No. I figure the nations and organizations that have nukes aren’t going to give them to suicide bombers if it means their destruction, nor will they be able to afford to tolerate the cultivation of such an individual.
I see no reason to believe that nations will give them to suicide bombers at all. Contrary to right wing paranoid fantasies, nations don’t give such powerful weapons to such fanatical, unreliable people. As for smaller organizations, they will likely not believe we CAN destroy them; we certainly won’t be able to by military force.
Okay, Scylla, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the People’s Republic of China decides to give PETA a free nuclear warhead and they blow up New York City. Let’s think about what happens next: If John McCain is President, we wipe out PETA and declare war on China. If Hillary Clinton is President, we wipe out PETA and declare war on China. If Ralph Nader is President, we wipe out PETA and declare war on China.
Face facts, unless you’ve become totally disconnected from reality, you know that it would make no difference who was President. FDR declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor. Bush declared war on Afghanistan after 9/11. And both of them had overwhelming bipartisan support.
So can we take “what do we do after a nuclear terrorist attack?” off the table - there’s no debate to be had there. So the real issues are “who’s more likely to prevent a nuclear attack in the first place?” and “who’s more likely to run a war effectively?”
Do I have to point out where Bush falls on the issues of preventing terrorist attacks and capturing terrorist leaders afterwards?
Now K-----, er, RTF, I had this exact discussion with you personally sitting on the couch at Anita’s prior to the war, and my position then was just as I’ve stated it now: If we are going to do this (invade Iraq), it’ll be a 15-20 year (or more) commitment. Are you telling me you don’t remember? As I recall, the discussion between us got quite…heated, as it’s prone to do between two people who despise each others politics but are adult enough to keep the debate civilized when talking in person. 
So can I take it that this is an admission that I won’t see any BrainGlutton or Der Trihs style wailing “The whole world hates us now! Boo hoo!” from you? What other countries or organizations think of us is not important, as long as they realize that when we set out to do something, we stick with it until the bitter end. We’re in the unique position that the world needs us. You think that’s hubris? It might be, I admit it, but I also see America as the lynchpin that holds the whole thing together. Economically, militarily and socially, the world revolves around the USA. That puts awesome responsibility on the US to use that wisely (which we haven’t always done), but it also gives us an awful lot of power and influence. If we waffle, if we set out on a course of action and then abandon it when it gets tough, then the whole world suffers from the uncertanty.
I think you miss the lesson of Vietnam. We could have easily won that war, if we didn’t fall into the trap of refusing to fight it full bore. We waffled, we previcated, we weaseled. We had no goal except “not to lose”, and in taking that approach, we insured that we would lose. War needs to be one of two things: Something you fight to the end, or something you don’t start at all. You can argue that we shouldn’t have started this war at all, and while it’s not my position, I’d admit that you would have a strong argument. All of that is a moot point now. The war has started, we’re stuck with it, the ONLY option is to see it through to, as I said above, the bitter end.
One thing that you and I agree on is that the Bush administration has mishandled the war. And I don’t think that things will get markedly better in the next 21 months. But I think they will get a little better. Upthread, a poster mentioned that comparisons to Germany or Japan post WWII were spurious because Germany and Japan had been crushed flat prior to our occupation. That is an excellent point. We’re not close to that point in Iraq yet, but 4 or 5 years from now we will be. The civil war as it exists in Iraq now is not infinitely sustainable, it can’t be. It’ll last longer than it should, thanks to the poison of religious fanaticism, but people can’t live in a war zone like this indefinitely. There will come a point when the violence between the factions does what we can not and will not do: it will “crush the country flat”. At that point, reconstruction will become possible. Like I said, I have always thought this will take upwards of a decade to happen.
If we left tomorrow, the smoldering civil war would erupt into a bonfire. As bad as the casualty figures are now, they’d grow worse by an order of magnitude, and it wouldn’t end until one side or the other or the other had exterminated the others. You want to talk about genocide? There it is, and I’d bet on the Shi’a coming out on top, with Iraq becoming a client state to Iran. That would be an unmitigated disaster for not just the US, but for the west as a whole. Sure, we’d be out of it, but the death toll would climb into the millions, and what happens afterwards? We broke this situation, that means we bought it. We OWN it. The only moral choice at this point is to ride it out. It’s going to cost us money and lives, but if we run now, we’re condemning the people of Iraq to a hell of our own creation, in the name of political expediency, and what comes out the other side will be worse for us than the cost of sticking. We would do well to remember the words of the Duke of Wellington: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”
This president’s one great strength is also his one great weakness: He won’t quit. Unfortunately, with this man, his stubbornness means that he won’t adapt to changing realities very well. I would hope that our next president has Bush’s dogged determination coupled with a lot of common sense and a willingness and ability to realize that changing tactics to meet new situations is not a sign of weakness.
Internet shorthand for “The fucking article” as in RTFA; “Read the fucking article”
Your theory is that with a continued U.S. troop presence, the violence can not be sustained, will reach a bottoming-out point, and things will improve; without a U.S. presence, the violence will grow worse, but will be sustained until one group has annihilated the other two?
I see no reason to believe that.
That’s right, I don’t. I don’t remember the content of a single political conversation I’ve had at a Dopefest; I just remember that every now and then I’d get suckered into one, but I inevitably regretted it within a few minutes if I did for this reason: what I was likely thinking while you were expounding was, “How do I get out of this debate, and back into the party?” 
But here online, one can put one’s best arguments forward, in their full complexity. (Not to mention, we can read and respond when we’re not missing out on a party by doing so.) Did you make that case here? Because the obvious question would have been, “Why would it be worth a 15-20 year involvement to get rid of a single tinhorn dictator who represents little if any threat to us?” And I can’t imagine what rebuttal you could have had that would have convinced anyone.
The Feynman question, “What do you care what other people think?” is always a good one to ask. Sometimes there are clear reasons to care what other people think, but IMHO it has to be something more substantive than “our enemies will get an emotional lift from doing X,” or “our allies will be unhappy with us if we do X.”
I fail to see the virtue of that, unless it’s clear that sticking it out to the bitter end will produce an outcome that will make future sacrifices worthwhile.
In Iraq, not only is that not at all clear (rather, given our steady regress over the past four years, what we likely have to look forward to is more of the same), but it’s not even clear what we’re sticking with to the bitter end.
I agree with this. I just draw different implications. By getting bogged down and wearing out our military in Iraq, we have put ourselves in a position where we have no reserve capacity for dealing with other crises that might come up.
If the world relies on us, then we might want to get our butts out of Iraq so we can be there if the world needs us somewhere else.
What’s ‘waffling’ about this? We’re into Year Five of this war, and we’ve realized that conditions in Iraq have gotten steadily worse under our occupation. We’re making a considered decision, based on a four-year track record, that staying isn’t doing us, Iraq, or the world any good. That’s not ‘waffling;’ that’s reconsidering in the light of a ton of evidence.
That makes no sense at all, in light of why we were there.
Sure, we could have bombed North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, and then done the same to Viet Cong strongholds in the South. But the reason why we were there wasn’t to conquer territory in a total-war fashion; we had no interest in subjugating Vietnam, killing all the menfolk, and using the women as we saw fit. We went there to rescue the South Vietnamese from Communism; we were fighting for a humanitarian purpose. Kinda like now, when our primary purpose for remaining in Iraq is to rescue the Iraqi people from the very violence we opened the door to by invading.
And if you go to war for humanitarian reasons, that means that if you just start butchering everyone who looks at you cross-eyed when things get tough, you have lost.
How?
When you’re there to protect someone, that’s how it works.
I think that stems more from the relation of the South Vietnamese people to their government than anything else, but that’s neither here nor there. The only way we could have gone on offense (above and beyond Nixon’s bombing of the North) would have been to invade North Vietnam, a Soviet ally. That would have involved risks that few in the U.S. were interested in taking on. But even if we had, what would that have gotten us? A situation much like the one we’re in now. (Remember how we were told back in 2003 that the Iraqi insurgency wouldn’t be anything like that in Vietnam, because there was no equivalent in Iraq to North Vietnam behind the VC, and the Soviets behind them in turn.)
Thanks. But you see my argument here too: that if you’re fighting in a country for the ostensible benefit of the inhabitants of that country, it limits the sort of war you can justifiably fight.
What end? When we are forced to choose between reducing our troop strength because we literally don’t have enough healthy troops to keep fighting with the same numbers, or going to a draft?
There’s little if any reason to suppose the likelihood of a worthwhile end, so why stick it out to the bitter end? Why burn more lives and limbs just to get to a worse end state than the one we’re in now?
V-E Day was May 8, 1945; V-J day was August 15, 1945; V-I day was April 9, 2003.
We’re now in 1949, on the WWII timeline.
But by our 2003 reckoning, it shouldn’t have ever gotten anywhere close to this scale in the first place.
If you think there’s reason for things to get better at all during the next 21 months, that’s a case you have to make. Why should the next 21 months be progress, when the last 48 have been regress?
OK, but that’s a pretty bleak path between here and there. Why exactly do we need to be there while all that is going on? What good will our presence do? If that’s what’s going to happen even if we stay, why stay?
This is why we preserve an over-the-horizon force. Also, if we’re out, we can arm the Sunnis, with the help of the Saudis. The Sunnis have an abundance of trained fighters; they used to run the army. They can defend themselves, given the means. But we’ve sided with the Shi’ite side in the civil war, effectively limiting the Sunnis to the weapons of insurgency.
But we don’t own Iraq; it belongs to the Iraqis. And having broken it a good deal already doesn’t give us the right to keep on playing ‘Og smash’ with it.
If I saw any evidence that the outcome of our staying would be significantly better than that of our leaving, I’d be all for staying, despite the cost. I don’t. That, in the end, is what it comes down to.
Problem is, we might get Giuliani.
Oops, you guessed wrong. As a result, your whole argument falls apart. Pity, that.
Well, how is it going to come about, that the complex engineering processes of refining uranium or plutonium to bomb-grade quality, then making a workable bomb out of it, gets reduced to something that groups like al-Qaeda can do in their camps somewhere?
The answer is that someone else has to blaze that trail. Think we could keep that from happening, with the right combination of carrots and sticks? For a good long while, probably, if we work at it. And in the meantime, it’s not like we’re forgetting about al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers: even if they can’t destroy us, we don’t want another 9/11-type event.
If people figure out how to engineer a bomb in a relatively small and remote facility, then the game’s up anyway. It’s not just the next Osama; it’s the next Tim McVeigh, the next Eric Rudolph, the next Seung-Hui Cho, whoever. Are we going to bomb ourselves in retaliation if the next terrorist is an American white supremacist group that can’t stand the idea of President Obama?
Like it or not, the only good choke point is to keep that day from ever arriving.
I’m not saying you can. What you do with goodwill is to ‘dry up the sea,’ shrink the universe of people who, if they get a hint that someone is part of an organization hostile to us, will quietly go about their business and say nothing to anyone. That’s what we had a priceless opportunity to do after 9/11.
Given that I know we don’t have a credible threat against them, it seems infinitely improbable that they don’t know it.
Because potential terrorists aren’t all from hostile countries, there’s no way to do that. But I already said that.
We are already that country. We just let a terrorist go free who blew up a Cuban airliner. Right-wing domestic terrorism, like the bomb at the abortion clinic the other day, is treated as no big deal by this Administration.
So, when, where, and how do we scorch our own earth?