But what if they, you know, breed??
With all due respect to the both of you, and particularly with great appreciation for your bravery, your experience does not jibe with presidential election tabulations. In 2004, the Washington Post reported that 72 percent of military personnel favored Bush over Kerry. And the votes actually cast, above and beyond abstentees, favored Bush by 57 percent over Kerry for all people who had ever served in the military, according to CNN.
You asserted that the urgency of the Iraq conflict spreading terrorism should have compelled Bush supporters to enlist. By analogy, the urgency of the Bosnian conflict spreading into a wider war should have compelled Clinton supporters to join the military. You will, of course, strain to point out some irrelevant problem with that analogy because the very last thing you would ever do is the intellectually honest thing of admitting your mistake.
Are you simply incapable of adding any sort of substance to a thread? You are to thinking contributors as winged monkeys were to the Wicked Witch of the West. Your function seems always to be nothing more than to cackle, and set your ass down on top of the pile.
No: see post 85. Were we, or were we not, able to bring the situation under control with our existing military? We were, and without great difficulty. In Iraq, we haven’t yet - and we’re wearing out our present troops in trying to do so. On that basis alone, there was no need for fresh volunteers for Bosnia, but there is for Iraq.
The other is the “wider war,” which neither you nor Clinton seems to have defined in anything but the vaguest manner. Was Greece threatened? Hungary? Romania? I don’t recall anyone saying they were. So who was threatened in this ‘wider war’? Other parts of onetime Yugoslavia, which were already involved in conflicts in the post-Tito era? Not exactly a threat to Western civilization - and per point 1, our then-existing military easily sufficed to contain the problem.
Whatever, dude.
That depends on the consequences of your failing to engage in it, doesn’t it?
You like analogies, so here’s one for you: suppose in WWII, we hadn’t had a draft, but instead relied on volunteers, and the result was too small an army to prosecute the war, with the result that we had made little if any progress in the war by 1945. And most pro-war Americans wrote letters to the editor, distributed pamphlets, etc., etc., urging Americans to continue to support the wars on Hitler and Tojo. Would there, or would there not, have come a point when the failure of war supporters of the appropriate age to enlist would have been a cop-out?
I’m a conservative who no longer believes in Bush. So? What do you want?
From you, nothing. If you don’t believe losing in Iraq would have the apocalyptic consequences Bush says it will, then there’s no reason for you to be doing anything special about it.
Fair enough.
All right, I read post 85. And now that I have no idea what your assertion is anymore, I’ll just shut up.
Scylla, were you living in the same country as I was then? This war was sold to the American people as nothing more or less than a preemptive strike to protect us from imminent danger.
In most every speech Bush made concerning the war he gave about ten reasons. During the build up I pointed this out, more than once. The debate was on WMDs As for the latter, the term used I recall was “grave and gathering threat” not “imminent.” So, if you say it was sold as an “imminent” threat, I’d like to see a cite.
Yes it does.
Yes there would be. Since I addressed this specifically in my post to you, I wonder why you would bring it up as if it were some sort of rebuttal.
Do you maintain that we are at such a point in Iraq, right now?
Do you maintain that all who support the war who have not enlisted are appropriate enlistment candidates?
I used myself as an example. Do you think it’s morally required for me to enlist before I have an opinion?
Do you beleive that women are allowed to support the war even though they are precluded for combat ops?
You’ve addressed none of the substance of my post to you, and you’ve thrown up a lame rebuttal of material I’ve already addressed while ignoring what I said about it.
Actaully, if you paid close enough attention it was much worse than that. It was introduced as the Bush doctrine which made “imminent threat” no longer the standard for intervention, pushing it back to pre-emptive strike on a grave and gathering threat. You might call that a distinction w/o a difference, but it does make the trigger point even earlier than “imminent”.
But there were certainly many statements made by administration officials that **implied **Iraq was an imminent threat, and I think Bush’s press secretary might have used that term once or twice. Factcheck.org did a detailed analysis of this, but I can’t seem to locate it at the moment. But, from wikipedia:
Of course not. I think the whole idea is a sick joke.
But others, including the 60 Year Old Boy King, do maintain that we are at such a point.
It’s pretty clear that you didn’t grasp even my brief OP, let alone my followup posts. Your post #84 rebutted the “idea that you cannot endorse a particular course of action without personally engaging in it.” I addressed your opening paragraph only because the remainder of your post was dedicated to backing up the truth of your rebuttal under ordinary circumstances, with ordinary consequences of failure to personally fight the battle in question.
The point here is that the Administration is asserting extraordinary consequences to failure in Iraq - that we’d lose the War on Terror, which presumably means they’d be fighting us over here, and all that goes with that. WWII-level consequences, IOW.
So I disregarded the rest of that post, because it didn’t seem to be at all on point. I thought my first response to that post made that pretty clear, but obviously not clear enough.
Similarly with most of this one, where you seem to think I’m the one claiming the apocalyptic consequences of failure, rather than the Bush White House. A remedial reading course might be in order.
Same same with Clinton’s Wider War doctrine. Since you brought this up again, I renew my question to you. Have you asked supporters of Clinton’s Bosnian intervention why they didn’t join the army?
Occasionally, Administration spokespersons accidentally went off script and used the more natural “imminent” and critics would go, “Aha! You said ‘imminent’!” but the vast majority of the time, they stuck with “grave and gathering.”
The question is, four years after the fact, what’s the difference? Does it matter now which terminology was used then? Either way, the argument seems to have been, “We’ve got to attack him now, or we may end up on the receiving end of his weapons.”
Yep, you are correct. I remembered reading this post of yours and it squares with what you’re saying, not with the way I interpreted it – for I thought that when you said you “were voting Democratic” you were siiding with the overwhelming Democratic and independent majority majority that made the Congressional elections a referendum on the Iraq clusterfuck and their oppossition to same.
Obviously then, I gave you too much credit in my laudatory reply.
Thus yes, apologies are in order, but so is a retraction of the goodwill I showed you in that post.
Guess we’re back to square one: you’re still a warmongering chickenhawk twat.
There, trust the matter is now settled.
Given what I said in post 103, why would I? I gave two very good reasons why I wouldn’t, neither of which applies to Bush’s Iraq. (As distinct from the real one.)
If you choose not to contest those reasons, I am satisified that we’ve resolved this question.
OK. So you repudiate the chickenhawk argument. Correct?
I don’t recall Bush saying that all eligible people should enlist. I don’t think he said that. I do recall him talking about the consequences for failure in Iraq, and that they would be extraordinarily high, comparing them to WWII.
I too, think they are that high. I think that quite a few were stridently against the war also beleive that the consequences of failure at this point would be extraordinarily bad.
If you feel that I don’t understand your OP, you’re incorrect. I think your attempt to connect the chickenhawk argument to the opinion that their are very high stakes in Iraq as fallacious. More, I wasn’t really responding to your OP so much (I think I said it all in my first post) but in general to the chickenhawk argument itself.
That’s why I said I was responding to the chickenhawk argument. Perhaps you should take your own advice about reading for comprehension.
I was going to thank you for the apology, but I note you stopped short of actually offering one. You did acknowledge your error which is nice.
As for the “warmongering chickenhawk twat” statement, I’ve posted a lengthy argument why I think it is fallacious and disingenuous, a substitute for rational argument, and a mere attempt to shout down dissenting opinion with insult.
Since you are one of the leading proponents of the “Chickenhawk” argument I’d be interested in your point by point rebuttal to that post, if you are up to it.
Just to make it clear, it isn’t like this is a side issue that I put down and bring up again. The facts at the heart of my argument are (1) Bush’s claim of apocalyptic consequences to failure in Iraq, and (2) the very real need for more, better volunteers, even for the war as is.