Somebody asserted on another thread that helping real people now was absolutely (i.e. exempt from the usual weighing of options to see which is likely to do the most good and least evil) more important than helping hypothetical people in the future. I think it will suffice to recycle my rebuttal of that argument:
That is not the complaint: your statement was indeed referring to the “lie” that “everyone” on the left was saying that “everyone [on the left] supports the troops”, unless you can point to all here opposing the war saying that “all the left supports the troops”, the only conclusion is that what you are saying is not true. No one was saying that “everyone [on the left] supports the troops”, just you. To say that the left is lying in this context requires that someone here was proposing that war opponents are like a monolith.
If you’re talking about things like making sure the troops have armor and the best equipment, we are in agreement, and the people who raise their voices to those ends deserve to be commended. But look at it from the standpoint of our soldiers in Iraq: “Wow, those people back home are really behind me. They want to help me stay alive .” Contrast that with "Illegitimate war. War based on lies. War for oil., etc.
You’re right. And I will. I have no doubt that there are people who vehemnently oppose the war and/or the administration and who love their country and support the young men and women we’ve sent to Iraq. I stand with those that I describe in wanting the best for our country and wanting the best from it. It is incumbent upon all of us to monitor our country and it’s leaders and to actively attempt to make sure it lives up to it’s promise. This transcends party and politics, and we should all remember that.
I simply ask that we pay attention to the means we employ and that each of us acknowledge that our actions have consequences, intended and unintended.
To the first part of your paragraph, I guess the assumptions you are working under are that Bush and Cheney can be brought down and that Hastert (?) and would do things differently. I would submit that a more effective plan for bringing the troops home is to go after congress. It’s easy for Bush top ignore even the largest anti-war rally. But what if there were rallys in each congressman’s district? It seems it would be much easier to get each congressman and senator to accept the will of their constituency if it was large enough.
It’s about numbers. A couple hundred thousand people at the Washington Mall is a drop in the bucket and easy to ignore, especially when their message is fractured, garbled, and so obviously driven by hate of an individual. It seems that a better strategy ids to find out when your congressman is in his district and march on his office. If oyu have enough people and he wants to stay in office, he will vote your way. If you don’t have enough people, you probably won’t get your way. Such is democracy.
With the exception of you, and one or two others, I feel the same way, which is why I am so appreciative of posters like you and cosmosdan, who I often disagree with. I’ll try harder to follow your example.
I don’t know. For me, I am intent in not making the troops pay for the mistakes of our leaders or those who elected them.
Translation : Der Trihs is right; I have no arguement, so I’ll make a meaningless comment.
Probably easier; it lends extra credibility to the “the Crusaders are coming to crush Islam” argument.
I always wonder why this can’t get through. “You’re endangering the troops!” By trying to get them home? “Yes!”
Sort of like the intelligence debate.
“They all believed the intelligence!”
Bush had access to different intelligence, and none of it supported his assertions.
“Yet they believed!”
Okaaay.
To crassly politicize a Veterans’ Day celebration takes huge balls. :wally The specific comments made on the occasion are delusional. :rolleyes:
Democracy ain’t for sissies. There are no perfectly innocent choices, save for those under tyranny who are helpless to affect decisions. We choose, therefore we are not innocent, we can choose, therefore we are free.
Is it possible that an enemy can be encouraged by my dissent? Yes, its possible. It is also possible that same enemy might pause to wonder, might pause to ask himself how it is that I live in a nation where dissent is permitted, even honored. And he does not. He might ask himself how it is that I have freedoms that he has not.
Truth is propaganda, in its highest, most rarified form. Only the brave and the free dare use truth as propaganda.
The thing is, the people who are opposed to giving the troops the best equipment available, are the ones who are continuing to lie about why we’re over there and what we’re accomplishing. If we’re going to fix the problems of equiping our troops, we have to get past the obstacle of those who would claim that there’s no problem with our troops equipment. The best way to do this is to illustrate all the other ways they’ve lied about this conflict, so that people won’t believe their further lies about this conflict.
I also have enough respect for the intelligence of our troops to expect them to understand the difference between, “I don’t like the war or the guy who started it,” with “I don’t like the guys who are fighting it.” I have trouble believing there are that many people who are that stupid in any walk of life.
The problem I’m having with you is that every single other thing you’ve said in this thread stands in contradiction to what you just wrote.
No, I doubt we could actually topple the administration. But we can hamstring it so that it lacks political pull, and can’t continue to make the sort of mistakes that got us into this mess in the first place, or that make the price we’re all paying for those mistakes higher and higher, every single day.
A nitpick, but Senators are congressmen. And you think that the people in congress aren’t paying attention when protestors march on the White House? You think they aren’t paying very careful attention to every poll that measures Bush’s spiraling popularity, and weigh their support for his policies accordingly?
Agreed. Hence, the protesting.
Let’s get down to the brass tacks. Bush is claiming that his oppononents are “re-writing history” and doctoring the facts. The FACTS say that Bush has been the one re-writing history and doctoring the facts all along. The reason we are all even talking about it is, Bush did it. It’s simple and it’s standard Bush/Rove strategy. Lie like a son of a bitch, and then lay the whole sordid mess at someone else’s feet, through the use of yet another lie.
A minor and respectful nitpick, if you will.
Even the most brain-dead don’t “oppose” giving our troops the best equipment. The colossal blunder was in believing that such would not be necessary, that the Iraqi people would shower us with garlands and offer us their daughters. After the cakewalk, the Victory Dance, and then home. The only special equipment needed would be dancing shoes.
Yeah they believed (at first), because the data was already cooked. All references to any doubts or reservations had already been expunged and “sanitized”. In short, they were also lied to.
Saying a falsehood is a lie. Deliberately withholding information to “tilt” the story in a certain direction to deliberatley mislead is also a lie. SO let’s not get into any semantic crap about what is a lie, or what is the meaning of is. In doctoring and changing the tone and content of the reports, Bush was lying to Congress. Just like he lied to the rest of us. Before you all ask for a cite, it’s already posted in the Pit.
Well, yes and no. The blunder was, indeed, the optimistic assumption that the armor wouldn’t be needed. But remember who the blunderer was: Bush the Infalliable would indeed oppose supplying the troops with armor, if the alternative were admitting he’d screwed up by not giving it to them in the first place.
I keep noticing that you can’t actually defend the actions of El Presidente, but contiually seem to imply that we’re helping the terrorists kill Americans if anyone so much as criticizes him. Basically, you don’t have an arguement. You just keep harping on the fact that we must support the troops.
News Flash, buddy.
WE DO SUPPORT THE TROOPS!
I don’t know how many times we can state that before you get that through your thick shull of yours. Now that we’ve established that, let’s move on.
In case your reading comprehension issues persist, I’ll break this down to make it very simple.
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Bush(which I’ll use as a stand-in for the adminstration) started a war for reasons that have turned out to be almost entirely false.
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There is reason to believe he knew that such reasons have been false.
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Despite having all the time in the world to plan this endevour, he has been mindnumblingly incompetant at both planning and execution.
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Because of this, our troops are in danger.
And your suggestion is: Do nothing. It puts the troops in more danger.
Exactly how does people pointing out the obvious truth that this was a disaster of Bush’s making, that is continually getting troops killed,and thus should be halted before it gets any worse, make it the fault of the people who are pointing out the flaws and not the guy who actually planned and executed the operation despite warning that it likely would be a disaster.
Or to use an analogy.
Bush runs a mining company. Bush decides to dig a gold mine in a moutain, he’s told that the moutain doesn’t have any gold and that it will take a lot of money to do so and a lot of miners will die due to hostile conditions. He does so anyway, and lo and behold, there’s no gold, so the mine loses money and miners die. The families of the miners start protesting, saying that their miners dying for nothing.
And you tell the familes to shut up, because by criticizing bush, they’re hurting the company and causing more miners to die because they see their familes as undercutting them. As opposed to the great sucess the company would be if the familes kept praising bush for sending miners to their death for no good reason.
Well Der Trihs, I can see his point regarding you, but I’m not ignoring your position either, IF you are specific, the corrupting nature of an unjust war does change the nature of some soldiers, like Nietzsche said: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”. At home, we have the sorry spectacle of many defenders of the administration supporting torture now; meanwhile in Iraq, reports are surfacing that are a carbon copy of the El Salvador civil war: (Cheney and others have said before that the plan for Iraq is like the one applied to El Salvador, heaven help us)
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000315.php#more
Even on this example, I can see that not all soldiers are there for evil, but a number of monsters are cropping out; bring our soldiers home before we turn into the monster.
I don’t think Bush’s attempt to squelch investigation into pre-war manipulation of intelligence is either delusional or particularly ballsy. It looks to me like a defensive maneuver.
Now that the Senate Intelligence committee is actually launching Phase II of the investigation, and a lot of congressional Republicans are distancing themselves from the President, he needs to get the meme out there that accusing him of wrongdoing is automatically a Very Bad Thing. (I wonder if it’s also a preliminary CYA strategy against potential political embarrassment if public demand makes it necessary to draw down US troops while the Iraq insurgency is still strong. Presumably the line would be “Well, I wanted to keep supporting the troops and winning the war, but those mean old America-hating traitors kept undermining me!”)
I think this attack is probably too little too late, however, given the current trends in public opinion:
Heh. When Bush had popular majorities expressing approval for him and his policies, Bush supporters cited that as an example of how ordinary people were clearer-sighted and more in touch with the facts than those Bush-haters on the left.
Now that public opinion has swung the other way, all of a sudden the Bush supporters are dismissing the ordinary people as a bunch of ignorant boobs incapable of “intelligent discussion” of the war buildup.
I think a more probable explanation is that the public started out, not surprisingly, believing what their leaders told them, and began changing their minds as more facts came out.
Here is yet another call to BUSH, to support the troops.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/10/iraq.intel/index.html
Prewar CIA report doubted claim that al Qaeda sought WMD in Iraq
A January 2003 CIA report raised doubts about a claim that al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons – assertions that were repeated later by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in making the case for the invasion of Iraq.
CNN on Thursday obtained a CIA document that outlined the history of the claim, which originated in 2002 with a captured al Qaeda operative who recanted two years later.
The CIA report appears to support a recently declassified document that revealed the Defense Intelligence Agency thought in February 2002 that the source, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was lying to interrogators.
Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, this week released the DIA report in alleging the administration cited faulty intelligence to argue for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Thanks again. I avoided that thread since, based solely on the title, I expected it to quickly devolve into all noise, no signal. I’ll take a gander.
For clarity, I’m not looking for information about “cooked” intelligence, as I’ve read enough of that. I’m just looking for a “statement of purpose” about the Phase I and Phase 2 Intelligence reports. For instance, a specific quote that outlines that the committee was “directed NOT to look at” certain topics. Or, a quote that says what Phase II’s purpose is.
This has already come up in conversation for me; Bush said something to the effect of “The reports found no manipulation of the intelligence”. Which is true, I suppose, if only another example of spinning. That is, if Phase I was only an analysis of the intelligence itself and did not examine why it was faulty, then of course no manipulation was found: that wasn’t even part of the questions being asked!
Nice…as a computer scientist, I appreciate (in a sick sort of way) the recursive nature of the tactic. Manipulate the information; then, state that there’s no findings of manipulation in the investigation…due to manipulation of the stated purpose of the investigation.
Originally Posted by CNN
Prewar CIA report doubted claim that al Qaeda sought WMD in Iraq
WASHINGTON (CNN) – A January 2003 CIA report raised doubts about a claim that al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons – assertions that were repeated later by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in making the case for the invasion of Iraq.
CNN on Thursday obtained a CIA document that outlined the history of the claim, which originated in 2002 with a captured al Qaeda operative who recanted two years later.
The CIA report appears to support a recently declassified document that revealed the Defense Intelligence Agency thought in February 2002 that the source, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was lying to interrogators. … The January 2003 updated version of the report added a key point: “That the detainee was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.” … No such stockpiles turned up after the U.S.-led invasion, and the independent commission investigating al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on New York and Washington found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities. Al-Libi recanted in January 2004 a number of claims he made while in custody, according to the CIA document.