If we want to form an alliance of deep mutual trust with the Kurds, perhaps we could send Kissinger? They would love to get their hands on…ah, too see him again.
That was a joke. But they do seem like nice people!
I guess so. Certainly I sympathize with them and can see no good reason why they shouldn’t have their own pan-Kurdish state – and if that eats the Turks’ lunch, at least losing their Kurdish territories will solve an intractable problem and make it easier for them to clean up their human-rights record and get into the EU. OTOH, no national/ethnic group can really safely be generalized as entirely “nice.”* Back in 1915-17 the Kurds eagerly did a lot of the Turks’ dirty work in the Armenian Genocide, and now they’re ethnically cleansing a lot of Arabs out of Kirkuk (artificially reversing the effects of Hussein’s policy of ethnically cleansing the city of Kurds – and so it goes round and round).
*Well, except for the Canadians, of course. And even there you’ve got to allow for anomalies like Sam Stone. 
I think the Kurds are just sort of sitting safely in their semi-autonomous regions and waiting for the Sunnis and Shi’a to kill each other off.
My boss worships W. Maybe I can convince him that I need to start working from my Southeastern Office?
-Joe
Is it S.O.P. to call your ranch/vacation home ‘The Other White House?’ Maybe it is; I don’t know.
At last an answer to the question: Is nothing sacred?
Even though I fully believe in our system of civilian leadership, sometimes I think it might be helpful if somebody at the top – the President, the VP, the Secretary of Defense – had some combat experience. Or weren’t total dipshits.
I always wondered why Colin Powell (I don’t know if he has any combat experience but I’m sure he knows his way around a war) was appointed secretary of state in W’s first term – wouldn’t secretary of defense have been a more fitting post for a retired general and JCOS chairman?
You think they could get some use out of their ability to avoid combat to, you know, avoid combat.
They’ve got such practice!
-Joe
He got his ticket punched, barely, like any ambitious officer of that time would have had to. His biggest contribution was whitewashing the My Lai investigation, however.
If he were *essentially * a general rather than a politician, sure.
Yeah, that’s pretty traditional verbiage. It’s unusual that it’s taken so long to take hold in this administration, but then, its use would have emphasized that a self-styled “wartime President” is so rarely at his normal command post.
The Kurds may seem “likeable” only because they already have their own country in which they’re the dominant group, and don’t have to fight for it. They’re still lacking a formal declaration and recognition, yes, but they have everything else - at long last, given their history. If they “had to do” more ethnic cleansing (and the reprisals against the Arabs who Saddam transplanted up there are disquieting enough) to get it, well, they wouldn’t look so likeable now, would they?
President Brush seems to have decidered that the practice of absolving himself via “accountability moment” can now be safely extended to elections in other countries. Just as the '04 landslide gave him a clear mandate from the American people, the Iraq election proves empirically that he has brought peace and democracy to the region. Next we’ll learn that Gambia’s national elections have justified Bush’s stem-cell veto.*
*Gambia, of course, is well-known for having the second-highest percentage of stem-cell-gestated battle clones of any region on Earth, after Missouri.
To be fair, Elvish, I have read a lot of the same sources (I’m guessing) as you have. Colin Powell clearly participated in the investigation within assigned limitations. I could easily fault him for lacking thoroughness, for not taking the next step. But I can’t fairly accuse him of particpation in a cover up. We had a pretty exhaustive thread on this, you will recall.
Dream headline: “Colin Powell has completed his “tell-all” memoir of his White House years, due to hit the stands in late October…”
In theory, but that would have been illegal. No person who has served in the active military within the previous ten years may be appointed Secretary of Defense. Powell had been out of uniform for only seven years when Bush was named President.
The tradition dates back at least to FDR-- some hotel or another in Hawaii. I don’t know if he actually called it that, but everyone else did.
Well, that’s pretty much the same thing I said, so I’m not in disagreement. They’re just patiently biding their time. I will say, though, that I do think they’re the smartest of the bunch.
Speaking of the Kurds, at what point do they look at the clusterfuck that is the rest of Iraq and decide that the time is right to break away and form their own country?
You folks just don’t get it. In a civil war two armies line either side of a field and exchange volleys of artillery and rifle fire.
This is an UNcivil war. All these booby traps and human bombs – what reasonable person would call that civil?
Intersting . . . But the last place I can recall being widely referred to as the “Western White House” was . . . San Clemente.