Headline on MSNBC: Is Bush preparing a new Iraq offensive? IMHO: Yes, yes, it is.
Take off and nuke 'em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
:rolleyes:
While I hadn’t put as much thought into it as Cervaise, I do admit the same idea has crossed my mind.
Bush & Co. seeing Sadam getting a little too organized for his own good decides it’s time to take him out, with or without WMDs. Didn’t really matter, they just needed an excuse plausible or not.
Knowing full well that Iraq would then fall back into a chaotic civil mess for many years to come they figure “better them killing eachother over there for years on end than them getting organized and coming to kill Americans. Well, at least on my watch.”
Of course, he can’t really come out and say “In order to protect our country from any possible organized Iraq, no matter how far-fetched, we’re going to drive their nation into a downward spiral that will take decades to climb out of.”
So he has to come up with some sort of “in the name of democracy for Iraq, blah, blah, blah” knowing full well it will never come to fruition.
WTF? Show me where the word “cover up” appears in anything I said! In short, what the hell are you babbling about?
I’m babbling about this bullshit right here:
In other words, he signed off on it of his own free will. Nobody forced him to do it. That makes your statement bullshit. Unless you really believe what you’re saying, in which case I laid out the conspiracy theory for you.
The term “cover up” appears nowhere in your cited quote.
Out of all the above predictions in the thread: hopeless, embarrassing optimism on behalf of the bellicose assholes; even in fact some hopeless optimism by the peaceniks, Mennochio’s prediction stands out as frighteningly accurate. Like, almost absolutely spot on, albeit optimistic over the number of civilian casualties. If it weren’t such a tragic situation, I’d declare you a prophet.
Well, yeah. But who’s idea was it? Your contempt for the man clearly has no bounds, but surely you can’t believe that he thought his background in nuclear submarines qualified him to make decisions about aerial assault and exfiltration? That would be like making Chester Nimitz commander of an armored division.
Is it not more likely that the scheme was devised by men in uniform with some level of expertise? And said scheme was presented for his approval? No doubt, he cast about looking for options. Is it your premise that he cooked this up on his own, against the advice of his military advisers? They said “This is a dumb idea, sir, and it won’t work!”? And he said “Screw. I’m CinC, salute and obey!”? Have some substantiation for that?
So what would President AFD do, if we can apply the gold standard? Military experts you have reason to trust advise you that you can save hundreds of American lives by, say, an underwater demolition mission conducted by Navy SEALS. And you would refuse, based on your expertise in the Air National Guard? I very much doubt that. Wrong you are, but stupid, you are not.
No, you concocted a conspiracy theory out of whole cloth and assigned it to me. I understand and accept that you have a deeply held contempt for civilian liberals. But sometimes we’re right. As recent history has demonstrated.
Umm - Israel and Egypt are at peace, and recognize each other? Egypt got the Sinai back? This gave cover for some other Arab states to finally end the 1948 war?
Perhaps you were thinking the Palestinians were involved?
Up until 1973, there were Arab-Israeli wars about every 9 years. There haven’t been any since Camp David. Things aren’t exactly great, but they’re better now then they were then.
I agree that Carter wasn’t a great president, but Camp David played to one of his few strengths.
What war did Teddy Roosevelt start under false premises? He wasn’t President in 1898.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to END a war, actually.
Oh, but I must disagree. It would be VASTLY dumber than making Chester Nimitz an army commander. Nimitz was a strategic and tactical genius, a man of tremendous honesty, character and moral courage, and a military leader extraordinaire right down to his bones. He’d have made himself a pretty good tank commander in no time at all.
Rumsfeld, er, not so much.
And here I thought this thread was going to be about Frank experimenting with things he read about in the sex torture thread…
“Umm”, no, I was not thinking the Palestinians were involved. It seems like there were less suicide bombers and terrorist acts inside of Israel in the late seventies in Israel than nowadays. Why is it so great that Israel gave up territory and still got no safety for it. Seems like they did pretty well in each of those wars. I do not see a huge gain in safety or stability in the region. You know that was the ultimate aim of the Camp David agreements.
BTW: Did you know starting your post the way you did with the Umm is pretty damn insulting to someone’s intelligence? I am hoping you did not realize that or intend that.
Jim
Just so. But he was an enthusiastic cheerleader for a war that was, at bottom, an excercise in geopolitical banditry.
Certainly deserved it more than Kissinger. Got a complex thing about TR, can’t help but love his vitality and a lot of his populist instincts were sound. But he had a belligerant posture, an enthusiasm for things military that is uncomfortably close to being bloodthirsty. And, of course, I stand with Twain and others who regarded an imperial, expansionist America as a betrayal of revolutionary values and a foul corruption of those ideals.
Of course, being educated and experienced in the essential principles…firepower, logistics, etc… he would no doubt be a fast study. But if its the Battle of the Bulge, no one is thinking “Maybe not Patton. Howzabout Nimitz?”
A responsible man with some military experience is aware of the limitations of his expertise. In a military, different men are trained to different tasks, and trained to entrust those tasks to those persons trained. Carter was trained in submarines, not helicopters, not infantry.
It is absurd to imagine he would have planned such an operation on his own, and it would be absurd for him to think that he could. Therefore, it follows that the plan could not have been his, he had to rely on his military staff. So the tactical failure is not his failure.
The overall plan, however, strikes me as a collossus of dumb. Zip in, spread some lead around, waste a couple dozen Iranian punks, grab the hostages and whisk them away? Pure Chuck Norris, no grown man should take it seriously. But clearly a bunch of them must have done, and not just one.
The Panamanian “revolution”. His real reasons were pretty transparent to everyone, of course, even if he didn’t dare say them out loud.
Perhaps because two countries that had been long time, dire enemies (going back to Biblical times, if you count ancient enemies) are no longer at odds with one another?
I don’t have much to add to the general mood of this thread other than: Bush better not take one fucking day of vacation between now and when he exercises his role as “The Decider” in January. And I, too, fear that he’s headed towards an increase in troops levels as one of his major decisions. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You say this like it was a bad thing, I consider the whole Panama thing to be one of his many positive accomplishments.
Sorry, I do not buy it. This Israel had effectively not existed until 1948 and that ancient Egypt has very little in common with modern Egypt. I will give you more peace between to countries with 30+ years of bad blood, but not thousands.
The problem is it did not really secure Israel in any meaningful way. No one has addressed this yet.
Jim
There were a lot fewer people in Israel during the 1970’s.
Sorry about that - but saying that Camp David didn’t accomplish anything much just seems so wrong. No, it didn’t solve the Palestinian question, nor was it designed to. Suicide bombing hadn’t been invented back then, remember. Having Israel be at peace with its neighbors - a peace that has held up - is no small feat.
The territory Israel gave up was territory it didn’t really want. The Sinai was useful as a buffer zone, but peace is an even better one.
Would you consider only a complete solution a major accomplishment? That seems very unrealistic to me. It’s like saying curing breast cancer was trivial because ten other types of cancers are still out there.
Question-I recall one of my professors saying that at one point, Carter locked Sadat and Begin in a room and refused to let them out until they at least agreed to talk to one another, or something like that. True or false?