In the specific case of Matt Lauer, it’s not far off the mark. NBC was a target of the 2001 anthrax attacks, after all.
Yeah, except we don’t know who did the attacking. Could have been AlQ. Could have been The Joker, for all we know.
But a terrorist by definition, whoever it was.
Don’t forget that Bush has prevented another terrorist attack since 9/11, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.
I agree that everyone has to find their own path. But if, for instance, it were generally known that the world was in imminent danger of blowing to smithereens, and I could do something to keep it from happening, I’d be wasting my time arguing about it online. And I’d think that anyone else who was able to help save the world, but wasn’t, was a waste of oxygen.
Well, according to Bush, the world won’t explode if we lose in Iraq. But he does say the West will lose the Global War on Terror to the Islamofascists if we lose in Iraq. Now, that’s pretty damned serious. Not as serious as the end of the world, but still pretty damned serious.
I agree that, even in the face of such a threat, everyone has to find their own path. But I am roundly condemnatory of any large group of like-minded people who believe what Bush claims to believe, yet very few of them find paths that involve enlistment. And I’d be even more condemnatory of them if they were making a lot of noise about how Bush was right, and those who criticized him were for all practical purposes supporting the terrorists.
I do not know each individual person’s story, so I am not going to condemn any one individual. But once we’ve got a nice large group, and we can look at its behavior as a whole, without having to reach conclusions about outliers, the statistician in me says we can reach conclusions. And yeah, the behavior of this group stinks to high heaven, no matter how valid the excuses of some individuals may be.
Well, we **are **at war with people who use the deliberate killing of as one of their main combat tactics. I wouldn’t phrase it the way Bush did, but I wouldn’t say that was flat out wrong either. But more importantly, that doesn’t mean we will lost “the War on Terror” if we lose in Iraq, as the OP asserts. Now, if he wants to modify that assertion, then we can debate what the new assertion is.
So why didn’t we get involved in Europe until Germany declared war on us (after Japan attacked us, and we declared war on them)? We might truthfully say that we stayed on in Europe after WWII because we learned that our interests were intertwined with the Europeans during that war, but we certainly didn’t, as a country, think so prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. FDR did, but he couldn’t convince the rest of us.
I did not. And I explained why @137, per the criteria I stated @139.
Is there an echo in here? I coulda sworn I just said this.
Oops. That should have been “deliberate killing of civilians” in that first sentence. Since our familiy members are largely civilians, they are potential targets.
RTFirefly, you have to account for your own behavior as well, your statistics be damned. Because you support your share of fighting, rhetorically at least.
Do you support it any other way?
What do you do for military readiness?
What do you do for veterans?
What do you do to help people in developing countries, particularly Islamic ones? Did you contribute to tsunami relief?
Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask, but since you’re bringing up the subject, I think you have to account for it. Your position, after all, seems to be that it is hypocritical to support a war and risk little yourself. Well, you supported sending troops into Afghanistan, and many have died there.
What have you risked, if anything?
That’s a valid criticism. I don’t think I’ve got a rebuttal handy, either.
It did. But good job of finding the flaw in my argument!
Because I’ve got no refutation, now that I’ve had a few minutes to think about it, just to be sure. This undercuts my first criterion - that of the seriousness of the threat. An ongoing threat of terrorism at some level might be serious enough, if it were a pretty damned high level, such as nukes being exploded in a different American city every few months, but that’s a lot more than they’re saying in this instance.
While I think Hentor is right in saying that Bush & Co. want us to regard this as a fight for our very lives, that’s more than they’re willing to say explicitly, AFAIK. No question that they’re being two-faced as all sin about it, but they’re not explicitly saying anything that rises to the level of ‘if you believe it’s really that serious, you’d have to have a damned good reason to do no more than root from the sidelines.’
I think it’s an extremely appropriate criticism that Bush has not make the American public participate (read: sacrifice) in order to fight the “War on Terror”; other than having to take our shoes off at the airport. We’ve definitely been oversold a bill of goods, and we are doing almost nothing, as a country, to address the real problem. We still think that slinging our weight around like a bull in a china shop is a good thing, when we should be looking for ways to extricate ourselves from the powderkeg also commonly known as the Middle East.
No. I damned sure don’t. At least not on this board.
If you and I were having a friendly beer away from this board, I’d do a 180° on that. But I think personalizing the debate on this board to the level you’re doing in this post is a lousy idea.
I’m not going to tell you, here in either the Pit or GD, if I’m donating to veterans’ causes, or if I contributed to tsunami relief, or anything like that, to justify my position in a debate. If I feel like doing that in MPSIMS, I may. But I think that to ask posters to demonstrate that they have ‘done good’ as an implied condition of participating in a debate here is a really, really lousy idea.
Where’s that ‘slams head against desk’ smiley when you need it?
Anyway, if that makes sense to you, I’m retiring from this battlefield. AFAIAC, John Mace has skewered the proposition I set out in the OP. If others disagree, they are of course welcome to carry on the fight (like I could stop them), but I think I should go get some work done. 
Of course, as we all know, when the US butchers thousands of civilians it’s “un-deliberate.”
Surveys pointing to high civilian death toll in Iraq
What? Oooopsie!
Moreover, although my google-fu is not helping, I clearly remember reading that Rumsfeld had to be consulted in pre-war raid (of which there were many) when the chosen targets posed danger to fifty or more civians in the surroundings. **He approved each and everyone of them.
**.
Hate to break it to you, John, but I don’t see you as the guys wearing the white hats.
And yet you feel you have the right to call the commitment of others into question?
Why is that?
Okay, if the bar is finding a quote from them that says “We will all die if we don’t win in Iraq,” I suppose I’ll concede that that is unlikely to turn up.
These people are masters of making statements that invite the listener to close the loop for them. Look at the latest PR push. Google “We cannot afford to lose in Iraq.” You’ll find that this phrase has been said, all in a single span of days, by Rice, Cheney, Secretary Gates, and Senator Lindsey Graham. Clearly it is a concerted effort, a talking point that they want out there.
What does it mean, that we “Cannot afford to lose in Iraq”? In my opinion, it is intended to convey the all-in nature of the conflict. The consequences of losing in Iraq are greater than we can bear.
But of course, it can be dissected in different ways, particularly by those killing time on a message board in mild defense of President Bush. “Well, Bush never said it!” “It simply means that the costs of losing would be great, since the war on terror would go on…” etc, etc.
But, yeah, it’s a semantic battle that I’m sure I just won’t be able to win - I can afford to lose the semantic battle about Bush’s selling of the magnitude of the cause being fought for by some of us.
You addressed an analogy that you made up (comparing the wars), and not the one that I presented to you (comparing the speeches). But I will accept your concession to John as a concession to me. Let’s just say that you were too proud to concede to me and used John vicariously.
I would absolutely agree that the level of rhetoric used by Bush et al in describing the threat of “terrorism” is waaaaay above what it needs to be and we are in no way being asked to put up an effort in that fight comensurate with the claimed level of the threat. But I still disagree with the OP that there is some inherent hypocracy in not signing up for a tour of duty in Iraq if you support the war. That’s taking the case to the opposite extreme.
The rhetoric of these arguments back and forth leave me a little confused. While I do not support the Iraq war and have not, I believe it is for reasons different from most of the more liberal members of the board. **I do not expect people ** who state a belief a war needs to be supported are required to do so in person.
Men and Woman volunteer for a variety of reasons. You cannot be in the reserves and not expect to possible have to serve in a war you do not believe in.
I just missed Desert Storm by less than a year. Many of my friends were working in the USS Ranger as it violated what to then had been military strategy of never having an Aircraft Carrier in the Persian Gulf. I was worried at the time and as a member of the IRR* I was unsure if the war would disrupt my life. If Desert Storm did not go so well, they may have activated the IRR. If called to return, I would have and I would have known I was going to serve in a just war. I would not expect those at home, who supported the war, to have to join up. That is the point of an all-volunteer military.
If President Bush has abused his powers and the military too much, than future recruitment and pretension will be a problem. I believe Shrub has abused his powers in many ways. I believe there will be a period following this war where recruitment will be difficult again. I believe we, as a country will recover from the idiocy of this war of false pretenses.
If we had concentrated on the Afghan war, we would have had more than enough forces and support to do the job properly and we would have helped the people of the country in a huge way. Instead, I can see no justification to claim that we have helped either Afghanistan or Iraq at this point.
Scylla, while I do not expect you to join the military to prove the value of your opinion in supporting the war, your excuses are pure bullshit. Anyone that is capable of running an ultra-marathon is better suited to army duty than I have ever been. I served the Navy, I did my time and I am proud of it. I did my time to help myself out, and so other did not have to.
RTFirefly, while I agree with most of your views about this war, and I might hate Shrub & Cheney more than even you do, I still think your Op holds no water.
Mr. Moto, good to see you back.
Jim
- Navy Inactive Ready Reserves.
Google-fu rewards effort and returns a cite on Rumsfeld-approved civilian killings:
Scroll down to a third of the page:
Bush Warriors Sign Off on War Crimes
Highlights/coloring obviously mine.
The source is obviously yours, too. A notoriously one-dimensional political hack quoted in a leftist blog.