Likewise I don’t recall ever having heard a president say: “I don?t think you can win it” when speaking of the war on poverty, drugs or crime.
It might be helpful if someone defined what winning the WoT looked like. I’m sure it would not look like no terrorist actions anywhere in the world -that’s impossible. I think it would look like the chance of being involved in terrrorism was below a certain threshhold. We won the war on hijacking (or thought we had) for a long time. Winning the war on terrorism would involve the number of terrorist acts trending down. Since that hasn’t happened, he’s trying to say it can’t. An internal war, like in 1984 is also useful for the power hungry.
If I were Kerry, I’d say who is the pessimist now - and that it can’t be won with Bush’s techniques, but it can be won with mine.
Except of course you have to drop the context to get that sort of contradiction. Wasn’t it you who posted about frames?
And here you have an example not of a droped context but of a totally perverted context. When the president ways we can win the war on terror, he means we can decrease the threat to terrorism to acceptable levels. When he says we cannot win the war on terrorism, he means we cannot stop every single act of terrorism from occuring without fail. You have reversed the context of both statements not to show a contradictiion, but to build a very handsome strawman argument.
And yet, this ‘war’ terminology has been used to justify many things including restrictions on civil liberties, questionable (some now ruled by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional) treatment of prisoners, new military doctrines based on what are really preventative (not pre-emptive) wars, and so on. That’s the problem that I have with it.
oh… can we say the magic words ? That maybe… maybe Bush is flip flopping ? 
Anyone smart knows that terrorism comes and goes… you don’t finish it. I just doubt Bush is doing a good job of making terrorists seem “bad” when he manages to get so much attention and bad press to his own “we dominate the world” routine.
Why he “admits” it can’t be won… and the timing would be interesting to discuss. Maybe some report “concluded” terrorism is here to stay ? Or Bush wants to change his message ? Wierd…
Still the way he has been spending money against an unwinnable war seems not too good on the long run...You want context? OK, but it won’t be rescuing Bush in this case.
(bolding mine)
Bush is saying two different things here. In the first statement, he is giving everyone the impression that we can win the war; that we can completely “remove” the danger to America and civilization. In the second, he is saying that we cannot completely remove the danger, only (basically) cut back on it.
Still looks contradictory to me.
(on preview…)
I refer you to the statement, made by Bush, quoted earlier in my post (talking about “removing” the danger). If he meant “decrease the threat to terrorism to acceptable levels” instead, then he really should have clarified. Of course, that wouldn’t have been as successful in winning over americans’ trust. (And yes, I realize that Bush is a politician, and that one of things that politicians do is win over their consituents’ trust… it can be accomplished without the convoluted double-speak put forth by Bush, though.)
LilShieste
Really? You mean government officials may have applied the term war to something other than a foriegn born attack against America? Darn that Bush! Darn that Bush to heck!
As I said, the point is not that the war terminology is being applied but that it is then being used to justify certain things by saying, “We are at war so…” Therein lies the point where a harmless abuse of terminology becomes a dangerous one. (One could argue that the infringements on civil liberties due to the “war on drugs” constitute a similar case, although my guess is when “war” is used in that context it is less likely to cause confusion in people’s mind in the way it does for the “war on terrorism”.))
LilShieste: Sorry, but I don’t see the contradiction between your two quotes. In the first, all Bush was saying was that they’d fight to stamp out terrorism until it’s completely eliminated, which makes perfect sense. He never said that day would ever come. Unless you think we should stop trying to stop terrorism before the problem vanishes from the face of the earth, I don’t think he was being hypocritical with your quoted remarks.
Where did I say that? I assume that Bush was using the same definition in both contexts, so the contradiction (or flip-flop) is in him. I’m also assuming that he never was clueless enough to think that we could totally eliminate terrorism. If Bush switched definitions in the middle, that is his problem, not mine.
My guess is that after three years, two wars, and no improvement, he’s guessing that many people are going to not accept the let’s keep on strategy - so calling it unwinnable lets him say he’s doing as well as anybody could. But actually I bet someone will be telling us what he really meant. :rolleyes:
We went wrong from the git-go, we went wrong by trying to define the situation to match our strengths, we tried to pretend it was something it wasn’t. We tried to pretend that our enormous military strength was relevent, even decisive. No such thing.
The Bushiviks were openly derisive of the only effective strategy, a war of intelligence, plodding police work, snitches, rats and skullduggery. A war that depends on the general good will of the rest of the world, their sympathy and cooperation.
We have unbeatable mojo when it comes to state-to-state conflict. But all that power is right next to useless when one attempts to apply it to a stateless and decentralized force, such as Al Queda. So when Bush says we can’t win the war on terror in any way we usually define victory, he’s entirely right. Pity he didn’t realize that before he pissed away the respect and sympathy of the world.
I agree, Leaper. I would point out, however that Bush may not even have gone this far in the first quote. All he did was suggest that “we” (America, not the Bush administration only) would fight until the danger was removed. From the begining he has been careful to identify international terrorism as the primary focus of the war on terror.
Yes, you did. But you took to different quotes from to different contexts and then assumed that they applied to a third context. That’s what I meant by perverting the context. Look up the word war. You will find that it has many definitions. You cannot take quotes out of context pick one of the definitions and then assume that it and it alone applies to each of the contexts you just dropped. You have to examine the context within which the quotes were made in order to determine which definition was meant. (Even then, you have to allow for differing definitions between people.)
No, if you want the context of this thread to be a Bush bashing then fine. Let me know and I’ll stop discussing.
One could even argue that the war on poverty has produced similar results. But of course one would have to believe that ownership of one’s own labor was a civil right.
I understand entirely the abuse of the term “war”, in this context. It just seems to me that it actually has more applicability to the war on terror than to the other cases. I understand that more harm may have been done to civil rights in the name of the war on terror, but I think that has to do with the fact that it is closer to a war rather than that it is more of a misapplication of the word.
You guys keep saying this. But I remember a speech early on in which Bush said just this. That the war would take place on many fronts and most of them would be hidden intelligence type actions. If you look at the quote I posted from the whitehouse for 2003, it says much the same thing. I’m not sure that political rhetoric against Democrats and the fact that our army is mosty engaged in military activities lessens this.
Can you imagine the charges of flip-flopping if Kerry said this? There’s be more ads on TV with these quotes than there are for freaking McDonalds.
Such a naif! Kerry flip-flops because he is constantly trying to align himself with the popular opinion of the day, just like when he joined the anti-war movement when it was so wildly popular, cops giving us flowers, stuff like that.
GeeDubya is a firm leader who remains steadfast and firm, even in the face of hardship, acrimony, and facts. He just happens to occassionally mispeak himself, sometimes you have to wait for the clarification to find out what he really said.
That’s probably true. And they’d be just as silly.
Ummm… no. They have said on numerous occasions that these were all essential, and in fact perhaps the most essential parts of the WOT. Sorry you weren’t listening.
No, you don’t have to wait for a clarification, you just have to prevent your knees from jerking into you rears and hearing the context of the statement. It would also help if you realized the reporters rarely give an accurate context to quotes they present. They tend to prefer to juice the context a little. Sometimes you have to seperate the quote from the reporter’s opinion about the quote.
Much like this thread.