This point in history is too crucial to be left to appeasers & apologists for the terrorists. You anti-warriors, mainly on the left, have let your fecklessness toward the enemy & eagerness to get Bush lose all of us some hard earned ground, especially on domestic programs. That’s just more reason to be annoyed about the stance of the left on the war.

On the “implication”: The CNN story was all implication, from headline to text & nothing else. I can do little about CNN(except watch Fox) but E’s posts are quite a different matter.

As for the “gotcha jokes,” E writes a lot about & evidently cares a lot about “class,” “taste” & likes to titillate about sexual affairs. He must at least be concerned about these issues – or else why write about them? It’s his pathology, not mine – I merely observe & attempt to diagnose. None of it has any bearing on the issue of the war but if he’s going to toss non sequitur into the mix we have a perfect right to respond.

As for the rest of your admonishment, is it really “cranky” to respond to E’s posts with spirit & passion? I marshal & present my opposition as best as I can & will continue to do so.

Wish you had a sense of humor. You treat a few cracks about Bush Sr. and the “implications” of a journalists’s revelation with dead earnestness. And then you put them together for an imagined “gotcha.”Jokes about old WASPy “class” are just Tom Wolfe-like “social notes,” surface observatins that, put together with many others, give you some understanding of where these people came from and what forces (family, wealth, schools, connections) shaped them. There’s no “anxiety” attached to these little notes.
But I’m wasting words and time here. I was also being tongue-in-cheek about a “conspiracy” between W and Osama. I leave that sort of fantasy to right-wing and left-wing blogs.
You’re bored. I’m sorry about that. Read a book.
And if you want something serious to think about, consider the elimination of the Supplemental Food Program (USDA) in Bush’s proposed 2007 budget. $107.2 million for “balanced food boxes” for 525,000 mostly elderly citizens, cut. See how it effects some of them, people like James Barone, 70, who is left with $90 to live on monthly after paying for rent and medicine.
Read the story, “Food Bank challenges program cut” in the Reno Gazette Journal, publ. on Feb 21.
Serious food for thought.
Well, I leave you to your warrior dreams and hope you get over your crankiness.

Naw, the Bush Sr. “relationship” with a State Dept. woman is known in DC. He did it smoothly, not in the Clinton lack of class manner.

Eleutherius loves to gossip about affairs & yet we are put on notice from the beginning of Eleutherius’s anxiety over issues of “taste” & “class.” I guess it doesn’t occur to Eleutherius that engaging in the one could signal a lack of the other.

Haven’t you seen the story on CNN: “Bush: Bin Laden helped me, book says?”
“I thought it (the Bin Laden tape just before 2004 election) was going to help,” Bush is quoted. If I were conspiracy-minded, why…

IF? Hmmm … Hey, I know! Why doesn’t Eleutherius pretend he is conspiratorial, just for the fun of it & flesh out the implication for the readers. I’m guessing that Eleutherius is all implication & no real theory on this one but one can always hope.

On the CNN story, here’s my favorite quote. Apparently the bin Laden tape was a subject of concern among some Bush campaigners, who thought it might work against Bush. When recalling the discussion back then, Bush related to the interviewer that he had argued the opposite:

I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.

Exactly. It couldn’t be said any better.

Releasing a tape just before the election that attempted to influence the election was a mistake & calls into question OBL’s utter lack of judgement concerning the reaction by Americans to certain stimuli.

Me battling in the Middle East? No, those much better than I are doing that quite well. And I’m trying to save the teeth I have left, so opening C rations with them is out of the question. My dentist would be really annoyed if he found out.

The fact is I’m just not needed over there, where our soldiers are doing a great job. I think me & others who think as I do are needed more in the battle over here, where the anti-warriors give talking points to bin Laden in their desperate & vain attempts to get Bush. I wouldn’t be surprised if bin Laden came out for impeachment a la Richard Dreyfuss the next time he feeds al Jazeera some video; he’s certainly been quick to pick up on other anti-warrior talking points. In one of his missives he even recommended a book written by a leading anti-warrior. The up to then obscure book went to number 12 on Amazon’s top sellers.

The article you linked was junk. Strauss was a scholar who was interested in close and disciplined readings of the great classics of philosophy; Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and so on. His disciples, who could fit in the back room of the elks club without crowding the place, are teachers who carry on his work of teaching and scholarship.

They are neither interested in contemporary politics nor foreign policy.

When I was an undergraduate, I took courses from real died-in-the-wool Straussians. It was the late 1960s, an even more politicized age than this one. Contemporary politics never made it into their classrooms.

There may have been one real Straussian at the Pentagon a couple of years ago, but he was a third or fourth tier guy. He is gone now. The idea that the liberal ivy league snobs who run the CIA harbor Straussians in their midsts is risible.

Myself, I almost donated to the Clinton fund, but I started seeing reports of the money he was getting from Hollywood fundraisers & decided my small contribution wouldn’t make any real difference. I liked ol’ Bill a lot. I voted for him twice & was unhappy to have the Executive branch hampered by the Monicagate farce. That was pre-9/11, of course.

I guess the Demos think its pay back time. Problem is, all their shenanigans to get the administration could hinder the WOT. Well, it already has, hasn’t it? We don’t have to worry too much anymore about listening to terrorists, now that the terrorist know all about the NSA program. Too bad, that could prove fatal to a bunch of Americans one of these days but we’ll never really know, will we? Harm can be done with impunity if the culprit is reckless & clever. Us Neocons have to do our best to see that the anti-warriors don’t succeed in their dangerous mischief or we’ll never forgive ourselves.

Oh, & I sure didn’t know about the Bush senior affair – teehee, snicker, snicker. Do you & your buddies get all giggly talking about Presidential extramarital affairs or is it more of a somber conversation with vigorous nods of approval & grunts of agreement at favorite gossip-points?

He’s Leo Strauss

“We believe the dimensions of national heartbeats are greater than village impulses, greater than city demands, greater than state dreams or ambitions. Therefore, we believe a nation’s memorial should, like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, have a serenity, a nobility, a power that reflects the gods who inspired them and suggests the gods they have become.”

Neoconservatives believe we all can be Gods!!! This must be why Islamic Jihad hates America so much.

There is only the One True God, Allah, inshallah.

The real reason is that Rummy, Cheney & the rest mostly ignore anti-warriors. There’s nothing worse than being ignored when you are a sputtering, futile anti-warrior. In fact I should ignore eleutherius but I’m bored & want to see what eleutherius has under the hood. So far, the performance is a bit disappointing.

Number 35 is that they swallow terrorist lies like gumdrops but are always ready to impugn the Bush Administration.

“Although the enemy is increasingly skillful at manipulating the media and using the tools of communications to its advantage, it should be noted that we have an advantage as well. And that is, quite simply, that the truth is on our side.”

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Belongs on a Letterman List.

How about that “quite simply?”
Beautiful. Ha, ha, ha. Funny, funny, funny.

I bet. Wink, wink, nod, nod.

This is what happens when children play with Occam’s razor…

You can’t have an invasion of Iran without the logistic support bases in Afganistan, Kuwait, and Iraq.

For one thing, Tehran is real close to Iraq. As with Iraq, if you don’t seal off the borders, the enemy is just going to slip away and plot destruction anew. Which is why the insurgency happened a couple of months later, rather than immediately. They got away to Iran and Syria. Mostly Syria.

Why? First, we always rely immensely on our aircraft carrier forces to provide close air support to our ground troops abroad.

Any military amateur knows that close air support is accomplished through 3 primary aircraft systems. The A-10 Warthog. The Apache Helicopter. And the Spectre gunship. New age systems like the JDAM dropped from fighter/bombers and the Hellfire Predator drone system, are innovations relatively new.

Marine Regiments actually have in-built air support, they are self-sufficient and do not depend upon the Army or the Navy or the Air Force for air support (Unless they need a lot of JDAMs). The Army has their own helicopter bases.

Without carriers, which doesn’t fly A-10 Warthogs the last time I checked, you don’t miss out much except probably a CAP and more pilots.

One of the reasons to take Iraq is to get access to their airfields, which allows the Air Force to strike deeper and harder into Iran. Marshall doesn’t want to say this fact, because it contradicts his theme. Air support is most effective when it has short distances to traverse, and close air support requires even shorter distances and faster communications.

Link

People need to understand that an untested military is a useless military. Nobody is afraid of an untested military. The idea that Iran was afraid of us before, but now isn’t given the kind of battle experience we are racking up in Iraq, shows a decided lack of military expertise and human diplomacy.

It is the belief that technology is what makes someone afraid of your army, rather than the experience and training of your soldiers. I don’t believe anti-Americans are afraid of our technology, since their media technology and savvy offsets our advantages.

Stop telling lies, our main basing and logistics were in Kuwait. Osama was using our forces in Saudi Arabia as a propaganda prop, it was about time we took that away from him.

We don’t need the Saudis for anything, they needed us. Get that straight before talking about logistics.

Funny how that hasn’t really happened yet, isn’t it?

Marshall seems to think we get 100% of our supplies from Kuwait. If we invaded Iran like Marshall wanted, how would we get any logistics through Afghanistan, when they didn’t have any highways?

Marshall needs to talk about how multilateralism people like him wanted us to go to the UN, and when we did, it just allowed Saddam to cook up an insurgency which is now killing Americans and Iraqi children. But he won’t.

Civilians are SUPPOSED to run the military in a democracy so that you don’t have a military state…

Didn’t you get the memo? Some people want a military state, it is the only way they can acquire power.

If it weren’t for multilateralists and UN wannabes, the insurgency in Iraq would be a lot less powerful.

As I said when the Democrats were yelling that Bush was unilateralist, they were totally lying, Bush is too multilateralist, not too unilateralist.

By the time the carriers came back on line, we were up to our ears in an Iraqi insurgency, which, from that point forward, has demanded virtually the entire rotation of our combat ground troops to even forestall, let alone defeat.

Marshall seems to believe that lack of US aircraft carrier capacity had something to do with the Iraqi terrorists, as in: If only the US had been able to keep those carriers afloat those pesky terrorists wouldn’t have come to Iraq. Am I the only reader to find this assertion incredible? It seems to me that US aircraft carriers & terrorists sneaking into Iraq have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

Second, our main staging and logistical bases in the region were in Saudi. They were how we kept “stability” [meaning the potential for us to go to war, and, more importantly, to be able to threaten it] in the region. We were welcome in Saudi only as long as the threat of Saddam Hussein to the Saudis had to be managed. The moment we “declared victory” over Saddam, our welcome in Saudi vanished.

For me this is a new wrinkle in the US-Causes-Problems-BY-Fighting-Terrorism Meme. Paraphrase: By fighting terrorism the US lost its military base in Saudi Arabia, which decreased US military strength in the ME region. I’ll admit the basic truth of this particular meme but have a different viewpoint on it’s significance.

I’ve noticed that anti-warriors & indeed many others are quick to criticize this particular Middle Eastern ally, I think with some justification. The Saudi rulers find themselves harassed by a monster of their own creation born out the hatred of the West they’ve instigated & encouraged. But Marshall & the others need to keep in mind some cultural & diplomatic realities.

Saudi Arabia is a bit like Europe during the Inquisition. There were the nominal rulers, the royalty & attendant security forces & bureaucracies. But there was also the Church, which had power to rival the royalty or any other secular elite.

Now try to imagine Inquisition-era Europe with a Church even more powerful. To me that type of society in some respects would look like today’s Saudi Arabia.

The alternative to the ruling Saudi royals? Probably a jihadist regime, perhaps even headed by none other than bin Ladin himself. Far-fetched? Bin Ladin is a Yemeni & Yemeni-led Jihadists are responsible for the current spate of terrorist attacks taking place now in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is one of America’s main trading partners. The US gets 20% of its oil from the Saudis. The oil is vital to the American economy. I can’t see that any US administration has had any practical choice other than to attempt to support & keep a friendly, cooperative relationship. Rather than bow to these diplomatic & foreign policy realities the anti-warriors & other critics affect a tone of outrage & become incensed.

… we spent all our time spinning our wheels looking for phantom WMDs, while the Iraqi insurgency not only put itself together, but also armed itself directly out of Saddam’s old supplies of military small arms. And they did this right under our noses.

I think Marshall exaggerates the amount of effort the US made to find WMD in Iraq. From what I’ve read the administration’s efforts were minimal – perhaps because they did not realize that the question of WMD would become so central to the current debate. After all, WMD was only one among many reasons to topple Saddam.

At any rate, Marshall sets up a false dichotomy by implying the US could either have stopped the terrorists in Iraq or looked for WMD in Iraq, but not both. I hold that one does not at all preclude the other. But more than that, I think that no amount of effort could prevent the sniping, car bombing & suicide bombing that represents the sum total of the terrorists’ activity in Iraq to date. As we have seen for years in Israel, that sort of low-grade, irritating-but-not-debilitating warfare is impossible to completely prevent.

Marshall’s basic stance is that US wars in Afghanistan & Iraq have lowered America’s ‘threat index,’ which has emboldened Iran to go nuclear. I disagree. I think Iran would be trying for a nuclear WMD irregardless of Iraq & Afghanistan. Iranian attempts at nuclear development goes back to at least the 80s, long before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait & the first Gulf War, long before 9/11 & the Afghan war, long before the present war in Iraq:

After Islamic radicals overthrew the Shah of Iran and seized the U.S. embassy in 1979, Washington slapped an arms embargo on Iran. Undaunted, Iran conducted an international campaign of assassinations and terrorism, pursued a clandestine nuclear-weapons program and waged a bitter war with neighboring Iraq (1980-88).

http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/140/documentid/420/history/3,2359,2167,645,140,420

The moment our troops stepped across the Iraqi border any credible threat to make war on Iran vanished. Period. Because of this, we have all but solicited the Iranians to successfully achieve a nuclear weapons capacity.

I think Marshall & perhaps the Iranians may be misjudging the seriousness of the administration’s intentions. Iran’s nuclear program can be set back another 10 years if Bush decides to do it. Personally, I hope Bush uses any means necessary to prevent a nuclear Iran, or Syria, or Libya.

On the other hand, if a Democrat wins the next Presidential election, I think Marshall is probably correct that nothing of substance would be done about Iran or other hostile states that might try to go nuclear. It would be back to diplomacy & hoping for the best – a pre-9/11 strategy – a strategy that 9/11 proved wrong.

Problem is, we didn’t have available the threat to go to war. Every leader in the world - even our allies - believed our threats of war were empty. That’s the reason our enemies felt they could fund Al-Qaeda and remain immune to any retaliation, even after they launched a terrorist attack on US soil. That’s also the reason many of our former allies are so alienated… we proved that our threats of war are not as empty as theirs are, and it terrifies them.

Simple fact is, we had to fight someone, if the threat of war was ever to mean anything at all. Another simple fact - no matter who we went to war with, the news organizations would declare it the wrong war. Before Iraq, Afghanistan was the wrong war to be involved in. I still remember the cries of “quagmire” that rose when we did that.

The leaders of the media are quite proud of the fact that no matter what Bush does - even if he does nothing - they can still condemn him. They truly think that means they have him checkmated, and thus have won the game.

But in real life, when you punish a man for everything he does, you end up actually freeing him to do anything.

Steve-
“There is no culture of individualism or autonomy in a clan society. Sure these things can develop OVER TIME.”
You mean like Japan in 1945? Talk about the ultimate clan society, not to mention “over-taxing the natural resources” of their little islands. Somehow, even with the precedence of the group over the individual, they have embraced democracy and have become a reliable ally; even though we WROTE THEIR CONSTITUTION. Every word. Go figure.

Steve-
“This may end up costing 100,000 Iraqi and American deaths (even without a civil war), not to mention the wounded and traumatized.”
Later:
“In terms of casualties, that is, killed and all wounded, I would expect that 100 K would be conservative at this point, 3 years later. There must be 30 K American killed and wounded already. To say that we are inflicting casualties at a 3:1 ratio is not at all extreme.”
It’s not good to attempt to reframe something that you’ve left a written record of thinking no one would notice. Folks, you can skip over Steve’s comments from now on.

Anon-
“If the aim of the WOT is to control bad guys — like Osama — from getting nukes, then that has to be accomplished with the military equivalent of giant SWAT teams. In this area, police states are our friends. They can do a lot of surveillance for us.
…
The only thing we can do is prophylaxis. In this respect, Afghanistan was perfectly justified, Iraq, in my opinion, much less so. “
In the first part, you’re absolutely correct (Pakistan comes to mind). Then there’s that following line that implies that leaving Saddam’s police state in place would somehow HELP us… You can’t be serious.

Steve quoting Flenser, then addressing it-
“We have have been attacked, repeatedly, by nations in the Middle East.

Name the sovereign states that have attacked us since, say, 1995. Iraq is not among them.”
Really? I bet the pilots that got shot at in the no-fly zone imposed on Iraq in the cease-fire agreement they signed would beg to differ. That alone is Casus Bellum. I’m not sure that attempting to assasinate the President doesn’t count either.

Joseph Marshall-
“Before we invaded Iraq we had a nation state whose capacity and intention to go nuclear was known, who had actual reactors and yellowcake in place, and who was implacably hostile to us.

The only leverage we had on Iran was the threat to go to war.”
And somehow, moving upwards of 150,000 troops next door on both sides, and establishing that we ARE willing to go to war isn’t leverage? You might want to check with the Iranians about that.

“Our fine President–and all his cheerleaders–simply fail to undertand even yet why it is more important in foreign relations to have available the threat to go to war than it is to actually go to war.
I’m not sure, but this may be the silliest thing I have ever read. It is more important to have the threat of war, but it’s not so important if you go to war…Hmmm, you’ll have to explain that one to me, I guess since I’m not a diplomat.

Jingoistic in that they imagine the US so strong that next to it, militant Islam is merely a criminal nuisance to be shooed away or an oppressed minority to be understood. Therefore, they were free to focus their attention on every perceived slight from the White House, blind to the extent to which they’ve been played like a violin by militant Islam, adding great flame to several fires, most notably the various insurgencies in Iraq.

It is rather rich to be getting “I told you so’s” from those who feed the hopes of the enemy at every turn. Thanks.

Precisely. And you still don’t even know where the real eggs were broken. This is because you and your confreres consistently refuse to look at the context for the Iraqi invasion.

Before we invaded Iraq we had a nation state whose capacity and intention to go nuclear was known, who had actual reactors and yellowcake in place, and who was implacably hostile to us.

That nation was Iran.

The only leverage we had on Iran was the threat to go to war. Our fine President–and all his cheerleaders–simply fail to undertand even yet why it is more important in foreign relations to have available the threat to go to war than it is to actually go to war.

And this is precisely why they are “silly boys”.

The moment our troops stepped across the Iraqi border any credible threat to make war on Iran vanished. Period. Because of this, we have all but solicited the Iranians to successfully achieve a nuclear weapons capacity.

Why? First, we always rely immensely on our aircraft carrier forces to provide close air support to our ground troops abroad. Fighting two wars in so close a succession as Afghanistan and Iraq all but exhausted those resources.

For thirteen months after the “mission accomplished” grandstanding, there was only one U.S. aircraft carrier on the entire high seas. All the rest were in for repairs. Consequently, you didn’t hear anybody in the Bush Administration even mention the word Iran during those 13 months.

By the time the carriers came back on line, we were up to our ears in an Iraqi insurgency, which, from that point forward, has demanded virtually the entire rotation of our combat ground troops to even forstall, let alone defeat.

So from that point forward we have never been a credible military threat to the Iranians.

My best guess is that we probably won’t be so again until 2010. We will need somebody in the Oval Office who is responsible, and not clueless. And it will take that person at least a year to reorient the policy. So 2010 is optomistic.

That will be seven years that we will have given the Iranians a free pass to work on nukes, because of the boneheaded decision to invade Iraq.

Second, our main staging and logistical bases in the region were in Saudi. They were how we kept “stability” [meaning the potential for us to go to war, and, more importantly, to be able to threaten it] in the region.

We were welcome in Saudi only as long as the threat of Saddam Hussein to the Saudis had to be managed. The moment we “declared victory” over Saddam, our welcome in Saudi vanished.

Our fine neo-con thinkers, both in and out of government, didn’t think this was a real military problem, because we would soon be re-establishing those stabilizing bases in Iraq.

Funny how that hasn’t really happened yet, isn’t it?

Why? Because, for six full months after the “mission” was “accompished” we spent all our time spinning our wheels looking for phantom WMDs, while the Iraqi insurgency not only put itself together, but also armed itself directly out of Saddam’s old supplies of military small arms. And they did this right under our noses.

Now you might ask why I seem to be so down on the President’s current “multilateral” approach to the Iranian problem. After all, that’s what fellows like me wanted him to do with Saddam, right?

“Multilateralism” is impotent without the threat of war behind it. If you are forced, as the President has been by his own blunders, to proceed multilaterally by default, you have already lost the diplomatic game. Because he cannot make yet a third war in the region while still tangled up in the other two, George Bush has already lost on Iran.

There will be a nuclear armed Iran. George Bush destroyed our best chance to prevent it. That will be his lasting Presidential legacy.

It is divided by the line, “To Steve”.

That it just magically occured independant of OIF?

Of course, only a fool or a patriot would believe his country was responsible for removing the premier evil in the world. The Berlin Wall collapsed without US help as well, dontcha know.

I told you guys that whenever anything bad happens in the world, it is the US’s fault; the US made an earthquake generator and caused the tsunami, the US did bad things and got hit by 5 hurricanes, and the US went into a sovereign nation and got their ass kicked and helped terrorism. And whenever anything good happens it is because of the socialists and the anti-American patriots.

where, precisely did you get that?

He got it from the MSM propaganda after the fall of Baghdad.

I’m telling ya, these people are easy to convince, just needs a good propaganda and psych ops.

Two things - where is such a thing written in law?

It’s called Real Politek. And everyone that practices real politeks also practices criticism of America.

I bet Kuwaiti’s would disagree

How many divisions does Kuwait have? With so few armed forces, the real politek guys are not going to waste time listening to their problems. They just don’t care.

The Kurds are even more of an underdog than Kuwait, and that means they are even less important to the world oligarchs.

No evidence? Have you ever even bothered to pay attention to what Saddam has done in the past? I think the hundreds of thousands dead at his hands that stopped only where we forced him to are “evidence”.

Do you remember when Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?

Or is your draft avoid/evade rule absolute?

Well, see, they believe that if we were invaded then it would be a people’s war, like the one in WWII with Russia. Since it would be a people’s war, it doesn’t matter if 20 million Russians die.

But when they say it is an “elective” war by Bush, then 2,000 is too much.

It all depends. Steve has a different argument of course, so I’m not refering to him.

Anti-warriors have a kind of childlike beatitude in that they can blandly gaze upon one of the Middle East’s worst murderers & mildly state that they see “a threat to no one.”

A threat to no one that matters, to them. I said it before, they just don’t give a damn. It ain’t their family, they don’t care, let them die.

It’s a bright contrast, in comparison to how American soldiers have performed when at their best.

Ymarsakar, I believe that if you punish bad actions, they will sometimes stop.

The percentage of the chance of it stopping or even being prevented is based upon the ratio of risk vs rewards, but more importantly, it is based upon the absolute punishment.

By increasing the punishment, you go from “sometimes” to “always”.

If your actions only stop people sometimes, then your problem is in your punitive actions, not with the principle itself.

UN has as much chance of punishing the bad actions of someone like Saddam or a rabid Iran as I have of turning into a pumpkin.

The theory that you can stop bad things by going punitive and pro-active, does not really require the UN. It just requires some organization that can act on a world ranged basis. Like all pragmatic people, I don’t care what you call it, I only care if it works.

Oh, sure. And Bill Clinton never had sex with that woman.

It’s always fun talking to people that wouldn’t know a mortar from a sex toy.

You see the logic, it is obvious. When confronted with things of war and peace, they go directly to the sex. Sex specialists make very poor warriors and soldiers. To win a war, you need those specialized in military science and the Art of War.

neo-con
As much as I understand your journey from a conformist, stifling liberal environment, isn’t it just possible the neo-con one is just as conformist and stifling?

People like me will always make sure that Neo won’t become conformist. Some people actually change their rhetoric and belief depending upon the audience, I think they used to call that Rhetoric Skill.

Our political system is as much dominated by corporate thinking

These people have a lot of nerve. They don’t give a pock about UN corruption and then upchucks to us, getting in our faces and telling us about corporate thinking. They should know, they are the ones cheering the corrupt oligarchs on in this world.

But you project. And that is your problem.

Don’t make the same mistake Erasmus made. The first guy that yells projection has a 50% chance of being the projector. Go look it up at wikipedia if you don’t believe. But I don’t think you would understand the logic, though you can try, even if you would fail.

You suggest—what? We’re waiting.

They suggest you take a stake and ram it up the… badonadunk?

To me, continuing a conversation at this point while refusing to simply check the “other” button and choose a consistent name is quite–well, this is the operative word again: annoying.

I just go with semi-literate to illiterate.

I don’t care about the people who correct their mistakes, but it is fun to rag on the ones that like making them.

As for America being a shell…that is stupid.

All fantasies are in the end, stupid in one form or another.

The United States is the still the hope of the world.

We are humanity’s last and best hope for maintaining civilization. If we fall, we’re taking everyone else with us into the Dark Age, so they’d better pray we stay alive and kicking.

To Steve,

Japan was never like this,

People need to think twice before suggesting, even if only in their heads, that Japan did not use suicide bombers, kamikaze attacks, bonzai charges, and totally fanatical fighting tactics.

You need to recognize the fact that everyone has a weakness, even the most fanatical enemy.

The point is that once you have turned the corner, you must keep the pressure on. Because people are chasing you and they are turning corners as well. If your rate of turning corners in the war is exceeded by the enemy’s, then you’re dead. If you aren’t ahead of the curve, you’re under the tires.

Until Saddam dies *the more gruesome the sooner the insurgency stops*, Syria is intimidated into backing off, and Iran is neutralized, the insurgency is not going to stop.

Do those 3 things, while maintaining the status quo strategy in Iraq, and victory will be in 5 years to 10.

Steve said…

In general I think too many people have some kind of absurd notion that, because 19 guys hijacked some planes and killed three thousand Americans, that we have the right to invade any country at any time and install any kind of government we want.

I don’t think we have the right to invade a nation because of 9/11, I think we have the right to invade a nation because we’re more powerful than that nation is or their allies are.

The US has to live in the rest of the world.

Tell that to the Arabs rioting, intimidating, and killing Danish and Dutch people that they have to live in the rest of the world.

Power is security, bar nothing.

The role of any sovereign government is to produce and harness enough power to protect the nation and the citizens. If you get invaded, that’s your problem to fix. There is no world policeman or court system to take your side and arbitrate the issues. Rights exist only so long as you have enough power to charge and maintain them.

We are 5% of the world’s population.

Do you know how many runner up (next largest) Navies combined would equal the tonnage of the US Navy?

We cannot rule the world by nuclear deterrence.

I don’t think Iran got the memo.

You can’t rule the world through nuclear deterence if you aren’t willing to use nukes, that would be obvious.

Nor can we even rule the world by force of conventional arms.

There is always unconventional arms, propaganda and psychology. The US is not ruled by the police. People obey laws because it is their laws and because they want to obey the laws.

You don’t need conventional arms or force to sustain a unity over a large group of people, but you do need it to create that security and unity.

Well flenser, in WWII we went to war against the guys who ACTUALLY bombed us.

I wasn’t aware that the French forces in Africa had anything to do with Pearl harbor… amazing what you can learn from the fake liberals, eh?

Name the sovereign states that have attacked us since, say, 1995. Iraq is not among them.

Don’t compare apples to oranges. Guerrila wars are not regular wars. For someone that doesn’t like the comparison between WWII reconstruction and iraq reconstruction, it is surprising that you are so inconsistent on this matter.

I wouldn’t say that sovereign nations have attacked us, I would only say that sovereign nations are in a state of undeclared war against the United States.
They didn’t sign up for 2-3 tours in Iraq. Sorry.

I don’t think McCain signed up for a tour of duty in a Viet POW camp either. War is cruelty, the crueler it is, the sooner it will end.

The rest of us, all we do is pay taxes.

Some Americans support Fischer House projects that house for free/low cost wounded and maimed soldiers. Some Americans send soldiers care packages, that the soldiers use to raise their own morale and the morale of Iraqi children. Others modify the basic care package and turn it into a propaganda machine, in order to help Iraqi children and schools. Others, go on USO tours to entertain the US troops. Some fight for veteran’s benefits.

We’re not being asked to do anything, outside of preparing CARE packages for the troops.

The time that an American needs to be told to help his nation and his family, is the time when that America deserves tyranny.

America functions best when left with free will, as with individuals.

The desire for strong man leadership is of course understandable, but there are disadvantages to the government telling the people exactly what they need to do and when they need to do it.

Look up Britain and how they sacked Churchill to get the unity of war, in peacetime through socialism. Look up Germany and Prusia.

Look up the mistakes made in WWII because Roosevelt didn’t get criticized.

The rest of us, all we do is pay taxes.

While it may be true that you only pay taxes and send care packages, it doesn’t mean you can speak for the 300 million other Americans.

I bet you did not know that General Pershing fought the Muslims in the Phillipines either. Because the Filipinos needed the help. They actually built a statue for Pershing.

And as for the Chinese, well one reason Truman fired MacArthur was because he said that the Chinese would not attack. He miscalculated.

The Communists killed tens of thousands of our men in Korea. We fought back. Something the anti war movement does not approve of anymore.

My point is Saddam violated a cease fire. He was implicated in the 1993 attack on the WTC. And he tried to kill a president. To think for one minute that Truman and FDR would have overlooked any of that that is just dumb. The Russians may have been mean, but they never openly tried to kill a president. But they did push it during the Berlin Airlift and we damn near went to war with them right there. Why? Because the US felt the Germans had suffered enough.

So fine, we give Iraq back to Saddam. We tell him that the laws do not apply to him. He can kill whoever he wants, he can lie, he can renig on his agreements, he can build wmd, he can train and arm terrorists, he can bring more people like his friend Zarqawi into the country, he can attack our allies, he can do whatever he wants and just so long as he does a half way decednt job of coverying his butt, we will kiss his behind. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt would be so proud.

Anti-warriors always criticize America, never the enemy. They never seem to acknowledge the absolute perfidy of the enemy but are always eager to highlight any imagined or real shortcoming of America. It’s not that the US doesn’t have criticism coming, constructive criticism is healthy, but anti-warriors lose all judgement. It’s a matter of degree: Almost always critical of the US & almost always easy on the enemy.

Any situation is stretched & distorted in order to fit it into a certain anti-US/Bush-bashing Template. Bush didn’t say the US needed to depose Saddam before Saddam became an imminent threat; oh no, the anti-warrior will claim(sometimes through sheer ignorance) that Bush said Saddam was already an imminent threat, because that type of distortion fits the template.

This tendency sometimes reaches bizarre proportions, such as the common anti-warrior meme that by fighting terrorism the US causes problems or that the US created various nefarious actors, such as bin Ladin or Saddam – fallacies that could be used as examples in a logic course.

When it’s not bizarre it’s artificial & insulting – such as the absurd “chickenhawk” meme – a non sequitur made up to fit the prime actors in the administration.

It’s true that I have no idea of what Anon’s actual feelings are; I can only go by what he writes:

You do care about those deaths. Accepted. Then, have those deaths (and all the other “consequences” in Iraq and in the USA)brought us closer to: Improving the relationship between the West and Islam? Or, did our invasion fuel the already flammable mood?

The fact the war was “elective” is important, if anyone wishes to complain about conditions there. We created those conditions by invading.

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