No no no sevasty, people think you’re a racist.
I could see how you’d get confused though.
Oh, but, I’m sorry, you didn’t give a cite. You gave an unatributed quote. How quaint.
How is it not? You’ve just said that the war is a sucess since Sadaam is gone.
Thus, it remains a sucess regardless of the death toll as long as Sadaam is gone.
Unless you mean to say that certain failures in the war will make the entire war a failure? If that is the case, what are those failures?
Such notions as not having a perpetual war aren’t part of your vocabulary?
“Major combat operations” have been concluded, so it now behoves you to set a standard of sucess for whatever this period shall be semantically minced as. Reconstruction? Rebuilding? Restoration? Liberation? Whatever, when does it become a sucess, and when a failure?
Agreed.
Now can you please comment on what would count as sucess for ‘dealing with the conditions’ and would would count as failure?
Ahem. Godwin?
Sadaam wasn’t “a Hitler” either.
Aww, come on.
Surely a modern country can assume that, oh, if they blow up generators, they’ll need to get new ones? That people like having running water? Surely even without a crystal ball you can post troops outside the ministry of intelligence so it doesn’t get looted?
Heavens, don’t forget that desperately dangerous 14-year-old grandson of his! That pimply faced threat to world peace was also taken out. And all that proud moment took was…what, about a division of Marines. When we say we mean to end juvinile delinquency, you better believe we mean business!
As to our willingness and resolve, I rather imagine those uncounted thousands of 30 megaton thermonuclear bombs are more of a deterrent force than our resolute character. What do you call a sniveling wussy with a nuke. I suggestYes, indeed, GeeDubya is a firm and decisive leader. So was Custer.
“…supported by a majority…” You haven’t been keeping up, have you?
“…absolutely no threat of WMD from Iraq…” Uh, right. True. Nor was there. Because he didn’t have any. You might just as well suggest that we are free from attacks by his voodoo trained necromancers, and their zombie armies. We are, of course, so I guess you might as well, certainly no sillier than any other argument you’ve plopped onto the table.
Well, he would have a point.
You haven’t seen any necromancers or zombie hordes showing up, have you?
There, that’s proof right there: we got 'em in time.
Or do I really need to bring up how you’ve said that pumping round after round into the bodies of a pregnant woman and her children at point blank range is okay as long as it’s an Israeli settler being shot?
In other words, shut up you damn contemptible piece of filth.
Did I assert it was true? Not at all, twas an elementary exercise in empirical reasoning, which you might care to undertake too.
Professor Cole asserts a number of factual propositions:
evidence based reasoning should be able to disprove these if they are not true: Try these:
for a while the Pentagon brass was refusing to share classified documents with Feith’s office.
One of feith’s subordinates is under investigation by the FBI for turning confidential Pentagon policy documents over to an official in the Israeli embassy via the pro-Israeli lobbying group, AIPAC.
Feith had signed on to a 1996 policy paper for Likud party politician Benyamin Netanyahu that called for a war against Iraq for Israeli security purposes
Feith openly opposed the Oslo peace process,
Feith’s Office of Special Plans, its personnel drawn in part from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, cherry-picked intelligence on Saddam’s Iraq to make an exaggerated and unfounded case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction programs and an operational link to al-Qaeda.
Now these are all large targets. Should be easy to disprove one or all of them in no time. Starts now.
Which can be explained by the fact that France and Germany (as well as Kofi Annan’s own son) were accepting kickbacks from the Oil For Food program. Combine that with Iraq’s outstanding debt to Russia and arms deals with China and you can begin to see why none of the resolutions were enforced. If you read through the list of resolutions, many of them begin with a clause that states that the resolution was in response to Iraq’s flagrant disregard for a previous resolution.
A hypothetical is an imaginary situation given a set of imaginary conditions. This was quite a different thing, a very real situation in very real conditions where the only variable was time. High-ranking Baathist officials and WMD scientists have verified that all orders given by Saddam were to preserve all knowlege of WMD for the purpose of re-constituting the program. A declared intention is a very different thing from a hypothesis. There is no conjecture or supposition on this point; it was an inevitability.
What should be more visible than any single incident is that Iraq’s failure to disarm or comply with a cease-fire necessitated a complex, expensive, and ultimately unsustainable system of containment and inspection.
The sanctions regime was the real failure here. The educated Iraqi middle class showed great promise and amenability to the prospect of regime change and democratic principles. Unfortunately, the Iraqi middle class was laid waste by 10 years of UN sanctions, leaving no fertile ground in Iraq for the seeds of democratic reform today. The sanctions were an expensive lose-lose situation for all parties involved (except for the recipients of oil-for-food kickbackks).
When you put all these pieces together, you see a security risk in an unsustainable, expensive containment system. After 9/11 (the cliche must be repeated because it is true) it became clear that this fiasco simply had to end, whatever the immediate cost.
I am open to having my mind changed… I do not relish either war or the Bush administration… but having given a lot of thought to the security question, I see no other way the inevitable threat of Iraqi WMD’s could have been removed other than military action. It could have been done at a different time, in a different way, and the follow-through has been miserable. But it had to be done.
Do you realize what you’re asking? It’s neither factual nor logical to pose a scenario such as you described in which every U.S. serviceman in Iraq were to be slaughtered tomorrow. Your words, not mine.
In the words of one of my favorite people, Eric Cartman: “Yeah, pretty much.”
Careful, you’re going to get a hernia from the strain of these extrapolations.
For the record, I know of no “failure” that could reasonably be expected to occur that would cause me to regard the war as a failure.
I see…we either “win the peace” or we have a perpetual war. Okay, let me see if I can come up with a suitable rejoinder. How about if peace just happens once the fighting is over, like in every other war? It isn’t “won,” it happens all by itself.
Calling Stephen Hawking, calling Stephen Hawking…
There are some things, Finn, that are just beyond ordinary human understanding (such as elucidator’s last post ). There is no point at which it becomes a success or failure. It is already a success. And even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be up to me to delineate the boundries.
Again you are presupposing that I have some sort of supernatural knowledge of all that comes to bear on the situation, and that I could therefore tell you precisely what should be done to correct whatever problems may be involved. And you are again looking to me to set the boundries of success or failure. While I appreciate the high esteem in which you appear to hold me, I would have to defer to those who are in a position to see what problems need to be addressed (i.e., the war’s administrators on the ground in Iraq and in the Pentagon) and who have an understanding of what should be needed in order to address them. I’m sure many things will need to be dealt with that haven’t even arisen yet.
The purpose of my comment was to illustrate that lack of foreknowledge of future events is not sufficient grounds to avoid going to war when necessary.
Now we’re back to war being messy. I don’t mean to be flippant, but you know, shit happens when you’re at war. Things don’t just fall into place seamlessly when such a huge and complex undertaking is going on.
Hell, I sometimes have trouble finding suitable toilets at arts festivals or state fairs. I don’t expect everything to function flawlessly at these venues, so I sure as hell don’t expect them to function flawless when nations are at war.
Well, see, if you weren’t asserting that something was true, one might say you were putting out a false position with the intent of reeling in people to talk with you about it.
I didn’t want to post this before becaus I thought you might slither away into the darkness, but here goes.
Wow, it was the project of Rummy? He must be a big Zionist? Right Sevasty? You wouldn’t steer us wrong, wouldja?
Cheney and Libby! Surely they are Zionists? You’re not spewing crap, are you Sevasty?
Ah… Newt! He’s a Secret Zionist Operative, right Sevasty?
Well, we all know that deputies set policy for their superiors. Right? Rummy is a pawn in the Zionist Scheme, right?
Don’t worry Sevasty, I’m sure your worldview is correct. The author misspelled “The Zionists” as “Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich.” I’m sure that happens all the time.
The administration! Why, they are of course Zionists or controlled by Zionists? Right?
Wow, less than ten staffers. And " its personnel drawn in part from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs" So, in part? We talking like, three staffers? Four? Moreoever, I’m sure that all the lawyers, staffers, and right wingers were Zionists. Right?
But wait! Here’s a tidbit that just might support your position, let’s take a look.
Notice, if Israeli security was the issue, they would’ve gone to Mossad to get the, ahem, straight dope. They didn’t want that, they wanted intel from Sharon’s clique that could be used to sell the war (eg. more alarmist reports). You will also note that they went to Sharon, not vice versa. Had Irsael wanted to manipulate our government, do you think they’d wait to be asked?
Wait, here’s another!
Wow, an exhange of information. That implies like, a working relationship with one of our allies. That is surely a sign that we are in their pocket, or they’re in ours. Or one of the two. There is no possible reason to share intel other than if we were doing their bidding.
You’ll also notice that the relationship was with Likud, not with Israel as a whole. They’ve got a political alliance with one faction in Israeli politics. This does not translate into a secret desire to conqueror countries on Israel’s behalf.
~yawn~
I suppose the question becomes “Cui bono?”
From the cite that Juan Cole ripped off his out of context quotations, Zinni says that not one single nation in the region felt threatened by Sadaam. As such, the Israelis couldn’t have felt he was a threat. As such, the elimination of Sadaam couldn’t be for Israeli security.
Or, let me make this painfully obvious, even to you.
Are there many christians in the government? Yeep.
Is it valid to state the christian theology drove the Iraq war? Nope. Not without proof. Simply showing how many christians there are, or how many people like christians, does not show how the war was developed.
Erunh? How on earth is it not factual to posit a hypothetical scenario? Would the death toll matter? Is it more ‘logical’ (you mean reasonable?) to posit a scenario in which, say, 10,000 troops get wiped out with a nuke tomorrow? Okay…
Whatever the case may be, if the war was ‘won’ with the capture of Sadaam and his sons, even being nuked and having to pull out of the country wouldn’t mean we lost the war. At least under your definition, since the war was already won.
So, in other words. no matter what happens the war is a sucess because we got Sadaam, right? I’m not putting words in your mouth? And you do realize that if that’s the case, whatever happens now doesn’t matter as you’ve already said it’s a sucess?
And, I don’t care about what you view as resonable to occur. I’m taking hypotheticals. What hypothetical if however unlikely scenario would you say is justification for calling the war a failure?
I don’t know if you want to call Hawking, his chair can’t roll that fast and he might miss the phone.
However, do you see any sign of the fighting being over any time soon? Or that, once a winner is declared and someone owns the country, it’ll be us?
So, you’re saying it can’t be a failure since it’s ‘already’ a sucess. Thus, any tragedy, horror, blunder to come is not to be counted. Right?
Yes, I want you to ask your HGA some questions. ~sighs~
Maybe I wasn’t asking you for solutions? Maybe I was only asking if you’re capable of seeing faults and realizing when mistakes are made. Maybe I was only asking how many mistakes and of what sort would qualify failure in your book.
But then again, maybe I was asking for supernatural knowledge.
Why?
Vietnam was a failure no matter what the planning was. Should we not be able to say that because military folk planned it? Come on, as an American you have the ability to speak your mind, and you don’t have to be in the military to relaize when your nation has lost a war.
Any of them potential failures for our occupation of Iraq? What if, for instance, there’s a civil war we can’t contain? Victory, or defeat for us?
Which is fine… but I’m not debating that point. When I still believed Powel at the UN, I supported this war. Now I do not becuase the evidence does not match the rosy predictions. I think those with rosy perceptions of the war now are having a serious pipe dream, and I want some of whatever they’re smoking.
Understood.
Now how many mistakes, and of what caliber, would constitute failure? At what point does ‘mess’ equal 'too much damn mess, oops, we lost the war."?
I don’t expect it to function flawlessly either.
But if at that state fair there were only two toilets, could you say that someone made a mistake in planning? (I can’t believe that my analogies have come to this)
So the inspection regime, no-fly zone, military presence and prepositioned equipment in Kuwait was to remain in place forever, then? Assuming infinite funds and resources, sure, infinite containment was an option. We don’t live in that world, I’m afraid. The system was unsustainable at its best, and known to be corrupt and undermined in reality.
Now observe, just as SA has a difficulty overcoming prejudice concerning a recent war, FA is unable to escape prejudice regarding a particular nation state. The fallacies:
The straw man, or representing a proposition as something other than it is, in order to more easily rebut:
number of times Professor Cole referred to “Zionism” - nil
number of times FA’s reply referred to “Zionism” - eight
The non sequitur, or a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premises.
Biased representation of evidence:
Omitted from FA’s source:
So alas, be aware apparently normal, functioning members of society are easy prey for prejudice, fallacy and hence, diminished reasoning.
I trust the exercise has been instructive on the beauty of empiricism, the gift of enabling the conquest over one’s own prejudices.
Dammit! As I said to luci the other night, let me outta here!
But first, what is it with you and hypotheticals? You can’t get me to say what you want using reality so you want to try to pin me down with hypotheticals? Hypotheticals are worthless. Anything and everything can be encompassed in hypotheticals.
I have no idea, just as those at war in Europe in WWII had no idea of events to follow.
You’re an extrapolating fool, aren’t you? Kindly point to where I said any such thing. But just so’s you’ll know, that’s right. The war happened. We won. Hussein is gone. Future events will play out as they will…just as in the aftermath of every war. Such as you mention would be counted, but not in terms of winning or losing the war.
That’s so kind of you. If only you could just try a little harder…you know how it is with us conservatives. We just don’t have enough information! We all need more education in order to see the light. And it’s happening all over the country. All of us, everywhere, just need more info from lefties and we’ll surely see the error of our ways and begin to think correctly for a change. Puh-fucking-leeese!!!
Yes, I realized it…and I was ashamed of my country and horrified at what became of the people of South Vietnam when Carter turned tail and ran.
Neither.
I’m not being flippant either. The Iraqi people will have the opportunity to govern themselves. If it goes south, it will be of their own volition (both voluntary and involuntary) as a country. The alternative would be for us to take over the governing of Iraq, which I’m sure would have you and your cohorts screaming bloody murder even more than now.
I’ve answered this already. “Failure” does not compute. Only varying degrees of andvantageous or disadvantageous happenings.
Your analogies have pretty much always belonged in the toilet, IMHO that is.
Had the expense being ongoing for 50 years it would not approach the war’s cost.
There is no evidence for either: unsustainable; or undermined. On the contrary, the evidence is otherwise. How many WMD were created during the ‘undermined’ containment regime? An approximate figure will do.
I advise you to gather evidence before forming conclusions. You may consider speeches by General Zinni, the US military officer in charge of the sanctions regime.
I’m going to have to ask that if you want me to continue to respect your request that I not engage you in discussion, that you stop mentioning me in a derogatory way. I honored your request; kindly honor mine.
How odd that we might have common ground. I simply believe that the ways we approach debate are irreconcilable and hence engagement would be futile. While I do believe you to be gripped by prejudice I shall honour your request and no longer refer to you.
). There is no point at which it becomes a success or failure. It is already a success. And even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be up to me to delineate the boundries.