Bush's plan is failing, we need a new crew

Great Debates
1

An article by Jessica Stern, Harvard Belfer Center, in the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times for 6 June starts by pointing out that worldwide acts of terrorism have almost doubled in the two years since 911 as compared to the two prior years(4422 v. 2303). Her numbers come from the Rand Corporation. (I would link the Times site but for some reason they won’t let me in today.)

GW, et al started out to clean up Afghanistan and left the job unfinished to go baying after Iraq. It also looks as if the final goal arrived at by the present gang after several false starts, i. e. liberating Iraq as a democratic example in the middle east, is also heading toward a slapdash job hurriedly finished so we can get the hell out.

Leaving worldwide terrorism worse than before. Or has it been forgotten that this whole business in that area started out to clean out the areas where terrists had found a haven?

In my view there is no military solution to the problem of terrorism I have made known the opinion that there is no military solution to anything. The military merely decides whose solution will be used in any given case. And it is clear to me the GW, Rummy, Wlofie, et al don’t have any solution to the problem of terrorism.

In that case why not try a new president? Maybe Kerry doesn’t have a pat solution to terrorism either but I don’t believe his plans include curtailing civil liberties for US citizens, putting people in the Guantanamo Bay gulag indefinitely and borrowing from the future to pay for useless military adventures that do nothing but divert attention from the problem of terrorism.

“Stay the course” is an infantile sound bite and not a viable plan of action. To me that makes a change, any change, at worst the lesser of two evils.

2

I disagree with the premise that terrorism has doubled in the 2 years following 9/11. The current war on terrorism goes back at least to the 1993 bombing of the WTC. The obsessive nature of the plot carried it 8 more years to 9/11. To date there has been: the Mogadishu attack, the USS Cole attack, the bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the Bali bombing, the Philippine bombings and numerous worldwide bombings.

It is not a war against a single army. It has no single leader. It is a war against an ideology that seeks the destruction of non-believers. It has been waged during 3 presidential terms of office and will continue regardless of election results. The enemy has grown in power and stature in the last 10 years and will continue to do so if left unchallenged.

I agree that the war will not be won through PURELY military means but it certainly requires military intervention. It is apparent enough to the rest of the world that this war requires the cooperation of all to defeat it. Whether it is with tanks or intelligence agencies there is multinational cooperation toward this end.

Engaging the enemy in physical confrontation is only part of the battle. This is a war of ideology, not land or wealth. It requires a sea change in strategy. The enemy has built a war machine using religion as a recruitment tool and a political force. In less than 10 years (through the mechanism of the Taliban) a radical form of Islam has spread through, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and is now working it’s way through much of Africa. There are seeds of this ideology in every nation on Earth. It affects us all.
Ultimately what is required to win this war is the reestablishment of human rights in regions that have shown a desire to do so. Afghanistan and Iraq represent 2 of these regions.

Senator Kerry is on record in support of the removal of the Taliban from Afghanistan and also Saddam from Iraq. His support differs only in the timing of Saddam’s removal. His position on Iraq relies on UN approval which ultimately means the vote of 3 nations: France, Germany and Russia. Since the UN does not have a functional standing army and cannot compel other nations to contribute soldiers this is a symbolic gesture of support. There was no indication that such a vote was ever likely to occur. Therefore, Senator Kerry is on record in support of Saddam’s removal but would not be willing to act without the approval of those 3 nations despite the 31 other countries who have troops in Iraq.

President Bush has demanded other nations become accountable for their actions and the actions of its citizens. He backed it up with the use of force.
To this end:

  • The Taliban no longer controls Afghanistan’s political future.
  • Saddam Hussein and his regime have been removed from power. Iraq has a democratic future.
  • Libya dismantled its nuclear program.
  • Yemen cooperated in the missile attack of Abu Ali.Harthi (USS Cole bombing).
  • Saudi Arabia is dismantling the charitable foundations used to fund terrorist groups.
  • Pakistan has captured:
    Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (9/11 planner)
    Ramzi Bin al-Shibh (suspected 9/11 planner)
    Abu Zubaydah (al-Queda Operations chief),
    Mohamed Sadeek Odeh (involved in Kenya Embassy)
3

Um, that isn’t a premise, it is a fact, unless you are claiming that Rand made up 2000 terrorist attacks? O_o

… except for the part of Afghanistan that they do still control…

… as a US military base…

… and is on the verge of collapsing into a fundamentalist state…

… and continued to commit human rights violations up the wazoo, as well as being a base for large scale terrorist activity.

4
  • Libya dismantled its nuclear program.

…Consisting of 2 coffee cans, a ball of wire and a microwave oven.

5

But only a week away from obtaining a metal fork. You scoff too quickly.

6

Is it possible that during the first years of WWII the acts of war against the US by Germany, Japan, or Italy increased? Is it possible that the current state of affairs is simply the beginings of a long war? That if the war had not been started recently would simply have lead to an ever increasing threat?

7

David - I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I will do one important bit of nitpicking, about your use of the word ‘plan’ in the thread title. It’s clear that Bush never had a plan beyond his rather premature victory dance on the aircraft carrier; after that, the extent of his ‘plan’ was to accept the accolades of a grateful nation (and another four years in the White House) while his subordinates did whatever mopping-up was necessary.

Then you’re obviously much smarter than our current President, who seemingly had no idea before 9/11 that we were fighting a war on terrorism.

You realize, of course, that while neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had human rights to speak of before our interventions there, one was a terrorist base, but the other one had virtually no terrorist presence.

True; now they’re just a major player, rather than in absolute control. OTOH, most of the power that’s slipped from their hands is now in the hands of warlords and drug lords. If that’s progress, you’ve got a funny definition of it.

Saddam has been removed from power, which has turned Iraq from a terrorist-free zone into a place where they can both recruit and act against us. Meanwhile, we’re stuck there, with every American in the country effectively wearing a bullseye.

You don’t know what sort of future Iraq has, and neither do I. But what’s happened in the past year doesn’t exactly constitute progress towards a democratic future - or even an orderly one, which is what worries me far more.

You do know that they’d been reforming for years now, going back to before 9/11, and the main problem seemed to be that we had no procedure for acknowledging that a former rogue state had stopped being one.

We’ll see how this actually plays out.

And they’ve also become the Johnny Appleseeds of third-world nuclear proliferation, helping North Korea, Iran, and Libya towards going atomic.

And we can’t forget how our brilliant Iraq policy resulted in Iran (which is far more worrisome than Iraq has been anytime in the past decade, in both the nuke department and the helping-terrorists department) knowing we’d cracked their code.

8

It’s not a fact, it’s a statistic. The disagreement is the starting date. The war started prior to 9/11, we just didn’t get a formal invitation. The statement implies that nothing would happen or would remain constant if we had not responded to the attack. That is the focal point of my disagreement.

I spent more than 5 minutes composing my response so it is my hope you consider what I’ve written as an overall thought. IMO, the threat that exists is very serious and will not go away if ignored.

9

I’m not going to respond to your one-liners because I don’t think you invested anything in their creation.

I’m not quit sure what you are trying to convey when you talk about Iran. The situation there is purely religious in nature going back to the overthrow of the Shaw (I’m not supporting the Shaw). The last elections were rigged toward fundamentalists by eliminating any candidate that questioned the leadership or religious dogma.

10

The statistic is not dependent upon when terrorism actually started which was in Biblical times if I’m not mistaken. The statistic deals with the increase in terrorism since the onset of the GW ‘war on terrorism.’

I don’t see how the Iraq adventure can possibly be contributing to that ‘war.’ You say that “… the threat that exists is very serious and will not go away if ignored.” Just the same the main threat of dispersed enemies is being ignored de facto because the attention of everybody in the administration is on how to get the Iraq mess straightened out. Meantime, as others have said, terror groups keep sending (some) real and (lots of) phony messages to each other which keeps Ashcroft, and whoever that guy in charge of Homeland Security is, changing meaningless ‘threat’ color codes.

11

We screwed the pooch almost from day one. And it was our craving for vengeance, our desperate need to hit back! that did it to us. We didn’t want to hear a bunch of shit about intelligence gathering, infiltrartion, cooperation between intelligence services… We wanted to see aircraft lifting boldly off of aircraft carrier decks, delivering another load of whuppass to the deserving. When you are a hammer, all problems look like nails. And we got the baddest military force in human history, bar none.

So rather than go the tough route, the slow route, the unglamorous and unappealing route - the route that makes one look like a careful, rational thinker than a bold Leader of Men - we called up our posse. Precisely the wrong tool for exactly the wrong purpose.

An armored division can’t skulk around apartment buildings in Hamburg and Beirut. A machine gun has markedly poor skills, as a crypto-analyst. A military posture requires a state-sized enemy, at the very least, a Grenada.

So we went to war in Afghanistan. Because the Taliban wouldn’t give us Bin Laden. Assuming, of course, that they could have had they wanted to. Now we are given to trumpeting our success in ousting the Taliban, forgetting conveniently that it was supposed to be the means to an end.

(We achieved this end, you may recall, by wholesale bribery, by dropping basket loads of hundred dollar bills on some of the most vicious and brutal warlords to plunder a village. The Northern Alliance. Our pals. Remember the scene in Macbeth when he suddenly realizes all he has for company is the band of cuthroats he has enlisted…)

Until we accept this central fact: that the conflict we are engaged in cannot, by definition, be resolved by military means. It will be resolved by the creepy methods of bribery, subversion, and propaganda. Rat out somebody and we will fly you and your whole family, slap citizenship papers in your hand along with a Starbucks franchise in a choice location, or a liquor store in Bakersfield.

That’s how to do it, and that’s how it will be done. Blackmail, cunning and subversion. Heroism got nothin’ to do with it. In an effort of this kind, our entire gargantuan military force is nothing but a “pitiful helpless giant”. We should have known that from the git-go, God knows its so obvious even I get it.

12

We in the dense fraction of the population ‘got it’ but there is merely dense and then there is George W. Bush.

Kerry might not be any better than Bush at the Iraq war, but I don’t think he will throw civil liberties out the window, and rob future generations or the poor and middle income folks to pay the rich.

13

Statistics aren’t facts? :confused:

Bush’s “War on Terrorism” didn’t.

14

Well, I was using the word ‘plan’ in the ‘imaginary,’ also called the ‘hopeful,’ mood.

15

Sounds a lot like my retirement plan.

16

The Iraq adventure gets Saddam off our long term policing chores (the original Iraqi mess) and allows us to nation build in a location where the people have demonstrated a desire to change. There are certainly more places we could send troops but Iraq is the country best positioned to make change. The event was going to happen at some point. Even Chiraq intimated that in his interviews (the ones where he speaks English). Maybe that was for American consumption. The reporters interviewing him never seem to ask the right questions so that’s just my impression of what he was trying to say.

Your argument that we have pulled troops out of Afghanistan for Iraq is valid (IMO) but I think so for a different reason. We don’t need anymore troops in Afghanistan (at least from the people I’ve talked to but that doesn’t qualify as a statistical poll) but we do need a larger pool of troops to rotate through Iraq. To increase the number of troops in Afghanistan invites a situation resembling the start of the war. You cannot strong-arm another nation into submitting to your will. The infighting between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban was particularly gruesome (didn’t get much press).

The change has to come from within to succeed and I think we are getting to that point. If at all possible democracy (and the life style associated with it) needs to spread out naturally. When you deny a college education to all and prevent girls from even a grade school education it doesn’t take much to convince the youth of Afghanistan that their lives have changed.

Before I forget, thanks for actually debating.

17

I think our day-to-day “policing chores” were not that onerous—they sometimes fired at us; we responded by wiping out the source of the fire. I don’t recall anyone complaining about our “policing chores” although some may have. I also seem to remember GWB saying that he was NOT interested in “nation building.” I also have to say that I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the people there are demonstrating any particular wish to change, if only because the people of Iraq ALLOW the terrorists and religious fanatics to continue their operations. I believe if they sincerely wanted change, they would help us to help them a little more. I believe, instead, that the majority of the people there want us out of there country.
It may be true that we don’t need any more troops in Afgahnistan, but I doubt it. What I don’t believe is that we needed any troops at all in Iraq and that we wouldn’t now need more if we hadn’t had a moron driving the damn boat.

What are we attempting to do in Iraq if not the very thing you say can’t be done?

18

I take it then that this amounted to an onerous burden. How does this dreadful drain on our treasury compare with the gazillion bucks we are spending to relieve ourselves of said burden? Cost effective, do you think?

They have? In who’s estimation?

Oh? Hadn’t happened in the thirty-five years of Saddam’s rule. And if, as you say, this was pretty much inevitable, mightn’t we have profited by staying out of the shit rather than diving in head first?

Even Chirac? Is his opinion supposed to mean something special in this context?

You’re kidding, right? A pity you didn’t share this insight with Perle, Wolfowitz, et. al., might have saved us a world of trouble.

Indeed. The fuse has burned quite short, change is imminent. A program that regards change as success cannot help but succeed.

19

No, statistics aren’t facts, they’re numbers. They can be used to support a fact or premise (Gravity is a fact, a train of thought is a premise).

Classic example (joke): There is a 2 car race between the United States and Russia. The US car wins. The Russian news said their car came in 2nd and the American car was next to last. They were statistically correct.

Regardless of the source, I always question a statistic when it is used to support an argument. You would be surprised how often math is abused in the media. Learned that in a journalism course which I took as a wanker-class in college. Turned out to be one of the best classes I took. We used our own newspaper as a daily example and I was floored by what I found. Even when they used a statistic correctly they often used poor statistical techniques. Learned that in Statistics class.

20

I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong. Your two statements aren’t mutually exclusive. Saying “statistics are numbers”, does not prove that statistics aren’t facts. That’s like saying, “No, my car is not a Ford, my car is blue.”

“There have been more acts of terrorism in the two years after 9/11 than in the two years before 9/11.”

Assuming it’s true, it’s a FACT. And you have presented nothing to dispute that it’s true, only misstatements about what a statistic is.

Non sequitur. (Besides which, neither of your 2 statements: “gravity is a fact”, and “a train of thought is a premise”, is true. In fact, they’re pretty much nonsensical.)

Cute joke, but it has nothing to do with what we’re discussing.

Yes, we all know that. But you are conflating two ideas. A fact can be used speciously, but IT’S STILL A FACT. If you want to argue that a statement is untrue, do that; if you want to argue that it’s mis-applied, do that. But you’re mixing up the two. A statement is not automatically false because YOU say it is.