I think, given the Republicans’ over-the-top reaction to McDermott and Bonoir’s visit to Iraq, this could go either way. The Dem’s rhetoric is a bit over the top, but to my mind many of the Republicans are showing their true partisan colors in their response.
Though there are several examples of poor judgment in their rhetoric, Trent Lott took the cake for me, as I saw him on television deriding McDermott. “He should come home and keep his mouth shut,” I witnessed him say.
Um, excuse me? This is how you treat an elected official of the United States? Trying to shut down the debate, are we? Where’s the “civility and respect” Bush was prattling on about last week? You show respect to someone by suggesting the “keep their mouth shut”? I think not.
It is possible that the Democrat’s visit to Iraq will reflect poorly on the party… that remains to be seen. Among liberal circles, the visit is an example of doing what is right, nd is really showing quite well. I happen to agree with this interpretation.
However, the Republicans are digging their own grave in their responses to it. Lott’s statement alone reminds me of everything I dislike about extreme conservatism.
The Weekly Standard! Well, that certainly settles that! Boy, when you can come up with a clear-eyed, unvarnished source like that, a veritable paragon of non-partisan…
(Whereupon your respondent, unable to restrain his mirth any longer, proceeds to roll about on the floor in spasms and " 'owls, 'owls of derisive laughter, Bruce!")
So, december, the Iraqis are using the Democrat’s visit for propaganda. And that’s news?!?! They are also using Bush’s war rhetoric for propaganda.
And, Castro has gotten 40 years of propaganda out of U.S. policy toward Cuba! If these leaders didn’t have the U.S. to blame everything on, their governments might conceivably even have collapsed under the weight of their own domestic problems long ago!
Not that I am arguing that TWS is a unbiased source (they lean towards the truth, it seems to me), but aren’t you the one who points to ‘mediawhores’ or something like that for cites?
I direct attention to mediawhores (God bless 'em!) as a source for links. I don’t direct your attention to them for thier editorial stance, they serve as a clearing house. More than that, I get my links by way of BuzzFlash, Cursor, and TomPaine.com, all of whom are gleefully cooperative in directing my attention to various right wing screwball commentary, frequently at the aforementioned Weekly Standard, which seems to be the best of a bad lot.
Whole step above American Spectator (Of Clinton’s Love Baby Bat Boy Area 51 fame). Way down from the Pravda of the Right, Rat Race Journal.
december posted an utterly predicatable editorial from an utterly impeachable source. The writing is shade better than his own, mayhap, but still innocent of relevent facts.
Who gives a rats ass what propaganda use the Iraqi’s make of the visit? Would it give the Iraqi’s the impression that America is not wholly united? Well, that happens to be true. Did it give them the impression that not all Americans crave war? So much the better because it’s true.
But they are also witness to what must be an astonishment: that a country exists such as we, where congressmen are actually elected, and can fly to a foreign country and openly display thier disagreement with the No. 1 guy, and fly back, entirely unmolested, save for overwrought rhetoric.
Did you actually read what the Weekly Standard said was the offical translation of what Bonior et al. said?
From which I glean that B&M claimed that
Iraq was a peace-loving country
Action to enforce the inspections of Iraq’s production of weapons of mass destruction is “aggression”.
Either they really said these things, in which case they are preaching moral idiocy, or they were mistranslated for propaganda purposes, in which case they were dupes. If they have not repudiated the lies spread in their names by Saddam et al., they become both moral idiots and dupes, in a rare double bid for the Ramsey Clark Hall of Fame for the Liberally Stupid.
In neither case does the truth have much to do with the ways in which Iraq is putting their little junket to use. That this doesn’t bother the hard Left of the Democratic party conveys far more information to the electorate of the nation as a whole than perhaps the Democrats care to think about.
Congressman Jim McDermott is now back in Washington, DC, and gave a brief interview to KING television in Seattle immediately following Bush’s speech tonight. I couldn’t find any reports on it, so the following is my own transcript:
It’s at shame you flunked reading comprehension. What you ‘glean’ exists only in your imagination. Let’s try again looking at what is actually said shall we?
Or in other words. If you are peace loving, we will not wish to wage war on you. This is a statement of our conditions for war, (and quite good ones, I think). It says nothing at all about whether or not he believes that the country is in fact peace loving. This would probably be considered a veiled threat.
to which you respond
Which is begging the question. Action to enforce inspections would by definition not be agression. On the other hand, you imply that diplomatic efforts would not be ‘action to enforce inspections’. Which is nonsense, of course.
War is ‘action’ and everthing else is inaction? what a odd worldview.
Diplomacy is making progress, (hence the word ‘continue’). So war at this time would be agression precisely because it would not be an “action to enforce inspections”, but rather an unprovoked assault on a sovereign nation in violation of international law.
It can only be action to enforce inspections if the UN authorizes it. Last I checked, that hasn’t happened.
Tejota, if someone responded to this post by writing, “I don’t like responding to poorly reasoned posts,” wouldn’t you think that response implied that your post was poorly reasoned?
Not to get into a pissing contest with you regarding reading skills or their lack, but you did notice that the quotes under discussion were from the official Iraqi translation of McDermott and Bonior’s speech from Iraq, didn’t you?
So you suppose that a speech delivered from Baghdad, delivered by a couple of the most fervent anti-Bush doves in Congress, explicitly given in opposition to the current administration’s policies on foreign terror, is really saying nothing about whether war with Iraq is justified or not? To go to a foreign country and declare your opposition to military action against it, is really a “veiled threat” against that very country? By that logic, Jane Fonda posing for pictures in North Viet Nam next to anti-aircraft equipment was really a “veiled threat” of further air strikes.
You must have been murder in the Boy Scouts, with those kinds of knots.
It may well be nonsense, but it is nonsense being pitched by McDermott and Co. The distinction between “diplomacy” and military “aggression” is theirs. They want the one, but not the other.
If you agree that military action to enforce inspections is not aggression, you are agreeing with me that McDermott and Bonior are moral idiots. If you are agreeing with M&B that military action to enforce the inspections is “aggression”, then your distinction is meaningless.
Or to put it another way, what are you talking about?
And here we part company altogether. To class military action to enforce the inspections as “unprovoked assault”, or to pretend, as you seem to be doing, that poor old Iraq was just sitting there minding its own business when the big mean US decided to invade, is a statement so morally grotesque as to defy parsing.
You did know that Iraq agreed to the inspections as a condition for a cease-fire after the Gulf War? You did remember that the Gulf War started when Iraq invaded Kuwait? You did realize that Iraq is in violation both of its own sworn oaths, and of international agreement by refusing to allow UN inspectors to inspect the sites where they are building weapons of mass destruction?
Didn’t you?
I don’t question your reading skills. I question your ability to see the world as it is.
McDermott and Bonior can, in a sense, be excused for channeling Neville Chamberlain as they seem to be doing. They are representing districts which are far to the left of the American center, and moral blindness is many left-wing peaceniks’ stock in trade.
But Iraq is in violation of a cease-fire to which they are signatories. The cease-fire was in the context of a war which they started. The UN agreed back in the nineties that Iraq had to fulfill certain conditions before they would be treated as a sovereign nation.
They have persisted in their refusal to do so. The US, as the senior member of the coalition of the Gulf War, is entirely justified in actiing militarily to enforce the agreement.
That McDermott and Bonior do not see this is unfortunate. It allows Saddam and the Iraqis to use them for what Lenin used to call “useful idiots”. Useful to the Iraqis, of course.
For the freedom and safety of the Middle East, not so much.
Again and again, you guys start waving the UN resolutions in the air. If you base the legitimacy of your actions on the legitimacy of the UN resolutions, you must thereby base same on the legitimacy of the UN itself.
Hence, the disagreement should be between the UN and Iraq. The US has no dispensation to appoint itself sheriff.
But we already know better, don’t we? Our Leader made it clear from the git-go: he would like UN approval, it goes nicely. But he doesn’t really care, we’ll do it regardless.
No doubt the member nations were quite moved by this gesture. The middle finger raised in salute is almost universally recognized.
Hey, its our planet, you guys just live here. We want to raise your rent, we do it. We want to evict Iraq, so be it. We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Americans.
Possibly, it would depend on what I had said, and what else you said along with this quote. For instance, in this case. You do not appear to me to be implying that my post was poorly reasoned.
In any case, the quote in question is not a response to anything that we can see, and must be taken on its own terms. The only valid context is the original context, not the imaginings of the poster. If you have evidence that the original context changes the meaning in the way that he suggested, then you need to provide that evidence.
Oh, and I want to hilight this statement by elucidator
Bravo! My point exactly. Violation of a 3rd party’s resolutions cannot be a valid basis for war unless the 3rd party authorizes us to act on their behalf. They have not.
You were the first to provide an interpretation of the comments, if you are now trying to discredit the source, you only discredit your original comments. His interpretation was at least as reasonable as yours (and in my mind, much more on target). To suggest otherwise, is to question the patriotism of members of Congress. And while that seems a popular pasttime of the hawks these days, it is downright despicable and wholly unsupportable.
You torturously twist M&B comments, equate them with the “Hanoi Jane” episode, then hypocritically suggest Tejota is tying knots?
Which you continue again:
When you had just quoted Tejota as saying:
Do you allow for any action that is not military?
You did know that the cease-fire agreement did not provide for an invasion by the US or a “regime-change” as a remedy for breach, didn’t you? You may not have remembered that Iraq invaded Kuwait, because that was more than 10 years ago, and prior to the war that developed the cease-fire agreement. You may not remember that the inspections broke down four years ago. You might have some memory problems, because Saddam hasn’t done anything in the intervening four years (that has at least been publicized) to warrant the sudden obsession to topple him. What happens in most agreement breaches when the other party appears to accept the status quo? Who were the parties to the cease-fire agreement? You do remember that Iraq was able to provide credible evidence to the UN that the inspectors were feeding non-weapons inspection related information directly to US intelligence agencies, a function normally referred to as spying, don’t you? And that spying was not a condition that was covered in the cease-fire agreement.
like moral righteousness, indignation, and claims of unamerican activities is the right-wing stock in trade?
Saying it over and over doesn’t make it true. But go ahead. Maybe you will convince someone.
This is stuff I literally cannot argue with. You don’t seem to be using words with the same meaning as I am.
Are you arguing that Bonior and McDermott are in support of President Bush? If so, why the dickens haven’t they corrected the universal interpretation that they went to Baghdad to speak out against US military action to enforce the inspections?
This is too weird.
This almost immediately after a paragraph in which I posted:
I literally don’t know how to address your post. I cannot see how you can read the statements by Bonior et al., and interpret them as saying - well, whatever the hell you think they are saying.
You mean anything other than exactly what he has been doing - refusing to allow the inspections he committed to allow?
And don’t you think that there might have been something that happened in the last year or so that would warrant increased concern with Middle East sociopaths and weapons of mass destruction? Think hard. (I mean other than the election of a new President .)
Will you please, please stop trying to drag the Twin Towers into this discussion. There is nothing, not the slightest wisp of a hint of evidence connecting Saddam bin Laden with 9/11. You are parroting a party line utterly devoid of content.
As Twain said “Its not what he don’t know thats so frightening, its the things he knows for certain that just ain’t so!”
If you can construct a case proving that Saddam is involved in 9/11, please do so. If you cannot, may we dare to expect that you will stop alluding to it?
Let the SDMB readers decide which interpretation is more likely.
In regards to your Washington Post cite, it should be noted that the US, Britain, and/or the UN, did very little to enforce the cease-fire agreement after that event. Find me a single press release in 1999, 2000, or 2001, urging military action from the office of the President to enforce the UNSCOM inspections. And just recently, with renewed pressure, Iraq has agreed to meet the inspection conditions from the existing UN resolutions. Iraqi officials met with UNSCOM officials, headed by Hans Blix, and reached an agreement to resume inspections. Bush said that that was not enough. That we need a new resolution. Or war.
You keep speaking like US military actions are to “enforce weapons inspections”. Balderdash. The UNSCOM inspectors have said that going in under military cover is a bad idea. The administration talks about “regime change”. You are the one torturing the language.
You could start by answering direct questions, like:
Who were the parties to the cease-fire agreement?
And yes, I’m more concerned about one particular sociopath (Middle Eastern or Asian, which description you think fits better), that has found himself a cave, dead or alive, and prevents Bush his victory. And that’s a damn shame. I was rooting for Bush, but it looks like he’ll be focusing elsewhere for now. So you claim that Saddam has been refusing to allow the inspections over the last four years, I’ll agree, why haven’t we been seeking to enforce the agreement? Why have we been satisfied with the no-fly zones? And if he has now accepted the inspections, why are we creating new resolutions, instead of going in there and destroying any WoMD he has?
