Yeats' dim forecast of "a blood-dimmed tide being loosed" seems not to register with illogical congressional Democrats.
Setting a “timetable” to abandon Iraq is an invitation to disaster. Illogical, beyond obtuse, it’s plainly stupid. Barbarians at Baghdad’s gates are asked by Congressional Democrats to play a waiting game.
Run out the clock and win. Simple.
Embolden terrorists? Sure. New hope for anarchists to succeed, then to set up a tyrannical Islamic state to export terrorism? Why not?
Would a pullout dishearten our allies? Certainly. Whom do YOU trust? Not a wobbly America.
Wartime logic is lost on most liberal Democrats much of the time, with the exception of that unlikely realist, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and a few scattered voices crying in Foggy Bottom.
For the rest, logic might be their worst enemy. Consider:
– “Surge” is working? Forget about it.
– Fledgling democracy finding its legs? Pull the plug. Bring the “troops” home at any cost.
– Erasing a base for terrorism? Let it be. Let it be a new base for terror, another Afghanistan, only with oil this time to barter the world’s security.
Success in Iraq seems anathema to most liberal Democrats and their fringe, that anti-war mob now taking to the streets again. Does a shred of common sense dent their defeatist souls?
Such naiveté in face of evil is difficult to fathom, except to consider it “political.” Perhaps the ’08 elections are paramount, to win even at the nation’s peril. Party first?
Some Bush-haters suppose the war in Iraq is somehow a political shell game, a sham; that cockeyed view, in spite of 3,000 Americans massacred on 9/11/01 by an enemy the very embodiment of evil.
The pullout proposal is Munich-style appeasement. If only the United States and its allies abandon the struggle against terrorism in Iraq, the Bad Guys will leave us all alone.
Like hell they will. Think World Trade Center, twice. USS Cole. Aborted crashes of trans-Atlantic airliners out of Great Britain. Kohbar Towers. The bang-bang list goes on.
With her narrow (218-212) vote for a date-certain to leave, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dared call it “victory.” That’s what Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said in September 1938 upon his return from Munich.
“Peace in our time,” he famously said, waving a piece of paper. Only it didn’t happen, and millions died. Will appeasers never learn? What twisted logic says it’s okay to kowtow to “macho” killers of innocents?
Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) said the Democrats’ proposals set a ". . . date-certain declaration of defeat." White flags, anyone?
Mere words are not possible to describe the stupidity of the proposals, strings and all. (Sorry. I tried.) Fleeing from enemies sworn to kill you in horrible ways, such as crashing fuel-laden aircraft missiles into skyscrapers, begs the question: What have these woosie congressional Democrats been smoking?
Whatever happened to the call expressed by JFK in his 1960 inauguration speech:
Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" . . .
Some Americans, typically of the far Left, loathe this country. “Death to Amerika” is not a problem to them. Privately, they might hope for just that, as for Iraq itself. Call them nihilists. Paint them traitorous.
For left-liberals who love their country, wishing its very defeat is illogical. A mystery, as Churchill said of the Soviet Union, wrapped in an enigma. Is there, at last, no patriotism here? No respect for "troops" in harm's way?
Contempt for our country is rooted, I submit, in the Sixties counterculture. Students protesting another war, dodging the dreaded draft, raged on. Some even waved the enemy’s flag, the Viet Cong’s gold-star, and occupied terrified campus deans’ offices. Oh, those were heady days for the anti-war crowd. On the verge of it, again, are we? (No draft now says it’s unlikely.)
“Hell No, We Won’t Go” protesters yelled, sometimes menacingly. I know. I was there, at times in my USAF uniform. (Note: I went.) Unruly, they chanted juvenile slogans, often Marxist. Some accused us of vile things, while holding up the evil-doers, murderers of South Vietnamese hamlet chiefs and schoolteachers, somehow as heroes. Young John F. Kerry called us GIs war criminals. (And we never forgot that lie of lies. Thanks forever to the Swift Boat Vets and POWS for Truth.)
Then, in the 70s, the mobs graduated. Some returned from Canada, later to be pardoned by President Carter. Many joined hierarchies of higher education, occupying deans’ offices again, but legitimately. New Criterion’s remarkable cultural critic Roger Kimball calls them “tenured radicals.” No longer raucous students, these hangers-on (as Ayn Rand might brand them) went on to occupy the seats of power in academe.
Columnist Michael Barone thinks the new professorate brings latent anti-Americanism to the table. Such prejudice against America, he says, lies in their automatic “default assumption.”
Simply put, “default” is the collectivist, leftist view that the United States, no matter what, is wrong. Mainstream media hew closely to this line, too; it’s as if a series of unchallenged New Left shibboleths control the news flow.
Barone speculates on why the “default assumption:”
. . . students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.
Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals' description of the world is wildly at odds with reality . . .
Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And so, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives.
The default assumption predisposes them to believe that if there is slaughter in Darfur, it is our fault; if there are IEDs in Iraq, it is our fault . . .
Senator Lieberman, rejected by his party for opposing its defeatist views, sums up the issue of oddly misplaced passions:
There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamic extremism.
Something un-American, if not anti-American, tells our blood-thirsty enemy when we will “cut and run.” Leaving the battle is not only inglorious, it goes against the natural law of self-preservation.
In his little-known book, The Abolition of Man (1947), my hero C.S. Lewis mocks the logic of a nation in self-defeat mode:
Think of a country where people are admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might as well try to imagine a country where two-and-two made five . . .
To some liberal Democrats, two and two equal five. Bad logic reigns. What’s their hidden goal? Prominent Minneapolis blogger John Hinderaker (at www.powelineblog.com) tags the 800-pound gorilla, one of MSM’s Most Unsaid Things:
. . . it’s clear to pretty much everyone that the Democrats want defeat in Iraq in order to advance their political agenda.
Pretty much everyone, yes, except the Democrats’ erstwhile allies, most of mainstream media (MSM). The John Murtha-Dick Durbin wing of hangdogs, immune to reality, press for their nation’s defeat, and media remain curiously silent. Again, silence of the liberals is deafening.
Speaker Pelosi calls her 218-212 cliffhanger a “victory.” This recalls George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” “Political language,” he wrote in 1938, “. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder acceptable.”
Consider finally, these words as timely, now more than ever before, from William Butler Yeats’ renowned “The Second Coming:”
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The Ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Stemming the “blood-dimmed tide” of terrorism might not be easy in the darkest of times, sans a presidential veto, if putting politics first prevails over our national security, when “the worst . . . are full of passionate intensity.” Sleep tight.
outing@earthlink.net
Read more articles by Gary Larson
“Simply put, ‘default’ is the collectivist, leftist view that the United States, no matter what, is wrong.”
The “default assumption” is that any and all authority ought to be rejected forthwith. Although he writes in "We the Sheeple" about the persistence of conspiracy theories http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092006B, Prof. Edward Feser mentions the “default assumption” which I believe applies here as well.
“I would suggest, then, that the post-Enlightenment pretense of hostility to authority, tradition, and common sense as such, and especially the extreme form of it represented by the likes of Marx and Nietzsche, is what really underlies the popularity of conspiracy theories, particularly those involving 9/11. The absurd idea that to be intelligent, scientific, and intellectually honest requires a distrust for all authority per se and a contempt for the opinions of the average person, has so deeply permeated the modern Western consciousness that conspiratorial thinking has for many people come to seem the rational default position…The belief that extremism in the attack on authority is no vice has a powerful appeal even for suit-wearing journalists and media executives (especially if they are liberals), even if they have too much sense to follow it out consistently.”
The strange thing about these people is they are the same ones who condemn the Catholic Church for not accepting Galileo’s heliocentric theory and in the next breath they refuse to accept evidence disproving a default assumption. They have become the people they despise.
Comment by sedonaman | April 5, 2007
Attacking those who are against the policies you support without acknowledging some degree of reasonable motivation on their behalf sounds a bit dogmatic and frankly desperate of Mr. Larson. How many failures are too many? How much proof do you need that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was undertaken for ignoble reasons and executed in the most incompetent way? I submit that the term you used "traitorous" applies to the support of the incompetent, illegal, and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. That some come by their support innocently through superficially convincing arguments like Mr. Larson's is a tragidy.
The invasion and occupation has created terrorist threats that were not previously there, has destablized the entire region, and (I know noecons don't do body counts) killed lots of people and ruined lots of lives (Iraqi lives count, too!). Contrary to "spreading democracy" this immorality has more firmly entreached most dictators in the region (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Kuwait, etc.) and stimulated radical fundamentalist resistence and rule (Afganistan, Iran, etc).
Pity that Mr. Larson does not argue for a UN peace keeping force to segua the exit of American and British troops along with the closing of American bases in Iraq.
Ah, but there is so much sweet money to be made. American taxpayers are generous to war profiteering charlatans. But, of course, Iraqis are only willing to give their oil to multinational conglomerates while there are guns in their faces. Alas, your rhetoric is clear.
Rest assured Mr. Larson, as long as you support policies that make the profanely rich richer you will always be a popular consultant.
Before his death Barry Goldwater lamented the the Republican Party was going astray. He was a conservative I admired and he was right.
Comment by Thom | April 5, 2007
Thom,
Either learn to spell, edit, or use spell check.
J3
Comment by J3 | April 6, 2007
Thom, the war wasn't illegal. Nor is it immoral. It wasn't started for ignoble reasons.
You ask how many failures it'll take before we realize the war's a bad thing…but there haven't been any failures. Nor is there any proof that the war was started for oil.
In short, grow up. Spouting stupid liberal platitudes that have no evidence, e.g. "Bush lied, kids died" and "The war has made dictatorship governments stronger", with nothing to back up your claims is moronic. Indeed, most of your lame assertions are easily refuted by fact. For example, while Pakistan's not a wonderful place, it's not a dictatorship. Nor is Kuwait a dictatorship. And none of these countries have been strengthened by our invasion into Iraq. And while you lament Americans being in Iraq, who do you think will comprise the UN forces? That's right, Americans.
It's not possible to take someone seriously who just spouts a lot of nonsense that they know is wrong. Everyone knows that leaving Iraq will cause not only a real civil war, but a region wide war over Iraq's vast oil fields. This will result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Yet the anti-war cut and runners want us to leave anyway.
In short Thom, the "leave Iraq now" crowd are the bad guys, not the pro-war forces.
Comment by WolvenBear | April 6, 2007
What's "plainly stupid" is this, Mr. Larson: leading a nation into a war based on lies. It's not only stupid, but reprehensible. Plain and simple: the war would never have sold to Congress without the FALSE information that was used. However, it did happen, we're there, what next?
Insulting those who just happen to disagree with continuing the policies of an administration who has done more to harm this nation's world relations than any president in history won't get you anywhere. Sorry, but the "cut and run" rhetoric simply won't work.
Ponder this: it is this president who is quite possibly paving the way, even as we speak, for the election of Hillary because Americans, for the most part, are sick of the arrogant lies that got us into this mess in the first place, not to speak of the mismanagement of the same war as time has gone on.
How long DO we stay, Mr. Larson? It will no longer be sufficient to the average American to be told "until the job is done." If U.S. forces stay another four years, or ten, or twenty, each day will go more and more toward destroying our international relations, run the national debt higher and higher and the nation itself ever closer to economic collapse, and divide the American people more and more deeply. When this war has finally destroyed more lives than the evil regime of Sadam did, it is then that virtually everyone will ask, why? It will also be then that we might just consider whether we as a nation have indeed become what we say we're fighting.
Comment by danielk | April 7, 2007
danielk: “What's ‘plainly stupid’ is this, Mr. Larson: leading a nation into a war based on lies. It's not only stupid, but reprehensible. Plain and simple: the war would never have sold to Congress without the FALSE information that was used.”
No, what’s plainly stupid and, I might add, most frustrating is the persistent assertion that “Bush lied us into war.” Next to that is the Bush-hater’s absolute refusal to admit what their side, the Democratic Party leaders, were saying BEFORE George Bush even arrived on the national scene. As political scientist Dr. Paul Kengor states, “Even on its face, this claim [Bush lied] is self-defeating. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Bush lied about WMDs. That would mean that he went to war for a reason he knew would be exposed as false the moment we got to Iraq and found no WMDs . . . In my lectures, I still use lengthy 1990s articles from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the London Times, Time, Newsweek, and the Washington Post [all highly critical of George Bush], that detailed Saddam's frightening covert biological and nuclear weapons programs. I still show my students video of Clinton's secretary of defense on ‘Meet the Press’ and of Clinton administration officials Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and William Cohen. . . their point: we must get Saddam's WMDs before he uses them.”
So, the war was NEVER “sold to Congress” in the first place; they (including Bush’s later opposition) believed as far back as the early 1990s that Saddam had WMDs. Besides what the individuals above were saying, consider the vote for the Authorization for the Use of Force the Congress gave Bush, something like 2/3 majority in the House and 3/4 in the Senate. This had to include a significant number of Democrats, who all looked at the same so-called “FALSE” information, came to the same conclusion as Bush, and repeated what they had said when Clinton was president. But somehow it was only Bush who “lied.”
You might also consider that the UN Security Council, that includes FRANCE(!), voted unanimously15-0 on Resolution 1441, demanding that Saddam disarm and remain disarmed of certain weapons. How is it they voted this way on a “lie”?
Really, when you come right down to it, the only difference between a statement that was true then and one that is a lie now is the occupant of the Oval Office. Gore lost; ergo, Bush lied.
“The argument that Bush lied about WMDs is not only extraordinarily unfair but stunningly misinformed and nonsensical – and comes from people who fancy themselves as smart and Bush as dumb.”
Source: “Yes, I Admit I Hate Bush”, by: Dr. Paul Kengor,
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=2549&dept_id=514258&newsid=16035769&PAG=461&rfi=9
It takes a Flat Earth Society-level of credulity to believe that not only Bush, but also British Prime Minister Tony Blair and dozens if not hundreds of their employees, would have risked political suicide and/or criminal prosecution to cover up their alleged knowledge that Iraq had in reality absolutely no WMDs to speak of. Such a cover-up would also require a conspiracy of such gigantic proportions to explain away the contradictions in your assertion that not even Karl Rove could do it.
“. . .an administration who has done more to harm this nation's world relations than any president in history. . .”
What’s your proof of this? Some opinion poll taken by al-Jezeera? I hadn’t heard of any country that has stopped trading with us.
“. . .we're there, what next?”
I will agree that this is the $64,000 question, but leaving before the job is done (however defined) would be repeating the same mistake (not taking out Saddam) we made in 1991.
Comment by sedonaman | April 7, 2007
I'll admit that yes, the suspicion of WMDs in Iraq went all the way back into the Clinton years. There surely have been many people in many times and places who've believed or wondered as to other countries procuring weapons of mass destruction. We'll all forever be wondering such things. However, no one ever acted upon it by starting a war, attacking a country based on that "belief" until four years ago.
You seem to be saying, "sedonaman," at least in so many words, that inasmuch as Bush was merely one of many who believed in these WMDs, it is unfair to label him the deceiver. You would thus seem to be saying that he was indeed misled the same as the rest of us. Has he admitted this? Has he begun an in-depth investigation/inquiry as to how our "intelligence" got it so blatantly wrong? Has he for a minute questioned how valuable or at all useful our intelligence is when it produces such monumental falsehoods? The fact is that someone somewhere lied sometime or other. Either Mr. Bush was in on the deception, or else he feels he must save face for being horribly misled and for starting a war as a result because that's what's most important to him.
Notwithstanding, let's talk about WMDs - real ones. We all hate the thought of them possibly getting into the hands of certain countries. But how long can we possibly expect to get away with being what appears to others in the world as arrogant and hypocritical by assuming we have the right to make war on a nation for their developing of nuclear warheads while still stockpiling them ourselves by the thousands? Yes, the U.S. still has a vast supply of weapons of mass destruction; nuclear, chemical, and biological. This despite their reduction through arms talks and treaties. If there were a nation attacking the U.S. right now because of our continued maintaining of WMDs, demanding their disarmament, while that same country had thousands more WMDs than we of their own, how hard is it to imagine that we would be anything but outraged? How many of us would see that nation as anything less than a bully of the worst kind?
The means of reducing the existence of these terrible things, or assuring their not being used, is simply not war. It must be done through diplomacy. All the successful reductions of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons over the years have not been accomplished by war but by people talking, despite cultural and philosophical differences. Of course by now God only knows how peace can be established in Iraq, through diplomacy or whatever in the face if this war that our nation started.
I suppose there will always be cruel, despotic, and maniacal leaders of nations, such as Sadam; leaders that are hard to trust and must be feared. Yet have we not seen the proof that this war our nation made upon him is a debacle, that is was so from the beginning, and that there is no end in sight? How can any two people even agree on what the definition of "winning this war" would be?
I have to give you this,"WolvenBear": it takes a huge amount of courage, of which I'm in awe, to blatantly say, "the 'leave Iraq now' guys are the bad guys, not the pro-war forces," when the majority of Americans now disagree with you and would in fact deem you to be the one spouting "stupid platitudes."
Comment by danielk | April 7, 2007
Danielk,
I'm going to deal with each of your points, and rip them apart in turn, though they probably won't be in order as I'm taking the most important one's first and then going back to make sure I didn't miss anything.
1. Assuming Saddam didn't have WMDs (pure bunk, but let's assume, for the sake of argument. Also, let's assume you are the President. You predicessor and everyone in his circle tells you Saddam has WMDs. Saddam is hiding something. Based on his past we assume WMDs (not an unreasonable assumption). The Brits tell us he sought enriched uranium from Niger (which a fact finding Joe Wilson confirms, despite his current position). The French tell us that the only use for his aluminum tubes is uranium enrichment. Hanz Blix of the UN tells you its undeniable that Hanz Blix has WMDs and is hiding them. Every single member of the opposition party tells you he has WMDs and you need to do something about it.
If you invade on this case, as a Democrat, I'm going to defend you when any Republican calls you on it. Because, even if you're wrong, every single person who's not in Iraq is telling you the same thing…Iraq has WMDs. You didn't lie. At best you were misled.
2. The belief that every single world agency was wrong (again assuming no WMDs were found), with Saddam's past history, and with the top ranking general in Iraq (pre-invasion) and a Syrian journalist telling us the weapons are in Syria is a religious belief that would make Scientologists and Cement worshipers blush.
To believe that Bush lied, we have to believe that the UN lied, that Britain, France, the Democrats…every single government in the World, including Saddam himself (who pre-Bush sent letters to the UN telling them how he was making chemical weapons again) was lying.
The chances of this are less than 0%.
There's no reason to believe a single person lied in getting us into Iraq because there's not a single person (pre-Bush) who looked at the evidence and concluded anything except the correct conclusion: Saddam had WMDs.
The liars are the ones now claiming he didn't.
3. We have found more than 500 WMDS in Iraq. While they are old and degraded, they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt Saddam never complied with the original UN resolutions. If he didn't follow those, there's no reason to believe that he didn't make new weapons. Especially in the light of the fact that we have witnesses testifying to Saddam's children using mustard and nerve gas between 1994-2000.
4. Bush has repeatedly stated that we have found no stockpiles of WMDs, but says that this doesn't mean they didn't exist.
5. Not a single country in the history of nuclear weapons has disarmed over talks. Not one.
6. If the US was using chemical and biological weapons on it's neighbors, we'd be in the same boat as Iraq. Seeing as how we're not…you can stop the moral equivalency claptrap.
7. Clinton attacked Iraq during the height of the Monica Lewinski scandal, so you crap about "no one attacking Iraq until Bush is ridiculous.
Bush Sr attacked Iraq. Clinton attacked Iraq. And Bush Jr attacked Iraq. All three took military action against Saddam. Even Reagan, who initially backed Saddam as the lesser of two evils changed his mind and started funding Kholmeni, because Saddams a sick SOB.
8. The war has not been a disaster. For every troop that dies, we kill 10 insurgents. We have removed some of al Quida's up and ups, dismantled Saddam's government and gotten rid of a cancer on the world. If we have the courage to stick it out, and the anti-war Dems stop stabbing our troops in the back, in a decade Iraq will be a strong and prosperous nation that will be a wonderul ally.
9. There hasn't been a single poll taken that doesn't show Americans wanting us to win this war. Poll after poll shows that the American public doesn't want us abandoning our allies in Iraq, and rightly so. After 4 years of a war in which we have a media that has not once reported on a positive event in the war, but every day looks for a single soldier to stub his toe as a sign that we can't win, the American public has (with some good reason) decided that the Republicans weren't pursuing the war right, and elected Democrats under the silly notion that they want to win the war.
10. Finally, it takes no courage to say that the anti-war forces are the bad guys.It doesn't even take much in the line of intelligence. The anti-war leadership knows exactly what'll happen if they pull out. At BEST, tens of thousands of Iraqis will be slaughtered (that's the bright side scenerio). Most likely that number will reach over 500k, and possibly more.
Michael Moore has acknowledged this, but with a simple wave of his hand says "Who cares? Well go in after the killing stops, help them bury the mass amounts of dead and say sorry". John Murtha has promised that the Dems will "deny the troops armor, equipment and support until they simply cannot continue and have no choice but to come home." Harry Reid has promised to make sure the troops don't have money to buy neccessary equipment.
When the leadership of the Democrats announce that they couldn't care less about the genocide of a people, and promise to leave our troops in harms way without the stuff they need to simply not die…yea they're the bad guys. Al Quida has stated repeatedly that they'll keep killing our soldiers because they know sooner or later the Democrats will force us to retreat. This is why (after the last elections) Zawahiri sent us tapes proclaiming (The Democrats victory is not a loss for the Republicans…it is a loss for America. We now know we will win, and we will kill as many troops as it takes until the Democrats flee.)
If our enemies see the Democrats as their allies, that means they're not a good choice.
The democrats know exactly what'll happen if we leave. They just don't care. They know that by their whining and crying that they are encouraging attacks on our soldiers, that by calling Bush a liar, and refusing to talk about the WMDs we've found in Iraq that they strengthen the case and encourage the terrorists. Yet they continue on.
Every single soldier who has died since the fall of Saddam is the anti-war crowds fault. And as such they are the bad guys. Not the pro-war crowd.
Comment by WolvenBear | April 9, 2007
“…the suspicion of WMDs in Iraq went all the way back into the Clinton years.”
It was more than suspicion. Have you forgotten that Saddam USED them against the Kurds? WMDs aren’t just atom bombs; they include chemical and biological weapons. Besides, there were other weapons on the prohibited list, missiles with a range over 150 kilometers, for example, that the inspectors did find.
“…no one ever acted upon it by starting a war, attacking a country based on that ‘belief’ until four years ago.”
You forget that SADDAM started the war in 1991 by invading Kuwait. At the end of hostilities, he signed an agreement to disarm himself of certain weapons in exchange for a cease-fire (not a peace treaty) and our letting him to continue to go on living. He refused to abide by that agreement, so we re-commenced hostilities until he demonstrated that he was seriously willing to do so. This is no different from the re-arrest of a convicted felon who violates the conditions of his parole. So, why do you blame Bush for starting a war that SADDAM clearly did?
“You would thus seem to be saying that he was indeed misled the same as the rest of us.”
I’m’ saying no such thing. Your term “misled” means some person, or persons, “knew” something different and was therefore “misleading” the rest of us. You even say so in a following sentence: “The fact is that someone somewhere lied sometime or other.” This is nothing more than another crackpot conspiracy theory. One of the biggest problems this White House has, like any administration, is leaks. You actually believe a conspiracy this “monumental” would be kept a total secret in such an environment, and many would risk criminal prosecution and their jobs? Give me a break.
“Either Mr. Bush was in on the deception, or else he feels he must save face for being horribly misled and for starting a war as a result because that's what's most important to him.”
SADDAM … started… the …war. He’s the one that war was important to in order to raise his prestige in the Arab world by showing his strength. And the fact that he acted as though he had something to hide means nothing to you, does it? Nor does the thought carry any weight with you that, in a post-9/11 world, Saddam might slip some terrorists a terrible weapon for use against us, does it? The mind of the conspiracy theorists is Manichaean. Either Bush lied, or he was dumb. There is no third option, like maybe, just maybe, Saddam squirreled his WMDs away in Syria or Russia. You are more willing to believe a despot like Saddam, whom you say cannot be trusted and must be feared, and who had nothing to lose, than George Bush who was risking his entire political future. Amazing. Purely amazing. You obviously have one standard (i.e., no standard) for the despots of the world and one for George Bush.
Your paragraph on WMDs can be summed up by saying that since the responsible Western democracies have nuclear weapons, it’s only right and fair that “cruel, despotic, and maniacal leaders of nations, such as Saddam, leaders that are hard to trust and must be feared” should be allowed to have them too. God help us. Why don’t you channel your Bush hatred instead into coming up with a way that despots such as Saddam, who seized power through murder and treachery, never take over a country in the first place? It would be far more productive.
You mention diplomacy. There is an old management saw that says, “If you do the same things in the same way, you will get the same results.” For diplomacy to work, both sides have to live up to their agreements. Even though Saddam did everything to convince us that he was not going to live up to those agreements, you continue to place faith in diplomacy, as though leaders like Saddam are on the one hand “cruel, despotic, and maniacal …hard to trust and must be feared,” but on the other are good-willing, reasonable, and willing to live up an agreement, and therefore diplomacy cannot fail. Naiveté such as this resulted in fifty million people being killed in world War II.
Saddam refused (repeat, refused) to abide by his agreement of 1991. By the time Bush entered office, eleven years of Clinton diplomacy failed to get Saddam to live up to his agreements, and Iraq had been without inspections for the last three years. Another year of failed diplomacy passed. Diplomatic(!) pressure on the UN from Iraq and other countries (France sticks out) to lift the sanctions was building. Once they were lifted, Saddam would be free to pursue his nuclear ambitions, after which the world would have been in a much more dangerous position with respect to Iraq, one that would be more difficult for your precious diplomacy to work. It became quite obvious that we were headed down the same path of appeasement we did with Hitler. But you say Bush should have kept up something that had clearly failed.
A final word about diplomacy. Diplomacy is a form of negotiation. When you enter negotiations (for anything), you have to be willing to give up something to get something out of the other side. We let Saddam keep his life in 1991 in exchange for his disarmament. He then wanted more. What are YOU , danielk, willing to give to an enemy who stole the peace and then wanted something for its return? Are you saying, “Give him anything, just as long as it’s not mine.”? Were the enemy’s bomb to fall on your toe, you would feel quite different, I assure you.
“How can any two people even agree on what the definition of ‘winning this war’ would be?”
I have been on the boards for two homeowners associations, and it constantly amazes me that we have a functioning nation when no two homeowners can agree on something as obvious that it’s daytime at noon. But we do. At some point, we have to trust our elected leaders to do the right thing.
Comment by sedonaman | April 9, 2007
Sedonaman,
It is instructive that you automatically assumed that danielk was a liberal and a Democrat? Did you know that from another thread, or did you just assume against the War = Democrat. You have been battling the paleos on here long enough to know that not everyone against the War is a liberal.
But intelligence WAS manipulated. I really don't see how anyone can deny that at this point. The Administration wanted their war against Iraq, and intelligence was spun and manipulated to help sell that to the people.
Read the Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF-Ret.) archives at Lew Rockwell (www.lewrockwell.com). She was an eye witness to the shenanigans that went on at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. (Could you get any more Orwellian?) And no she is not a liberal or a Democrat. She is a libertarian. And much of what she has written she has testified to under oath or to investigators.
I know it rocks your world, but intelligence was manipulated. That is hardly credibly disputable. Now if you want to maintain that that is not lying then go right ahead. But the people were sold a war on false pretenses, and thousands (Americans and Iraqis) have died as a result.
Comment by Dan Phillips | April 9, 2007
What would winning the war in Iraq look like? Which faction in Iraq do you support?
We got conned into Iraq by supporters of Iran who played on neocon belief that every
democracy will be pro-US. In fact, Iraq is a country that 70% hated us before the war, and now 90% hate us. Any democratically elected government will have to be anti-US to stay in power.
The more we fight the Sunni's the more the pro-Iranian Shiite gain power.
Both hate us. So the more we stay the more we get blamed for the carnage. If we leave we at least save our money and marines to fight another day (for someone that is for US).
Comment by christianzog | April 9, 2007
Dan Phillips:
Thank you for your comments.
I understand that “against the War” does not automatically equal Democrat or liberal, but there seems to be a 99.44% intersection. I tried to avoid calling danielk a liberal or a Democrat, and I don’t think I used either term in my replies to him but tried to address only why I thought the notion that Bush “lied” was as dumb as some of his critics think he is.
I have read your comments and find no reason to change any of mine or my mind about the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I particularly hold that my Hitler-Chamberlain analogy is quite appropriate in describing the events between the cease-fire of 1991 and the following eleven years for at least these reasons:
1. There was a similar agreement in both cases, the Treaty of Versailles and Saddam’s agreement to disarm and to the inspections.
2. De-militarized zones were set up in both cases, the Rheinland and the no-fly zones.
3. Both Hitler and Saddam abrogated those agreements.
4. Both Hitler and Saddam re-armed (at least Saddam created that impression), violating the agreements.
5. Both violated their respective demilitarized zones; Hitler re-occupied the Rheinland; Saddam fired on the coalition aircraft enforcing the zones, in itself an act of war.
6. The Western powers wished to avoid war with Germany at all costs. Ditto Iraq.
7. The Western powers, as a result, chose to ignore Hitler and Saddam; in Hitler’s case, pretended he was not a threat until it was too late (after all, “he occupied only what was his anyway”). In Saddam’s case, we still have pretenders.
8. Taking advantage of the weakness of the will of the Western/international powers, Hitler and Saddam continued to “push the envelope” of international endurance.
9. Hitler pushed until war resulted. Fifty million people died as a result of Chamberlain’s naiveté.
It doesn’t take much imagination to “connect the dots” in Saddam’s case to see that a really bad war was the next step if he wasn’t stopped immediately, and he wasn’t going to stop on his own.
You say that intelligence was manipulated, yet no one came forth to say that at the time. In fact, we have Hans Blix’s reports to the UN of Jan. and Feb. of 2003 complaining of something like 6,000 tonnes of “unaccountable” biological agents. Was that “manipulated” by the Bush Administration?
By creating the impression he had something to hide, Saddam did not live up to his agreement. The inspections were not a “hide-and-seek” game. The way they are supposed to work is the Iraqi representatives were to lead the inspectors to where the prohibited weapons were stored; or, if the weapons in question had been destroyed, provide “credible” (Blix’s word, not mine) evidence of it. According to Blix in 2003, none of it had been provided.
Finally, I stand firmly by my comments regarding diplomacy. The anti-war group (however you characterize them politically) gives me the impression that it wants peace at any price. If this is not true, I repeat my question posed to danielk: Up to what limit are they personally willing to commit? Another fifty million dead (not them, of course)? They demand that “Chicken-hawks” Bush and Cheney send their own kids to fight in Iraq, but at the same time condemn others to live under an oppressive regime. It seems as long as the bomb doesn’t fall on their toes today, everything will be OK for them tomorrow. Until they do suffer, they expect the rest of us to accept that the likes of Saddam are “cruel, despotic, and maniacal leaders…hard to trust and must be feared;” but, hey, let’s use diplomacy to get still another agreement out of them because this time somehow things will be different. Bush doesn’t have to lie to reveal the absurdity of this mindset.. They apparently have much more faith in evil than I do.
Best regards.
sedonaman
Comment by sedonaman | April 9, 2007
The belief that Bush (lied/misled/manipulated/insert your favorite term here for deception) us into Iraw is a near religious belief that requires far more faith than believing that Mary was a virgin (which is at least possible).
What did Bush tell the American people that was any different than what Clinton told them? There was a consensus before Bush even got into office that Saddam had WMDs. So if Bush manipulated the evidence, he had to do it starting at least 3 years before he even ran for office. While this fits in with the far left perception that Bush dealt with the devil to steal the 2000 election and start 2 wars…for the rest of us, this is a hard pill to swallow. The unanimous consensus existed before he entered office. And it was still there after he invaded. There wasn't a single agency telling us differently.
Let's review the case and what was confirmed or denied.
1. Saddam was refusing to provide documentation or evidence of destruction of WMDs. (100% true) And he still had them. (We've found more than 500.)
2. Saddam supported terrorism, especially al Quida. (After the original WTC bombings, Saddam supported the attacker as a guest of the state, up until the invasion. He financed Hamas suicide bombers. And after the US invaded Afghanistan, the first place many of al Quida's soldiers fled was to Iraq.)
3. Saddam was seeking to rebuild his arsenal. (Everyone, even post war agrees that he kept up his capabilities. Blix found many new munitions that Saddam wasn't supposed to have under the treaty. And we have enough testimony of Uday using mustard gas on political prisoners to support this. And this is leaving aside the other circumstancial evidence. Even Wilson, who now blasts Bush, said that Saddam had saught uranium in Niger.)
4. Saddam wasn't following UN resolutions. (This is simply not possible to deny.)
The only thing that Bush could even be remotely wrong about was him making new WMDs. 3 out of 4 big points are undisputable. And even if the 4th is dead wrong (it's not, but even if it was), the case simply doesn't exist that Bush (or anyone else) lied us into war.
And as for Zog…bud you made those numbers up out of whole cloth, because they didn't come from any survey out of Iraq.
But if we want to make up numbers . 85% of war protestor secretly want to see the US lose. 92% of those have no problem with the wholesale slaughter of innocent Iraqis, as it will not only accomplish their goal, but give them something else to bash America with.
Isn't making up survey numbers fun?
Comment by WolvenBear | April 10, 2007
attitudes toward Americans have deteriorated, according to surveys of nationally representative samples of the population conducted in November 2004 and April 2006.
The Iraqi surveys, part of the ongoing World Values Surveys, are a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and Eastern Michigan University.
The percentage of Iraqis who said they would not want to have Americans as neighbors rose from 87 percent in 2004 to 90 percent in 2006. When asked what they thought were the three main reasons why the United States invaded Iraq, 76 percent gave "to control Iraqi oil" as their first choice.
The above quote from the survey is one of many showing the deep dislike for the US in Iraq. What survey are you using to show that there is any faction that could be democratically elected that would support US interests in Iraq? We cannot 'win' in Iraq. We lost the day we disbanded the Iraq army removing any leverage we had with the pro-Iranian Shiites.
Comment by christianzog | April 10, 2007
While I've looked at the WVS website (and cannot find your survey), I am not impressed with the information they do provide. The only "book that is worth reading" on the Middle east, post 9/11, is one that shows "Muslims as people, not mythical beings, but as agents of social change." Not only does that reek of overwhelming bias, but that they consider that sort of information (I doubt anyone would deny Muslims are people) the most relevant debate in the post 9/11 world shows a lack of perspective in deciding what is crucial data.
Why would anyone ask Iraqis "whether or not they wanted an American as a neighbor"? Among other questions that could be asked, that actually have relevance to the debate, they ask whether or not they want American neighbors (something not likely to happen anyway).
Good (or better) questions include:
Do you feel you are better or worse off than you were under Saddam Hussein?
Do you trust the American forces?
Questions along those veins.
Surveys are tricky and the wording can completely change the outcome. But there are surveys that show progress in Iraq, such as an abc one.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/PollVault/story?id=1389228
In this poll, the Iraqis sound remarkable like Americans. "Things are going good for me, but the nation? Yea, not so sure there. I think MY politician is doing great, but the government in general? Bad news."
Or this one showing the majority of Iraqis are against terrorism and half against attacks against Americans (10% unsure).
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=16932
As for which "sect" we'd support, that is also the wrong question. We cannot support a single sect, but need to get the Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurds together. Support only one, and you're right, there is no victory.
Comment by WolvenBear | April 10, 2007
Dear Wolvenbear: One survey you use is from the US Military (hardly independent) and the other is over a year old taken a particular good news time at Iraq (and even that one has the majority of that survey said that the Iraq people felt it was a mistake that we invaded and want the US to leave). Any independent survey NOW would show much deteriation in respect for troops and US.
Again, what combination of Sunni, Shiite, Kurd do you think would be pro-USA? If not why stay? Just so we can blame the democrats when we spent $100 billions and thosands more marines to delay inevitable to their watch?
Comment by christianzog | April 10, 2007
christianzog and WolvenBear:
Imagine you are an ordinary Iraqi on the street, and a pollster comes up to you and asks if you want the Americans to leave Iraq. If you answer “Yes”, there is no price to pay. If you answer “No,” there’s a finite chance that some death squad will find you and shoot you.
How do you answer?
Comment by sedonaman | April 11, 2007