Have you not been paying attention for the last 4 years?
They clearly are idiots. Anyone who believed they could march into a middle east country and be welcomed with flowers, to the extent of disbanding the only organisations capable of maintaining order is an idiot.
Who but a team of idiots would let a major city drown without feeling any need to act?
What breed of buffoon would go after Bin Ladin and leave the job half done?
These people actually are either idiots or actively malicious.
Try paying attention. First, you missed my “if I remember correctly”, indicating that my memory was unclear. Next, I didn’t say or imply that the fleet build-up in (what was actually) Dover (and other ports) was “secret”, I said it was “fake”. They knew the Germans could see, so they intentionally poorly camouflaged what were fake landing craft and tanks. From the air these would appear real. Finally, there is my Post #194, in which I acknowledge my error and straigthen out the facts.
Right after the Baker Commission issued its set of recommendations, Jim Baker was The Daily Show. John Stewart asked him, “So what do we do with Iran?” Baker’s response was spot on (I thought) - “You practice diplomacy. We hated Russia for 50 years - they were our sworn enemy - but we continued to maintain diplomatic relations with them and we talked with them 'til we were both blue in the face. That’s how diplomacy works.”
Of course, diplomacy takes nuance, intuition, skill, and some brains. We all know that the present administration “doesn’t do nuance.”
If you want to point out how the Iranian government is so deeply backwards and nutty compared to the American government… are you sure you chose the best comparison?
There is no need to ‘remember correctly’. That is not an excuse. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of ww2 knows Norway was occupied by Germany and that the statement was absurd. It’s like me saying ‘if I remember correctly’ the Chinese were the first men on the moon. It is self-evidently absurd to anyone with the slightest pretence of knowledge on the subject.
That you did not illustrates you are not in a position to use analogies from that war in any intelligent way.
Apart from the fact that your already pitifully weak analogy fails to hold water from the get-go because you are talking about deceiving the germans about the operational details of the invasion not the invasion itself and the leak was about the existence of a plan and not the operational targets.
The only thing the two have in common is that the enemy both know it’s happening. The Germans knew there was an invasion imminent and the Iranians know the USA is screwing with them.
The Germans didn’t know where and when, so they couldn’t fortify any one place. Those facts were secret. Surely, Eisenhower thought that keeping that information secret was important, as he went to great pains to misdirect them. It would have been counter-productive to announce the when, how and where back WWII, or any war, or today with clandestine plans concerning Iran.
I forgive you for missing the painfully obvious. God gives us each different gifts and he evidently made up for your propensity to miss things by bestowing in you the perfection of never misspeaking. Oh, if we could all have such a gift…
The government’s attempts to destabilize Iran could have an impact on national security - to wit, make Iran mad and maybe bad things will happen, so the public deserves to know if the government is provoking Iran. I didn’t say our national security was threatened by the disclosure of the program.
It’s better that the details not be made public, but the government is acting in the public’s names and the public can bear the consequences, so it should at least have a general idea.
I think the government is entitled to try, let’s put it that way. But I don’t know how much actual secrecy is in our best interests.
I don’t know if it’s standard, but I’m not shocked. Journalists generally don’t want to get people killed, believe it or not, and it would be bad for business if they did.
I agree. In some respects it’s even more important to have open communications with your enemies than with your allies. I give Condi at least a little credit for talking to Iran, even if on a very limited basis. I’m sure it took a lot of persuasive work with Bush to get him to allow her to do that. But we need to do a lot more.
We should also keep in mind, too, that as repressive as the Iranian regime is, it’s actually one of the least repressive regimes in the region (remember, I’m grading on a curve here). It’s a sham of a democracy, but I’d much rather be an ordinary citizen of Iran than an ordinary citizen of Saudi Arabia.
I maybe didn’t read the article closely enough, but I didn’t see anything in that article that gave away any pertinent information as to operations that were happening. It was a vague article about strategic objectives that to me were like ‘Well duh’ aspects of espionage.
The rationale is that the administration was driven by ideology pushed by amateurs. The whole Wolfowitz term paper that decreed that if we waltzed into Iraq, the people would come out and welcome us as liberators and then quickly settle down to American-style democracy, the notion that a light strike force would be the way to win wars in the future, so that we should ignore the calls from the Joint Chiefs and attack Iraq with one third of the requested manpower (which successfully overthrew their military, but ignored the need to hold the territory and keep the peace once their military collapsed), the idea that if we cobbled together (through bribery and threat) a “coalition” to invade Iraq, the rest of the Middle East would be faked into believing that it was a world-wide rescue effort instead of simply an American act of imperialism.
These people clearly did NOT know what they were doing. I do not claim that they were stupid, only naively driven by their own blindered ideologies.
The Japanese leadership of 1941 was not idiotic, they simply made some really foolish assumptions based on not recognzing the American culture. Similar examples can be found throughout history. One significant difference in this case is that there was no lack of voices that warned these people ahead of time that their actions would fail–in pretty much the ways that they have failed.
A rationale for the “Axis of Evil” speech? I would guess that it was pretty much a lack of any career observers of world politics being permitted to interfere with the ideology being tossed around the Oval Office.
“Threatened” is not something I said you said, although that would be the ultimate fear. I did say “have an effect”. I thought that was a fair characterization of this, from your Post 104: (bolding mine)
It seems you at least think that it could have an effect. Sorry if I misunderstood you.
I agree with the first part. As far as the rest, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I’d say as little as possible. But for those areas where the government feels it is in the best interest of national security to keep something secret, secret it should be kept. We can’t have leakers, journalists—well-meaning or outright traitors—either leaking such information or publishing it. The judgment of how to protect us is placed in the hands of our elected officials. Granted once the cat is completely out of the bag it isw a different story. Both figuratively and literally.
Perhaps not, but they are blinded by neocon PNAC ideology. Very intelligent people can be blinded by ideology; the whole history of the Communist Bloc portrays that.
I was trying to clarify what I said. Is my point clear now? What I was saying is that the policy has an impact on our security. I think the disclosure will have zero impact on national security - I’m sure Iran knew what we were doing, and we know now the government had no problem with the reporting.
The problem is that there’s no way to determine if they are making the right call, or making it for the right reasons. I’m not willing to just trust everyone with that ability.
He’s a War President, a Leader of Men. The war he’s got just isn’t adequate to his needs, so he’s shopping. He dreams at night of Iran pulling a Pearl Harbor/Tonkin Bay, and then Laura wakes him up and makes him sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Did anyone read my linked interview with Scott Ritter? It got shunned on the bottom of page 3…I think it’s the best summary of Ritter’s wisdom on Iran, outside of his book. Very informative.
I think sanctions are kind of the middle-ground between diplomacy and war.
A similar split happened during the Reagan Administration. It was over people who supported Iraq and people who supported Iran in their war. It lead to things like Iran Contra, and of course Bush’s Daddy played both sides.