon as possible. They just differ and when it will be possible.
The majority of Democratic members of congress don’t support pulling out within a year. It appears that on this point they might differ from a majority of Democratic** voters.**
Didn’t Murtha say he thought it could be done in 6 months? In fact, Kerry floated an “exit by end of '06” proposal a few weeks ago before he put up the “exit by mid '07” proposal last week. So, no, I don’t think you can argue that Murtha and GW have the same plan. As I said above, I think you can argue that the Levin-Reed proposal is the same as Bush’s plan, or that had the L-R proposed passed, and had it been binding, it probably wouldn’t have changed anything.
That does seem to be true, which is all the more puzzling.
Yet you assure us that there is no civil war going on anyway.
If there were a factual reason to believe their presence is actually limiting violence at present, it might be something to discuss.
He’s there and you’re not; how about that? And he’s just an example, really. Have you noticed the correlation among commentators between being there and seeing what’s happening, and thinking that yes, it’s a civil war? Or the one between actually coming up with plausible definitions of “civil war” and concluding that they’re met?
Beltway Blinkers Effect once again, as **David ** points out. There is entirely too much fear of and even respect for the GOP’s lapdog media among them, and its ability to make the “unpatriotic” or “cowardly” or even “crazy” labels stick - all the more reason to look for the next Dem candidate (and probably GOP too) among governors, or at least outside the Washington culture.
Look, I’m not “assuring” you of anything. As I said before, there is no univerally accepted definition of what is and what is not a Civil War. You can call the violence in Ira anything you want, but that doesn’t alter the substance of the debate-- whether the US should get out as fast as physicaly possible, or stay longer until the Iraqi government is able to handle the situation in its own.
Just because you say it’s already a Civil War doesn’t mean that the alleged Civil War couldn’t get a lot worse if we left too soon. Why you insist on getting stuck in a semantic debate instead of focusing on the real issue at hand is beyond me. If you want to debate whether the Iraq situation constitutes a Civil War or not, I suggest you open a different thread. I’m not going to debate that here.
Seems to me that it can much more easily be argued that the alleged ciivil war would be about the same no matter when we leave, which means we could be needlessly wasting the lives of American soldiers by leaving them around to get killed. And I’m sure you’re against wasting the lives of American soldiers, aren’t you?
I trust that everybody here understands that we are arguing about slogans. We might as well rage and rant about whether Winstons do indeed taste good (like a cigarette should) or whether Wonder Bread builds strong bodies. The real question is what are the US’s objectives in, not just Iraq, but in the Middle East in general.
Despite the rhetoric (read rationalizing balderdash) about weapons of mass destruction, freedom and liberal parliamentary democracy, carrying the war on terrorism to its authors, it is pretty apparent that petroleum is at the heart of the US’s involvement in this unhappy and alien land. Our objective, and Europe’s objective, and Japan’s objective, and Australia/New Zealand’s objective, is the establishment of a friendly and stable and effective government in Iraq that will let the Western nations get Sweet Arab Crude at a reasonable price and will serve as a counter weight to the Arab/Islamic impulse to reject ties with outside culture. China and maybe the former and reemerging Soviet Union want the same thing but on terms favorable to them, not us.
The question is just how much the US is willing to pay for access to Middle Eastern oil. Are we willing to maintain an open ended military presence in the region to accomplish our objective? Will the maintenance of a permanent military presence achieve our objective? Clearly the present strategy of invade, occupy and struggle with insurgency is not reaching the end as quickly as some might have expected. Is it time to rethink this “adventure;” to try to figure out how a stable, friendly (or at least compliant) government can be put in control of what is left of the Middle Eastern oil reserves? If it can’t be done, if we have screwed this thing up beyond salvation, should we start thinking about how to best stop the bleeding away of the US’s treasure, military strength and treasure and salvaging what we can?
There is the argument. Forget the slogans. Forget the semantics and the word games. Deal with the problem and find a solution. Any other course is just self-indulgence and partisan posturing.
That’s “AS a cigarette should”, dammit (Yes, I am that old).
Don’t dismiss sloganeering quite so abruptly. It does affect public perceptions in general and election results in particular, and those create the conditions which define those objectives and the strategies to attain them.
Not the only thing, though. Don’t discount the end-of-days Christian religious doctrine influencing many of the current US decisionmakers. For that matter, don’t discount the sincerity of the doctrine of democratization and the belief that everyone must want it more than anything else. That sentiment is deeply rooted in the American tradition.
It’s enough to maintain an oligopsony there, though - having multiple suppliers needing cash to support their struggle against each other is a great way to keep the prices down and the supplies high, or at least it had been in recent decades. The main purpose of GW1 as I understand it was to keep Saddam from controlling too much of the world’s oil supply - Iraq’s, Kuwait’s, and SA’s combined.
Now, though, there’s a real danger that the Iranian regime will do so instead, by controlling the nascent Shiite theocracy in Iraq. US/Western objectives, among the list of the attainable ones, just might be to help establish zones of control (okay, proto-states) in what’s left of Iraq, each with its own ethnic group and its own oil supply, and each with its own need for cash that can’t quickly be met any other way. I do believe we have to help partition the place accordingly, and help that end the civil war. If not, we’ll simply have to find a way to deal, from weakness, with the winners - and their leaders in Tehran.
The term ‘Cutting and Running’ is a distraction to keep people looking away from the fact that Iraq is about a President who created a false emergency to get us into a war with a country that he never intended to leave. Because the war gives him special “emergency” powers that Bushco is using to try and usurp power away from the legislative and judicial branches. Like looking at bank records, data mining phone information, and tapping lines without going before a court with a record saying who you’re looking at, what the probable cause to invade their privacy is, telling how you will invade that privacy. And then letting a judge decide if you have a case or if you are abusing your power.
Never mind the 12 or so permanent bases that have been built in Iraq, or the billion dollar embassy, the biggest in the world. It’s not even so much about controlling (limiting) the flow of oil from the Middle East. The crybaby squealing about Cutting and Running is an attempt to keep the focus “over there” so that people don’t see a potential neutering of the constitution “over here.” It’s harder to build an empire based on a democratic republic than a well neutered republic. That can be done in part if the opponents of the neoconservatives are set up, blackmailed, spied upon, and seemingly blocked out of nowhere before they can carry out their opposing strategies.
If The War on Terror™ ends, then what happens to special powers, hmmm? Without Iraq, it’s harder to keep the fascade up during an undeclared war. The GOP wants to keep the focus on the Democrats and Iraq, not some of Bush’s great successes.
This is likely a good part of what Rove means. The peace treaty with the North included commitments by the US to provide military assistance to the South in the event of an invasion from the North. So the US pulled out, the North took a couple of years to rebuild its military, and then invaded. Congress, controlled by Democrats, looked the the other way.
I’m betting some Democrats are willing to repeat the scenario in Iraq in the same way it went down in Viet Nam - pull out, wait for the country to be invaded or merely descend into chaos, and ignore it because they are busy patting each other on the back for driving the President out of office.
And Democrats like Kerry are charter members of the party of proactively cutting and running - he voted against the first Gulf War.
Which, IMO, makes him either too stupid, or too big a moral coward to come anywhere near the Oval Office.
Nixon wasn’t driven out of office, he resigned in disgrace because of his own misdeeds. If you’re talking about Bush, he isn’t going to be driven from office.
However, none of the Democrats are proposing a cut-off of future aid to Iraq if it is needed.
While I’ve always been puzzled by Kerry’s vote against the first Gulf War, I find the concept of “proactively cutting and running” to be an absurdity.
I don’t think there is any difference. And you are correct that Bush will finish out his term. I was referring mostly to the hopes of the more excitable types in the Democratic party.
I don’t recall any Dems announcing that this is what they would do when the US pulled out of Viet Nam either. Certainly the circumstances will be different, in all likelihood - no major scandal like Watergate to cripple a President and his successor.
He guessed wrong. He thought Gulf War I would be like Viet Nam, and that the war in Iraq would be like Gulf War I.
Generals are often accused of preparing to fight the last war. Kerry was never a general, thank God, but this is a pretty clear example of that.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
I’m betting some Democrats are willing to repeat the scenario in Iraq in the same way it went down in Viet Nam - pull out, wait for the country to be invaded or merely descend into chaos, and ignore it because they are busy patting each other on the back for driving the President out of office.
Thanx to W, what you are describing is now Iraq’s best-case scenario. Every conceivable scenario that involves us staying would be even worse.
Which would have been the right decision, and how would it constitute “cutting and running”? How can you cut and run from a conflict you have not yet entered?
