Hey, somebody call Moto so he can start another whiny thread! Oh, it’s no longer a politically motivated complaint? Nevermind.
So did Bush the Elder. If there was any time in the past 20 years when we should have not listened to world opinion and gone ahead with a unilateral intervention, it should have been…well, Bosnia, 1993. But a close second is GW1.
There wouldnt have been that much of a difference between having Quwait and Iraq forcibly unified, versus having only the Iraqi people under Saddam’s thumb, like it turned out. Much better would have been to get rid of Saddam when the Iraqis supported us and were actually revolting themselves.
I guess the fact that he blamed the troops, in plain English, cannot even break through to you, since basically you only care about three things:
- Bush is great,
- War is cool,
- Kill the Bosnians!
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Distinguish between “responsibility for a mistake or shortcoming” and “blame.”
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“His other great line” is probably the most famous thing that President Eisenhower ever said.
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I am prepared to give President Bush credit for some things – his initial response to 9/11, for example, was precisely what he should have done. Have you ever, on this board, admitted that he might possibly have made a mistake?
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You can describe something as “bovine-source organic fertilizer” all you want, but most people will be able to recognize it as what it is.
Thanks much for the significant correction! My apologies to Mr. Rumsfeld.
I substantially agree with Brutus.
If you look at the back-and-forth of the thing, it’s clear that Giuliani didn’t intend to place the blame on the troops. What it is is an example of a spin machine gone horribly wrong.
When you look at the GOP talking points leading up to Giuliani’s faux pas, the standard spin on Kerry’s criticism of the missing HMX fiasco has been to imply that Kerry is blaming the troops. Sort of a “Les troupes, c’est moi,” sort of thing. If you criticize the CiC, you’re denigrating the troops.
Giuliani was ineptly repeating a stock counter-argument against criticisms leveled against the administration over the missing explosives: “Kerry isn’t really criticizing the administration, he’s badmouthing the troops.”
It probably seems clear to people who are familiar with the argument – but it was so poorly-phrased (and is such a manifestly stupid attempt at deflection,) that to the unindoctrinated, it’s taken at face value and sounds like an incredibly offensive defense instead of the cynical bit of sophistry that it is.
So he managed to mess up “repeating a stock counter-argument”?
A politician messing up his talking points that much? Is he often inarticulate?
I’m a bit lost there… but, ok. This means to me that he has become little more than a mouthpiece for Bush, though; I think I would have respected him a little more if he was saying this out of ignorance or mistake, than by messing up the delivery of some cooked-up counter-argument.
Geez… politicians…
Would you mind clarifying? In the context of Brutus’ original I’m not sure if you mean Truman’s “The buck stops here” or Eisenhower’s “Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
I think one can answer this a number of ways:
(1) The buck does stop with the President and for good reason. He made the choice…and it certainly was a choice…to go into Iraq. So, in some sense he is responsible for everything that goes wrong there, just like he would get the credit for everything that went well there had it gone well. (And, of course, he was happy to take that credit with his little “flight suit” escapade when it looked like things were going pretty well.)
(2) The securing of sites that potentially contained WMDs and definitely contained materials of important military value (and especially that were of important enough use in nuclear weapons that the IAEA felt it necessary to seal them) should have been Priority-1 if we were going in there to prevent WMDs from ending up in the hands of terrorists, as we supposedly were! And, everything from troop levels to the basic strategy should have been dictated by this.
To be honest, I really expected to hear about fancy operations in which they were paratrooping special forces in and what-not to secure potential WMD sites. Instead, what we heard about was such nifty operations to secure the oil wells while the weapons sites were left unguarded. This to me is nothing short of amazing. It means either that the Bush Administration didn’t even remotely believe their own claims (dare we say “lies”) that they were going in to prevent WMDs from getting into the hands of terrorists or that they were so stunningly incompetent that they seemed to take no particular measures to try to insure that their main object was achieved. If I were President and were presented with this plan for invading Iraq to keep WMD out of the hands of terrorists, my first question would be: “What are we going to do to make sure we actually make it less likely rather than more likely that the weapons will end up in the hands of terrorists?” Not only was this apparently not the first question Bush asked; it doesn’t even seem to be on the list at all!
And, in regards to the dangers of WMD ending up in the hands of terrorists, what you have to realize is that the CIA was telling Bush that Saddam was very unlikely to give WMDs to terrorists (for obvious reasons). So, it is hard to see how we were actually doing anything except increasing the chances of these ending up in the hands of terrorists.
Finally, it is worth pointing out an irony in the situation: As it turns out, we went to war largely because Iraq had shitty record-keeping…i.e., we now know with a high degree of confidence that they did destroy their WMD but that they didn’t produce records to us proving this. Now, we find that the administration trotting out a soldier in its own defense who says that he participated in destroying materials that may or may not have been some of these explosives under IAEA seal. In other words, our record-keeping is so bad that not only don’t we have proof of having destroyed these explosives but we are not even sure if we did or not. And, this from the people the administration is trotting out in their defense. I mean, it’s a freakin’ embarrassment!