Democrats & Liberals: Archives

thorswitch. On the surface you can make this argument, and I believe that I read a similar argument on Al-Jazerra about a year ago (that 9/11 was successful because the troops were pulled from the Peninsula). But in my opinion the benefits of ending the failed policy of containment in the Middle East, including the end of protecting Saudi Arabia via our troops, outweigh the argument that we gave the terrorists some kind of victory.

I dont think you understand what apeasement means. It is not just giving someone what they want, purposefully or accedentially, it is doing what others want you to do in an attempt to make them like you better. This is an important distintion because the facts you present where not done to make Osama like the usa better, they were done because they were seen as being in the best interests of the us. you are not apeasing someone just because your interests intersect nicely with theirs. Apeasement is giving food to the north koreans in exchange for not developing a nuke program.

Thorswitch,

So, is your position that we should leave troops in Saudi Arabia?

For one, the main reason for having troops in Saudi Arabia were as protection from an Iraqi invasion. The removal of Saddam negates that threat. Osama Bin Laden was pissed because the Saudi’s asked the US for military help in the first Gulf War rather than relying on the ‘muhajadeen’.

What other purpose could having US troops in Saudi Arabia serve? Other than occupation?

Here is an example that exposes the left’s lie that Bush is not trying to get allies and use diplomacy in the war on terror. They’ve done everything possible to get the Saudi’s to cooperate.

We will stay in Iraq until they have a government able to fend off these terrorist attacks by themselves. Once we leave, the terrorist attacks will have no moral support whatsoever in the Arab world and would acheive the opposite of their aim. The Iraqis themselves will be much more successful at stopping these attacks once we leave because they know the language and the people.

> What other purpose could having US troops in
> Saudi Arabia serve? Other than occupation?

Our troops in Saudi Arabia were not only there to protect Saudi Arabia. They were there to provide security and stability for the whole region.

The point was to have an airbase from which the US could conduct a major war in the region. Not just against Iraq, but also to defend Israel, to counter Russian ambitions in the region, etc. A Middle East in chaos is not a good thing for the US. Our forces in Saudi Arabi helped keep the peace more generally.

Al Qaeda doesn’t want the US in Saudi Arabia, or in the region *at all*, because they see our presence as a counterweight to their ambition of establishing and cultivating a thriving fundamentalist Arab superstate in the region.

The current US policy seems to be to appease Saudi Arabia (not exactly appeasing Al Qaeda), and to shift our military center of gravity over to Iraq. I suspect that the US wants to make Iraq not a cornerstone of democracy in the Middle East, but rather a replacement for Saudi Arabia as an American launchpad in the Middle East. With the Iraq invasion, we hoped to kill two birds with one stone: we’d help the Saudi’s releive the internal pressure from Al Qaeda and we’d knock Saddam out of power.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have such a permanent mideast military footprint, by the way. I can’t imagine the mayhem that would ensue if the US pulled out of the region entirely. Not to mention that the price of oil would certainly skyrocket!

-Cf

I think talking of appeasement is misleading. It suggests an intention among Spanish voters that I have no way of knowing.

What we know is this:

Aznar’s pro-US party with troops in Iraq was expected to win before the bombing.

Al Qaeda explicitly desired that Spain remove troops from Iraq. It knew that the Socialist Party wanted to remove the troops from Iraq (see link). It believed that targeting Spain for bombing would insure a Socialist victory.

After the bombings, the Socialist Party won in Spain.

Immediately after discovering that his party won, Zapatero announced that he would be removing the Spanish troops. He made this one of his chief announcements, and he made it loudly and repeatedly.

Al-Qaeda has declared a truce with Spain:

“Because of this decision, the leadership has decided to stop all operations within the Spanish territories… until we know the intentions of the new government that has promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq,” the statement said.

“And we repeat this to all the brigades present in European lands: stop all operations.”

So we know that Al Qaeda desired a Socialist victory for a particular foreign policy change and that by murdering 200 people they were a substantial factor in that victory and succeeded in obtaining the foreign policy change which they desired.

I don’t need to worry about ‘appeasement’. I worry about what Al Qaeda will do now that it believes it can change the course of elections.

(Please note I say ‘substantial factor’. It is unknowable if they completely caused the change. It is enough for them to be able to credibly claim to have caused the change.)

As to US ‘appeasement’ you use the word far too loosely. First there is the time factor. The Spanish change in policy came within one week of the attacks. The US withdrew almost 2 full years later. Second the US withdrew in order to attack and later reinforce Iraq. Whether or not you personally feel that Iraq is critical to the war on terror, it is quite clear that Al Qaeda thinks it is. Or at least they are engaging in Iraq as if it were important. And they are bombing in Spain as if they thought it was important. And they are giving Spain a cease-fire for be willing to withdraw, as if they thought it was important.

So calling the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia appeasement when it was clearly done to invade and deal with Iraq, doesn’t seem obvious even from Al Qaeda’s twisted view of the world—much less other views.

I believe the source of the trouble—as with so much of our international relations—is the huge power discrepancy between us and our allies.

It’s clear to me that the Spanish were intimidated in appeasing Al Qaida, but why did we have such a weak ally, one so easily peeled away, working with us to begin with? It was almost too easy for Al Qaida. It’s because to exercise US military power, we have to build these cosmetic alliances with members who contribute substantially little to any overall effort—this is nothing new by the way, it was true in Gulf War 1 and Kosovo too. Even Britain is relatively weak—we could have done Iraq and Kosovo without them easily.

The Catch 22 is that we enable our allies, living under the security umbrella we provide, to spend virtually nothing on their militaries—in turn, we’re hated and envied for being such a goliath and constantly accused of throwing our weight around. Spain knows they can surrender—we’re gonna do for them what they can’t do for themselves anyway.

Consider the alternative—disengaging with the world, striking an isolationist posture, letting the rest of the world sort things out without the stabilizing influence of American power. The shallowness of so called international law would instantly be shown for the utopian fantasy that it is. The moment we do that, China takes Taiwan, the Balkans explode, Russia has its way with western Europe, the middle east explodes with everybody going after Israel (and perhaps all the Arab capitals get nuked in the bargain).

Do links not work here? I was trying to link to:

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/03/15/spain.invest/index.html

and

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/18/1079199323371.html

My argument works better with evidence. :)

Current reports say that the Socialists were leading some polls before the blasts.

The Socialists are threatening to extract the Spanish force from Iraq only if the UN doesn’t take over. They’re not giving up; they’re trying to internationalize and legitimize the rebuilding of Iraq.

It’s not appeasement due to a terrorist attack.

They were there to provide security and stability for the whole region.

They are still there in the region. In fact there are more troops in the region today than there were.

The point was to have an airbase from which the US could conduct a major war in the region. Not just against Iraq, but also to defend Israel, to counter Russian ambitions in the region, etc. A Middle East in chaos is not a good thing for the US. Our forces in Saudi Arabi helped keep the peace more generally.

I think that we will continue to have troops in Iraq for some time. But we will be able to withdraw the majority of our military force at some point. Once the Iraqis have their own security up and going they will be less prone to attack. If they end up with a functioning democracy and strong economy then it will be the first domino to fall.

Not only that but we now have bases in Qatar, and Kuwait, and I think one other country in that immediate area.

Al Qaeda doesn’t want the US in Saudi Arabia, or in the region *at all*, because they see our presence as a counterweight to their ambition of establishing and cultivating a thriving fundamentalist Arab superstate in the region.

As long as George Bush is President there will be US troops wherever they need to be to fight terrorism. The threat of force has to have a believable payoff. Kerry says he voted for the authorization of the war in Iraq merely as a threat of force, but didn’t really mean to authorize the use of force. Threats are only so good as long as you actually back it up with something besides UN resolutions.

Saddam was evil. He’s gone. Al Qaeda is a many headed monster which will take time to destroy because it is backed by pervasive beliefs throughout the middle east. Decimating dictatorships is an integral part of the war on terror.

Miguel, I’m not sure your definition of appeasement (“doing what others want you to do in an attempt to make them like you better”) really works as applied to the situation in Spain.

“Appeasement”, to me, means that we would engage the enemy exclusively peacefully, that we would continue to stay in discussions and negotiations with them in the hopes that their thirst for violence will eventually be quenched. It’s hard to argue that anyone on earth is “appeasing” Al Qaeda since nobody is negotiating or for that matter even communicating with them.

In the case of North Korea, you sort of have a point: the policy did seem to be to make the regime and people of North Korea less inclined towards belligerence towards their neighbors who are feeding them. But another facet of this is that the food and energy programs were designed as part of a larger strategy of victory through economic engagement, a theory that as nations become economically healthy and stable that they will then become more inclined towards democratic/capitalist systems and will become less inclined to rash acts of warfare. It’s analgous to Reagan’s “constructive engagement” strategy with South Africa. It’s also analogous to US policy towards China under the last seven presidents. I’m not saying this theory is a good one

By your definition, also, the Spanish vote doesn’t look like “appeasement” either: The new regime hasn’t expressed any desire to engage Al Qaeda in a more friendly or conciliatory way. In fact, the populace of Spain (based on the protests I’ve read about) seem to be as aligned against terrorism as any red-blooded American is.

-Cf

Eric wrote:
> Kerry says he voted for the authorization of
> the war in Iraq merely as a threat of force,
> but didn’t really mean to authorize the use
> of force.

That is a scurrilous mischaracterization.

The vote you are talking about was NOT a vote “for the authorization of the war in Iraq”. It was a vote to permit the President to launch *A* war in Iraq if he judged it necessary. There’s a difference.

Kerry and the other Democrats who voted for the resolution beleived that President Bush intended to exhaust all diplomatic and inspection-related channels before launching the war. They beleived that if the President could genuinely threaten war, then Saddam would be more likely to allow inspectors into the country. And they were right - in the runup to the war, UN inspectors were returning in larger and larger numbers! Remember?

Those who supported the Iraq resolution did not dream that Bush was going to be as disingenuous as he was. Apparently the President NEVER intended to give inspections a chance to proceed or to succeed, and from their rehetoric it seems pretty obvious that most of his supporters thought the same way. This explains why the congressional resolution regarding Iraq is so often misrepresented (by the media and by you, Eric) as some kind of approval of going to war, when in fact it was a vote to allow Bush to go to war as a last resort.

Those who supported the Iraq resolution put their trust in the President’s judgement. They trusted that he had intelligence reports that were more accurate than those available to the public or to Congressional leaders. They trusted that the President would use international pressure to force the inspections down Saddam’s throat, and then to give the inspections time to grow in strength and to succeed. They trusted that, failing that, he would build a strong, convincing international case for war, and that he would then put together a strong international coalition. They trusted that the invasion, if it came to that, would be a military coalition force on a scale greater than that of the Persian Gulf war, drawing on the international unity and American leadership we had established in the Afghanistan operations following 9/11.

Those who supported the Iraq resolution apparently never dreamed that Bush would fail on every one of these responsibilities.

This is where I get mad at Democrats: I fault Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Gephardt, etc. for their political spinelessness - or their downright poor judgement - for trusting and empowering Bush in the first place.

I opposed the Iraq resolution because, IMHO, any idiot could tell that Bush was exaggerating the WMD threat. Any fool could tell that there was no amount of successful inspections and no degree of cooperation by Saddam was going to stop Bush’s invasion plans. As I recall, there was a loud call among Bush supporters essentially saying “forget the inspections, screw the coalitions, attack now!”

In short, there is no hypocrisy in supporting the Iraq resolution but opposing the actual war. The only mistake Kerry made was trusting the Bush Administration in the first place.

> Saddam was evil. He’s gone. Al Qaeda is a many
> headed monster which will take time to destroy
> because it is backed by pervasive beliefs
> throughout the middle east. Decimating
> dictatorships is an integral part of the war
> on terror.

I really don’t see the logic in that statement at all! Saddam’s regime was not part of the “pervasive beliefs” that backed (and still back) Al Qaeda. Unless by “pervasive beliefs” you mean “Islam” or “Violence”, because other than those two things Saddam and Osama are pretty much polar opposites.

-Cf

Sebastian: “It knew that the Socialist Party wanted to remove the troops from Iraq (see link). It believed that targeting Spain for bombing would insure a Socialist victory.

After the bombings, the Socialist Party won in Spain.”

You forgot a crucial step in that progression right before the paragraph break. You should have included, “The government mislead the public by pushing ETA as the perpetrators in the face of strong evidence that islamic militants were involved. This greatly angered many Spaniards.”

Include that and you’ve got the whole story.

Chris,

I don’t know how you swallowed Kerry’s whole rationalization about this.

It’s on par with Kerry’s explanation of why he didn’t vote to support our troops with additional money. “I did vote for it, before I voted against it.”

Please, what exactly does, “if he judged it necessary,” mean? Other than the fact that they left it to the president’s discretion? There is no difference. It authorizes the President to go to war. It doesn’t say, come back and ask us again if you really really think it’s necessary.

Does the resolution say that the President can only go to war if he builds a unanimous coalition of all nations at the UN? Does it say that all the intelligence must be proven 100% to be accurate? Does it say the President can go to war only if it is proven that Saddam not only has WMD but must be ready to use this *NOW* in order to enforce resolution 1441? (Which by the way, Saddam never fulfilled the conditions of the First Gulf War.)

No. It just authorizes the President to go to war.

If Kerry was against the war he shouldn’t have voted for it. If he had reservations about what the resolution actually said he shouldn’t have voted for it. He didn’t have any problem not voting for money for our troops to protest Bush’s tax cuts.

Saddam’s regime was not part of the “pervasive beliefs” that backed (and still back) Al Qaeda. Unless by “pervasive beliefs” you mean “Islam” or “Violence”, because other than those two things Saddam and Osama are pretty much polar opposites.

You are missing a huge piece of the puzzle if you cannot acknowledge the link between Osama and Saddam. It’s called the middle east. The entire region is fortressed by petty dictators and absolutist theocratic regimes of thought. All I can say is: two down. (I realize afghanistan is more asian than mid-east but what the hay.)

Saddam was also funding Palestinian terrorists. He was harboring international terrorists. Abu Nadal and Abu Abbas were both his guests. Saddam certainly trained foreign fighters for his fedeyeen group. Most if not many of the terrorist bombings in Iraq are executed by Al Qaeda affiliated groups like Ansar Al Islam, which was in Iraq before the war.

Don’t forget to add, Eric, that Kerry’s vote against funding the troops was to protest tax cuts that he’d also voted for! So Kerry decides to punish the troops for his own voting record!

We’re beyond accusations of flip-fopping with Kerry now—this is either some kind of multiple personality disorder or evidence of a comic genius not seen seen Andy Kaufman. My admiration for John Kerry is growing by leaps and bounds.

> I don’t know how you swallowed Kerry’s whole
> rationalization about this.

It was easy because I read the Congressional resolution, as did Kerry.

> Please, what exactly does, “if he judged it
> necessary,” mean?

It simply means that the President was required to think about going to war before actually going to war. We know now that when the President asked for the resolution, he actually already intended to go to war. He didn’t intend to think about it. He didn’t intend to “use judgement”. He only intended to invade. There was no other plan but war. There was no plan to force a thousand new inspectors down Saddam’s throat, or to use other forms of leverage to extract cooperation from Iraq.

If the resolution was so clearly a vote for war, as you claim, then why didn’t the resolution say “The United States is now at war with Iraq”? Why didn’t the President simply ask Congress to declare war, as is their (sole) power? Because President Bush wanted to give the outward appearance of a patient man who was diligently trying to exhaust all non-military options… even though secretly his mind was already made up.

> Does the resolution say that the President
> can only go to war if he builds a unanimous
> coalition of all nations at the UN?

Of course it doesn’t, that’s just silly. But it also doesn’t say “Here Mr. President, we want you to forget about any further inspections or diplomatic approaches, just go ahead and invade Iraq right away if you feel like it, we don’t care. Do whatever you want.”

The concept of the resolution was that the administration had some special insight into the “Iraqi threat” that the Senate did not have, and if that threat was grave enough (i.e., if it was “imminent”) then of course war would be necessary. The resolution was designed to give the President flexibility in a time of (apparent) crisis.

In fact, here’s what the resolution says:

The president is authorized to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, and (2) enforce all relevant United Nation Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

We now know that he deliberately violated both stipulation #1 and #2: there was no threat against the United States (and he knew it), nor were the UN inspection programs failing (which was pretty clear).

Also, the resolution does not say that the President could invade Iraq in order to create a keystone democracy in the heart of the Middle East! Of course, that is the reason the Administration now gives for invading in the first place!

I will admit that I initially thought that Bush’s belligerence towards Iraq was actually a good thing, that it was having a positive effect on getting inspections/disarmament to actually work in Iraq. And I honestly hoped that the resolution (which I opposed out of distrust of the Administration’s motives) would help in this effect. I hoped that the threat of force would allow the inspectors (again, they were succeeding!) to completely cripple Saddam’s WMD ambitions. My hopes were dashed, of course, when Bush marched our soldiers into Iraq without a second thought.

> If Kerry was against the war he shouldn’t
> have voted for it.

I’m sorry, but I am going to yell now:

KERRY DIDN’T VOTE FOR A WAR.

He didn’t vote for the war any more than you did if you voted for Bush in 2000. It’s like saying that just because we give cops guns that we want them to shoot anyone they please. No, we expect them to use good judgement. Kerry expected Bush to use good judgement, so he voted to give Bush the power to go to war on short notice without a long debate over a Congressional Declaration of War. He gave Bush this power, one hopes, because he genuinely thought that the President might be telling the truth about the WMD threat, and because he thought that the President might, when things got hot, need the option to go to war without a long Congressional Declaration of War debate. He was probably thinking that he would want that power himself if he were in the same situation.

> You are missing a huge piece of the puzzle
> if you cannot acknowledge the link between
> Osama and Saddam. It’s called the middle
> east.

Holy crap, is that really what you believe? That just because a country is *in* the Middle East that it is automatically a legitimate target in the war on terrorism? So should we invade Jordan next, or Egypt? How about Saudi Arabia? Those are all brutal dictatorships, and they have much much stronger connections with Al Qaeda than Iraq ever did.

> Abu Nadal and Abu Abbas were both his guests.

You are seriously stretching the boundaries of credibility here. Abu Nidal (who, by the way, died before the invasion and whose organization was in tatters) and Abu Abbas (whose terrorist resume simply includes the killing of a single person 20 years ago) are hardly proof of Saddam’s connection to terrorism. These were simply two aging terrorists from the 1980’s with no connection whatsoever to Al Qaeda who Saddam was hosting to make it look like he was a supporter of terrorism. Same goes for the infamous cash rewards he offered to Palestinian suicide bombers’ families: it was his way of riding on the popular coattails of other people’s terrorist movements.

Notice that these examples are Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian terrorists are hardly a threat to the security of the United States - they have for over a decade known better than to deliberately target Americans. They target Israelis almost exclusively. Also notice that all of these Iraq-terror connections are after the fact: not one of them involves Saddam involved in planning or even being in contact with terrorists before an attack. I’m not excusing Saddam’s relationship with these evil men, but I am saying that it doesn’t come close to justifying the war.

> The entire region is fortressed by petty
> dictators and absolutist theocratic
> regimes of thought.

For what it’s worth, Saddam was not a theocrat. He’s about as much a theocrat as George Bush. Probably even less, actually, insofar as he oppressed religiosity in his country and was personally entirely unobservant.

It’s telling that you lump all Muslims together so easily (Palestinian terrorists, Al Qaeda terrorists, secular dictators, fundamentalist theocracies, Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Afghans), when there are so many clear distinctions (even deep antagonisms) between the various groups. If you think we should be fighting all of these different factions at once, you should make that argument plainly. I know you’re not ignorant of these distinctions, so I wonder why you find it so easy to lump them all together.

Hm, maybe it’s not so hard to see how you find it so easy to swallow Bush’s rationalizations about invading Iraq.

-Cf

How many times do we have to say it was the Spanish Government’s MANIPULATION AND LIES, trying to blame ETA (arguably because that would have given them more votes) that ultimately helped tilt the balance towards the Socialists?

In a poll released yesterday, 8% of voters declared to have switched their votes at the last minute, MAINLY BECAUSE OF OUR OUTGOING GOVERNMENT’S DISHONESTY (they had a long track record of compulsive lying, by the way).

The Socialists had vowed to WITHDRAW OUR TROOPS FROM IRAQ IF IT REMAINS UNDER US-ONLY OCCUPATION BY JUNE 30TH 2004. It’s the Socialists’ stance (and an overwhelming majority of Spaniards’ too) IRAQ MUST BE PLACED UNDER UNITED NATIONS AUTHORITY. And that is exactly what our new Prime Minister said. The Socialists have been saying this for the last 6 months.

WHERE IS THE APPEASEMENT HERE?

By the way, ‘appeasement’ is the word that best describes our former PM’s attitude towards Mr. Bush, don’t you think?

Germán
Madrid, Spain