Third Party & Independents: Archives

Interesting. Why wouldn’t it be an option to stop on a dime, turn to the European junta of Bechtel and other Eurocorporate conglomerates who operate all those faux “leftist” mass rallies like sock puppets, and say, “hey guys, you were right, we SHOULDN’T try to arrogantly flex our muscles in places like Iraq. Our bad. We’ll be leaving now.” And just leave.

Sure, it would mean exposing Adnan Chalabi to an immediate and painful death at the hands of his rivals on scene. So what? He couldn’t say he wasn’t running the risk of it to begin with anyway. He’s no Hamid Karzai.

And sure, it might make that disgusting piece of tripe Moqtada Al Sadr look like a victorious hero in the Muslim world, but you’ve got to understand. If they engage in a battle against you where they lose 50,000 of their troops in a single day, and one of your men get a hangnail, they WILL be dancing in the streets at how they ‘bloodied’ their infidel opponents. Remember the Iran/Iraq war, where each side was claiming victory over battles where both sides really lost about a city’s worth of kids at each charge of the mustard-gassed trenches? Well there you are. Saddam himself was in a rat hole eating moldy chickpeas and when he was found the response was “I am willing to negotiate”. That’s Arab chutzpah for you. And there’s never going to be an end to that, so don’t let the prospect of their insipid celebrations become a factor in any of your strategic planning.

No, I think we really CAN just leave. If people start preening on and on about us “shirking our responsibilities”, the easy answer is that for one, we no longer wish to be arrogant imperialists, and all those European demonstrations have made us aware of how wrong our presence in Iraq really was. We apologize, and we’re gone. As for rebuilding, well, we lost about 1000 of our men and women trying to get the chance to do so, but we’re not going to burn through another 1000 body bags to get another chance at it. Screw it. If they WANT our help in reconstruction they can just put the car bombs back in the garage and be peaceful enough to allow it to happen. If they won’t, let them rot.

Neither Bush nor Kerry agree with me, apparently. Maybe Kerry will get angry at his own conduct in the counterinsurgency again, and throw his own medals at his OWN lawn this time around. And maybe Bush has a woodie for invading Syria because a little bird told Jon Edwards that somewhere in Syria there’s a couple of cans of mustard gas. (Or maybe it’s Grey Poupon, but we’ll have to invade just to be sure!)

They’re both wrong. Bring ‘em home now. Tell Europe that if they want it, go for it. We’re out of the business of “regime change and nation building”. That gives us a good excuse for not having done jack dammit in Rwanda, too. We’ll almost become consistent and credible as a side-effect. Almost.

Exactly right—no matter who wins in November, that president will have to mobilize public opinion here and abroad to prosecute the Iraq engagement to a successful conclusion. Kerry would have to go to great lengths to ensure our troops that he’s behind them, since his rhetoric has been so anti-Iraq war. And if he thinks the Europeans and Arabs would just fall in line if he says please and thank you and not, after noticing his campaign promises, try to exact massive and humiliating concessions, he has another thing coming. Americans are just now starting to think about this—it’s the old maxim about not trying to change horses mid-stream.

This isn’t about changing horses midstream, this is about changing horses when the one you’re on is intent on taking you over a cliff.

Stephen, both “horses” are headed in the same direction. One of them is braying and ninnying that he doesn’t want to go there, but he’s still running to the same precipice at the same speed.

Are they? Let’s extend the visual metaphor. The horse we’re on is Bush, the Horse I’m trying to get on is Kerry, and since Bush won’t slow down, having built all that momentum, Kerry is going to have to come alongside, so I can jump to him. Once we’ve made the jump, Kerry can now veer off to side while Bush heads off the cliff.

Neeeeeeeigh…
Splat.

We pull out now, and it’s worse than Somalia. It’s not only a demonstration of how vulnerable we are, it’s an invitation for some country to come in and try and take over. It happened with Lebanon. A puppet government supported by Syria now rules there. Iran would sure enjoy having a monopoly on Shiite holy cities. Turkey might invade to put a damper on any ideas of Kurdish independence.

It also makes us look much more dangerous, and sets a terrible precedent. It’s bad enough that we fought a pre-emptive war. It’s only going to make things worse if we don’t clean up after ourselves. We look more dangerous if people believe that we are not only willing to wage first strikes on bad evidence, but that we are also unwilling to clean up the mess we leave behind. All in all, it’s a nice set of bad habits that I’d just as soon not see us get into.

So what if Syria rules Lebanon? Now Syria has to worry about car bombs. See how that works?

And so what if Iran would rule the Shiite holy cities? How does that pick our pocket or break our legs?

Why is everyone afraid of “precedent” here? Just because we see the error of a mistake and LEAVE? I think if anything that would play to our credit. It was failure to do that for several long years that made Vietnam such a quagmire—when all that time it was as simple as loading up the planes and helicopters and taking off.

And I’m sick and tired of all this talk about “clean up the mess we left behind”. You can’t clean ANYTHING up when car bombs are going off, and in fact their resistance to our reconstruction efforts should relieve us of the responsibility of doing any such thing. They didn’t deserve “liberation” and they certainly don’t deserve “reconstruction”. Let the bastards rot in their own filth and car-bomb each OTHER for a while, until they learn to be civilized, which may be never.

It’s always interesting to me when the left uses the Vietnam analogy. The only lesson I see in Vietnam (and perhaps it’s because I’m younger that I have a different perspective) is that the left shouldn’t be allowed to inhibit the successful prosecution of a just war by sapping morale at home.

Two and a half million peasants were slaughtered when America withdrew from Vietnam—and THAT is the true legacy of the anti-war movement. Not tie-dye, Jimmy Hendrix or the contemporary Democratic party for whom questions of foreign policy induce only acid-flashbacks to the summer of love.

That aging leftists like John Kerry are still proud of doing their part to open the gates of hell will only be looked back on by history with contempt. Leftists then and today will be regarded as part of the same intellectual lineage that equivocated over (when they weren’t actually cheerleading) Stalin and his pograms.

I guess it has a lot to do with what Ciggy’s attitude—the left doesn’t care how many get slaughtered, so long as they don’t have to get their own hands dirty or give their sanction to the bloody business of taking on murderers. They didn’t care when Saddam was murdering hundreds of thousands in Iraq. They don’t care now—they just want to sit in the grass, smoke pot and sing Kumbaya.

Martin, those of us who did protest the continuation of the Viet Nam war did so for a number of reasons not the least of which was to save American lives. The Constitution of the United States provides for military, militia and authorization for war in DEFENSE of the United States, its people and territories. It does not provide for wasting American military lives when the holders of office have proven their incompetence and inability to win a war they have engaged in.

From Kennedy to Nixon, each and every President thought they had a strategy for winning that war, and NOT ONE OF THEM demonstrated that their strategy was realistic, viable or doable.

There are a couple parallels between Viet Nam and Iraq. First is that neither of those countries threatened the U.S., its people, or territories, and thus did not constitute a threat to the U.S., though, I will admit, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that faulty intelligence did indicate their was a potential non-imminent threat. Second, as in Viet Nam, this Administration has yet to provide a realistic and viable strategy for exiting Iraq and removing American troops from harm’s way.

Third, Viet Nam was a civil war, and thus, the only resolution was for S. Viet Nam or N. Viet Nam to win. We failed after killing over 52,000 of our troops and injuring many times that many soldiers and their families, to move that country a single step closer to resolution of their civil conflict. Iraq immediately after the toppling of Saddam’s regime, became a civil conflict between factions and us within Iraq. It remains to be seen if the Bush Administration has a realistic and viable strategy for resolving the civil conflict that it has created by removing Saddam. But, as an Army veteran of the Viet Nam era, I can tell you, my patience is running thin for this administration to demonstrate its ability to end the civil conflict there without incurring endless American casualties.

American troops should NEVER die or be maimed due to incompetence, lack of planning or foresight, or lack of preparation by our civilian government when intervening in the affairs of another nation. If I were of enlistment age after 9/11, I would have enlisted to fight in Afghanistan.

But there is no way in hell based on my knowledge of Viet Nam that I would enlist to fight in Iraq. Had there been WMD and intercontinental missiles in Iraq posing a threat to America, fine. But, there wasn’t, isn’t, and as far as I am concerned we need to be drawing down troop strength in Iraq, not building it up. There isn’t even a coalition of Iraqi’s yet to take over the reigns of government almost a year after the end of Saddam’s regime, yet, this President is saying we will turn it over on June 30 or July 1 regardless - but with the proviso that WE Americans will remain to provide the security. I am not seeing the progress toward removing American troops. I can’t even see where this administration has a plan to do so. Bush keeps saying we will stay for as long as it takes. That was the mistake we made in Viet Nam, wasting American young men and women with no end in sight.

Why are you guys so worked up about the Iraqi resistance? For many different reasons, they no longer want to be occupied. It’s that simple. They want to have their say over who will rule them and they are not willing (for the most part) to tolerate Western forces in their neighborhoods. Again, it’s that simple. Are they ungrateful that the US deposed Saddam? Most of them are glad, but also feel ashamed that it took a foreign force to do it. This is all hardly surprising. Will there be bloody clashes, possibly civil war and probably a disintegration of the artificial entity called Iraq after the troops leave? Yes, that can be expected. But you cannot impose democracy on anyone. This is not Japan or Germany 60 years ago. Kerry does not want to hurt his chances by spelling out an alternative strategy to Bush’s vision. I think he’s mistaken, hopefully in due time there will be a credible plan.

Martin, the lessons of Vietnam are:

1. That a conventional military force is normally not prepared to engage and prevail in the way necessary against unconventional insurgents. The international laws of armed conflict constrain the conventional force while the insurgents don’t feel the same restrictions. The Al Sadr militia are very much like the Viet Cong in this way—committing war crimes themselves, and shielded from war crimes by the media attention on their opponents.

2. That if you place large classes of targets off-limits you will lose. In Vietnam that amounted to the Russian elements in theatre. In Iraq this entails the mosques. Either way, if you outline safe zones or places where the enemy cannot be attacked, you will never defeat them.

3. That counter-insurgency is by definition a “quagmire” because there is no clear definition of targets, goals, or objectives. No conditions for victory can be attained. One lives day to day simply hoping not to get hit as hard as the day before. This saps at morale far more than any protest against the war at home.

Insurgency CAN be squashed, but only by resorting to means that are condemned by the civilized portion of the world community. After WWII we squashed an insurgency of the German paramilitary elements still loyal to Hitler. We did it by committing some pretty severe war crimes in a decisive way, and without worrying about reprimand from the “world community”. Saddam himself squashed the same exact insurgent groups we are fighting, and he did so with a military force tactically inferior to the one we have there now. How? By NOT constraining that force in any way, not prohibiting any tactic whatsoever on the part of local commanders or agents of the Muhabarat. Al Sadr’s father and aunt were killed in that insurgency movement, in a very grisly way, and that was the end of that. Saddam never worried about mosques. Ever.

The bottom line is that insurgency gives us a very tough choice when it arises: lose our humanitarian and civilized and democratic bona fides, OR lose the war. The only way to pick “none of the above” is to get out, and do so quickly.

The mistake of this Administration was to fight this war so light that it could only win by the psychological effect of taking baghdad. If we had established firm control of the cities at each point, and only then moved on, we could have made the transition from Saddam’s control to ours much smoother, and not left the huge gaps in law and order we did. We unfortunately went in and crippled the ruling authority without the ability to take over immediately.

Our best bet now is to get huge amounts of reinforcements into Iraq, and fast. Also, we should make American presence a fact of life, and a reassurance to those with no love for the insurgents or the former regime. This isn’t hearts and minds, it’s setting up the conditions for victory. A victory for us is a self-sufficient Iraq under a neutral if not friendly government.

We should be concerned about Al Quaeda’s activities, because they are aimed at doing to us what we taught them to do to the Russians in Afghanistan- that is, to make our occupation so difficult on American forces and interests that it’s not worth their while to stay. As long as our occupational force remains as light as it is, and as uninvolved with protecting the average Iraqi, we cannot do what it takes to win this fight.

It’s not too late to do this right. Let’s hope that remains true long enough for such actions to be taken.

This, by the way is why I favor the draft, because the US armed forces are already strained in terms of personnel taken up by the Iraq war. If we are going to get the troops we need, we may have to order conscriptions to do so.

Im suprised more people havent brought up some of the parallels between our occupation of Iraq and the Soviet/Afghan war. Both are/were an attempt at regime change. Both regimes were changed. however neither of the replacements are/were popular with the natives. In Both wars, less than 200,000 troops are used. Resistance groups (mujahadeen apparently in both wars now) began attacking the soviet supply lines, drawing off troops from anti-insurgent operations to protecting vulnerable supply lines. The Same tactic is being used in Iraq against us. The Soviets fought the mujahadeen for 10 years before giving up. There is talk that we may have forces in Iraq for 10 years. IF we dont win over these resistance groups and their supporters, and do it fast, were gonna be in for a rough ride. Especially if Iran and Syria decide to chip in and covertly support the Iraqi resistance.

The Vietnam war (like Iraq) was in large part a proxy war, a showdown between more significant powers. The Viet Cong may have been an “insurgency,” but they were armed, trained and supported by the Soviets and Red China—they were hardly a popular movement that could have been sustained themselves without their protectors. Evidence of this is the number of civilians they had to slaughter—by the million—to secure their communist “utopia” once Americans were successfully driven from the picture (by the likes of Hanoi Jane and John, incidentally, far more than those ill-trained and equipped soldiers in black pajamas).

That the Viet Cong were not a “threat” to American civilians themselves is obvious, but that misses the point. Like Islamic extremists in Iraq, supported by Al Qaida, Iran, Syria, etc, the forces BEHIND the Viet Cong were a HUGE threat to America and had to be dealt with.
That’s the vision thing—which Bush junior has in spades and his dad didn’t.

You don’t have to agree that this is the best way of confronting the Islamicists, but it’s simply wrong to say that it’s “all about oil,” or “ideology.” It’s about making America safer by strangling this monster in the cradle before it aquires the means and weapons to actually threaten our civilization.

If we fail in Iraq it won’t be because of any Iraqi “insurgency”—it will be because of a lack of political will here at home, the success of a morale-sapping program which the left, as it has done so many times before, is trying to foment in order to advance the narrow interests of their own domestic political party.

Hey Guy, I think that’s a pretty good analogy. Unfortunately most Americans can’t relate to it since they know nothing about it. And I wouldn’t worry so much about Iran and Syrian funding as Saudi funding. The Saudis are Sunnis, they have a vested interest in seeing a Sunni nation on their border rather than a potentially hostile Shiite regime, even if it is US backed (or maybe because of that).

Hey Martin, maybe you don’t read the news. Iraq was a secular country. There was no Islamicist threat from Iraq.

And Martin, exactly what is the goal in Iraq? President Bush hasn’t made any public statement of what needs to be checked off the to-do list before we can pull out. All you guys seem to do is (wrongly) accuse Democrats of wanting to pull out “before the job is finished”. What is the job? How do we know when it’s finished?

It seems like the Republicans are using Iraq as a political ploy to stay in power without having any real plan.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a jackass drink. Sorry. It had to be said :)

Stephen and Guy, larger volumes of troops aren’t necessarily a positive thing in modern counter-insurgent operations. If we absolutely cannot pick up and leave Iraq immediately (which is what I advocate—for the reason that a popular uprising logically relieves us of any duty to rebuild), then continued efforts should run like this:

1) Good human intelligence activity infiltrate the groups with agents who can identify, at least WHERE THEY ARE
2) Highly trained, motivated, and equipped, and small ground assault units to get after the cells identified by the HUMINT activity. The size should be small to minimize the logistical footprint and make movements more stealthy.
3) The ground forces should AT ALL TIMES be heavily supported by air power, chiefly AC-130U gunships, but also A-10s, attack helicopters, and fighter-bombers. If an infantry unit is on the move and there isn’t a gunship in the air watching over them, you’re WRONG. In fact, layer the air support such that when one plane is rearming and refueling, another one takes its place in the support role.
4) Psyops. The truth makes for the best propaganda. If there isn’t a public address system blaring out each and every day that we are there to rebuild what we destroyed, in preparation for turning power over to the people of Iraq in open elections, then we are missing the boat. I don’t just mean TV and radio, but loudspeakers at the public square. Additionally, part of our reconstruction effort should include building mosques which are run by non-radical Ulama (either Shiite or Sunni, depending on the local sects). Any local mosques that ARE preaching radical Al Qaeda-style beliefs, some secret operations are in order to disrupt the activity there. Directional sound and energy beams can make life highly uncomfortable in the mosques and they won’t even know what’s causing it. The radical Ulama can catch diseases or die of “accidents”. Advertise that Allah is making His will known by striking down those rebellious clerics. Repeatedly disrupt those activities while building up the non-radical Muslim activities to give the locals a positive choice for expressing their faith. Having Paul Bremer in charge of the provisional government there has been MADNESS on the part of the Bush administration. Do we have absolutely NO Arab Americans who can at least put an Arab face on the occupational government there? They don’t have to really REALLY run things but they should at least be presented as a concept that America is not completely made up of Christian white people—a notion that plays into the hands of Islamic terrorist types in THEIR propaganda.
5) As pockets of safety emerge, quickly build up the economies in those areas. Add that to the psyops campaign—showing that when you are peaceful you get jobs and the good life. When you go off on Jihad against us, you get squalor and destruction and agony. Carrot or stick. Pluma o plata.
6) Create opportunities to make good on promises. In the Safe Zones, conduct local elections and turn power over to those local leaders and transition authority to them. Add that to the psyops campaign—the sooner you quit fighting us, the sooner we will leave.
7) The oil equation. With the oil operations rebuilt, tightly account for what the proceeds are and what goes into economic development that goes beyond the status quo ante of what existed during Saddam’s regime. This can be published in the form of “your oil money working for you” and outlining where it went and how it benefitted the Iraqi people. Also advertise humanitarian relief efforts, etc. It’s a good chance that if Iraqis believe we’re not the good guys, it’s because we forgot to remind them of the truth, and to make a factual rebuttal to the anti-American propaganda swirling around in extremist circles there.
8) When all pockets of destruction are rebuilt to at least the status quo ante, THAT is our signal to leave. Mission accomplished, paperwork filed, shop floor swept and mopped, and all the tools are put away. I’s dotted. T’s crossed. BUH bye.

This isn’t purely a problem of insurgency, as with vietnam. It’s also a occupational problem. Part of what’s fueling the insurgency is a hideous mix of Iraqi insecurity, a breakdown of law and order, and unemployment that lends help to the best employers in such times, which are the militias. If we were smarter about the ways we managed the occupation, the support would drop, and fewer American soldiers would die.

I agree, Stephen—there seemed to be no thought at all given to how the occupation was to roll out after the last Republican Guard tank was destroyed. If you have masses of troops on site and there is still no law and order, obviously you don’t have them doing the right things. There should have been a law and order force ready and waiting to take control of at LEAST Baghdad itself after the end of major hostilities. Ideally this interim martial law police force would have had a “Muslim look” to them at the very least, e.g., Saudis, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, you name it. Their uniforms should have been Arab-looking, NOT American uniforms. You may think this is silly, but it matters. If the law and order force doesn’t look like American occupiers, they won’t think of it as American occupation. I’d go so far as to say that the Arab League should have been officially brought on-board for the operation, and after the completion of conventional conflict with Saddam’s forces and the Arab League forces in place, have the American force keep as low a profile as possible. Remote airbases out in the boonies for Special Ops and air power should have been the limit of our presence by then.

And if you can’t get the Arab League on board to occupy a Saddamless Iraq, that should be a hint right there that something’s wrong with the whole plan to BEGIN with.

Martin, I just discovered that I failed to respond to this quote from you:

“I guess it has a lot to do with what Ciggy’s attitude—the left doesn’t care how many get slaughtered, so long as they don’t have to get their own hands dirty or give their sanction to the bloody business of taking on murderers.”

Our first and foremost concern must always be direct American interests. It’s a huge tear-jerker that we didn’t go into Rwanda, but for the same reason we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, it was also the right thing to not do a damn thing for Rwandans. It would have been arrogant. It would have been imperialist. It would have been global policing. It wouldn’t have had a damn thing to do with protecting ourselves from attack or retaliating against attack. And as France proved in the aftermath of World War II, any “liberated” people will always be ungrateful for said liberation, and it doesn’t really get you anything. No “good deed” ever goes unpunished, in that regard. In WWII it was still self-defense though, because we were attacked by Japan and then had war declared on us by Germany, ungrateful French or no ungrateful French. We don’t really need French gratitude if we can at least be glad we didn’t all end up in concentration camps alongside the Jews (which is where Germany threw their own people if they committed such crimes as listening to American swing music—for being “dissolute”).

But Iraq? It would have made sense if there were WMDs, and Saddam demonstrated some glimmer of intention to use them against us, but there weren’t. It turned out Saddam wasn’t even 1/100th the threat North Korea is, and I don’t see any PNAC briefs advocating a U.S. invasion there.

On a side-note, I’m glad you associated me with “the left” because with the frequency at which the real leftists call me a right-winger, I was getting worried for a bit that I’d gone off-center.

My bad, Ciggy. You America-first types can be a little hard to pin down on the left-right spectrum. Well, your mind is definitely made up (has anybody’s mind ever been changed on Watchblog?—just a question), but this is why I disagree.

First, if I can try one that might speak from your point of view: removing a crazed megomoniacal lunatic from his perch atop one third the world’s oil reserves could be really considered “good” for American interests. I don’t really buy this view, but hey.

Second, we should have done something about Rwanda even if we didn’t. I fault members of ALL parties for not doing so, like I fault the entire world for not doing anything sooner about the extermination of Jews in the forties. I don’t buy this whole arguement that we should sit idly by while innocent people are slaughtered in huge numbers if we have the means to react. When I say this, I know people will say that genocide has taken place under Republican administrations as well—and to their shame, I say. This ought to be a matter, from a moral point of view, that goes beyond party loyalties. Our “interests” are broader than you seem to let on—there is a moral dimension to life on this planet as well.

“It turned out Saddam wasn’t even 1/100th the threat North Korea is.” Maybe it has “turned out” that way—but now we’ll never know. If the 9-11 hijackers had been stopped, you could say that Al Qaida was never a domestic threat to America. If there really were no WMDS is Iraq (and the jury is still out on that as far as I’m concerned), we know Saddam wanted them and would gladly have used them if he had the means. We know that he HAD used them before—he was just that sort of guy.

Korea—well, maybe they’re next. Because we haven’t dealt yet with Kim Jong mentally-Il is no arguement against having dealt with others of his ilk already.

Wow, Martin. I’m impressed. You actually sound thoughtful and persuasive. I actually find myself agreeing with you. On the Rwanda subject, anyhow.

Clinton has said that’s the one issue he now wishes he had fought harder for. Unfortunately he had his hands full defending his attempts to prevent slaughter in Kosovo before a hostile Republican Congress. “Wag the dog!”

Our “interests” are broader than you seem to let on—there is a moral dimension to life on this planet as well.

Don’t they kick you out of the Republican Party for that? :) Seriously though, if you feel that way, I hope you’re writing your representatives and asking them to intervene in the Sudan immediately.

“It turned out Saddam wasn’t even 1/100th the threat North Korea is.” Maybe it has “turned out” that way—but now we’ll never know

I have to disagree here. Saddam had opened up everything in Iraq to UN inspectors. They were confidant that there were no WMDs, and would have prevented the development of WMDs and WMD programs (though apparently not WMD program activities, which I think I’m doing right now just by accessing the Internet) while Bush worked with the UN to get them behind a second resolution to oust Saddam and replace him with a democratically elected government. The job could have been done by now.

But like you said, we’ll never know.

And I’d like to think Korea was next, but we’re pulling troops out of Korea to augment the Iraq occupation, and their funding is being cut so the Pentagon can cover a 4 billion dollar hole in the Iraq funding. So it won’t be any time soon. Until we’re able to stand down the majority of troops in Iraq, any talk dealing with N Korea is just that: talk.

Martin’s first point, which he himself doesn’t “buy” but throws “out there” anyway, into the breach, to say that removing a crazed megalomaniacal leader off the top of 1/3 of the world’s oil reserves is good for American interests: I agree with your disagreement. It doesn’t fly as a defensive measure. If anything Saddam’s own greed made him sell oil to us at times when OPEC was trying to shut off all the spigots. If the oil resource question were really key here, we’d have had even more of an interest to keep him in power—as our little Pinochet of the Middle East.

Regarding Rwanda: hindsight isn’t ALWAYS 20/20. Sure we see hundreds of thousands of bodies washing down the rivers there, but you know what? All it would have taken to unite the Hutu and Tutsi clans would be for Big Bad America to show up on-scene with our Big Bad Helicopters to mow down what we perceive to be the bad guys. Just as today we see Sunni fighting alongside Shiite against our troops in Iraq, we’d have had the same quagmire in Rwanda. Martin, I hate to burst your naive bubble, but Turd World people generally are trash and don’t deserve squat. They don’t deserve liberation, they don’t deserve help, they don’t deserve a damn thing other than a little bit of pity as we display the video of what’s being done to them on reality TV. Yes, that sounds harsh and it IS. The world is harsh. And by the way, there is no Santa Clause, either. Take a good look at Moqtada Al Sadr. THAT is what you get when you try and “liberate” people.

As for Korea, it appears the policy being used with them, the same Mutually Assured Destruction policy we had with the former Soviet Union, is a better one than trying to invade and thus force a nuclear conflict. Do you disagree?

Lee, I say SCREW Sudan. I don’t want to face a Sudanese Al Sadr either. Them them all rot in their own filth, because any time we help anyone they just hate us even more.

If someone really wants to pick a fight with us that I would join in gladly, let them attack us. Retaliatory force I can support. I can’t support initiating it.

“Retaliatory force” is fine and good, but if that’s the only kind of force you’re willing to use, then you’re willing to pay a very high price for your clean conscience.

The thing is, some of us aren’t willing to wait around until we see mushroom clouds over American cities before we’re willing to pull the trigger.

Lee, I say SCREW Sudan.

Ciggy, I agree insofar as military intervention goes. I was just curious if Martin’s belief in a “moral dimension to life on this planet” went deeper than just bringing up a bad thing that happened on Clinton’s watch.

I notice he didn’t mention writing his congressperson demanding that we intervene to stop the slaughter immediately.

And Martin, we got fooled by that mushroom cloud BS once. It’s going to be harder to convince the American people using that same argument next time. Thank you President Bush for crying wolf.

Martin, retaliatory force isn’t all about “conscience”, it’s also pragmatic in the way it sets a consistent tone of foreign policy. Attack us and you WILL be destroyed. Like the Taliban, for example.

With regard to “waiting for a mushroom cloud”, there’s nothing to prohibit the CIA and FBI from trying to foil plots of that nature, or from developing RELIABLE intelligence that such an attack is imminent from a particular Turd World government. If such an attack is imminent, then that’s close enough to retaliatory for me. The interpersonal analogy is that someone is truly drawing down on you with their gun—and that’s an an itiation of force, retaliation against which is to shoot them. Remember the “code” of western gun battles created by Hollywood for gunfighters? That one gunfighter had to wait for the other one to reach for his pistol before he’d reach for his own? And that shooting someone in the back was a no-no? Even though it didn’t exist in reality, it should today in foreign policy. What creates disasters is when we go off half-cocked on ephemeral and squishy intelligence, fighting wars that don’t need to be fought, over threats that we only THOUGHT existed at the time. Now there are close to 1000 families to say “sorry” to, for that goof.

Support our OOPS? Only to the extent of cover fire to allow the safe take-off of the C-5s as they head back to Germany. When the last plane leaves, drop leaflets over the cities saying “fine, be that way—reconstruct your OWN damn country if you don’t want us here.”

Lee, I agree that the “mushroom cloud BS” has amounted to crying wolf. I took that with a grain of salt originally, and supported the war at the outset because I had the mistaken notion that the Iraqi people deserved better than a ruler like Saddam. My thinking was clouded at the time, though, with all the gory details of what Uday and Qusay were up to. In the bigger picture, it seems Saddam and his sons were really just giving the Iraqi people what they deserved, and if left alone, Moqtada Al Sadr would have just followed in the tortured and executed footsteps of his father when HE tried that Jihad nonsense. This past year has re-taught me that when third world people want to topple a dictator, they NEED to do it THEMSELVES. If they can’t, well that’s just too bad.

Do anyone of you have a friend or family member who is serving in Iraq right now?

One cousin and several friends that I used to serve with are there. But even if I didn’t know anyone currently there, I wouldn’t want any American service members to lose their lives needlessly.

The only thing Bush believes in is Evangelical Fundamental Christianity. TV brings us a Rove illusion. Shrub reality is Cheney puppet and Corporate shill with zero concern for the common good. Shrub is as dangerous and crazy as Osama binLaden (except Osama is willing to die for his cause). Guess who gets to pay for Shrub’s mistakes and guess who gets to profit from them?