shereads
Sloganless
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2003
- Posts
- 19,242
Oldnot, I admire your calm way of debating. That out of the way, you are wrong, wrong, wrong, liar-liar-pants-on-fire!
Specifically:
Your assumption that I prefer pacifism over inaction is wrong. On Afghanistan, for example, I'm not anti-war but anti-waste. I think it's tragic that Bush chose that moment to go after Saddam, diverting resources from Afghanistan long before we had completed the task there. It may be that he has Osama stashed in a cave someplace for a pre-election surprise, but meanwhile the few press that stayed to cover the less-than-fashionable war (it's so last-season!) are seeing a resurgence of goodwill toward the Taliban among people embittered by the U.S.' failure to rebuild.
I favored the U.S. intervention in Bosnia, and Bill Clinton's use of diplomacy to achieve a united effort there. I would favor a similar intervention in Sudan.
I'd have favored the invasion of Iraq if I had believed for one moment Bush's claims that Saddam was implicated in 9/11 and was preparing for an imminent strike against us or our allies. I don't happen to like the idea of being nuked any more than you do; the difference is, I knew he was lying. Cheney's Iraq agenda was a poorly kept secret, and that knowledge combined with Bush's speechwriters suddenly droppiing Osama's name and replacing it with Saddam's was a less-than-subtle clue that these people were manipulating the biggest tragedy of our time to achieve a political purpose.
You're also wrong in the assumption that the right wing is always more willing to fight than the left. Witness the Republican reaction to Clinton's Bosnia intervention.
Clinton was heaped with scorn by the same party leaders who now accuse Bush's critics of endangering the troops and givng comfort to our enemies. Was it Trent Lott or Gingrich who said - while we had troops on the ground in Bosnia - that Clinton wasn't "morally fit to be commander in chief?" Rumsfeld told Newsweek that Clinton shoud have negotiated with Milosovich rather than intervene militarily. Bush/Cheney peppered their campaign speeches with accusations that Clinton risked American lives and wasted our resources on "nation-building exercises."
I feel proud of what we accomplished in Bosnia. I wish we had done more in Somalia, and I'm afraid we'll do nothing in Sudan. By Republican criteria, Bosnia was a war of choice because Milosovech wasn't a threat to the U.S. (It may or may not be significant that Bosnia didn't have anything we wanted.)
Yet Bush ignored moderates in his own camp who insisted that Saddam was, at worst, a contained threat. Remebering the reluctance of the right to get involved in Bosnia, I was amazed at Bush's performance when he whipped out Plan B: the reason we went into Iraq (after the failure to find WMD or establish a link with 9/11) was out of compassion for the oppressed people of Iraq. One has to wonder what the essential difference is between a mass grave in Bosnia and one in Iraq that makes the former of negligible importance and the latter a matter of such importance, it justifies leaving Afganistan unfinished - and taking resources away from the search for Bin Laden.
You can argue that we should have invaded Iraq rather than let Saddam make fools of us, but by doing so we allowed Bin Laden to do precisely that. The timing could not have been worse, which is why they had to make us believe there were mushroom clouds on the horizon. You haven't denied that it was a war of choice, in which case you must admit that the $200+ billion was urgently needed elsewhere after 9/11: to secure our borders, finish what we said we'd do in Afghanistan, and bring to justice the one man whose defeat would have brought a degree of closure to the families of 9/11.
I think the War on Terror is a fancy phrase for "give me carte blanche in the middle east and allow me to suspend certain privacy rights and other freedoms you've taken for granted." War powers cannot have been intended to be given to a president whose "war" was against an enemy without borders or an identity. To pretend that such a war is winnable - and we're assured that we'll have all of our civil liberties back just as soon as the war is over - is no different than saying we can win a war on hatred, a war on revenge, a war on misplaced religious fervor.
That's what I meant when I said that Bush had recruited new terrorists. He gave them an honor that no number of murders could have, when he proclaimed the so-called War on Terror. Instead of murderers they are an army of warriors, just as Osama would have them believe. Every 14-year-old Arab boy who hates the Jews and the U.S. and wants to be a hero has now been given Osama as a role model, not by his actions but by the words of his opponent.
Terrorism isn't an army that can be defeated, and to treat it as such is exactly the kind of simplistic hype that has Karl Rove promotes so well. If we had reacted quietly and intelligently after 9/11, we might have accomplished some things without giving Osama what he wanted: a hostile presence on the oil fields of iraq, to make his worst accusations about us come true.
Do you really believe there was no other way to react to 9/11 than this? Do you believe we'd have focused on Saddam and told the American people that going after him was our best response, if Bush/Cheney hadn't already wanted this war? Have you read Richard Clarke's account of the days after 9/11? It will make you a Democrat, or a Naderite, or maybe just an anti-Bush Republican, but you won't walk away from that book with any respect for these people. And don't give me the old saw about how Clarke is just bitter about being demoted; the picture he paints of the Bush White House is no different than in the other books by former Bush insiders.
Terrorism is a virus that lay dormant in most of the human race, and even in most of Islam, until Bush let Osama Bin Laden play him like a puppet.
Specifically:
Your assumption that I prefer pacifism over inaction is wrong. On Afghanistan, for example, I'm not anti-war but anti-waste. I think it's tragic that Bush chose that moment to go after Saddam, diverting resources from Afghanistan long before we had completed the task there. It may be that he has Osama stashed in a cave someplace for a pre-election surprise, but meanwhile the few press that stayed to cover the less-than-fashionable war (it's so last-season!) are seeing a resurgence of goodwill toward the Taliban among people embittered by the U.S.' failure to rebuild.
I favored the U.S. intervention in Bosnia, and Bill Clinton's use of diplomacy to achieve a united effort there. I would favor a similar intervention in Sudan.
I'd have favored the invasion of Iraq if I had believed for one moment Bush's claims that Saddam was implicated in 9/11 and was preparing for an imminent strike against us or our allies. I don't happen to like the idea of being nuked any more than you do; the difference is, I knew he was lying. Cheney's Iraq agenda was a poorly kept secret, and that knowledge combined with Bush's speechwriters suddenly droppiing Osama's name and replacing it with Saddam's was a less-than-subtle clue that these people were manipulating the biggest tragedy of our time to achieve a political purpose.
You're also wrong in the assumption that the right wing is always more willing to fight than the left. Witness the Republican reaction to Clinton's Bosnia intervention.
Clinton was heaped with scorn by the same party leaders who now accuse Bush's critics of endangering the troops and givng comfort to our enemies. Was it Trent Lott or Gingrich who said - while we had troops on the ground in Bosnia - that Clinton wasn't "morally fit to be commander in chief?" Rumsfeld told Newsweek that Clinton shoud have negotiated with Milosovich rather than intervene militarily. Bush/Cheney peppered their campaign speeches with accusations that Clinton risked American lives and wasted our resources on "nation-building exercises."
I feel proud of what we accomplished in Bosnia. I wish we had done more in Somalia, and I'm afraid we'll do nothing in Sudan. By Republican criteria, Bosnia was a war of choice because Milosovech wasn't a threat to the U.S. (It may or may not be significant that Bosnia didn't have anything we wanted.)
Yet Bush ignored moderates in his own camp who insisted that Saddam was, at worst, a contained threat. Remebering the reluctance of the right to get involved in Bosnia, I was amazed at Bush's performance when he whipped out Plan B: the reason we went into Iraq (after the failure to find WMD or establish a link with 9/11) was out of compassion for the oppressed people of Iraq. One has to wonder what the essential difference is between a mass grave in Bosnia and one in Iraq that makes the former of negligible importance and the latter a matter of such importance, it justifies leaving Afganistan unfinished - and taking resources away from the search for Bin Laden.
You can argue that we should have invaded Iraq rather than let Saddam make fools of us, but by doing so we allowed Bin Laden to do precisely that. The timing could not have been worse, which is why they had to make us believe there were mushroom clouds on the horizon. You haven't denied that it was a war of choice, in which case you must admit that the $200+ billion was urgently needed elsewhere after 9/11: to secure our borders, finish what we said we'd do in Afghanistan, and bring to justice the one man whose defeat would have brought a degree of closure to the families of 9/11.
I think the War on Terror is a fancy phrase for "give me carte blanche in the middle east and allow me to suspend certain privacy rights and other freedoms you've taken for granted." War powers cannot have been intended to be given to a president whose "war" was against an enemy without borders or an identity. To pretend that such a war is winnable - and we're assured that we'll have all of our civil liberties back just as soon as the war is over - is no different than saying we can win a war on hatred, a war on revenge, a war on misplaced religious fervor.
That's what I meant when I said that Bush had recruited new terrorists. He gave them an honor that no number of murders could have, when he proclaimed the so-called War on Terror. Instead of murderers they are an army of warriors, just as Osama would have them believe. Every 14-year-old Arab boy who hates the Jews and the U.S. and wants to be a hero has now been given Osama as a role model, not by his actions but by the words of his opponent.
Terrorism isn't an army that can be defeated, and to treat it as such is exactly the kind of simplistic hype that has Karl Rove promotes so well. If we had reacted quietly and intelligently after 9/11, we might have accomplished some things without giving Osama what he wanted: a hostile presence on the oil fields of iraq, to make his worst accusations about us come true.
Do you really believe there was no other way to react to 9/11 than this? Do you believe we'd have focused on Saddam and told the American people that going after him was our best response, if Bush/Cheney hadn't already wanted this war? Have you read Richard Clarke's account of the days after 9/11? It will make you a Democrat, or a Naderite, or maybe just an anti-Bush Republican, but you won't walk away from that book with any respect for these people. And don't give me the old saw about how Clarke is just bitter about being demoted; the picture he paints of the Bush White House is no different than in the other books by former Bush insiders.
Terrorism is a virus that lay dormant in most of the human race, and even in most of Islam, until Bush let Osama Bin Laden play him like a puppet.
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