Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Eric,
Here here on the comparison to gun control. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I don’t necessarily think Bush is doing a good job as president, but the alternative is virtually national suicide.

I for one don’t think anyone who declares themselves a war criminal is fit for office… Senate or otherwise. I’m praying for Julianni in 2008.

vs. Hillary

Eric, whose case was this, whose CIA, whose NSA, whose Administration gave this to congress? I do not see why you are trying to pawn off responsibility for this to a person who was dependent on your administration to hand them reliable evidence, and instead was given a Casey lawyered up to be as frightening as possible by Scooter Libby and Steve Hadley

Wake up and smell the paper trail. Congress does not have an intelligence agency working for it. Congress didn’t tell it’s aides to take a case for war that seemed weak to them, and pile on exagerrations and discredited evidence for scare value. Congress did not set out in a series of speeches to practically convince America that Saddam helped Al Quaeda strike at us on 9/11, and it most certainly did not make support for Bush’s foreign policy a referendum for electability, to where opposition to it could (and did) cost a candidate their job.

Would you have supported Kerry calling the case B.S. at the time it really mattered, or would you have dismissed him as a Massachusetts Liberal who was soft on Iraq? My bet, is that your people would have torn him a new one, if he did anything so politically courageous (read: foolish) as to get in the way of your administrations march to Iraq. You certainly did that to Dean.

Is Kerry a liar? No more than any person who is passed faulty information. If anybody has lied, it’s the administration. They are the owners of the well, so if the water’s poisoned, theirs is the source that must be examined and judged first.

I agree, it is the evil people in this world that are a danger to us. WMD’s and the like are only their tools. Which they will always have and be able to aquire. It is the evil people themselves that we must protect against, fight, and defeat.

And we must realize that appeasement only works to their advantage. It just gives them an opening, an opportunity. The can never be appeased only defeated. Which is why we can’t let the UN take over in Iraq. All the UN has ever done is try to appease people. And it has very rarely worked. They do not believe that evil people exist, only differing ideals that can be reconciled.

Against terrorists(and I will include Saddam in that group) the statement that “a strong offense is the best defense” has never been more true. The only thing that will stop these evil people is fear of the consequences.

Stephen, Newsflash: You’re own party took out Dean. He was submarined by the bigwigs(one was named Bill) because he was to Liberal. They said Kerry had better electibility. Don’t blame the White House for your own parties shortcomings.

Stephen:

Please include Mr. Clinton’s Administration in your indictment of lying. They are the one’s that developed the policy of regime change and continued until the end to proclaim that Saddam had WMD.

http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/1999/msg00185.html

Of course you can include the rest of the world too.

He was submarined by the bigwigs(one was named Bill) because he was to Liberal.

Wow, Jeremy. I didn’t know Bill had that much influence with all the voters in all the states in which Dean lost the primary. It makes Bush’s argument that he was only following Clinton’s policy on Iraq that much more believable. Clinton is really the shadow President! Is Clinton a Freemason? Perhaps a member of the Illuminati?

Creepy. Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

I don’t necessarily think Bush is doing a good job as president, but the alternative is virtually national suicide.

Ha! I love it. There’s a campaign slogan for you, “If You Aren’t Going to Vote for Bush, You May as Well Just Slit Your Wrists Right Now.”

Or another one, “Don’t Vote for Kerry, He Believed Our Lies.”

I know my party had a great deal to do with Dean’s being undermined, but the Republicans set the tone of what was considered electable.

As for your points about evil and everything, though, I think your point is kind of self serving. Why, there’s evil in the world! And we have to fight it! The UN appeases it, so we must oppose the UN!

Therefore, we must invade all those problematic countries and do everything right that we’ve done in Iraq!

Problem is, nobody’s going to defeat evil. Man is creature capable of freely making evil decisions, even in the face of the consequences. Our own people are no exception. Abu Ghraib proves that. If you can’t look at what those people were doing and call it evil, I don’t know what you can call it. There is darkness in everybody, and the wrong circumstances can tempt us towards that darkness.

I can’t tell you what the exact form that avoiding and resisting those temptations takes, but one thing is for sure: we cannot countenance dishonesty and sadism in our country’s name. We cannot overlook people’s misdeeds because their intentions in the beginning were good. those kinds of intentions are the same kind that pave the road to hell. Decisions made in the suspension of one’s human decency in order to fight what one percieves as a greater evil. Fact is though, you do not fight evil with evil. You might oppose it, stop the chaos it causes before more harm is done by it, but in the end if we follow our enemies into the abyss of rationalized evil, we will only replace their darkness with ours, if we win at all.

Eric, Kerry was misled, and not having the same level of access to probe and demand factual assessments from the DoD and Intel. Community that the President had, thus renders Kerry ignorant, but, not a liar or inept on this issue. (Doesn’t mean he does not lie on the campaign trail in order to be all things to all constituency groups, but, that is par for the course. One only need look at Bush’s promises and actions as President to see that a 42% fulfillment rating renders the President and all politicians liars. Lying is a part of the strategy to win elections — oops! did I let the cat out of the bag?)

Would you have supported Kerry calling the case B.S. at the time it really mattered, or would you have dismissed him as a Massachusetts Liberal who was soft on Iraq? My bet, is that your people would have torn him a new one, if he did anything so politically courageous (read: foolish) as to get in the way of your administrations march to Iraq. You certainly did that to Dean.

This is what I mean about Kerry. No courage of conviction. Did he believe in the case he was making? Or did he look around at the current political temperature to decide what his position on this would be? He wasn’t making these speeches after Dean looked like he was garnering democratic support with his anti-war position.

In fact Dean led with his convictions and Kerry followed. It was Kerry who knocked Dean out of the race. Republicans don’t vote in the Democratic Primaries.

Is Kerry a liar? No more than any person who is passed faulty information. If anybody has lied, it’s the administration. They are the owners of the well, so if the water’s poisoned, theirs is the source that must be examined and judged first.

Kerry’s own statements impeach him. Why demand absolute proof of WMD if you have enough proof already to say that there are WMD? This is either sly duplicity or lazy and flawed logic.

What you are saying is that the Bush Administration knew there were no WMD to be found in Iraq and yet made up intelligence to say that there were.

Bush didn’t have to make up anything. The argument for invading Iraq isn’t whether or not we can prove with detailed documentation where WMD were hidden in Iraq. It is that Saddam is willing to use WMD, proven to have had WMD, and proven to have hidden WMD, and refused to cooperate in revealing and destroying his WMD.

Jordan said earlier this month it had foiled a chemical attack on its spy HQ that could have killed 20,000 people.

Reports quoting security officials on Monday said the planned attacks could have left up to 80,000 people dead. -news.bbc.co.uk

Who among us…?

In the wake of September 11, who among us can discount the possibility that those weapons might be used against our troops or our allies in the region? And while the administration has failed to prove any direct link between Iraq and the events of September 11, can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam Hussein might provide weapons of destruction to some terrorist group bent on destroying the United States? -johnkerry.com

Problem is, nobody’s going to defeat evil…

…There is darkness in everybody, and the wrong circumstances can tempt us towards that darkness…

…but in the end if we follow our enemies into the abyss of rationalized evil, we will only replace their darkness with ours, if we win at all.

Stephen,

Having read your arguments here I don’t think you mean this the way it sounds. The way the left increasingly seems to be presenting it. (i.e. Ted Kennedy… ‘under new management’.)

This moral equivalence is part of the achilles heel of the left. In a deeper sense I think it stems from an anti-western ideology.

I almost agree with the following statement but I would respectfully add that nobody is going to defeat evil for all time. I agree that men are not angels, and we should not assume that they are or will be made so by any utopian program or transformation.

WWI was the ‘war to end all wars’. Chamberlain announced, ‘peace in our time’. And after WWII they set up the UN as a utopian institution to end war. I think this liberal thinking is an aberation. Human nature is not that malleable.

The application of violence in human affairs is here to stay. Moreover, I do not concede that war in itself is evil. There is such a thing as deterrence.

We will ensure our failure if we continue to make the perfect the enemy of the good. This method of saying we are all at the same moral level and unless we can do everything without flaw and without mistakes is illogical and wrong.

Re “under new management”:

What Kennedy’s critics seem to be overlooking is that what he said was literally true. He didn’t say that we are as bad us Hussein. What he said was, “Shamefully we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.” This is indisputably true. Saddam was torturing people in Abu Ghraib, then then US took over Abu Ghraib, and the torture started again. These are simple facts.

The only way he injected his subjective viewpoint was be observing that it was “shameful”. Do you disagree?

First of all, let’s get the fact straight about what Kerry’s opinions are. You say “Kerry lied” and then you reproduce a speech in which Kerry reports what he has been told by the Bush Administration. He was merely doing his job as a Senator: reporting the facts that have been provided to him. Was he deliberately making a case for war? No. Was he laying the rhetorical groundwork for the possibility that the Bush administration might someday create a convincing argument for war. Yes.

This is what being a responsible politician is about. You start talking to your constituents about the possibilities for America’s future. You outline the potential threats.

I opposed the invasion of Iraq, and I have no disagreement with a single word of what Kerry said in that speech. Chew on that for a few minutes and see if you can figure out how I can logically reconcile these two views. My answer is a few lines below.

> Throughout his speech Kerry says that Saddam’s
> intention is to develop WMD, that he had WMD,
> that he used WMD, and that he will do whatever
> it takes to have WMD.

Yes, this appears to be correct.

> In short he says Saddam is a clear and
> present danger…

This, on the other hand, is NOT correct.

Nowhere does he say that Saddam is a “clear and present” danger. Nowhere does he argue that Iraq needs to be invaded.

Bush supporters keep forgetting that there were still many other options besides invasion, and that Congress’s October 2002 vote in support of the President’s discretion in taking military action against Iraq was not the equivalent of a declaration of war.

Basically, John Kerry and the majority of Congress decided that Saddam was enough of a potential threat that the President needed to be able to act quickly and decisively to neutralize that threat. I and many other Americans didn’t agree with that decision because, unlike John Kerry and most other Democrats back in 2002, I have always held a complete and thorough distrust of the Bush administration’s honesty and competance.

> In short he says Saddam is a clear and
> present danger… but we can’t do anything
> about it until we can find and document
> ‘detailed evidence’. Which essentially means
> open and unfettered inspections. Something
> Saddam continually resisted for the last
> decade.

Something that, in the months leading up to the invasion, Saddam was well on the way to fully capitulating to. We had him by the balls. I’ve argued many times that Bush was on the path of a great acheivement of statesmanship, on the verge of bringing comprehensive inspections to Iraq, and then he threw it all away by going forward with the invasion plan. Hell, they didn’t even have an alternative ‘something-besides-an-invasion’ plan!!

> Do we fear Great Britain’s nuclear arsenal?
> The prime component of danger is the intent
> of the wielder, not the weapon.

That doesn’t even make sense. It’s only a danger if both means and motivation are present. Minus one or the other, there is no threat. Do we fear Syria’s intent to posess nuclear weapons? Do we fear Indonesia’s intentions? Egypt’s?

There are dozens of countries with questionable international motivations who would just love to have a nuclear weapon, and we can only assume that a great many of them are trying as best as they can, albeit secretly. It’s just illogical to assume that intent is enough to justify an invasion. There must also be a logical possiblity that such a threat can occur, and that such a threat cannot be destroyed through other means besides invasion. In all of your quotes, John Kerry clearly outlines exactly that policy.

It was my opinion in 2002 (and indeed the opinion of many foreign policy experts on both sides of the invasion issue) that Saddam’s ability to make a nuclear bomb was years away, and that it was entirely containable through increased inspections, intelligence, targeted military interventions, and sanctions. This opinion has today been borne out by the facts. I also believed in 2002 that Saddam quite likely posessed some small, vestigal stockpile of WMDs and perhaps even tiny active programs, but that such as they were they didn’t constitute a significant threat to us, Iraq’s neighbors, or Iraq’s own people. This, too, has been borne out by the facts - in fact, it has been shown to be even less of a threat than I had thought it was.

Somewhere between the time of Kerry’s speech above and the day of the invasion, the Bush administration figured that they had done a good enough job making it seem like they knew something we didn’t. They made it seem like they had intelligence about Saddam’s weapons that we, the public, and most members of Congress did not. They made it seem like they knew that Saddam might have nukes today. They made it seem like he had enough WMDs to turn Israel into a wasteland. They made it seem like he was giving WMDs to al Qaeda. These were the foundations upon which the Bush Administration’s case for war were built, and NONE of these arguments can be found in Kerry’s statements. Kerry was ready for such potentialities, but he never claimed any of the kind of stuff the Bush administration was rolling out in those last few months (“mushroom clouds”, “45 minutes”, etc).

Don’t try to pin this mess on Kerry. It was George Bush and hawks like yourself who twisted Bill Clinton’s “regime change” policy (twisting the facts, too) to make the case that we had no choice but to invade Iraq as quickly as possible.

-Cf

Saddam was torturing people in Abu Ghraib, then the US took over Abu Ghraib, and the torture started again. These are simple facts.

Woody,

With all of the 7 day a week 24 hour coverage of the abu ghraib abuse story how much do we really know about it?

WASHINGTON - Many of the worst abuses that have come to light from the Abu Ghraib prison happened on a single November day amid a flare of insurgent violence in Iraq (news - web sites), the deaths of many U.S. soldiers and a breakdown of the American guards’ command structure.

Nov. 8 was the day U.S. guards took most of the infamous photographs: soldiers mugging in front of a pile of naked, hooded Iraqis, prisoners forced to perform or simulate sex acts, a hooded prisoner in a scarecrow-like pose with wires attached to him. -yahoonews

The glee with which the left brandishes this evidence of our likeness to the Saddam Hussein regime speaks volumes about the loyalty of the left. I think what Kennedy said was reprehensible, ridiculous, and even treasonous.

> The glee with which the left brandishes this
> evidence of our likeness to the Saddam Hussein
> regime speaks volumes about the loyalty of the
> left. I think what Kennedy said was
> reprehensible, ridiculous, and even treasonous.

Thank you, Senator McCarthy. Let the witch hunts begin!!

-Cf

Chris,

You are working hard to free him from this one aren’t you?

Kerry reports what he has been told by the Bush Administration. He was merely doing his job as a Senator: reporting the facts that have been provided to him.

What? I thought they were lies, not facts. In which case in your argument he was ‘reporting’ lies.

Seriously, this is a stretch. Reporting? See that’s why our country is in danger. We have politicians reporting and the media trying to lead and set policy. It’s no wonder we are a divided country; no one is doing their job.

Nowhere does he say that Saddam is a “clear and present” danger. Nowhere does he argue that Iraq needs to be invaded.

Let’s review what clear and present means. Clear. Um, maybe obvious is a better word. Understood by all? etc. Present. Means now. Like present day. Present hour. Today. Near future.

Clear. And. Present. Danger. Not to be confused with imminent mind you. Imminent means the bombers are ten minutes from DC, and the amphibious landing craft are poised at our beaches.

He definitely lays it on thick about Saddam’s danger, i.e. clear and present. Where did you pull out that I said he said invasion from that?

We had him by the balls. I’ve argued many times that Bush was on the path of a great achievement of statesmanship, on the verge of bringing comprehensive inspections to Iraq, and then he threw it all away by going forward with the invasion plan.

Yes, we really had Saddam on the run didn’t we? Ten years of crippling sanctions, which many left leaning human rights advocates say killed thousands upon thousands of Iraqi’s, really had Saddam in a box.

A 1999 State Department study reported Saddam’s regime had spent $2.2 billion building about 48 palaces since the 1991 Gulf War. Some estimates put the total number of palaces between 70 and 80. -foxnews

He was hurting in his tens of palaces.

> Do we fear Great Britain’s nuclear arsenal? > The prime component of danger is the intent > of the wielder, not the weapon.

That doesn’t even make sense. It’s only a danger if both means and motivation are present. Minus one or the other, there is no threat.

Precisely my point. It is not the WMD that we need to fear. It is the wielder who would use them. To say that once we disarmed Saddam that we would be safe doesn’t make sense. Saddam was the WMD.

It’s just illogical to assume that intent is enough to justify an invasion.

No, it is illogical to assume that if we take invasion off the table completely that anyone will fear acquiring WMD. Deterrence. It’s an older, more conservative concept, I know. Like mutually assured destruction. Think of Iraq as an example. Ghadaffi did.

These were the foundations upon which the Bush Administration’s case for war were built, and NONE of these arguments can be found in Kerry’s statements.

…Don’t try to pin this mess on Kerry. It was George Bush and hawks like yourself who twisted Bill Clinton’s “regime change” policy (twisting the facts, too) to make the case that we had no choice but to invade Iraq as quickly as possible.

Wrong. Kerry did a thorough job outlining all of the administration’s arguments. Minus the nuance of course. There were no twisting of facts here Chris. That is revisionist history. Clearly this Kerry speech should have been cataloged in Congressman Waxman’s report.

The glee with which the left brandishes this evidence of our likeness to the Saddam Hussein regime speaks volumes about the loyalty of the left.

GLEE? Who the heck have you been talking to? Personally, the whole business makes me want to blow chunks.

Tempered criticism is a sign of loyalty. If I were trying to sabotage the US, I would be encouraging the government to sweep this under the rug and let it get worse.

> What? I thought they were lies, not facts. In
> which case in your argument he was ‘reporting’
> lies.

Do you believe that anything Kerry said in your quotation was a lie? Me either. In hindsight we now know that some of it was based on inaccurate intelligence, but in general what he was saying was consistent with what ALL Democrats and Republicans have been saying for years and years, and it pretty much represents my impression at the time of the Iraq situation in 2002-2003.

The reason why Kerry’s statement is not a lie and why the Bush Administration’s later statements were lies is quite simple (I’ll even allow you to overlook those specific inflammatory phrases that Republicans are nowadays legalistically squirming away from — does “mushroom clouds” mean that he currently has nukes? does “immediate” mean the same as “imminent”?): The overall message from the Bush Administration was clearly that the Iraq threat was dire, more dire than any threat that has ever faced our nation since World War II, that the only solution was to pre-emptively invade Iraq immediately, with or without allies, with or without enough evidence, with or without UN support, with or without a thorough plan of attack or occupation, with or without adequate intelligence, and regardless of financial cost. They led us to believe that they knew stuff we didn’t know.

Admit it: In late 2002 you were assuming that the Bush Administration had some intelligence that Colin Powell couldn’t share at the UN, that they couldn’t make public to the American People. Hell, at the time I was hoping that the Administration had a ton of secret evidence, because I didn’t think that the evidence shown at the UN seemed good enough. Never in my wildest nightmares did I ever guess that the evidence presented at the UN, most of which has since been discredited, would turn out to be the whole shebang. Admit it, you too were disappointed in that evidence, and you too were assuming that they had more evidence.

The Bush Administration told us over and over again that there was “no doubt”. That’s the Bush lie.

Kerry’s argument was simply to state that Saddam was a really dangerous threat, one worthy of America’s closest attention and aggressive pressures. But nowhere does he even remotely suggest that Iraq needs to be pre-emptively invaded.

> Clear. And. Present. Danger. Not to be confused
> with imminent mind you. Imminent means the
> bombers are ten minutes from DC, and the
> amphibious landing craft are poised at our
> beaches.

Thank you Johnnie Cochran.

Can you tell me exactly what Saddam could have done that our invasion has prevented? What could he have done that we couldn’t have dealt with with targeted bombings, increased inspections, increased intelligence efforts, increased international pressure (all of which were entirely workable solutions before Bush turned the USA into an international pariah)?

I mean, could he have nuked Tel Aviv? Could he have delivered a WMD to New York City? Would he have? Would the damage caused by such an attack be worth the price we are paying in Iraq today? My answer is still no. I am substnatially more concerned about a terrorist attack today than I was before the Iraq invasion.

Hell, I am substantially more concerned about terrorists posessing some of Saddam’s WMDs today than I was before the invasion!

I think ultimately it comes down to a simple difference of opinion about the nature of invasions and national sovereignty: In my opinion, invading another country is one of the most extreme, drastic, desperate, long-term, and costly (politically, economically, and in human lives) undertakings a nation can take. But to you and the Bush Administration it isn’t such a big deal. You folks are wrong.

(Robert McNamara, the shockingly Rumsfeld-like Secretary of Defense under Johnson and the architect of America’s increased involvement in the Vietnam war, said recently that the reason we failed in Vietnam, the reason why the enemy didn’t give up even when facing losses in the millions, is that we didn’t realize what we were getting into: While we saw Vietnam as a proxy war against the spread of communism, the Vietnamese saw it quite simply as a kind of war of independence. They wanted us out and would fight us until we either subjugated them utterly or until they were all dead. Where we saw ideology, they saw national pride. Such is the nature of invasion - not parades and flowers.)

(Speaking of legalisms, you are partially correct about the expression “clear and present danger” - I say ‘partially’ because you are only correct if you go by an obsolete, century-old definition of the expression. Its origin is in several early-20th-century Supreme Court decisions where the Court ruled that certain kinds of seemingly-benign speech were subject to prosecution if it was determined that such speech presented, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s words, a “clear and present danger” of inspiring others to commit illegal acts. The specific cases involved leftist pamphlets and speakers (including Eugene Debs) advocating, often only in suggestive language, such crimes as forming unions and avoiding the draft. In the years since those early rulings, however, the “clear and present danger” standard has been narrowed by subsequent Courts to apply only when the words are likely to immediately cause dangerous crimes to occur, such as incitement to riot or to attack police officers. Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate the way that your interpretation resembles the interpretation of people from a hundred years ago.)

> Yes, we really had Saddam on the run didn’t we?
> Ten years of crippling sanctions, which many
> left leaning human rights advocates say killed
> thousands upon thousands of Iraqi’s, really had
> Saddam in a box.

You’re ignoring my actual words. I never said we had him by the balls for ten years. I said we had him by the balls in late 2002.

I agree with you that Saddam was given too much leeway by the international community and by the Clinton administration. After September 11, like many Americans I came to believe that it was more critical than ever to contain Saddam and neutralize him as a threat. I agreed that it was probably important to focus America’s political and military attention on him because, like John Kerry, I realized that the long-term potential for his nuclear programs (i was specifically and almost exclusively concerned about Saddam’s nuclear programs, by the way) was something we couldn’t underestimate in light of September 11.

What I wrote, and what you chose to ignore, was that in late 2002 due to Bush’s increased diplomatic and military pressure, the weapons inspections had in fact resumed with great force. Bush could have increased them even more, too, especially given that the rest of the security council also wanted to increase inspections. This would have been Bush’s great triumph.

You have to recognize that the only reason why the inspections didn’t continue to increase was that Bush had already made up his mind to invade regardless of what happened. They didn’t even bother to write up contingency plans for the possibility that Saddam might quickly capitulate to international inspections - which he did.

They also didn’t like the fact that the increased WMD inspections were producing a whole lot of inconvenient “there’s nothing here” reports.

> it is illogical to assume that if we take
> invasion off the table completely that anyone
> will fear acquiring WMD. Deterrence.

I agree. As I said above, Bush’s threat of military action was working, he was making great progress towards neutralizing Saddam’s WMD abilities.

The problem is that invasion was his only plan. They didn’t have any alternate plans, not even alternate military plans.

See, it doesn’t count as a deterrence policy if your only plan is to invade no matter what. If Bush were president during the Cuban Missle Crisis, do you not agree that the world would now be a lifeless cinder?

-Cf

No courage of conviction, Eric? You certainly didn’t answer my real question. Would you have honored such a committment had he shown it. No, you would have labeld him weak on defense. I’m sure there are cases you consider exceptions, but for the most part, I don’t think you consider any liberal, even one that is as pro-defense as Kerry (I’ve seen his actual voting record, so don’t gainsay me) to be correct on defense.

I mean, what you’re doing here is the standard ploy you used on Gore: The candidate is wishy-washy, he has no convictions of his own, he is fundamentally dishonest.

Your side demanded absolute evidence that WMDS were not in Iraq as the condition for not acting on the UN Resolutions and thereby keep the sanctions up. I believe Kerry called for us to find better evidence, evidence that was more than just intelligence, which as somebody quoted in Plan of Attack falls short of fact.

Look, Eric, It is a deeply humiliating thing that our president was screaming to the world what a horrendous threat was in Iraq, and when we get there, we find nowhere near the threat level we were brought to expect. It makes all the scary cases we were making look like pretexts. It makes us look dishonest, or worse, as if we were looking to pick a “clash of civilizations” with the Arab world. I am not going to be scared by a bunch of half-ass speculation into a bunch of pre-emptive wars we have no business fighting.

The Jordan chemical attack plot is great example of how much weight your side puts on the reams of speculation out there. No substantial connection to Iraq has been established yet. All you guys have right now is a conflation of your claims in Iraq (mostly discredited now) and your claims that Iraq moved its weapons to Syria (so far unproven, but we’ll see). I don’t know whether you even understand the fact that the chemical agent in question was not even created yet- they only had the primary chemicals.

What Kerry wanted was the United states to have it’s gun pulled this time when it used the threat of force to persuade Iraq to cooperate, and admit to it’s contravention of it’s agreements. Pulling the trigger, for him, was something to do when everything else had been tried.

As for my little treatise on the nature of evil at the bottom of my last comment, I’d say that I’m not looking for perfection in human behavior, but effort, awareness, and integrity. We do not have to be perfect to exceed the morality of our enemies. We just have to avoid falling into the traps of ideology that create moral relativism of the kinds you speak of.

I agree that liberals should be more willing to go to war, that they shouldn’t be the default peaceniks. Many aren’t, Kerry included. Kerry’s voted for just about every major military action we’ve gone into since the last Gulf War. Personally, I think it hurts one’s ability to work for peace if you won’t compromise towards war. Those who cannot keep force as option cannot enforce agreements like the one we had with Saddam.

I agree that the UN needs to be more willing to strike at dictators and the like, and intervene in certain conflicts. Sometimes, just their presence is enough to defuse conflicts and prevent people from getting funny ideas. But they got to stick around.

But it’s good to have the UN, because the UN means America’s interests are not always obvious targets, and America’s not alone among the nations that will get pissed off if somebody does cross the line. If they can’t run to some other country to get around our principles, that puts more teeth in our threats and our sanctions.

Of course, the UN does have problems. My brother was reading a book on the UN, and he said the thing to understand about the Security council was that the countries that founded it were at the time great powers, with territorial holdings world wide. In their day, they could project power simply by using their colonial holdings. Britain for example. But you look at Great Britains decline and our rise as a territorial power, and you see something of why France can be a pain in the ass. They no longer have Algeria, Vietnam, Syria or Lebanon. They no longer have their old prominence on the world stage.

So what power do they have? That which they can exercise through the UN and other such organizations.

So what do we do? We give them what they want…

In the way we want it. We let them have their victories every now and then. We don’t give them Black and white choices, where they even have the chance to oppose us, we push them into sets of alternatives where to declare victory, they have to compromise with us one way or another.

We gave them a great deal of power by resting UN legitimacy on them, when we made it obvious that we could live without it. We could have just as easily made France look like the bad guy, and diminished their power by putting them in the embarrassing position of opposing a resolution that could lead to peace. Instead, we make them heroes by giving them the chance to oppose an American march to war.

The art of Diplomacy is the art of manipulation, and we would have been a lot better off with a president who knows how to manipulate, rather than one who just likes to force things to be his way.

Do you believe that anything Kerry said in your quotation was a lie? Me either.

…The Bush Administration told us over and over again that there was “no doubt”. That’s the Bush lie.

Here’s where the wheels fall off your cart. If nothing in Kerry’s statement was a lie, then nothing in Bush’s statements were a lie. They are the same arguments.

Bush et al did not say that there were nukes in Iraq. They said we needed to remove Saddam and his regime before there are nukes in Iraq.

Now that we know more of the extent of nuclear proliferation concerning Khan and Pakistan, and now North Korea to Libya, there was even more reason to remove Saddam.

The argument was that we couldn’t wait until we know all of this with detailed precision, the i’s dotted, and t’s crossed, ready for international court prosecution. That’s why it’s called pre-emption. We know enough to know that it is not only likely, not only highly probable, but in fact a certainty that Saddam was determined to attain nuclear weapons. And that he was psychologically messed up enough to use them and or give them to someone to use them.

VIENNA, Austria — Evidence gathered by the U.N. atomic agency suggests North Korea was the source of nearly two tons of uranium to Libya as part of attempts by Moammar Gadhaffi to build nuclear warheads, diplomats said today. -Houston Chronicle

What we don’t know will hurt us. As it turned out we would have had plenty of justification to invade Afghanistan before 9/11. But would we have had sufficient evidence?

While we saw Vietnam as a proxy war against the spread of communism, the Vietnamese saw it quite simply as a kind of war of independence. They wanted us out and would fight us until we either subjugated them utterly or until they were all dead. Where we saw ideology, they saw national pride. Such is the nature of invasion - not parades and flowers.)

Better to just let communist dictatorships take over? Better not to fight because ‘we can’t win’?

We are nowhere near a Vietnam situation in Iraq. For one, the Vietnamese had the Soviet Union supplying limitless arms, equipment, and training. It was in fact a proxy war against the US.

…you are partially correct about the expression “clear and present danger”

Since I am not using the term in regards to a free speech issue most of your argument does not really apply. I am using the term in the sense of Oliver Wendal Holmes explanation that, “It is a question of proximity and degree.”

Think of it this way… A man in your neighborhood has killed members of his own family, buried them in the backyard, brandishes weapons openly, even attempts to take a neighbors property. The police have fined him, put him under ‘house arrest’, but have never completely disarmed him or removed him from your neighborhood. Do you feel safe?

After September 11, like many Americans I came to believe that it was more critical than ever to contain Saddam and neutralize him as a threat.

Sept. 11 did change the equation. Regime change was the only option. Anything less is merely a delay. The harder we were on him without removing him the more likely that he would seek revenge.

Therefore it is a failure to remove the weapons without removing the intent of the wielder or the wielder himself.

Here’s where the wheels fall off your cart. If nothing in Kerry’s statement was a lie, then nothing in Bush’s statements were a lie. They are the same arguments.

That, dear Eric, is quite a bit of logical sophistry. It assumes equal access to information, which Kerry did not have.

The Administration has the advantage, and sits at the top of the intelligence food chain, passing down information as it will. If Kerry did not know the information he was being given was false, he did not lie by relating it further.

Furthermore, it is the Administration’s duty to factcheck such information. A member of congress cannot be expected to do the Bush Administration’s job for it in terms of intelligence. If Bush and his people knew that certain information they were using was false or unreliable, and they went ahead and used it to make their case for war, then they are the ones who deserve to be named liars.

Besides, whatever your people thought the truth was, they were wrong, on many levels. They may have been right about one or two things, but they severely overestimated the extent to which Saddam’s WMD infrastructure had recovered, and vastly overestimated it’s capability to develop nukes. To date, no significant connection between Al Quaeda and the Baathists has surfaced to indicate that Saddam was sponsoring the terror organization at all, much less to the degree that Laura Mylroie and Paul Wolfowitz claimed.

In essence, Saddam was contained. In violation of UN resolutions, yes. Trying to recover his program, yes. Perhaps one day, a threat again, yes. But no, not a threat in the near term, not enough to justify the invasion.

Problem is, we are past the point, long past the point where we were free to devote our attentions elsewhere.

So, I support our efforts now, as do most Democrats and Americans. But I, and others like me, including Kerry, want to know how we are going to get out of this mess, without leaving things worse. We want reconstruction to succeed. We want the Occupation to succeed. We want the best for our soldiers, and we wonder why, with the attention this administration devoted to getting us into this war, why they never thought to deal with what happened after we won, and how we would free ourselves up to do other things in the world.

I am not by nature a pessimist, but I am also not by nature irrationally optimistic. It seems to me that you people believed so strongly that your war would naturally effect the changes you were looking for that you never stopped to consider that some of these things would take harder work than that.

Here’s where the wheels fall off your cart. If nothing in Kerry’s statement was a lie, then nothing in Bush’s statements were a lie. They are the same arguments.

Let me explain this with a simple example. Say I tell you I grew up in Alabama. I didn’t, but that’s what I told you. You then later tell a friend you’ve been arguing on a blog with a crazy liberal from Alabama. The friend contacts me, finds out I grew up in Minnesota, and calls you a liar.

Are you a liar? Of course not, because you were misinformed and unknowingly passed on false information. Am I a liar? Yes, because I knowingly mislead you.

Kerry is not a liar for basing his decisions and statements on mistruths told to him. If the people who told him (the Bush administration) knowingly misled him, then they are liars.

Got it?

I don’t know whether you even understand the fact that the chemical agent in question was not even created yet- they only had the primary chemicals.

Like the binary shell that mixes two chemical agents to create a weapon? I think this has been over looked. We have found large quantities of chemical agent in Iraq, ‘dual-use,’ hidden in unlikely places, buried and camoflaged. Why.

What Kerry wanted was the United states to have it’s gun pulled this time when it used the threat of force to persuade Iraq to cooperate, and admit to it’s contravention of it’s agreements. Pulling the trigger, for him, was something to do when everything else had been tried.

Kerry voted against the Gulf War. Supposedly the most multilateral war in history.

You are right about the UN. It was created in an era when the ‘balance of powers’ was entirely different than it is today. This is part of it’s present day malfunction. It needs an overhaul. It was programmed with fixed variables that are no longer true today.

…you see something of why France can be a pain in the ass. They no longer have Algeria, Vietnam, Syria or Lebanon. They no longer have their old prominence on the world stage.

So what power do they have? That which they can exercise through the UN and other such organizations.

A bit unrepresentative isn’t it?

So what do we do? We give them what they want…

In the way we want it. We let them have their victories every now and then. We don’t give them Black and white choices, where they even have the chance to oppose us,

That’s right. And that’s why Bush’s real mistake was giving in to those like Kerry who insisted we go to the UN. Bush should have learned a lesson from Clinton’s unilateral war in Bosnia. No UN. Not even a congressional resolution.

The art of Diplomacy is the art of manipulation, and we would have been a lot better off with a president who knows how to manipulate, rather than one who just likes to force things to be his way.

If Kerry is your manipulator, good luck. Is this what liberal real-politics is all about? Manipulation and pushing our allies into our alternatives?

…we push them into sets of alternatives where to declare victory, they have to compromise with us one way or another.

It assumes equal access to information, which Kerry did not have.

Did Clinton have such access? Does a myriad of democratic politicians not have this access? Where was Clinton when this argument was being made? Why didn’t he stand up and say it wasn’t true if Bush was lying?

Please, this is the lamest set of excuses I have ever heard.

A member of congress cannot be expected to do the Bush Administration’s job for it in terms of intelligence.

Christopher tries to say Kerry is just a reporter. You say it’s not Kerry’s job to check these things.

This is why the liberal charge that Bush lied is dead in the water. When did Bush claim to have secret evidence? Never.

Let’s pretend we didn’t invade Iraq. Where would we be today? Saddam would be in power. Inspectors might have declared Iraq free of WMD. In a post 9/11 world do you feel safer? Did the inspectors really search everywhere? How can we be sure? Now that inspectors are gone, and sanctions are lifted, how long will it take for Saddam to make WMD? 5 years? 2 years? 10 years? If there is no real openess, and there can’t be in a dictatorship, we can never be sure they are telling the truth.

Not only that but Saddam is there with his information minister proclaiming victory, working up the arab street, and subsidizing terrorism in Israel.

In essence, Saddam was contained. In violation of UN resolutions, yes. Trying to recover his program, yes. Perhaps one day, a threat again, yes. But no, not a threat in the near term, not enough to justify the invasion.

Saddam was not contained. Stephen, I recall you saying something about the war of ideas. The propaganda war. Sanctions were not helping us in this propaganda war. The fact that Saddam could subvert the very container holding him should give you pause. How many Iraqi’s died under these sanctions? Hans Blix himself said that if the sanctions were sucessful in keeping Saddam from having the facilities to develop WMD it was because the sanctions in effect completely destroyed the Iraqi industrial capacity. They couldn’t make WMD, but they also couldn’t make much of anything else. Is that your moral equivalent to war?

Removing Saddam is not merely removing a threat to the US. It is a service to humanity. It is part of a geopolitical strategy to reverse the last thirty years of non-deterence in the middle east.

Lastly I dispute your characterization of the war in Iraq. We are winning and we will continue to win.

You need a longer term outlook.

“Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” -Winston Churchill

Lawnboy,

You grew up in Alabama?

> Here’s where the wheels fall off your cart.
> If nothing in Kerry’s statement was a lie,
> then nothing in Bush’s statements were a
> lie. They are the same arguments.

Except that Kerry never said anything to the effect that there was “no doubt”, or that the threat was so important that we had to invade right away. He never even suggested an invasion. The Bush Administration was arguing both for months, some of them even for years. Cheney did. Rumsfeld did. Powell did. Wolfowitz did. Rice did. Each time, of course, these Bush Administration officials were telling blatant lies.

(As an aside, notice how I almost never attribute any Bush Administration policies to President Bush himself. I always write “Bush Administration” to refer to these policies. Bush Administration supporters always seem to try to quote Bush to back up their defenses of the Administration. Why? Because Bush never (intentionally) says anything beyond the most sweeping generalizations, so you can use Bush’s use of the word “grave and growing” instead of “imminent” to sweep under the rug the fact that every single other person working for him consistently used language which any resonable person would understand to be synonymous. It’s not even remotely fair to use the President’s words as representative of Administration policy.)

> Bush et al did not say that there were nukes
> in Iraq. They said we needed to remove Saddam
> and his regime before there are nukes in Iraq.

Remember “mushroom cloud”?

> We know enough to know that it is not only
> likely, not only highly probable, but in fact
> a certainty that Saddam was determined to
> attain nuclear weapons.

Perhaps you are right about this, but he wasn’t at the time capable of actually building them, and was a long way from being capable. He was closer than most unfriendly dictators were, that’s for sure, but from everything I had ever read before the invasion it was, worst case scenario, at least a couple of years off. Again, this is from what I had read, but I had the impression that most nuclear physicists who were asked about it put the estimate out about a decade or so.

And even if these estimates were wrong, and he was perhaps as little as a year away from producing a bomb or two, I think that even this risk could have been totally averted by something less than an invasion. I repeat: in late 2002 Bush had nearly succeeded in averting this nuclear risk without putting the world through this current chaos.

> And that he was psychologically messed up
> enough to use them and or give them to
> someone to use them.

Saddam was pretty crazy, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that even a crazy dictator who just spent twenty three years trying to build a nuclear bomb would just give it to someone else.

> Now that we know more of the extent of
> nuclear proliferation concerning Khan and
> Pakistan, and now North Korea to Libya, there
> was even more reason to remove Saddam.

Sounds like a reason to focus our attention on North Korea and maybe to stop being so chummy and forgiving with Pakistan.

> Better to just let communist dictatorships take
> over? Better not to fight because ‘we can’t win’?

Good lord, Eric, stop building straw men. I was trying to make a point about how this Administration is incompetant, not about how invasions are inherently wrong. This Administration takes the concept of an invasion so lightly that they didn’t prepare even remotely adequately for the national political, geopolitical, financial, military, and human costs of the war. No-one can deny that this Administration has vastly misunderstood the Iraqi people. That’s why we didn’t succeed in Vietnam: we never really understood who we were fighting.

> A man in your neighborhood has killed members of
> his own family, buried them in the backyard,
> brandishes weapons openly, even attempts to take
> a neighbors property. The police have fined him,
> put him under ‘house arrest’, but have never
> completely disarmed him or removed him from
> your neighborhood. Do you feel safe?

Sounds pretty safe to me, yes. Your implied solution sounds like another fiasco I remember from my Philadelphia youth, that is, a hasty and ill-planned overreaction that causes more harm than good.

-Cf

Eric, of course Clinton had the same access as Bush did. Kerry did not. The Commander in Chief has the authority to demand accurate, up to date, and specific information from the intel community and DoD. Congresspersons do not. I fail to see your point.

Eric, we won the war last year. We are losing the occupation that Bush has promised since the end of “major hostilities” and deposing Hussein. You know how to tell Bush lost the occupation? When the voters vote him out of office. Contrary to your apparent belief, the man works for the voters, not for God or himself, or JCS or anyone else.

He has shown what he can and cannot do as President. The voters will say in November whether Bush’s committments, strategies and plans for our ship of state, our public interests, and our invasion and occupation of Iraq are, were, a success. Believers should try very hard to avoid the polls these days. They could cause believers to drink.

What is going to lose Bush his job his adamant stance on not backing down despite what polls and voters are saying. That kind of President does not work for the people, that kind of President serves himself and his own ego.

David:
“You know how to tell Bush lost the occupation? When the voters vote him out of office.”

By your logic then, if Bush is re elected, does that mean he has won the occupation?

> By your logic then, if Bush is re elected,
> does that mean he has won the occupation?

It may at least mean that David was wrong and that Bush is correct in his assertion that he works for God himself.

-Cf

(Bush) works for the voters, not for God or himself, or JCS or anyone else.

He works for Jesus Christ Superstar? Is he in the set department or fundraising?

Eric:
Clinton, as president had access to the information equal to Bush’s. Kerry, as a senator did not. There are different levels of clearance for classified information, and clearly Bush has higher clearance, as do many on his staff. He does in fact have secret information he is privy to where congress is not.

They also have first access to that information, and the ability to act as gatekeepers in its dissemination.

Let’s pretend we didn’t invade Iraq. Where would we be today? Saddam would be in power. Inspectors might have declared Iraq free of WMD. In a post 9/11 world do you feel safer? Did the inspectors really search everywhere? How can we be sure? Now that inspectors are gone, and sanctions are lifted, how long will it take for Saddam to make WMD? 5 years? 2 years? 10 years? If there is no real openess, and there can’t be in a dictatorship, we can never be sure they are telling the truth.

That, Eric, is an argument from ignorance, and an appeal to fear. Neither justifies a pre-emptive war, which is typically employed at times of clear and present danger, not at times where the danger is two or five years ahead, much less ten.

You’re equivocating here, comparing sanctions unfavorably to a full out invasion and occupation. You also concede a major point of your party’s case for war, the idea that Saddam was manufacturing WMDS at all.

As for the propaganda war, I ask you, do you see anybody in the Arab world cheering us for lifting sanctions now? Or are they focused on that little thing called the occupation?

Even if we didn’t have the Abu Ghraib prison debacle going on, I’d say the average Arab’s opinion of us has dropped, not risen.

You can give me all this high flown rhetoric, claim to be winning things, but right now your side is low on provable facts. God, I am willing to concede that things might improve, and that we are not beaten yet. But for heaven’s sake don’t be arguing the positions even your own administration is backing away from! You have General Abizaid, the man in charge of this war, actually saying on capitol hill that we won’t be beaten, but that with the current state of things, we have no hope of winning either. If you want to contradict a four star general who has been in theatre for some time now, be my guest.

The administration stubbornly refuses to correct obvious mistakes. It has taken a seige mentality with the press, conceding things only when their numbers are in danger of dropping too low. Worse, they hardly seem to do anything once they make the admissions. If the administration had a personality it seems, it wouldn’t be much different than that of a juvenile delinquent.

You can quote Churchill all you want to, but I for one want maturity out of my government, not the immature responses of a rebellious teenager.

Except that Kerry never said anything to the effect that there was “no doubt”, or that the threat was so important that we had to invade right away. He never even suggested an invasion. The Bush Administration was arguing both for months, some of them even for years. Cheney did. Rumsfeld did. Powell did. Wolfowitz did. Rice did. Each time, of course, these Bush Administration officials were telling blatant lies.

Kerry has the same record. While Clinton was in office Kerry made many of the same speeches to support bombing Iraq.

> Bush et al did not say that there were nukes
> in Iraq. They said we needed to remove Saddam
> and his regime before there are nukes in Iraq.

Remember “mushroom cloud”?

Come on, you’re smarter than that. The reference to a mushroom cloud does not mean they are saying that there are nukes in Iraq. In fact as I recall they went out of they’re way to say the opposite.

The entire liberal script on this is full of holes. Overstate the ‘administrations’ claims before the war and then say see they lied!

> Better to just let communist dictatorships take
> over? Better not to fight because ‘we can’t win’?

Good lord, Eric, stop building straw men. I was trying to make a point about how this Administration is incompetant, not about how invasions are inherently wrong.

There are no straw men here. Chris, you are the one who brought up Vietnam and the Soviets. Are the Vietnamese not communists? Are the soviets not communists?

No-one can deny that this Administration has vastly misunderstood the Iraqi people. That’s why we didn’t succeed in Vietnam: we never really understood who we were fighting.

I disagree. Argue that they had no plan or argue that they had bad plans; you can’t have it both ways. The ‘administration’ has approached the Iraq war with the maximum amount of flexibility and used considerable good judgment every step of the way.

Most of the criticism I keep hearing is that there wasn’t some kind of rigid, all or nothing plan, which has plotted out and predicted every event correctly. This is a false standard. No such plan would ever be correct. I suspect this is the kind of plan Kerry would put together.

In what way have we failed in Iraq? I submit that so far we have succeeded dramatically. We expected oppressed people to welcome their freedom. They have. We expected the Iraqi people to welcome democracy so they could control their own fate. They will.

We didn’t fail in Vietnam because we didn’t understand them. We failed in Vietnam because we failed to understand ourselves. It was a failure of will.

The Iraqi people are not an enigma. As many are fond of saying, they are people just like us.

Eric, we won the war last year. We are losing the occupation that Bush has promised since the end of “major hostilities” and deposing Hussein. You know how to tell Bush lost the occupation? When the voters vote him out of office. Contrary to your apparent belief, the man works for the voters, not for God or himself, or JCS or anyone else.

I have to laugh every time I hear this reference to ‘the end of major hostilities’. You’re right, we won the war. ie. the end of major hostilities. We did. And that is precisely what Bush was saying at the time. Thank you for making the distinction.

Are we losing the occupation? According to many we are. The democrats have predicated their electoral success on it’s failure. In order for Kerry to win, Bush must lose the occupation.

America loses, democrats win. So much for supporting the troops.

What is going to lose Bush his job his adamant stance on not backing down despite what polls and voters are saying. That kind of President does not work for the people, that kind of President serves himself and his own ego.

What kind of President takes a course of action and then changes his mind based on polls and not whether it is the right course of action? Possibly a Kerry Presidency? That kind of President is not serving the American people, but himself and his ego.

Bush is the kind of President who does what he thinks is right, even in the face of difficulties. Even when there is opposition to doing the right thing. Even when the right thing is villified and slandered. What is right doesn’t necessarily change according to momentary political fashion. He actually holds the good of the country above his own personal ego.

Stephen,

As for the propaganda war, I ask you, do you see anybody in the Arab world cheering us for lifting sanctions now? Or are they focused on that little thing called the occupation?

The difference is that in the long term which course of action holds more promise? Indefinite sanctions? Or a short war, removal of a dictator, and a free Iraq?

General Abizaid, the man in charge of this war, actually saying on capitol hill that we won’t be beaten, but that with the current state of things, we have no hope of winning either.

We have no hope of winning? Is that an exact quote?

This is why I quoted Churchill. Based on the left’s logic we should have admitted defeat in 1940. The axis powers had swallowed up and occupied two thirds of the earth. In Europe only one small island twenty miles off the coast of a Nazi Fortress Europe remained defiant to Hitler. A seemingly hopeless scenario.

What are we talking about in Iraq? How are we losing? The broad based popular and massive insurgency of Al Sadr? The former uprising in Fallujah? The foreign fighters aiding Al Qaeda boss Zarqawi? How are we defeated if not by our own decision to give up?

Tell me once again why we are losing. Why we are not up to the task. Why we must accept defeat before it’s too late.

Eric, of course, I respectfully disagree. You say, “Bush is the kind of President who does what he thinks is right, even in the face of difficulties. Even when there is opposition to doing the right thing. Even when the right thing is villified and slandered.”

I say, Bush is the kind of President who does what HE thinks is right regardless of evidence, opinion, or feedback data which indicates the ‘right’ thing is the wrong thing. The shear preponderance of the evidence coming out of Iraq for a very long time now has indicated we are NOT doing the “right” things, which would lead a normal person to try something else. But, of course, Bush Jr. is an exceptional person in this regard, anyway.

David,

I say, Bush is the kind of President who does what HE thinks is right regardless of evidence, opinion, or feedback data which indicates the ‘right’ thing is the wrong thing.

All we can do is what we think is right. After all, what is right? The actions which are dictated by your knowledge of what is good and right.

Were I to yeild to your knowledge, or any other man’s, I would not be doing what I believed to be right.

The shear preponderance of the evidence coming out of Iraq for a very long time now has indicated we are NOT doing the “right” things, which would lead a normal person to try something else. But, of course, Bush Jr. is an exceptional person in this regard, anyway.

That depends on what you assume to be the ‘right’ things. The left has called victory defeat, and trouble disaster. Are we defeated David? Are we hopelessly lost? Or by believing it is so have you fulfilled it in your own mind?

Eric, may I ask then why we tax payers are paying the salaries of all those so called experts on foreign affairs, those economicians, those historians on Capital Hill and in the Whitehouse? I mean if listening to others is a waste of time in knowing what the right thing to do is, I want my money back and I want to see a huge drop in Gov’t payrolls.

Oh, I forgot, George has a direct line to God, so he don’t need no stinking experts advising him what the right thing to do is, right?

Oh, well, guess we can get rid of words like competent, rational, expeditious, appropriate, measured, successful and a host of others where the government is concerned. I mean who needs to measure whether we are doing the right thing, eh? If you want to know if we are doing the right thing in this country on any particular issue, just ask King George - he defines what is right for all of us whether it feels right, looks right, or functions right, or not, eh? :-)

> Eric, may I ask then why we tax payers are
> paying the salaries of all those so called
> experts on foreign affairs, those economicians,
> those historians on Capital Hill and in the
> Whitehouse?

I still wonder why Colin Powell still works for the Administration at all. I mean, Bush has not ever listened to a single word the Secretary of State has ever said. Often, they do the opposite (anyone remember the “Powell Doctrine”, of using overwhelming force and having a clear objective and a clear exit strategy?). The Administration uses the State Department as just another channel to reach the media, and Powell as just another White House spokesperson.

And yeah, David, I am suprised at how little attention has been given to Bush’s claim that he talks to God. Bush apologists may claim that he was speaking metaphorically, or that he was pandering to the religious right. Frankly, I take him at his word. The guy is in way over his head, and it seems perfectly possible that he has started listening to voices in his head as a way of coping with the pressures of power.

-Cf

Well, Eric, I was paraphrasing. A closer paraphrasing would be that he said that they weren’t going to lose military but they weren’t going to win either, not without additional help.

But he was saying, effectively, that with current forces, and the current diplomatic and economic position we are in, we weren’t going to be successful, even if they weren’t chasing us back to Kuwait

As for the former uprising in Fallujah, I think you’re misinformed. Former does not describe the situation. The violence is still going on, and Najaf and the other cities are still war zones.

You quote Churchill, right? Did you know what Churchill did in World War One? One word describes it: Galipolli. A 259 day campaign against a well defended Turkish position in the dardanelles where 500,000 soldiers landed, of which 300,000 died. They never took the position, and Churchill was kicked out of the Admiralty for it. Persistence can be a strength, as he demonstrated in WWII, but can also be a weakness in military exploits, a long slow waste of men, machinery and supplies.

All we can do is what we think is right. After all, what is right? The actions which are dictated by your knowledge of what is good and right.

Were I to yeild to your knowledge, or any other man’s, I would not be doing what I believed to be right.

My old professor up at at Baylor had a rule, amongs a list he always showed to freshman in his introductory class on film and video aesthetics: Everybody works on partial information.

Education (or the lack of it) always has a opportunity cost in terms of what one learns. Some people like to believe that common sense is all you need. They should be reminded that their whole civilization is based on uncommon sense, on expertise gained through hard work, study, and natural inclination. engineers and architects design our roads and buildings, scientists research new materials and phenomena, computer programmers create the very medium by which we discuss this subject. Now, we might have insights into what good buildings, good roads, and good computer programs do, but we don’t have the skill or expertise to plan those things out as well as those who have been educated to that purpose. So while the correct position isn’t always one of deferrence, some respect must given for those who have taken the time and effort to learn their craft, their field of study.

Bush is not surrounded by idiots. He is surrounded, though, by people with very particular theories of how the world works. He has the Neocons on foreign policy, the transformationalists on military strategy, the religious right on matters of legislative morality and matters of the separation of church and state, the more ideological wing of the supply-siders on economics and taxes and so on and so forth. Problem isn’t that he doesn’t listen to experts. Problem is, he looks at one set of people, and decides their opinion is right, when in fact everybody’s theories are subject to verification by the way things work out in the real world,and therefore must be held as tentative.

You see, even the experts lack perspective in certain areas. When one viewpoint is imposed on all, certain very useful objections get overruled. When continued power and influence depend on the success of one’s theories, one can be very hesitant to deal with evidence of the theory’s shortcomings. Power tends to protect itself. This is what the market place of ideas is formulated as a response to: the evils of ideas imposed from the top.

In the end, deferrence to experts is a judgement call, but it is often necessary in a culture that depends on the profound expertise of it’s scientists, legal practitioners, medical professionals, engineers, and other well educated folk to survive. The responsibility laid on those who would govern is that they be somewhat open-minded and well informed enought to hold the experts to their side of the bargain: that with their greater knowledge comes the charge of greater care in how they use that knowledge, and the ability to accept responsibility for failures in their theories and their plans.

> Kerry has the same record. While Clinton was in
> office Kerry made many of the same speeches to
> support bombing Iraq.

So Clinton’s targeted bombings are the equivalent of Bush’s invasion? Your logic is getting a bit muddled here.

> > Remember “mushroom cloud”?
>
> Come on, you’re smarter than that. The reference
> to a mushroom cloud does not mean they are saying
> that there are nukes in Iraq. In fact as I recall
> they went out of they’re way to say the opposite.

My reference to “mushroom cloud” was meant to stand in for the hundreds of dishonest inflammatory statements that the Administration made before the war. But, okay, let’s focus on the one phrase “mushroom cloud”. Rice meant to suggest that there was a possibility that Saddam could make a nuclear bomb. She meant to argue that we had to invade now to prevent American cities from getting nuked.

Think about it. It’s simple logic. Look at the Administration’s arguments:

A) Saddam is working on nuclear weapons. There is no doubt.
B) He might blow up American cities with such weapons.
C) We absolutely need to invade right away, in 2003, in order to prevent such an attack.

It’s perfectly logical for the average American, indeed for any thinking person, to conclude from these three Administration arguments that, yes, the Administration thought that there was a likelihood, or maybe just a remote possibility, that Saddam might have a nuclear weapon by 2003. Otherwise, why bother invading?

In later statements some Administration officials did sometimes mention that perhaps Saddam was years away from making a bomb, but to say they “went out of their way” is pretty disingenuous. More often then not, they usually slipped back to arguments from ignorance, saying, in effect, “we just don’t know, they very well might have a nuclear bomb”, even though (I think) they were 110% certain that Saddam didn’t have a nuclear bomb.

Same thing applies to the on-again off-again allegations of a 9/11 and Al Qaeda connection. The Administration speaks from both sides of its mouth at the same time, making accurate statements about the non-existence of such connections simultaneously with inflammatory lies about the certainty of such connections just so someone like you can have some shred of evidence to argue that “they went out of their way” to say the truth.

You say “Come on, you’re smarter than that”, but what I think you really mean is “Come on, Chris, you should be able to distinguish between when the Administration is stating facts and when the Administration is using exaggerations and scare tactics in order to gain the support of the American people.”

It’s easy for you to argue that we on the left are exaggerating the Administration’s statements before the war because you, too, were probably aware at the time that many of those statements were exaggerations designed to drum up emotional support for an invasion. You were probably discounting those statements at the time, so they didn’t register with you the way they did with me and the way they did with the over 30% of the American people who agreed with the Administration’s argument for invasion in 2003 and who disagree with him now. They changed their minds because they now realize that they were fooled by the “mushroom cloud” statements.

This ain’t WWII. We live in a different time, one in which we expect our government to never lie, to never exaggerate the dangers facing us, and to never gloss over our failures and shortcomings, even if the Administration thinks such falsehoods are ultimately for our own good.

> Most of the criticism I keep hearing is that there
> wasn’t some kind of rigid, all or nothing plan, which
> has plotted out and predicted every event correctly.

What are you talking about? Who has ever said that? The criticism is just the opposite: The problem is specifically that there was only an all-or-nothing rigid plan: to invade, get showered with flowers, and to depart within months with Chalabi firmly in control of a Democratic Iraq, all in time for the 2004 Presidential election. That was the only plan, there was no other plan. It was insane.

> We didn’t fail in Vietnam because we didn’t
> understand them.

Sigh.

-Cf

David,

…regardless of evidence, opinion, or feedback data…

…we can get rid of words like competent, rational, expeditious, appropriate, measured, successful and a host of others where the government is concerned. I mean who needs to measure whether we are doing the right thing, eh? If you want to know if we are doing the right thing in this country on any particular issue, just ask King George

King George? Please refer to our glorious master as GW, the merciful and compassionate.

Chris,

Bush has not ever listened to a single word the Secretary of State has ever said.

I didn’t know you were privy to the private counsel between Powell and Bush. I should give your rantings more weight from now on. Do you hear their voices too?

> I didn’t know you were privy to the private
> counsel between Powell and Bush.

Your sarcasm aside, I am content in my certainty that you understood my point perfectly well.

-Cf

Chris,

So Clinton’s targeted bombings are the equivalent of Bush’s invasion? Your logic is getting a bit muddled here.

So it’s okay to lie about WMD if you’re just bombing?

It’s perfectly logical for the average American, indeed for any thinking person, to conclude from these three Administration arguments that, yes, the Administration thought that there was a likelihood, or maybe just a remote possibility, that Saddam might have a nuclear weapon by 2003. Otherwise, why bother invading?

No, Chris. That does not follow at all. It’s where you want it to go but that is not the rationale used. What happened to the liberal arguments against pre-emption? You know, take him out BEFORE he has a nuclear bomb?

Taking out Saddam Hussein was and is the right decision. Liberating the Iraqi people was and is the right decision. Saddam Hussein was not going to be disarmed by UN inspections. No amount of sanctions was going to remove the threat of Saddam or one of his sons acquiring Nuclear weapons.

What’s more, we are going to have to act very soon in both Iran and North Korea. Whether that means invasion or just destroying every facility we even think may have some tangential link to nuclear research remains to be seen. But we cannot wait until the UN knows for sure that there are nukes rolling off assembly lines.

If you want to argue against the Iraq war you would do better to argue that it has prevented us from taking out Kim Jong Ill.

The problem is specifically that there was only an all-or-nothing rigid plan: to invade, get showered with flowers, and to depart within months with Chalabi firmly in control of a Democratic Iraq, all in time for the 2004 Presidential election. That was the only plan, there was no other plan. It was insane.

Again, that is your partisan impression and characterization of what ‘the plan’ was. Let’s look at the facts. The number of troops used to invade was more than sufficent. The invasion of Iraq was executed flawlessly.

As for why we ‘lost’ Vietnam. We failed because we weren’t willing to do what was necessary. We failed because our will failed.

The liberal interpretation of Vietnam is that we lost because we were in a country that didn’t want us there… We underestimated the tenacity and organization of the North vietnamese… and that North Vietnamese were ‘a local, popular guerilla movement.’

Some of which can be said to be true, but overall it’s a skewed interpretaion. That alone does not explain why we ‘lost’. We won militarily, but lost politically. Our will was defeated.

> The liberal interpretation of Vietnam …

I was merely quoting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the #1 most-hated enemy of those who would hold a “liberal interpretation” of Vietnam. He was discussing the fact that when we went to Vietnam, they were already in the throes of a decade-long war intended, in part, to expel the 100,000 imperial French troops occupying the country. We were largely perceived as a replacement imperial power.

He was talking about nationalism, which has proven over and over again to be the most powerful force in modern history. A force the US government, from Eisenhower to Nixon, ignored in Vietnam, and something the Bush Administration is ignoring today in Iraq.

Anyway, perhaps you can tell us all “what was necessary” to defeat a foe who showed no signs of weakening even after dying at a ratio of nearly 20-to-1 when compared to American deaths? Perhaps you can tell me how many more American deaths would have been a worthy price to pay to have maintained a non-communist South Vietnam?

> Saddam Hussein was not going to be disarmed
> by UN inspections. No amount of sanctions was
> going to remove the threat of Saddam or one
> of his sons acquiring Nuclear weapons.

You’ve omitted one other non-invasion option that I’ve consistently suggested. But you mention it later in another non-Iraq context. You apparently have the skill of selecting your military strategies based on how well they support the Administration’s current predicament.

> What’s more, we are going to have to act
> very soon in both Iran and North Korea.

You may be right, I don’t know. Too bad we’re spread so thin already and have blown all of our international credibility on a wasteful reckless adventure in Iraq, instead of saving our military and geopolitical capital for potentially more dangerous problems.

> Whether that means invasion or just destroying
> every facility we even think may have some
> tangential link to nuclear research remains to
> be seen.

Ah, and here it is: A method of handling a dangerous state without invading it. Funny how easy it is for you to come up with non-invasion alternatives, now that invading these countries is exponentially more difficult because of our Iraq fiasco.

How come such non-invasion tactics weren’t considered for Iraq? How come you don’t agree, or even entertain the possibility, that maybe we should have tried such tactics in Iraq?

> But we cannot wait until the UN knows for
> sure that there are nukes rolling off
> assembly lines.

News flash: In North Korea, they already have nukes.

(By the way, your “rolling off assembly lines” metaphor is kind of sloppy. The ability to make one nuke doesn’t open a floodgate to make hundreds of them. Each single nuke a nation builds, in particular nations who have to synthesize the nuclear material with primitive technology or smuggle nuclear material from Russia or Pakistan, requires herculean national efforts.)

> If you want to argue against the Iraq war you
> would do better to argue that it has prevented
> us from taking out Kim Jong Ill.

I wouldn’t put it so simplistically (simply “taking out” Kim Jong Il would almost certainly lead to millions of dead people in Seoul and Tokyo), but I think we agree that Kim Jong Il is a great and overlooked threat these days. I’ve always thought that it was an obvious subtext to all of our arguments against the Iraq invasion: Invading Iraq was and is a waste of resources (geopolitical, financial, military) that we need to keep for other, much more important, purposes.

-Cf

I’ve noticed that there are two really good ways to kill a thread on WatchBlog: A really long comment, or that ‘Clinton’s cigar’ guys posts - especially if someone responds to it.

Just wanted to know what your opinon is of the man stepping down as kerry’s adviser, i believe that was his position, and the actual reason he stepped down for? Does this not a little bit make anyone worry what kerry would do in office?

George Bush is not qualified to manage a Chuck E Cheese ( pizza franchise ). Can you Sheeplicans actually honestly come up with one positive accomplishment by Bush and this administration ? The trade deficit , the budget deficit , the economy / jobs , Iraq , international relations ????? All in good shape right ????? Maybe it’s not a Republican thing to be honest but pull the wool from your eyes and give it a try .

To: John Koom- If you’re looking for honesty, and apparently you are, look no further than Sen John F. Kerry !! Afterall, he was in Cambodia during Xmas of ‘68, then his campaign “spokespersons” said that he had never claimed to be in Cambodia. This statement was quickly reversed and then amended AGAIN (we used to call this a “do over for a do over”) Now it seems that the Frenchurian candidate has altered his statement, once again, stating (we hope for the last time) that he was “near the border”.
First he was “for the war” then against it (color me surprised) and now, today, he says he would still be FOR THE WAR. What I want to know is if Kerry is being intentionally stupid or is he giving us a political version of “rope-a-dope” ??