[mike777]

Over 40 years the CIA could not give us an accurate picture of the USSR economy. Over 40 years they got it wrong, come on. The questions you want answered by the President are much more difficult.

I repeat as an intellectual arguement we all agree but in the real political world your expectations are unreasonable.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Over 40 years the CIA could not give us an accurate picture of the USSR economy. Over 40 years they got it wrong, come on. The questions you want answered by the President are much more difficult.

I repeat as an intellectual arguement we all agree but in the real political world your expectations are unreasonable.

Mike, you seem to use the U.S.S.R. and the cold war often in comparison to this present conflict - is that because you view it in a similar light to the president's claims that it is a war of ideology? Not putting you down, just curious.

You may be right that some questions I ask are too difficult - but some I think are rather simple. Comparing to the U.S.S.R.:

We knew who they were.
We knew where they lived.
We knew their religion.

I think it unrealistic to try to compare what the differences or similarities between the U.S.S.R. and the insurgents/terrorists/enemy.

And of course if you never have any dialogue with your enemy, never attempt any diplomacy, you never will know the enemies protests or if the differences are solveable without violence.

But then we all know the world is in perfect black and white, so why bother?

Yippee-yo-kayay!

[mike777]

Yes in my many other posts I compare this struggle in many ways, not all, to the 40 year ideologue Cold War, sometimes hot war vs Communism.

I think there are some things to learn from that last war. I also recognize the danger in not refighting old wars with old ideas. I expect we will make many many errors along the way that seem really stupid and do a few things that are amazing.

As I have said many times, too many perhaps, if you think we are not at war, then what we are doing is Nuts.

I think treating whatever is going on as some Police/Crime/Trial/Jail under English common law is Nuts. ")

[Winstonm]

Quote

I think treating whatever is going on as some Police/Crime/Trial/Jail under English common law is Nuts.

That must mean we are both nuts in our own special way.

P.S. Thanks for the straight talk. I don't do circular talk well.

[mike777]

Do you suggest we should never go to war and try and win in afghanistan? We should treat it as a police crime...
1) Kobar towers
2) Yeman ship bombing
3) Kenya Embassy bombing
4) etc./

At what point do you think we should go to war,...how many dead?

1 Please do not assume I do endorse Iraq
2) Please do not assume I auto endorse Afghanistan today.

[pbleighton]

"As I have said many times, too many perhaps, if you think we are not at war, then what we are doing is Nuts.

I think treating whatever is going on as some Police/Crime/Trial/Jail under English common law is Nuts. ") "

You are creating a false dichotomy. Either we are at war, or there is no real problem.

Calling our problem/struggle/threat (which is very serious, and of course partially created by us, and increased by our adventure inIraq, any attempt to deny this is raving insanity) with radical Islam a war is linguistic and intellectual sloppiness, which led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Let's distinguish betweem Iraq and Afghanistan. The Taliban were closely allied with Bin Laden, and refused to give him up. This was an act of war on their part. We didn't handle the sistuation very well, but we were clearly justified in invading Afghanistan, because of their actions.

Iraq was completely different. We invaded for many reasons:
1. A family grudge
2. Oil
3. Revenge for 9/11
4. False propaganda
5. And most of all, identity. We invaded Iraq because it was an Arab country with a government we hated.

None of these are grounds for war.

In the future, if we have a situation analogous to Afganistan, we have the right to invade and occupy a country. We should be more intelligent than we have with Afghanistan, of course.

Iran doesn't fit this model at all, BTW.

Peter

[mike777]

"In the future, if we have a situation analogous to Afganistan, we have the right to invade and occupy a country. We should be more intelligent than we have with Afghanistan, of course.

Iran doesn't fit this model at all, BTW.

Peter "


1) Can you expand on your thoughts or anyone else feel free to jump in with your thoughts on Afganistan. More intelligent, how so?
2) I admit my memory is foggy, but I thought the overwhelming reason we were TOLD we should invade Iraq was Saddam has WMD and someone, somehow is going to use those weapons against us very soon.

[pbleighton]

"1) Can you expand on your thoughts or anyone else feel free to jump in with your thoughts on Afganistan. More intelligent, how so?"

a. We shouldn't underestimate the difficulty of nation-building. We needed to bring resources to the proble, military, but even more so economic and organizational. The government of Afghanistan has never controlled more than the capital and its immediate surroundings. The taliban has made a huge comeback. I'd like to hear your thoughts as to why you think (if you do) that we shouldn't have handled the situation more
b. Even more importantly, we should have gone after Bin laden more vigorously than we did.
c. Both a. and b. were made more difficult by Bush' obsession with Iraq..

"2) I admit my memory is foggy, but I thought the overwhelming reason we were TOLD we should invade Iraq was Saddam has WMD and someone, somehow is going to use those weapons against us very soon."

Possesion of WMD wasn't a legitimate reason to go to war.

If there was convincing evidence that
a. Saddam had these weapons, and
b. He had plans to either use them against us, or to sell them to a terrorist group who would use them against us.

There was (weak and partially invented) evidence of a.

There was no credible evidence of b.

Peter

[mike777]

1) If Afganistan is a civil war or multi tribal war then why are we there?

You suggest the Taliban may come back, that sounds like some form of a civil war, yes?

2) No evidence or poor evidence or made up evidence I think this is the reason most of Congress and the Public thought we went to war in Iraq.

[pbleighton]

"1) If Afganistan is a civil war or multi tribal war then why are we there?"

You suggest the Taliban may come back, that sounds like some form of a civil war, yes?"

It's not. It's a failed occupation

It's possible that a civil war could bereak out, however. If we really want to invade and occupy a country, and change its government, we should be prepared for the consequences. We weren't in Afghanistan, and weren't even more so in Iraq.

We could have just gone in after Bin Laden (I'm not saying that's right, but we could have), but we chose to try nation-building on the cheap. This was really stupid.

"2) No evidence or poor evidence or made up evidence I think this is the reason most of Congress and the Public thought we went to war in Iraq. "

Totally nonresponsive to my point.

Peter

[hrothgar]

I think that its important to differentiate between two different types of behaviour:

1. I will be the first to admit that the most of the Democrats in congress were spineless in their failure to oppose the Bush administration's reckless rush to war. I very much wish that more politicans showed the same courage as Russ Feingold, Bob Graham, Barbara Boxer, Lincoln Chafee, ... In their defense, it was perfectly clear that

(a) The American people were dealing with the 9-11 attack on an emotional level and not making logicial calculations
(B) The the Republican party was going out of its way to attack anyone who was question the great War on terror.

I don't think that Congress did the right thing.
I don't beleive that they were particularly competent.

2. In contrast, I believe that the behaviour of the Bush administration was downright criminal. Many senior members of the Bush administration came into office with a dream of using military force to reshape the Middle East. Within hours of the attack they were looking for ways to blame this on Iraq. They launched a massive propaganda campaign to hoodwink the American people into believing that

(a) Iraq was responsible for 9-11
(B) Iraq was on the verge of arming terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction

During the lead up to the war I felt that it was completely clear that the Bush administration was lying to the country about the need for this war. Over time more and more evidence has come out confirming this fact. From the Downing Streets Memo, to DoD study released last week, to Doug Feith's testimony a few days back... The evidence is piling up that the Bush administration manipulated data to justify invading Iraq. Hell... Look at recent issues of the Weekly Standard. Even they admit that the whole WMD scare was manufactured as a pretext for invasion.

Don't tell me that we can't fault Bush because he was forced to make a hard choice with insufficient data.

His administration chose to manipulate the information that was available

His administration shut down nuanced debate and prevented the open/honest discourse that might have stopped this disaster from happening

[mike777]

I hope I have never suggested we cannot blame or find fault with GWB.
My earlier posts here only suggested imho that I thought it was naive at best to expect much more in depth cultural thinking from our political leaders of other countries. If you expect more, so be it. .

[Al_U_Card]

An old scientific trick is to plot your data on a log-log scale. Almost everything becomes a "linear" relationship. Bush was itching to avenge his Dad and to retaliate for 9-11 and was ripe for "conversion" by the puppet-masters who talked him into being the "decider" (what a horrible joke that is).

Politicians want to get re-elected because they like having power and influence. I don't expect anything good from these people, but I expect that the watchdogs in place be allowed to operate and not be subverted by political pressure into kowtowing to the party line like the bad old days in Moscow.

Fox and CNN are getting more and more like Tass and Isvestia every day.

Habeas Corpus first....then freedom of the press....then elections????who knows?

[mycroft]

The quote has been for years - and years before the Terrorist Attack That Worked:

"Fox News. Because every Government needs their own Pravda."

I've heard it more recently as

"Fox News. Because every Government needs their own al-Jazeera."

It's cheaper to print delivered news than it is to do your own reporting, and you don't lose all that many readers; at least not enough to lose much advertising revenue. It's cheaper to snipe at people for social faults than to criticise their policies, and you actually *gain* readers that way.

Integrity? I've heard of that word. Don't know what it means, though. Something about "staying bought"?

Michael.

[jtfanclub]

hrothgar, on Feb 13 2007, 10:40 AM, said:

1. I will be the first to admit that the most of the Democrats in congress were spineless in their failure to oppose the Bush administration's reckless rush to war.

I don't agree...the Democrats approved a resolution saying that if Bush decided to go to war, that they would support him. Many Democrats at the time thought this was just a bargaining tool, a way of forcing Saddam to allow complete and full inspections. I don't think they seriously expected him to go to war with it instead, and once he did, they were trapped.

I think showing that level of faith in your President should not be a flaw, not when he's shown no duplicity so far. If I hire a security guard with good qualifications, and I give him a gun so that he can do his job, and he ends up shooting four passers-by, two employees, and a doggie in the window, is it my fault because I armed him?

[Winstonm]

Quote

Do you suggest we should never go to war and try and win in afghanistan? We should treat it as a police crime...
1) Kobar towers
2) Yeman ship bombing
3) Kenya Embassy bombing
4) etc./

At what point do you think we should go to war,...how many dead?

1 Please do not assume I do endorse Iraq
2) Please do not assume I auto endorse Afghanistan today.

I suggest we rarely go to war and mostly in a defensive role; I do not accept the preemptive strike as a defensive measure - it is too easy to be wrong, mistaken, lied to, etc. If the U.S. is attacked by another country or one of our allies is attacked by another country I could justify war.

I do not support the initial invasion of Afghanistan nor Iraq. In Afghanistan, the reported problem was that the Taliban were harboring Osama bin Laden after 9-11.
The Taliban asked for proof of bin Laden's complicity before they would turn him over, although this may have been nothing but a stall tactic. It is my belief that what should have occured is that a strategic unit should have been sent into Afghanistan to find and arrest/kill bin Laden - then if Afghanistan resisted this force, we would have been justified in defending ourselves against the Taliban, as it would then have been obvious that the Taliban were no only harboring but defending bin Laden and preventing his capture.

It is obvious that there are enemies of the U.S. who object strongly to our presense in certain areas - the embassy bombings, the bombing of our ship, the attacks against the WTC twice - these are real events. However, they are not acts of war - they are the tactics of terror.

The way to fight terrorist to to arrest/eliminate the terrorists - not countries.

At least that is how I view it.

[mike777]

What you suggest sure sounds like War, send warriors to attack a base deep inside another country against hundreds if not thousands of well trained terriosts? Just how many thousands are you planning on sending?

[pbleighton]

"What you suggest sure sounds like War, send warriors to attack a base deep inside another country against hundreds if not thousands of well trained terriosts? Just how many thousands are you planning on sending?"

Who is this addressed to, Mike?

Peter

[Winstonm]

mike777, on Feb 13 2007, 07:44 PM, said:

What you suggest sure sounds like War, send warriors to attack a base deep inside another country against hundreds if not thousands of well trained terriosts? Just how many thousands are you planning on sending?

The size of the force sent would depend on the size of the terrorist cell around bin Laden. I doubt this to be anywhere near 1000. The point being is the conflict would be between the one harmed (the U.S.) and the ones who caused harm (bin Laden and the terrorists). Only if the Taliban had forcefully resisted this atempt at justice should they have been targeted. When qaddifi targeted the U.S., Clinton ordered a strike on qaddifi and the presedential palace - was that war?

It is interesting to notice how with the U.S. expansion of war the size of enemy has increased. It began with one man: get bin Laden after 9-11. Then it expanded to a group: get the Taliban for harboring bin Laden. It grew again to a country: get the radical Islamists and WMD in Iraq. And now it is a global war: get the terrorists who hate our freedom, no matter where they hide, as we bomb in Africa and rattle sabers toward Iran.