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Topic Review (Newest First)
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| Sep 2nd, 2005 08:35 AM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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Of course a war against terrorism can't truly be won, because that's a tactic, not an enemy. The enemy that nobody feels comfortable saying is Islamic extremism. No, it's not Islam, and it's not your typical Muslim. But the problem is that the ACTUAL problem is woven into the other two, and we need to pick it apart, and get at the root. So how do you win a war against an ideology? That's the question. Quote:
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| Sep 2nd, 2005 08:19 AM | |||||||
| mburbank |
I think winning the war in Iraq is theoretically possible. I think winning the war on terror is not even an explicable concept, let alone possible. As long as there's no debate on that subject at the national political level, the whole idea that our objective is to 'win a war on terror' is carte blanche for a forever war. And Kev, I never thought you ''loved the war". Just so you know. |
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| Sep 1st, 2005 09:32 PM | |||||||
| ItalianStereotype | it's okay kev, I like the new you. | ||||||
| Sep 1st, 2005 05:37 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore | I think i'm still pretty Lefty, I just love war now apparently. | ||||||
| Sep 1st, 2005 05:36 PM | |||||||
| Pub Lover |
Kev isn't left wing anymore, the meat has made him crazy. 
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| Sep 1st, 2005 05:33 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore | I've reverted to anarch-neo-communal-fascism. | ||||||
| Sep 1st, 2005 05:31 PM | |||||||
| Preechr |
Seriously? Four pages and no oil? This place sucks now. I blame you and max for being such sensible commies. |
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| Sep 1st, 2005 05:28 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
Who the heck even said that? STAY TOPICAL! |
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| Sep 1st, 2005 05:26 PM | |||||||
| Preechr |
Yes. It's the oil. It's all about the oil. |
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| Sep 1st, 2005 05:22 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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I think I heard Kristol support thisd point on TV by saying that Bush needs to essentially do fire-side chats, he needs to make his case to the people, and try to define the argument, rather than letting his silence do that. Unfortunately, his handlers might not have faith that he could be capable of that. I dunno. Quote:
I think Bush has in fact stated a plan to combat terrorism, which is what has made this iraq war so questionable. People bought it when he said we'd fight terror by stopping the states and institutions that supported it. He told the American people Saddam had weapons, that he was best buddies with Osama, and that he supported terrorism (which he did, btw, on the latter). Now, with no WMDs showing up, and no clear ties to the Islamo-fascists that threaten us, people are finally beginning to wonder why we went in there in the first place, and does it indeed relate to the war on terrorism. Quote:
Winning in iraq however is a bit clearer than you assume-- that's why Kristol mentions bombing border villages in Syria. It may sound crazy to you (and probably is), but he is pointing out that a big part of this problem in iraq has nothing to do with actual IRAQIS. |
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| Sep 1st, 2005 04:50 PM | |||||||
| Ant10708 |
Didn't we already give our government massive leeway during an undefeined war? The Cold War? Where we built up a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the entire world. And you're worried about Bush getting some extra war time powers? I've yet to see Bush turn this country into the facist theocracy I keep hearing is coming. He did ban federal government money on stem cell research thou and he was able to look at what books I took out of the library for most of his first term. 
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| Sep 1st, 2005 01:36 PM | |||||||
| mburbank |
"we will stay, we will fight, and we will win the war on terror" W "THESE WORDS NEEDED TO BE SAID." -Kristol Okay, first off, I think Kristol must be deaf, as I've heard pretty much this speech at VERY least once a month for over a year now. Second, and here lies my biggest problem, not just with W, but with this entire war... What would winning the war on terror mean? Me, I don't think you can win a war on a concept. Far from thinking this is just bad grammar, I think it's deliberate. Crafting a ntional and foreigbn policy with a nebulous forever war at it's core is quite deliberate. We don't know really what the war on terror is. No one has bothered to say what winning it would mean, or how we would get there or even if it's possible. War time presidents are granted extraordinary powers. This administration intends for those powers to be held by the office of the presidency indefintely, and it's wider constituency believes their party can hoild on to that office from now on. That doesn't mean terror isn't an issue. That doesn't mean there aren't terrorists. That doesn't mean the use of the military may not be legitimate. It DOES mean that we shouldn't be cowed into giving our government massive leeway for an undefined war. We have been in wars where we didn't know if we would win. We have been in wars we did not know the duration of. We have never been in a war where we had no idea what winning would be and no one would talk about it. War on poverty? No one argued for war powers. War on drugs? No one argued for war powers. No one thought they were wars in anything but a rhetorical sense. There is an Iraq war. It could one day be 'won'. Does anyone think the war on terror is analagous? |
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| Sep 1st, 2005 12:48 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
From the Weekly Standard: The War Presidency From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The success of the Bush presidency depends on his success as commander in chief. by William Kristol 09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47 "During the last few decades, the terrorists grew to believe that if they hit America hard, as in Lebanon and Somalia, America would retreat and back down. . . . So now they're trying to break our will with acts of violence. . . . Their goal is to force us to retreat. . . . We will stay on the offense. We'll complete our work in Afghanistan and Iraq. An immediate withdrawal . . . would only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free nations. So long as I'm the president, we will stay, we will fight, and we will win the war on terror." --George W. Bush, speaking to National Guard soldiers and their families, Nampa, Idaho, August 24, 2005 THESE WORDS NEEDED TO BE SAID. In the face of mixed news from Iraq, and mixed signals from the administration, some of the president's supporters and subordinates have been going wobbly. They've been denying that the war on terror is a war, or that Iraq is central to that war. They've been defining down success in Iraq, and for that matter victory in the broader war on terror. Fortunately, the president made clear on Wednesday that he isn't buying the defeatism. He isn't heading for the exits. Others want to. Republican strategist Grover Norquist, for example, recently told the New York Times: "If Iraq is in the rearview mirror in the '06 election, the Republicans will do fine. But if it's still in the windshield, there are problems." Norquist was reflecting real GOP congressional unease about the war and its implications for 2006. But would it really be possible to put Iraq in the "rearview mirror" by the fall of 2006, even if we started leaving now? In any case, what Bush did in Idaho was to sever the link between war policy and the 2006 elections. He made clear that his time horizon is 2008. Congress can worry and complain, but Bush is not going to let his policy--U.S. foreign policy--be driven by such worries and complaints. So Republican senators and congressmen can stop the hand-wringing that the war isn't proceeding according to their electoral calendars. Instead, they can help the administration make the case for the necessity of victory, and could even follow the lead of John McCain in providing serious and constructive criticism of the war effort. Meanwhile, the estimable George Will proclaimed last week that U.S. hopes for democracy in Iraq were "delusional," and that we had to be wary of further "overreaching." In particular, he took aim at a suggestion made in these pages some seven months ago that we consider bombing Syrian military facilities and/or occupying Syrian border towns in order to prevent terrorists from using Syria as a sanctuary from which to enter Iraq in order to kill Americans and Iraqis. No. Will said, "U.S. forces already have quite enough bombing and occupying chores." Really? Occupying--maybe. But bombing? Is our Air Force overextended right now? Are we so weak that we can't deter or punish Syria? Some Bush supporters, especially those already inclined toward world-weary skepticism, have become convinced that we can't or won't fight the war so as to win it. That's a problem for the president. The solution is to explain that we have a strategy to win--not a strategy to withdraw--and to encourage the military to be aggressive and imaginative in carrying out that strategy, and to give it all the resources it needs to follow through. Then, on Thursday, the day after the president's speech, the Financial Times ran a front-page story based on an interview with Major General Douglas Lute, director of operations at U.S. Central Command. Lute, still speaking off of old Rumsfeld talking points, and ignoring what the president had said a week before, said we were seeking to draw down troops over the next year in Iraq. Indeed, he seemed eager to proclaim this--and made the case for withdrawal based on Rumsfeldian dependency theory: "We believe at some point, in order to break this dependence on the . . . coalition, you simply have to back off and let the Iraqis step forward." This is war-fighting as welfare reform. Is the problem with our allies and potential allies in Iraq really that they are too convinced we're staying? Isn't it more likely that they're now too worried that we're going to leave, creating a dangerous dynamic in which Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds each feel they have to fend for themselves? And more important, if Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, who cares about dependency theory? Don't we need to defeat Zarqawi? Don't we need to dishearten terrorists in Iraq and around the world who, as the president said, "want us to retreat"? We need to win in Iraq. We're not doing someone else a favor. And in fact, private conversations suggest that the operational U.S. generals in the field (if not the planners at CENTCOM) are confident we can win--if we don't draw down troops too soon, and if we build up Iraqi troops to fight side by side with ours instead of pretending they can immediately replace ours. There have been real failures in the execution of the war in Iraq, and a poor job has been done in recent months of explaining the war at home. On the latter front, Wednesday's speech is a good start. Now the president needs to ensure his own administration is executing a policy consistent with his words, and also that these words are followed up with many more. Wartime presidents need to explain and re-explain what's at stake. They need to keep the country informed about the war. They need to keep morale high. And they need to take command so that the military and political strategy aims at victory. The success of the Bush presidency depends on his success as commander in chief. So does the success of American foreign policy. -William Kristol © Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved. |
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| Aug 26th, 2005 01:47 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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I'm not condoning this behavior, but i am asking for an alternative. Should every soldier have their own mini-press corp. follow them around, take pictures, and record their frustrations? Should the Pentagon put out a PDF version of all their military plans for a given week? Does this sound like it would fly in a place where journalists have been the targets of kidnappings and beheadings...? What level of transparency would make you happy, and would you care if it jeopardized winning the war? |
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| Aug 26th, 2005 10:32 AM | |||||||
| mburbank |
Substitute the word 'army' for CIA, and I think you'll get my message. Or didn't we hide prisoners from the Red Cross and reduce Fallujah to a big heap of rubble? Since there's virtually no reporting outside the greenzone, I'd say anything taking place out there is 'unfettered'. This Bush adminsitration isn't as chummy with the CIA as the first one. That's why Donny has created paralell, creepy ass functions within the Pentagon, and it's why we use military advisors in Columbia. The 'proof' you are looking for usually comes a lot of miles down the road. I'm a believer in transperancy and agressive watchdogs, because this shit almost always gets out of control. Couple that with the fact that this administration views secrecy as being next to Godliness and I hate to think of all the stuff that's going to under our national rock when it finally gets tuned over. |
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| Aug 26th, 2005 08:44 AM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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| Aug 25th, 2005 11:53 PM | |||||||
| Ninjavenom |
NARM NARM NARM DERP DERP DERP BIG PEOPLE TALK |
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| Aug 25th, 2005 10:47 PM | |||||||
| Ant10708 | I think we all understand that Bush and his cronies don't have the best things motivating them. But that still doesn't mean we should leave immiediately. | ||||||
| Aug 25th, 2005 04:03 PM | |||||||
| kellychaos | If this is a country with a rich heritage worthy of effort (I agree with that, btw), then why didn't we put forth the appropriate amount of commitment from the beginning when U.S. generals were begging and screaming for it? It kind of makes you question the present administration's motives in the whole affair, don't you think? | ||||||
| Aug 25th, 2005 10:50 AM | |||||||
| mburbank |
Kev; I think we can find common ground in the desperate hope that the next administration is nothing like this one. I think this one is tainted, stupid, egotistical and hamfisted, a very bad combo platter. "1. Do you think these innocent people are being targeted, or are they being targeted due to reasonable suspicion or cause? " Dude... (and I hate to say dude, but you made me) how about neither? Almost no one from soldier on the ground to policy maker ever thinks of themselves as a supervillian. Of course they are not being targeted. That in no way means that our causes and suspicions are reasonable. In our fairly recent history we trained, funded and in some cases fought alongside right wing death squads all over south and central America. We engineered a coup in Argenina and at very least turned a blind eye to the assasination of their president. Why in the world would you think we've gotten over that kind of behavior? We didn't do all the evil shit for the sake of being evil, we talked ourselves into thinking we had reasonable suspicions and causes. Any time we send soldiers to places where they don't get intense media scrutiny should send up red flags, not because we are evil, but because the nature of unfettered, unobserved power is abusive. |
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| Aug 25th, 2005 09:01 AM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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2. Do you happen to have any numbers on the frequency of this behavior? How often exactly are we "raiding houses, beating innocent people, tear gassing, etc."??? Is this something you've seen heavily documented, or is it something you just assume is going on? Quote:
With that being said, I don't think this is a lose-lose situation. I think it's a difficult one, but one that could have outstanding strategic possibilities for us, as well as for the middle east. I've already talked about why I think Iraq can and will succeed if given the necessary support, so I'm not getting into that again. |
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| Aug 24th, 2005 05:39 PM | |||||||
| ziggytrix |
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Perhaps I should have said "I'm sick of trying to talk to you" - since here I am still typing shit at you when I should know you don't give a fuck. |
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| Aug 24th, 2005 05:36 PM | |||||||
| Ant10708 |
Jonah Godlberg's take on Cindy: Playing “Chickenhawk” Left-wing platitudes. "Cindy Sheehan, the mother of Casey Sheehan, an American soldier who was killed in Iraq . . . " That's the sentence Cindy Sheehan and her increasingly lugubrious p.r. machine want every news story about her to begin with. Nobody likes the idea of criticizing a woman who's lost her son in such circumstances. The hope has been that the high wall of Mrs. Sheehan's "moral authority" will allow her to say whatever she pleases and that nobody will say boo about it for fear of seeming insensitive to what must be unimaginable anguish. Still, even some of her supporters must realize that her anguish has caused her to find meaning in a wildly partisan, orchestrated publicity stunt. What's interesting, to me at least, is that Mrs. Sheehan represents simply the latest installment in a long, nasty, desperate ideological campaign — and one that demonstrates the logical limits of identity politics. Anybody who's been on the receiving end of the "chickenhawk" epithet knows what I'm getting at. Various definitions of chickenhawk are out there, but the gist — as if you didn't know — is "coward" or "unpatriotic hypocrite." The accusation is less an argument than an insult. It's also a form of bullying. The intent is to say, "You have no right to support the war since you haven't served or signed up." It's a way to get supporters of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, or the president simply to shut up. But there's a benefit of a doubt to be given. There are many people — I know because I've argued with lots of them — who don't believe the "chickenhawk" thing is intellectually unserious. Obsessed with "authenticity" and the evil of hypocrisy — as they see it — they think the message and the messenger are inextricably linked. Two plus two is four only if the right person says so. We hear this logic most often from adherents of identity politics, who give more weight to the statements of women, blacks, Jews, and others for the sole reason that they were uttered by people born female, black, Jewish or whatever. People who grew up poor are supposed to have a more "authentic" perspective on economic policy than people who didn't, and so on. Don't get me wrong — experience is important and useful, including the experiences that come from being black or gay or otherwise a member of the Coalition of the Oppressed. But valuable experience confers knowledge; it doesn't beatify. And identity isn't an iron cage: It is not insurmountable. And, at the end of the day, arguments must stand on their own merits, regardless of who delivers them. Indeed, the notion that there is a single, authentic black perspective strikes me as fundamentally racist in its essentialism. And the idea that women adhere to a female logic unique to them strikes me as by definition sexist. But the Left doesn't care, because this perspective is indispensable for attacking "inauthentic" blacks or other supposed traitors. What was it that Harry Belafonte said the other week? That blacks who work for the Bush administration are, in effect, "house slaves," akin to the high-ranking Jews in the Hitler regime (never mind that no such Jews existed). The chickenhawk charge is the misapplication of the same faulty logic. There are war heroes who oppose the war, and there are war heroes who supported it. John Keegan is the greatest living military historian, and he never saw a day of battle. George McGovern flew 35 combat missions in World War II. I'll take Keegan's guidance on military matters over McGovern's any day. Recently, desperate Democrats championed the campaign of Paul Hackett, an Iraq-war veteran running for Congress in Ohio, because he opposed the war and called the president an S.O.B. Just as others had done before with Wesley Clark and Max Cleland, Hackett's supporters suddenly declared that their hand-picked veteran had the indisputable, irrefutable moral authority to say what other anti-Bush liberals had been saying all along. But how does that make the content of those charges any more — or for that matter, less — accurate? Maureen Dowd wrote of Sheehan in the New York Times this week that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." This is either a sincere but meaningless platitude or it's a charge made in grotesquely bad faith. Surely Dowd recognizes that there are a great many mothers of fallen soldiers who believe the war was worthwhile. Is their moral authority absolute, too? If so, then moral authority can't really be very relevant to public debates. Or does Dowd claim that only those moms-of-the-fallen who say things critical of George Bush have absolute moral authority? If that's the case, does Dowd truly believe — as Sheehan seems to — that this war was fought to line the pockets of Texas oilmen and to serve the interests of a treasonous Zionist cabal inside the United States? I think that's batty, and I'd need proof to believe it. Mrs. Sheehan's word isn't good enough for me on anything — save the fact that she loved her son. |
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| Aug 24th, 2005 05:18 PM | |||||||
| Ant10708 |
Aren't people afaid that if we just up and left Iraq that it could easily become how Afghanstan was in the 90s? The Base's philsophy is pretty much an Arab/Islamic version of Hitler's. Isn't anyone afriad that if these people ever gained real military power that they would be more than willingly to inflict a Holocaust style killing on anyone they deem to be an infidel or apostate instead of blowing themselves up in a car on some street in Bagdhad. Our occupation is defiantly adding to recruitment and terrorism but I can only imagine how many more people would sign up if it looked like they drove us out of Iraq like they did to the Soviets in Afghanstan. Bin Laden has in the past commented that our biggest weakest is not being able to finish things through and put up with causualties of our own men. Leaving Iraq now would prove him right 100%. The extremists consider the fight in Iraq to be the equilvant to fighting the Soviets in Afghanstan. The foriegn fighters from all over the globe are coming to fight US in Iraq. Its terrible that the Iraqi civilians and Iraqi police/soldiers and our serivcemen and woman and other international soldiers are the ones being killed but I see fighting the flood of foriegn fighters coming into Iraq because of our occupation as better than them all chilling in their home countries planning ways to win matrydom. Just sucks that our invasion of Iraq has created a new network of terrorists and taught a new era of people the techniques just like the Soviet war in Afghanstan did, but leaving now wouldn't stop that and I personally think Iraq's future would be much grimer if we left within the next year. I'm a conservative and the amount of money Bush has spent in his years as president is truly disgusting but leaving now before Iraq is somewhat stable I think would be costlier for us and the world in the long run. Max you want years? I'd say we will have to still have some type of prescense in Iraq for another 5 years atleast and another 10 years at the most. But deciding when to end a conflict based on loss of life is never a good idea. I think if we did that we would never of even entered WW2, let alone ended it. The invasion of Iraq was obviously not helpful to the world or our 'war on terrorism' but I don't think leaving prematurly will solve any of the problems we created and I think with the amount of extremists in Iraq now, there is more reason to stay than when we thought/lied about Saddam having WMDs. |
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| Aug 24th, 2005 03:46 PM | |||||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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Oh, and as for my "embedded DC life"....  I dismissed your point because it was a ridiculous comparison. Do people who haven't done bad things get yelled at and have guns pointed at them and stuff sometimes? YES! You said yourself (slightly in jest) that it's hard to distinguish who are the bad guys and who are just civilians, particularly if it is this "urban guerilla" warfare everyone keeps saying. Once again, this doesn't mean that we are specifically there to terrorize these people and rule over them like some evil hegemon. Quote:
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But, I am a believer that we need to be unequivocal and firm to a certain extent. If we allow these people to think that we'd buckle under at the slightest sign of pressure, then you will just see the terror more and more and more. Quote:
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But I also think the Left on this debate isn't in the right place necessarily either. A lot of these anti-war groups and Dem. blogs are screaming "BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!" I don't think they're talking about creating a feasible plan either, which leaves this serious discussion you'd like to have off the table completely, IMO. |
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