Personally, I see Iraq as necessary for conducting any military operations in the Middle East, forget whether you think the goal should be to attack all Muslim nations or not.

So instead of stopping the construction of future terrorist strongholds, like what was done in Iraq, you want an endless line of Afghanistans where the terrorists always have the advantage of tactical defense.

No one here has criticized Vince P for his views, yet moderate Democrats are supposed to disown the far left?

You have no evidence that your claims are even close to right about what Vince P “claimed”. So don’t count your chickens before they exist.

The point here is RIGHT NOW they are building terrorist training camps and training people to attack the United States.

Attack Afghanistan, you mean. Which sort of brings into question by what basis you use to judge whether a person has attacked you or not. Is attacking America’s proxy ally in Arabia, Israel, enough to say Saddam attacked America? Is attacking Kuwaitt enough to say Saddam attacked America? Is attacking Afghanistan, which America has promised to protect, the same as attacking America?

By the time you have figured out all this stuff out, Osama bin Laden, not to mention Hizbollah and Hamas, would already have pre-empted you. You would forever be reacting to the injuries they inflict instead of the other way around. That’s the philosohical difference right there. You think we can win by allowing the terrorists time to think up new places from which to attack us. I, however, prefer a decisive victory in which not only current or previous terrorist strongholds are converted to our cause, but future terrorist strongholds are converted to our cause before the terrorists even get near them.

To do such things require pre-emption.

They have a command and control structure which they are rebuilding, and we’re not doing much to stop them.

The first thing you said you wanted to do about it was to get Musharaff to stop it. How is that “us doing something to stop them”? It isn’t. You mentioned joint ops, yes, but joint ops are occuring in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is Pakistan so different? Or why should Pakistan be better than Iraq when the same methods are being used due to the nature of terrorism? You said Iraq was a mistake, yet there is no apparent difference to what you seek to do in Pakistan as compared to Iraq. Are you recommending that we make Pakistan into a mistake as well?

I say there is no apparent difference because obviously due to your beliefs, there will be a huge amount of difference in how any attack is applied against Pakistan, given the beliefs held about Iraq.

Sure, if we clear northern Pakistan they’ll go somewhere else, but not all of them — we will have captured or killed a number of them, and furthermore they will have lost a base of operations.

The same can and has been said about Iraq. Yet you make Pakistan out to be something different than Iraq, in this war of ours. Obviously, I don’t think there’s much of a difference except that we are in Iraq and not Pakistan. But you do think there is a fundamental difference about the strategy for Iraq as opposed to what you propose for Pakistan. Yet to analyze your proposals with logic, there is no difference on the surface.

Your alternative seems to be total war against all Islamic nations

Given that you have just stated that you will be chasing terrorists to where ever they flee, how are you going to NOT be in total war against all the Islamic nations? How?

You keep acting like there’s something fundamentally different about my strategy as compared to yours. That is correct, but the inconsistency is with your proposals, not mine. Because your strategy is inconsistent, it cannot win against a focused enemy.

which we simply cannot do, because we don’t have the military force to do it.

That’s like saying we can’t learn violence because people have been brought up to live in peace. Just because you don’t have a skill, doesn’t mean you should avoid Iraq and refuse to learn the skill of how to do violence in this war.

We will never be able to pull that off

You will never be able to pull it off, yes. But that is not applicable to Jacksonians or the US military.

particularly since our allies would not join us.

Why would any potential ally join you when they know you have already handicapped yourself? Allies join people that promise victory and are confident. They don’t want to get saddled up with a dead weight that is too weak to defend itself.

We’d be alone

America has always been alone.

and we can’t even handle Iraq much less every Muslim country in the world.

Yet you seem to think that there is some kind of logical consistency in thinking that and also thinking the US can handle the 150 million Pakistanis that you want to attack and disrupt. That’s cognitive dissonance.

I believe America can handle most of the world’s armies combined together. It might take 90% of the GDP and 70% casualties of the total citizens of America, but it can be done. But you don’t. Yet you think America should attack Pakistan and can win there.

it has to appear justified or you multiply your enemies.

Victory justifies war, nothing else does.

Going after ancillary targets like Iraq will simply multiply our enemies and stretch our forces too thin.

Iraq has 29-30 million people. Pakistan has 150 million. You claim we can’t handle Iraq and are stretched. At the same time you claim we can handle Pakistan by using the same or similar “joint ops” used in Iraq for the failed years of 2004-5.

I say your claims will fail before they even get into the planning stage.

Of course it does. Then we have to keep repeating the process of going after them, which we failed to do after Afghanistan.

The point here is RIGHT NOW they are building terrorist training camps and training people to attack the United States. They have a command and control structure which they are rebuilding, and we’re not doing much to stop them. Sure, if we clear northern Pakistan they’ll go somewhere else, but not all of them — we will have captured or killed a number of them, and furthermore they will have lost a base of operations.

Your alternative seems to be total war against all Islamic nations — which we simply cannot do, because we don’t have the military force to do it. We will never be able to pull that off — particularly since our allies would not join us. We’d be alone, and we can’t even handle Iraq much less every Muslim country in the world.

The terrorist threat has to be handled in two ways: first, by lessening the political appeal of terrorism, second by attacking and destabilizing them. An attack directly at Al Qaeda in Pakistan would not engender the same worldwide revulsion that we’ve experienced in the aftermath of our attack on Iraq, revulsion that has helped Al Qaeda grow significantly in strength. War is politics carried out by other means: it has to appear justified or you multiply your enemies. Thus, going after our direct enemies is the best way to fight out enemies. Going after ancillary targets like Iraq will simply multiply our enemies and stretch our forces too thin.

You will never destroy terrorism with such defensive minded beliefs, Mitsu. You won’t even be able to relegate terrorism to the ash bin of history, as Nazism was. And you sure won’t faze the Islamic Jihad’s revolution to turn upside down human progress.

This is a war. Others will always take up the fight on both sides, until one side gives up. Your methods will not arrive at a decisive victory for America in this war. Her enemies will always be able to corrupt the international and Arab body, while America will try to wait for attacks, attacks that the Arab and International body will give great joy in planning, executing, and observing the results of. They will feel no fear. They will not surrender to your tactics or strategies. AQ is not the only enemy we have to face, Mitsu.

With such things as that, what does it really matter how many nations in the world resist America due to our pre-emption, Mitsu?

Our enemies are not other nations, our enemies are non-nations like CAIR, the ACLU, the Muslim Council, AQ, Hizbollah, etc. So long as non-state enemies of America exist, there will always be nations out to “resist” America. You can’t stop such things by sitting back and working up agreements to attack “only after the fact”.

like in Afghanistan, a local force which can impose order: the Pakistani central government itself.

You have got to be joking, Mitsu. The local force in Afghanistan you are refering to lead to the Civil War between Taliban and Northern Alliance. The Taliban won. And now the Taliban are in Pakistan.

The local force that is actually in Afghanistan, which you forgot to mention, is a force led, trained, and inspired by Americans. That is not the same as the local force in Pakistan.

Even still, Pakistan does not have the power or the military support to keep control of the North. Even the mighty US had to change some fundamentals just for Iraq. Which is why Iraq will give America the tools to resist, while Pakistan has not even tried to acquire such tools. Musharaffef has been too worried about appearing the military dictator to conduct truly effective operations. Although he has done some things, they just aren’t decisive.

But — that order is steadily weakening since we haven’t provided them with sufficient support.

You mean NATO hasn’t provided them with sufficient support. It is not the United States that are sitting around having parties in Afghanistan. And if you want more troops in Afghanistan, go to Germany and Korea and strip the garrisons there. If your idea about pre-emption is correct, they should be happy to help a war fought after Osama pre-empted the US.

We can and should do this in concert with the Pakistanis — which means, if they refuse to cooperate we go in (to the tribal areas only)

As Americans learned in Iraq, “going into terrorist areas” simply scatters the terrorists to places elsewhere. Not going to work. How long do you plan to stay in these tribal areas, Mitsu? 10 years?

but afterwards we negotiate with them to take over.

Negotiate with the tribal members for them to take over and then invite the terrorists back in?

Or negotiate with Musharref’s forces for them to go back into what was once a terrorist stronghold? That didn’t really work out well when US high command tried the same in 2004-5. Local forces, of whatever stripe, are worthless without US forces already there. Which means you would have to duplicate what worked for Iraq, in Pakistan. Of course, you could not do that if Iraq had never occured. Then your strategy for Pakistan would fail. And nobody would know why, because Iraq would never have occured.

Which, again, underscores why you are wrong about Iraq. Iraq has disproven every false strategy proposed against America’s enemies, and will keep doing it so long as terrorists are willing to go there to teach Americans how to fight terrorists in a guerrilla war.

Preventive war is an endless disaster for great powers because it creates more frontiers with more hostile forces which you then have to subdue, and the cycle goes on forever. Doesn’t matter if you “completely destroy” one country’s military — others will rise up to take their place.

Regarding Pakistan: your analysis is wrong simply because there is already, like in Afghanistan, a local force which can impose order: the Pakistani central government itself. With Afghanistan the reason it isn’t (yet) a disaster at the scale of Iraq is that the Northern Alliance was able to impose order over most of the country. But — that order is steadily weakening since we haven’t provided them with sufficient support. In Pakistan, yes, of course we can’t just do limited strikes — the area has to be pacified and cleared of terrorist camps. We can and should do this in concert with the Pakistanis — which means, if they refuse to cooperate we go in (to the tribal areas only) but afterwards we negotiate with them to take over. That would be the only sensible long-term approach in my view.

Naturally, such an approach is hugely risky and can go wrong in many ways. BUT: it is a fight against our direct enemies and thus is not “preventive” or “preemption” at all. It’s a legitimate war against those who attacked us.

It was necessary to figure out which word was the culprit, since the others I had found S[o]ma and So[m]alia were avoided by me.

This time it was d[e]p[o]s[i]t[i]ng

Because Iran can retaliate against Afghanistan/pakistan targets or other Gulf/European shipping, Iran’s naval facilities and forces must also be annihilated. Such things constitute more than any threat Bill Clinton was willing to make, Mitsu, and such things also constitute far more in terms of effective pre-emption than any strikes launched.

As I said before, I don’t believe that pre-emption will always result in greater blowback than the benefits you gain from attacking first. However, that also means I do believe sometimes that attacking first will create a greater blowback than the initial attack. And that is when you attack first, but fail to adequately damage the enemy. Such as when you threaten to bomb people and then never carry it out, or bomb people but don’t wipe them out in the process.

Both the threats of AQ in Pakistan and Hizbollah in Iran are the same threats, just separated by power and geography. Iraq is there to deal with Iran and to draw off attacks on Afghanistan. Afghanistan is there to deal with Pakistan and to serve as a logistics base, given that Iran is too busy attacking (kidnapping) US soldiers and Iraqi civilians in Iraq.

As a clarification, when I say that you will have to invest as much resources in pakistan as was invested in Iraq, I mean ground forces. Not just threats of bombing, not just raids/strikes that are temporary in nature.

You could argue that you can deal with Pakistan and the terrorists there without committing as many ground forces as was done for Iraq, but I doubt such arguments would be effective.

Also you mentioned Iraq as serving as a propaganda and recruiting tool for AQ. I really don’t see why your attacks in Pakistani tribal areas would not serve as propaganda for AQ. Remember, I didn’t deny that Iraq was being used as propaganda by AQ. I said it didn’t matter so long as terrorists die. But if you are concerned about enemies using unjustified attacks against them in order to formulate effective propaganda against us, then why would you be willing to provide them such propaganda by striking the tribes in Pakistan that are in league with Osama Bin Laden?

Bombing tribal folks won’t make them surrender, you know. Unless you use nukes. But I doubt you would wish to use nukes.

What’s the long term point in dealing with Pakistan when short term strikes won’t do anything good long term and long term military campaigns required the experience of Iraq?

That’s the critical portion of the problems with your position on Pakistan and Iraq.