So you agree that we should “push on” and were only taking a cheap shot to the contrary for annoyance value.
You agree with my logic but don’t like my attitude.
My attitude is “my country right or wrong.” If we’re wrong I want us to make it right because this is my country. I would not seek to turn a wrong into a right simply because it was my country perpetrating the wrong.
Frankly, I don’t see where you get that from my post. I didn’t put that attitude in there.
My point seems to be identical to yours. We are committed.
Nonsense. Saddam was paying $25,000 to suicide bombers. He cheered 9/11 as a victory against us on behalf of Islamic nations.
I’m glad that there are lots of foreign terrorists there now. This is a bonus that I would not have hoped for. One of the problems of fighting against terrorists is getting them to commit to a place where they can be fought. They see our attack against Iraq as an attack against them and they have committed themselves to fighting against us there. That flushes them out. More importantly, I would prefer to be fighting them in Iraq than in New York.
It’s good stuff.
No it would not have been. That is one very good reason why it would not have been “better” despite your statement to the contray (I do appreciate it when you provide your own rebuttal.)
Is this just another cheap shot, or do you really think we should have attacked Saudi Arabia or that that would have been just as good?
How about instead of cheap shots, we actually hear your ideas?
What an amazingly stupid post. And ahistorical to boot.
Here’s the ahistorical part: There have indeed been total wars waged throughout the history of mankind, but none of them have been waged without the tactic of due and deliberate genocide perpetrated by a faction possessing (or perceiving) a huge advantage in means and manpower. Most wars between nation states are initiated, prosecuted and won or lost through a series of cost-benefit determinations. Put simply, nations sue for peace or withdraw their troops from conflict when the costs (in blood, treasure or political capital) are seen to outweigh the benefits. That’s why the Persians never conquered the Greeks, although had they pursued the goal with everything they had, they clearly had the means and men to do it. It’s why the Japanese decided to attack Pearl Harbor, and also why three and half years later they surrendered, even though they fought for a god-emperor and were presumed willing to fight to the last man. It’s why the US Civil War would’ve almost certainly ended in 1865 no matter what.
Here’s the amazingly stupid part: You’ve differentiated the “war on terror” from the merely rhetorical wars against poverty and drugs. You’ve spoken of “destroy[ing] the enemy” and “tak[ing] over his country”, as if there’s some nation called Terror (maybe Terra?) or as if terrorism is some regional peculiarity which can be altered by killing the easily identifiable bad guys and fixing the locality with good ole American management techniques.
To which other countries besides Iraq do you propose sending “everybody we have plus one”? (And does this include you, your wife and over-18 family members along with me and my soon-to-be-draft-age son?) We gonna invade every country where we find “militant islamic [sic] fundamentalism”? Uh oh, better start by killin’ some folks in this country; I hear we’ve seen some of that stuff right here in River City. (You’ll know right where to find it too… somewhat north and west, a bit southerly and in the eastern parts of the country.)
You can’t wage war against a tactic, and you can’t invade a belief system. We can and should go to war when we’re attacked or threatened by a real and verifiable danger from another nation or a well organized, powerful and geographically centered entity (like the Barbary Pirates). Other than that, diplomacy, international policing, good will policies and economic leverage work pretty damn well. War is only justified when it’s used to resist real aggression or to right a great wrong (like slavery or that genocide thing you so coyly refer to as “old school” warfare). And when we wage it, we can and should limit our objectives to the removal of the means to fight, rather than the manpower, of our enemy.
The war on terror can’t be anything but a rhetorical war. And we can’t destroy terrorism by destroying countries and populations. But we can damn sure destroy ourselves that way.
Rick, I’m not an avid reader of the Pit, and I seldom post here, as I have in the past had my ass handed to me. Also in Great Debates. I’m a lightweight when it comes to being able to defend my thoughts.
I’m sorry that I only get to form opinions of posters from reading random threads.
You’ve always been one of my favorites, especially in GQ and other threads that lend themselves to factual replies. You’re almost like the robotictomndebb when it comes to factual posts.
But, I still think that you’ve taken it up a level. It may be nothing more than what you have offered in the quote above. Being called names such as that would tend to produce your reaction.
Perhaps we’ll see as the vitriol winds down(hopefully), now that the election is over.
I submit as evidence that this may be happening in this very thread. Some very civil, yet provocative posts.
I’m not going to argue against the Vietnam model of retreat that you propose as if it were a good thing.
That abandonment was one of the most shameful incidents in our history. And, while you may be older than me, I remember it too. My father was there for two tours, and that’s what he taught me.
It was Scylla’s insistence that people who voted against Bush just didn’t understand the other side that got me thinking: Do I understand the other side?
The answer was no, I don’t.
I have never understood how anyone could rationalize the administration’s actions regarding Chalabi, how he could have given us blatantly false intelligence and how we could accept it uncritically because it was what we wanted to hear, how we could allow him to pass our own intelligence to Iran, or how we could have ever trusted a person with his history. I wondered too about how Bush pretended to barely know him after the truth about Chalabi became public (“Chalabi?”), while beforehand he was professing to having had conferences with him about the future of Iraq.
I have never understood what Bush supporters thought about the use of local warlords and their largely Al Qaeda friendly, US-hating men to try and get Bin Laden, or why we had to rush our troops out and let Bin Laden escape easily (by most accounts just walking to Pakistan), or why the man who murdered so many on US soil was of no concern anymore.
Nor have I ever understood why nobody cared about the suspected WMD sites being looted before we went to them. If we really thought WMD were there, that should have been first priority, and the looting should have been seen as an enormous disaster. If we didn’t think they were there, then we had been lied to in the worst way.
I realized that I really don’t know what Bush supporters think about any of this. And I wondered if there was a reason for that.
So I looked up the threads on Chalabi, and found that there had been some factual, intelligent discussions on the subject, without the pointless fall into name-calling that characterizes so many threads.
And what I found inside startled me: These threads were almost completely devoid of imput from any Bush supporter.
One of them was even started by December - but he was the absolute only Bush supporter willing to tackle the subject. Again… respect for you, December, wherever you are.
As for the rest of the Bush supporters here, I now know why I don’t understand you.
It is because you have avoided the reasonable debate threads in which you might be asked to provide a reasonable defense for the Bush administration. Because you had no such defense, and you knew it.
Oh, you took part in the threads, unsubstantive and full of name-calling and demonizing, which you now decry and blame for your own loss off humanity. You rewarded these threads with your attention and your contributions. That doesn’t make them your fault, but perhaps it means you bear some responsibility for their prevalence and longevity. But you made sure not to join in the threads in which more would be expected of you than an insult; those threads in which you would finally be asked to explain your defense of the Bush administration.
Oh, c’mon…surely our pullout after years of needlessly losing young lives in a pulled-punches war – fought mainly to maintain an acceptible kill ratio between us and the enemy – and followed by the wholesale slaughter of some two million of our former allies and their families, wasn’t really all that bad. Their lives didn’t matter anymore than the lives of the Iraqis who are now no longer being killed by the thousands each month due to the direct and indirect actions of Saddam Hussein, and the 50 million who now have at least a chance of living under self-rule.
They don’t count at all.
They’re invisible and they don’t matter. All that matters is that we not be thought of as bullies, and that it isn’t American lives that are lost. The hell with other countries’ peoples. They don’t have kids they love; they don’t feel pain when they’re bound and thrown off buildings or fed feet first into ovens and wood choppers; and they don’t feel grief when they plead for the return of their loved one who was spirited away in the middle of the night only to find that upon that loved one’s return, they are in pieces in plastic trash bags. Naw…they’re only Iraqis. Far better we just sit at the sidelines and allow all this to go on while their leader, if he didn’t actually have WMD, was working to obtain them.
It is early spring in Washington, and The Leader stares out the window at the fog of morning. His heart is sorely laden, he is troubled. His desk is covered with pleas and entreaties from the Iraqi people, begging for the succor that he, and he alone, can provide. They cry out to him, The Leader, for rescue.
He is resolved. He will take the nation to war, to rescue the widows and orphans of Iraq from the monster Saddam. Of course, he will have to have a reason, something plausible, something the people will accept. He might have to fudge a bit, bend the truth here and there, in order to attain his noble purpose. But that’s what a Great Leader does, isn’t it?
He lifts a model of an A-Bomb from his desk, and ponders it. Hmmmmmmmm…maybe…
Are you really this stupid, or do you think we are?
Well you see, that’s my fault. I was fucking your girlfriend in your backroom and she was making a lot of noise so I had her bite down on my history book.
She bit right through it!
Later when I went to consult the relevant portions in preparing my post, that portion of the book had been masticated beyond repair.
My bad. Sorry.
Wow. That sure is an attempt to say something that sounds authoritative and correct. Actually, it’s bullshit.
For example, the civil war was an example of total warfare where genocide was not pursued. In fact, they through Sherman in a sanitorium for suggesting that the war was going to be a total war. Later, when it became one they took him out and made him a General.
As we go back further in history more and more wars were total wars, but not all were necessarily genocidal nor were they pursued by unequal partners.
Further, there is certainly a concurrence between total war and genocidal practices as many wars are fought between different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Total war is using any and all means to destroy your enemy, so in such cases genocide is pretty much implied.
Pointing out the obvious in authorative language doesn’t make it any more intelligent or any less obvious.
This was not total war, so it really doesn’t fit into your theme.
Ummm. No. This was not a cost benefit decision. They had lost completely. Fighting to death wasn’t even an option as the emperor beleived they would be utterly destroyed by nuclear bombs without ever even getting to fight. There was no benefit to fighting on, only the cost of death.
You accuse me of being ahistorical and you throw out these vapid generalizations? No matter what?
What if the South had pushed its advantage the first day at Gettysburg and won there? What if instead of engaging the army of the North, Lee maintained the succesful strategy of digging in and forcing the North to lay siege to its cities at great cost.
I certainly think in either case the South might have struggled on another year or two. Certainly, I wouldn’t say the war would have ended in 1865 no matter what, and I don’t think any careful and knowledgable historian would make such a statement. Certainly not one who has striving to avoid being ahistorical.
Not sure how this total war digression of yours fits in other than to demonstrate your credentials to ignoragnce, but there it is.
Why is that amazingly stupid? Do you think the war in Iraq is equivalent to the war on drugs?
Well, yeah. Basically, it’s Militant Islamic fundamentalism and it’s located in the Mideast in Countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. It’s active in other areas, but that’s its heartland. Pinning it down, destroying it with the best techniques available sure seems like a good idea to me.
[sarcasm]Why yes, Xeno. That is my viewpoint. We’re just going to keep invading countries until we run out of people. That’s what I’m arguing. Congratulations on your wonderful insight and understanding into the subtleties of my position. I am equally astute about your position and that of liberals. You are going to roll over and die for anybody. Wow. Look we both understand each others positions[/sarcasm]
Sure you can in all but the most semantic sense. Destroy and attack everybody who engages in or supports the tactic.
No it didn’t work very well, unless you wish to pretend 9/11 didn’t occur.
And, while you keep talking about what we can’t do, what you fail to address is that terrorism is specifically designed with this viewpoint of yours in mind. That’s why they do it this. We are in the process of attempting to change the rules of the game by displaying adaptability.
Everybody knows that you can’t use a modern military to combat terrorism. We are attempting to give them cause to rethink the terrorism model, that the use of terrorism results in the destruction of whatever people attempt it and whatever institutions support it. Those people and those institutions are subject to a modern military.
I disagree with you. I make no opinion about the justifications of wars, but in terms of fighting them, fighting to “disarm” your opponent is a stupid way to fight. When you say that we “should limit our objectives to the removal of the means to fight, rather than the manpower, of our enemy.” You are being both naive and stupid.
“Manpower” is the “means to fight.” If you have the first, you can have the second.
Well, that’s good to know. For a second there, I thought real people were dying. I am greatly relieved to learn that they are just “rhetorical.”
Yes. We can. It’s just not very nice.
Is this one of those “I demean myself by hurting others.” kind of things?
Well go stand over there next to the theme music and pontificate.
A thousand pardons, my intelligent though judgementally-challenged friend, but I think the purpose of my post was clearly that of poking holes in the anti-war, anti-Bush mindset that focusses only on the negatives and totally ignores the overwhelmingly greater positives of our action in Iraq.
And Vietnam, too, for the matter of that. It was certainly no shining moment in our country’s history to jump ship and let millions of innocent people, people who we recruited and convinced they could depend on us, be slaughtered at the hands of our enemy. This is very typical in my mind of the liberal way of solving such problems. There is no effort made to extricate the country from a bad situation in such a way as to employ strength and resolve to end it in such a way that our allies aren’t left holding the bag. Nope…it’s just cut and run and fuck everybody else. This goes back at least as far as Humphrey, who, when Nixon proposed an honorable and face-saving way to exricate ourselves from Vietnam without abandoning the South Vietnamese, roundly excoriated him for wanting to protract the war instead of “pulling out immediately, saying we had no business being there in the first place.” And then, to make this stance even more ridiculous, it was uttered only three weeks after Humphrey made comments defending the war and saying it was just and that we were doing the right thing by being there.
What happened to so radically change his mind?
Johnson announced he would not run for a second elected term, and therefore he was no longer obliged to support Johnson in the prosecution of the war. And of course he had to contradict Nixon as a matter of political expediency in order to try to get elected.
Millions upon millions of people have died on the face of this planet as a result of wishy-washy, fair-weather Democrats who, once they gained power, bailed on our allies and left them to be tortured and murdered at the hands of our enemies in order to “do the right thing.”
The only possible way this sort of thing could be thought of as the right thing to do would be to totally ignore the fate of the people we are abandoning – which is what they typically do…and which is what we see going on here in thread after thread on the subject.
Ah, I see your problem. In this instance, a nearly perfect ignorance about the history of Viet Nam. Allow me, and forgive some necessary brevity.
Ho Chi Minh was our ally in WWII. Some of the tunnels used by our adversaries in VN were dug by their fathers and grandfathers as the Viet Minh made life miserable for the Japanese. We promised them freedom and unification. We changed our minds, and supported the French, who insisted on reclaiming their former “glory” and lucrative colonial plantations. The Vietnamese were less than thrilled. With some cast off Russian and Chinese weapons, and by dint of sheer ruthless determination, they kicked the French’s butts. (Dien Ben Phu. Look it up)
So we helped them out. We took out a ruler and drew a line, North Viet Nam and South Viet Nam, and promised that, in the fullness of time, we, that is, the Americans, would support and sponsor a referendum on the future of a united Viet Nam. Maybe we really meant it. We changed our minds.
South Viet Nam was ruled by a corrupt Catholic minority, collaborators with the French colonial powers. The Diem Brothers, and the never to be forgotten Madame Nhu. A poisonous bitch if ever there was one. They were oppossed by the National Liberation Front, a largely Buddhist, nativist organization. The NLF desperately tried to avoid being taken over by the Communists, who were better organized and armed. If we had listened to them, we might have been able to actually establish a popular, Buddhist based governance. But the Diems told us they were all Commies, and we believed them. We did that a lot. Some bloody tyrant tells us he’s anti-Communist, and we fall all over ourselves in our rush to supply him with the means to oppress and murder his people. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Cuba, oh, such a long, long list!
Eventually, the self-fulfilling prophecy worked out. The NLF, having no one else to turn to, turned to the Communists. Who had thier own agenda for post-unification Viet Nam.
And the rest, as they say, is tragedy.
America’s record as a liberator of oppressed peoples is, well, spotty. More precisely, thin. Point of fact, virtually non-existent. We have cooperated far, far more often in oppression and murder.
And people like you wonder why they don’t love us.
None of which addresses in the slightest the points I made about our deserting millions of people to be slaughtered by our enemies, nor our shameful and eager willingness to do so. It doesn’t address this phenomenon of totally ignoring the plight of these people while focussing on a relatively minor negatives, such as the victims of banana republic dictators who, on their worst days, never killed anywhere near as many people as the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, Maddass Hussein, etc.
No, see, they are not minor, relatively or not.
If we prop up bannana republic dictators who then go on to kill a single human being, we’ve done wrong.
That we have a history of supporting thugs and killers…
(by the way, the test of a ‘bad guy’ isn’t their bodycount)
You don’t get it, Starv. We created the Viet Cong, by refusing to help the non-Communist Buddhist population of Viet Nam in their wholly justifiable rebellion against the oppression of creeps like the Diems! Now, it is possible that some struggle between the Buddhists and the Communists of Viet Nam may have emerged. But here’s the punchline: its their country! Not ours! Any of this getting through to you?
As to the massacre numbers of South and Central American monsters we installed and cozened, the facts are murky. Mass graves of indigenous indians of Central America are sometimes discovered, they don’t get a lot of play on Fox News. But the kicker is: theres a whole helluva lot less people to kill in Central America. So they were at a disadvantage is the Massacre Olympics.
So there’s a little boat, afloat in the vast ocean or your ignorance.
Actually, I agree with you that the original president Bush should have finished off Saddam instead of deserting all the people in Iraq we convinced to stand up to him. It was certainly more justified, and would have had more support, then than now.
spooje, the point I’m trying to make has nothing to do with President Bush. I’m trying to question the left-wing propensity – both here and in general – to totally ignore the victims of our enemies, and to weigh the good that is being accomplished on their behalf, incidental or not, when they are assessing whether our action is for the best or not.
All one hears about, here and in the media, is 1,000 soldiers killed here, or 100,000 civilians killed there…and they act like that is all that’s happening, and use it to condemn our actions in Iraq. For every death in Iraq, I see a hundred Iraqis not being murdered by Hussein and his policies, and a thousand lives that are incalculably happier and better off than if we had done nothing.
And of course, if what Bush hopes to accomplish is correct and the world winds up with a couple of democracies in the ME, this almost incalculably improves the liklihood of less terrorism and conflict in the Middle East in the decades to come.
True, true, true! I almost included Bush I as an honorary liberal but decided it would only serve to obfuscate matters. I don’t know how that man can look himself in the mirror knowing how he encouraged certain groups of Iraqis to rise up against Hussein, and then abandoned them to be slaughtered, along with their families, when we bailed. Utterly reprehensible!
Lessee now, if 100,000 civilians are sacrificed in the benign massacre, and it saves a hundred Iraqis each, and the population of Iraq is roughly 22 million…you think Saddam was going to kill half the population of Iraq? Math is not your strong suit? Sure as hell isn’t history.
Yeah, if. How likely do you think it is? Have I told you about that guy I know in Nigeria, needs a little help? Make a bunch of money…
I’m sorry, luci, but the point is: *it doesn’t frickin’ matter! *
We abandoned millions of people to be slaughtered who had believed in and depended upon us, and we knew it at the time! But no, it didn’t matter. We had to do the “right thing.” You know, former hippies were voting and all. :rolleyes:
And hang on, I’m about to prove another point…
Thank you for making my point! “It’s their country, fuck 'em. It’s their own fault they live under a repressive and murderous regime. Why is it my problem?”
It’s not their country, luci…they just happen to be living in it. It belongs to the murderous assholes you are happy to ignore.
tomndebb when it comes to factual posts.