We are so f*cking screwed (re: the war)

The BBQ Pit
81

Oh, no. Not excluding None of the Above. But I feel that the stereotype of the vaugely goofy, but good natured GI Joe, giving out chocolate to kids when not in war, is fairly close to the knight in shining armor that many people, in their hearts, want to be.

Certainly, people can behave in many different ways for many different reasons.

But, all things considered, I feel confident in the decency and morality of your average american soldier. Or average american citizen. When something goes wrong, they will do what they can to make things better.

So… Yes, they see us as invaders. Well, some of them do. Some of them will hate us forever. Some of them won’t. Some of them like us… or at least the Brits… already.
But in the end, I feel that, once they get to know us, we can be friends.
As far as not qualifying positions, I think that any absolute has qualifiers. Even this one. And I am not 5TC or Elucidator, but I think I can understand where they come from. Sorry if I won’t be a cardboard target to shoot down. But if I were against this war… I’m not sure I am. I’m still not sure I am. I’m not sure I’m not, either… If I were against this war, once committed, I would not want us to do what we did to South Vietnam. Vanish, leaving our allies in the lurch, leaving a destroyed land behind us.
I would, therefore, support our troops and the war, but call for a managed end as soon as possible.

And, when it comes to the fighting, the actual fighting… If someone has to die, I still prefer the other person dies. And not someone on my side. It may be arbritrary, from an absolute standpoint. Perhaps my soldier was a thief all his life, and the Iraqi is a living saint. But I must, being a finite person, pick a side to stand on, and here it is.

Not my country, right or wrong. Not America: Love it or Leave it.

But a true and loving embrace of the ideals of this great land, and an understanding that every person wearing dogtags is, in some small way, doing his best to defend them.

82

Oh, now all of you are in trouble. I’m roaring drunk and still rattling around in my armchair where I’m safely assured to be virtually invisible until the ugly truth slaps you in the face like The Hedgehog’s semescent tubule waking you from a quaalude daydream while the cameras roll.

Yeah, those Germans and those Japanese are just fucking great examples of militaristic countries that suddenly fell into line after the great and mighty America clobbered them both into sumbission.

Except for one thing. Both of those fine current bulwarks of democracy tumbled and fell into line when they were faced with invasion from a completely different and infinitely more insane alternative: the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Well, wake up and smell the caviar, my friends, because the Commies are long gone and suddenly Iraq is being invaded by a strange and foreign bogeyman which seeks to destroy their way of life. We’re no longer Stalin Lite, we’re the evil horde itself. Why do they fight us? Because they’ve never seen anything scarier than we.

What, I ask you redneck road-farm-game-and-communications-but-not-health-unemployment-traditional-welfare-subsidized maniac solipsists, is the lesser evil compared to us, you fucking fools!

I’ll tell you what it is, it’s some sort of philosophy which can hold the line against a giant military behemoth by slowly wearing it down and economically damaging it by methods which we cannot easily combat.

And I’ll give you one hint what that is, you stupid motherfuckers. It’s a good thing they taught you how to do those girl pushups in gym class, 'cause we just went down a path where if we lose, we’ll be doing those eight times a day.

We just bought a war so big that we can be assured of decades of our best and brightest being diverted into it. Our team captains, the heads of our debating clubs, the most dependable drug dealers in town–they’re all gonna go down the tubes with the rest of this shit. Combating asymmetric warfare requires our very best these days, not you fucking idiots who cheered it along.

And they’ll be the ones who die, not you. And the ones who lead you will be the ones scarred by this warfare. And the most insane and ruthless of them will find the message which squirms your fat asses to the voting booth, because he’ll figure out that it’s easier to lie to the top and continue the fight than it is to solve the fucking problem.

So sit there and laugh at me when this bullshit “war” lasts merely a month, or a year, or a decade, and maybe you’ll remember me when I told you it was the first unjust battle which sparked a war against a tide of ignorance so vast you can never win. You just fucked with someone and left them nothing left to turn to except a god more irrational and psychotic than your own.

This may be the very descent of man, because when I play it out I see that we are about to submerge back into the very sublime slime from which you refuse to believe you emerged. There you shall reign as particulate fools among the detrius of kings.

I’ll fight you fools to the end, and if there isn’t a God who can pull your heads out of your own asses, I’ll be the first against the wall. Right after elucidator, that is, if he doesn’t take to flying small planes in Minnesota.

Oh, and could someone do me the favor of e-mailing me something about this? There’s no possible way I’ll remember it.

83

One of the best gonzo rants I’ve ever read. Clap clap.

Dr Sofa “Hunter” King, I salute you.

84

Alea jacta est.

What more is there to say? Sofa’s possibly right. We have crossed the Rubicon, and a new and uncertain world awaits us on the other side. It may well have been coming, we may simply have sped it up. Perhaps we can firebreak before it ignites… or perhaps we have entered a conflict we can not win.

But the one thing we can’t do is stop.

Besides, it might not be that bad after all. We’ll see… but it’ll take three-four years to be certain.

85

And all of that time, you will be able to sit at home on your drunk ass telling the rest of the world [backward-ass accent] “Hows it shoulda been dun!”[/b-aa]

[sub]Awesome typing skills though dude- I wish I could do that well sober.[/sub]

86

Welcome to the Dubya Zone…

87

saen

And in 7 weeks, 6 days and 1 minute, I’m gonna start screaming about how this administration lied to us about how long this war will last. I mean, f’chrissakes, can’t they tell exactly how long a war will last before it starts?

As well as exactly what battles will occur, when they will occur, how they will occur, the exact numbers of casualties…and of course give us all that information before the first bullet is fired…

:feh:

88

that’s it Sofa thanks.
I do remember some one (weirddave perhaps?) kept on asking me ‘if it was only going to be 3 days and then Iraq would be liberated, would I be against it…’ (I may be misremembering the amount of time), and thinking ‘who the hell really believes that it’ll only be a few days?’.

89

But hey, think of the possible rewards!! If all goes in Iraq like it did with Japan, in 50 years some kid named Sayed Hussein will be a starting right-fielder for the Yankees drawing a $20 million paycheck from the reanimated corpse of George Steinbrenner.

90

Toaster,

I have the war in Microsoft Project - don’t you? 250,000 resources, 24 hour days, taking Baghdad on the critical path…dependencies on bombing before ground war.

Yep, 7 weeks, 6 days, 23 hours.

91

I think I agree with you Sofa. (I didn’t quite understand all of it. :))

I now see the attack on Iraq as the first battle in a war that will rage on until the United States as we know it is destroyed. We have no allies anymore - governments obey us out of fear. As much as I would like to see major changes in the world power structure, that’s not the way for it to happen. Eventually the increasing number of deseparate people full of rage against this country are going to strike back, and it’s not going to be pretty.

92

Ok, who wants to be our Thucydides and write the modern version of his ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’? I’d volunteer myself but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to maintain a detached attitude towards the major players. Hubris is not a good quality for a leader to have (as history has repeatedly pointed out).

93

This thread reminds me of this week’s This Modern World cartoon.

94

Count me with those who say this war is the biggest foreign-policy and national-security mistake in fifty years, but that now that it’s on, it would be more damaging to withdraw. Goddammit.

But also count me with those who say the doom-saying from the media is off-base. Militarily, the U.S. will prevail, in weeks or months, at the cost of hundreds or thousands of lives on both sides. The short-term military victory is not in question, though you’ll have to ignore all the pesky local flare-ups, a la Afghanistan.

The long-term problems, though, are totally up in the air. Let’s consider some history, shall we?

The Spanish-American War of 1898, viewed in the short term, was a wonderful, low-impact victory. A “splendid little war,” goes the phrase. Inflamed by daily reports of Spanish atrocities committed against the Cuban people, our rage is triggered by a single devastating (and, to this day, inadequately explained) incident. Off we go, marching south on a “war of liberation.” Four months later, and only a few hundred people killed in battle (not counting the several thousand who died of malaria), we’ve achieved the absolute destruction of the Spanish fleet and the uncontested dominance of the island of Cuba, with its rich sugar fields and other desirables.

Fast-forward, now, as sixty years of ham-fisted imperialistic mismanagement create the conditions that allow Castro to take power.

Oops.

The current administration knows full well they won’t be around to take the heat when, in the long term, the chain of events set in motion by this foolhardy military adventure comes to fruition, any more than McKinley and Roosevelt get blamed for Cuba, or Eisenhower and Kennedy get blamed for entangling us in Vietnam. Obviously, the initiators don’t deserve the full measure of guilt for what ultimately became major failures; there’s more than enough to go around. But if McKinley and Roosevelt had followed up their “splendid little war” with more even-handed management of and a clear statement of purpose regarding the incipient state, the decades of neglect might have been avoided. They needed to set the precedent.

When we invaded Afghanistan, the Bush administration said we would not forget them again. The American people, went the rhetoric, would be there for them as they labor to create a national identity and join the family of modern states. And now, a year later, we’ve gone right back to ignoring them, and nobody seems to care or even notice.

That’s the appalling reality, and that’s why this war is such a gross mistake. The current administration has given us absolutely no reason to think they’ll manage the aftermath intelligently and navigate the insanely complicated minefield of ethnic, theocratic, and international interests in the region. But it won’t matter, because a year later, nobody will be paying attention.

No, I’m not angry about it. Not at all. What gives you that idea?

95

Sofa: Dr Thompson himself picked Kentucky to go all the way.
Great rant. Right up there with your old martini post.

96

Agreed, Cervaise, but I’m thinking this is just going to be the start of a series of smaller wars which will eventually bleed us dry. Not Bush and his minions (heaven forbid that they have to shed one drop of blood to carry out their assinine policies), mind you, just us common 'merikans. You know, the people that supposedly run this place. What a mess.

97

Linkety, link, link, link?

98

Just what the hell do you think the military are doing right now???

Many don’t understand that more civilian casualties on the iraqi side mean less casualties in the u.s military. Whether it’s cowardly and/or morally wrong is another matter altogether.

99

Only in the short run. Unlike the first Gulf War, where the main objective was to drive the Iraqi military out of Kuwait, the goal in this case is to replace the current regime with a stable, West-friendly, reasonably democratic one. That requires some measure of trust and goodwill from the Iraqi citizenry, and the more civilian casualties there are, the harder that’s going to be to get. The less receptive the general populace is to a US-organized government, the longer US forces are going to have to stay there as ‘interim peacekeepers’. The long the US has forces in Iraq, the more US military casualties there will inevitably be.