Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Sebastian, I think your piece is quite thoughtful and makes some accurate observations, but ultimately your reasons for why Saddam was a threat, unintentionally demonstrate exactly why this was an unwise war. You suggest that Saddam was a “threat to the United States both directly by keeping our attention on him, and indirectly by radicalizing more and more of the Arab world”. Yet this is precisely what the war has done. Like some Greek tragedy, American intervention, has intesified radicalization of the Arab world, moved the focus away from Al Qaeda and increasingly onto Iraq, and as a bonus, destroyed the broad international support that America enjoyed in the wake of 9/11. In acting pre-emptively a lot of American (soldiers) have died, in order to prevent an unproven and unlikely threat. Yet I thought the point of the excercise was to ensure the safety of Americans, not endanger them.

The war has not made America safer, but has extinguished much of the sympathy and support for America. You allude to the tough choices the US must make, by pragmatically admitting “that the Middle East is more important to us than much of Africa because of oil”, and so also you must realise that, on a purely logical and pragmatic level, by divorcing the US from world opinion in order to fight an optional war, the current administration has severely damaged US interests in the long term.

While I disagree with your premise, you’ve done a great job in pulling all of the war rationales together. Then I read this interesting article concerning the war. Makes me wonder where the American press is on this story.

What do these add? Are you assuming the liberal just don’t get what the reasoning was? I certainly got it. This is the essential argument that you guys had going in.

Too bad, then, if you value it so highly, that you didn’t stick with it in the first place.

Specifically, I think the idea of lower threat thresholds amounts to nothing more than Bureacratic butt-covering, and it waste American dollars, lives, and opportunities to deal with it. We cannot, and should not follow every lead. If we fail to be discerning, we waste American time, money and credibility.

Waste enough, and the presence of the United States as a major power in the world will have been diminished, and because of that, The terrorist will have won.

Do you want the terrorists to win, on a count of our inability to tell real threat from fake?

As for liberals not getting what the reasoning was, if they did understand it they intentionally chose to ignore it as can be seen by the constant ‘imminent threat’ refrain.

As for extinguishing sympathy and support, I think a lot of people are were willing to have sympathy so long as we maintained the passive victim stance. But in my opinion almost none of them who are now put off wanted to ‘assist’ in the sense of helping make serious short term action to make long term changes in the Arab world. I don’t just mean war. I mean that many of our allies were not and are not interested in the Arab world changing all that much. I hate to belabour the point, but by ‘interested’ I mean interested in taking action to make change. I am not saying that if Europe didn’t have to lift a finger, they would cry if the Middle East were freer.

I don’t understand how you can think that lower threat thresholds are ass-covering. 9-11 showed that we could have 30,000 civilian dead (because that was the target for a quicker WTC collapse) without anybody formally declaring war against us. That suggests that we might have to take some serious action earlier than we used to.

Also Steve, I think a careful reading of my three posts will suggest that I think Saddam was a real threat, so I don’t know how I can respond to: “Do you want the terrorists to win, on account of our inability to tell real threat from fake?”

Look, Sebastian, there is no credible connection between those who leveled the WTC, and Saddam Husseins regime.

I, of all people, would have seen Saddam tossed out on his keister, but I would have demanded that Osama’s head be on the platter, and Afghanistan stabilized under a democratic government, before we ever thought of doing anything military concerning Iraq short of some real provocation on his part.

The thing that your “acceptable risk” argument misses, is that our military is best suited to striking at other states. I don’t know whether it is just impatience on your part or a lack of imagination, but you seem to think that making our military a hair-trigger establishment will actually cut the Gordian Knot of terrorism and mideast politics.

Truth is, this government has all kinds of possible options ready for it. Take espionage for example. We could do better than destroying the groups themselves. We could subvert them, outmanuever them, cause their operations to blowback on them. We could allow them to continue, but as impotent, discredited organizations, instead of martyrs and firebrands. Or we could just use the information to send an airstrike down their throats. But we would have choices- a nice malicious set of choices. We could play the game at their level, and perhaps even beat them at it. That would be better than just parading around a bunch of potential targets in a mired military campaign.

And diplomacy! If there is one war we lost before we even touched ground in Iraq, it was the diplomatic war. Bush alienated our allies. He alienated the public in those countries, and he made damn sure that they knew how little he and his people thought of them. Has that helped us any lately? I think not, especially now that we have to beg the UN for greater involvement!

Additionally, you have forgotten just how much diplomacy can put people through the wringer. Our problem has not been that we’ve used too much diplomacy in the past, but that we’ve projected the impression that at some point we will draw our swords if pushed enough on it. Used in conjunction with military action, diplomacy can be quite an effective weapon. Again, we can draw opponents into situations where we have the advantage, where they stand discredited, with alienated allies and overextended resources, instead of us.

Trouble is, you’re too ideologically hide-bound to make full use of the weapons at your disposal. You get your hammer, and you start to look at every problem like it’s a nail. For once let go of your preconcieved ideas of the world, and start recognizing your other options.

Steve Dougherty, in your response to Sebastion you made the following statement:

I don’t know whether it is just impatience on your part or a lack of imagination, but you seem to think that making our military a hair-trigger establishment will actually cut the Gordian Knot of terrorism and mideast politics.

Your arguments and thinking are welcomed and valued as part of the lifeblood of what makes WatchBlog unique. WatchBlog maintains a policy of critiquing the message, and not the messenger.

Therefore, I respectfully request that you refrain from statements that impune or denigrate the personal attributes of other writers and commentors here on WatchBlog. Your cooperation in this will be very much appreciated as will your continued contributions to the goal of WatchBlog of informing through perspective and debate.

Thanks, Managing Editor, WatchBlog.

“Look, Sebastian, there is no credible connection between those who leveled the WTC, and Saddam Husseins regime.”

Your whole critique flows from this statement, but I don’t understand it in the context of my three posts. I conceeded from the outset that there are no provable organizational connections between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussien, but my entire argument is that both are symptoms of the very same underlying problem.

Sebastian, this three part analysis of the US led invasion of Iraq is a truly worthy piece of work and it is obvious you put a great deal of time and thought into. It caused me to reexamine some of my own perspectives.

While you and I might disagree on whether the price being paid is worth taking Saddam down at this time, or not, it is obvious from this work why you were selected to become a writer at WatchBlog. Good job.

Sebastian, you do a good job explaining your rationale for war, but nowhere did i see a response to the one objection that seems strongest to me. We, as a nation of laws, try to convince other countries that our system or something like it is best. that system includes everyone obeying the same laws. In the current world situation, with a very weak UN meant to prevent wars and better the human condition, shouldn’t we try to set an example by scrupulously observing the rule of law? Shouldn’t we apply the ‘law’ that one country cannot attack another without the approval of the UN? (Yes, I realize there is no such law, but it is a law that every human intuitively understands, though not necessarily obeys. Even when you were a kid, you knew that you didn’t hit people, but you recognized that the proper authorities had the right to do so if they decided it was necessary. by the way, in this scenario the US cannot claim to be a proper authority since almost no one recognizes it as such) If we lived in a world dominated by the UN, that would be good for our interests, unless all the talk about wanting other countries to join us in building a world of democracies is simply cover for aggression against states we decide might not want to do exactly what will help our economy.

Nice work. Tough choices had to be made. No matter what the American civilization would have had a sect that acted with disgust.