Why Kerry doesn't deserve your vote

[Belegon]

completely unqualified agreement: COBRA is a bitch and way too costly. Kaiser has a plan they offer that is just as good normally and half as expensive. downside, high copays and deductibles. upside, coverage against disaster.

 

[Belegon]

Originally posted by shereads
Now I agree with my bosses nine times out of ten.

Which means no opposing ideas and no chance to spot the problems in the plan before it is enacted.


The other companies went out of business anyway


and it is highly likely that the second had a lot to do with the first...

 

[cantdog]

When I went to work for the Bookstore, they said they really meant it about suggestions from the rank and file. They said the record proved that you miss out on a pile of good ideas if the people doing the actual work are inhibited from telling people what needs to be done to make things easier and smoother.

I was there five years, and during that time the "open door" closed right off. We had a silly ass suggestion box and the alcoholic who ran the store made such a scene about anything that was in there, no one in their right mind would use the thing.

So they lost out, as their corporate culture became more and more top-down, shut-up-and-do-what-they-tell-you.


cantdog

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I wouldn’t trivialize the whole matter quite so quickly. The original charge about Kerry’s missing a crucial vote turns out to be a bit of engineered skullduggery by the opposition aimed at damaging perceptions of his character. Now that it’s been exposed for what it is, I don’t hear any retractions or explanations from the other side; any apologies for the usual irresponsible and ubiquitous Karl Rove-style character assassination.

The discussion about Kerry’s protesting the war and mentioning atrocities is rather critical to the way we understand his character. Was he a traitor selling out his government just so he could make some headlines? Or was he a man of such character that he had the courage to stand up for his own beliefs and try and stop a wrong and immoral war?

I thought that it was essential to understand his actions in the context of that war and the general zeitgeist. I was afraid that, in light of what’s happened in Abu Ghraib, it would be natural to think of the “atrocities” Kerry had mentioned as comprising comparatively minor cases of abuse and disrespect of human rights as we saw in Iraq. I thought it was important to remind people of the enormity of those atrocities in Viet Nam, that they were not trivial, and that the barbarism of the war was infecting not only everything back home, but the soldiers who were fighting in it too.

I chose that article simply because Somme had posted a link to it on another thread, so it was there at hand. Of course it had a bias. However, if you think that his bias invalidates his information, or that the author of that piece is so lacking in integrity that he's just prevaricating or lying and making things up out of whole cloth, well, then I suppose there’s nothing anyone can say that would change your mind.

---dr.M.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Re: Kerry deserving votes

[Without the bomb, it would have been messy. So why ban the bomb? It's kept us out of war so far...

Does this make sense?


cantdog

Sure it does. It was policy. It even had a name: MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.

However, while the Russians seemed like fairly reasonable fellows, I'm not so sure about Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran. And since we've unilaterally broken the nuclear weapons test ban treaty, we've kind of lost the moral edge to keep the weapons from spreading. It's kind of hard to go in and tell another country not to test when we've pulled out of the treaty and decided to start testing ourselves.

---dr.M.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

[No message]

 

[shereads]

Originally posted by shereads
Now I agree with my bosses nine times out of ten.

Which means no opposing ideas and no chance to spot the problems in the plan before it is enacted.


The other companies went out of business anyway


and it is highly likely that the second had a lot to do with the first...

Absolutely, B. The corporate world is so bloated with middle-managers of such mediocrity that creativity terrifies them. They need independent thinkers to make their departments function productively. But it frightens them, because any deviation from the status quo presents a challenge.

Before I decided to sit back and ride the ride to its conclusion instead of making myself ill with frustration, I had this conversation at two different companies, on two different topics. In nearly these exact words:

"We'd have more quality control if we did this ourselves."

"Yes, but then it would be our fault if something went wrong."

I eventually caught on that the job description of many people in large companies is, "Stay under the radar." The goal is to survive by not calling attention to themselves. They can't make positive changes because they risk failure.

It's a strategy that works well during a strong economy, because it's easier for companies to keep the weak links in the chain than to locate them and make the chain stronger. (Pardon me while I mix up this metaphor.) There are so many chains that it's barely a blip on the radar when one department of one division of a multi-national becomes unprofitable or even loses money for a few years. b. (The radar being quarterly revenues.)

In lean times, everyone associated with a weak link is likely to get the axe - I'm speaking of big, multi-office corporations where the ultimate decision-makers are so far removed from what's happening at the middle-management level that they have no idea why Department X's numbers went south. And who's going to explain it to them? And do they ask? No, they add a new inefficiency to the old one: replacing entire segments of the division with brand new people who have no clue.

At my most recent closed company - a local office of a New York firm that was bought by a British firm that was bought by a French firm - we went from thirty employees to four (and one new boss) in less than two years, and spent the next eighteen months with virtually nothing to do. The four of us went out and got a client, for which our new boss got credit, but the client's billings barely covered his salary.

He didn't speak English, you see, and at least half of our clients didn't speak his language, so in effect we had no boss. He was given the Miami office as a reward by somebody in the original company, because he wanted to retire in the U.S. By the time the global corporation noticed that our office had gone from highly profitable to losing money, he had his permanent work visa. They took our account, gave it to a larger office in another state, canned the four people who had kept the office going, and he retired in Coral Gables.



You see now why I don't care so much anymore?

I saw a book promoted on the Today Show last week called, "Fire Your Boss." The premise is that there is no longer a corporate mindset that rewards employees who come in early, work overtime and offer unsolicited ideas to improve products and procedures. Statistically, according to this author, corporations fire or retain employees at the same salary level/job description pretty much without regard to measurable job performance. The idea of "firing your boss" refers to staying on the job but thinking of it as just that: a job. The fulfillment we used to look for from a career needs to be found in our lives outside the office, and we need to stop thinking of our fates as being bound together with our supervisors.

I blame the system that makes a company's stock profitable, which is all about short-term goals and rewards. When the measure of a manager's success is based on meeting quarterly revenue goals, a long-term view is never likely to be rewarded. Things like employee retention and training programs carry a cost in the short-term that might not affect the numbers in a positive way for several years. The smarter managers figure out quickly that the required behavior will eventually backfire. So their goal becomes to make the numbers look good for a year or two (even if it means bringing in new clients by promising things they can't deliver) and then request promotion or transfer to another office. The people they leave behind will then appear to have failed once their manager was gone.

I feel better now that I don't care very much about anything except doing my personal almost-best.

 

[shereads]

Oops. For a moment, I thought I was in the Why You Shouldn't Kill Yourself Over Your Job thread. Sorry.

<<performs Unhijacking Ritual and returns thread to its original topic>>

Where were we?

Homer the baby squirrel! Now I remember...Whatever happened to Homer?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I wouldn’t trivialize the whole matter quite so quickly. The original charge about Kerry’s missing a crucial vote turns out to be a bit of engineered skullduggery by the opposition aimed at damaging perceptions of his character. Now that it’s been exposed for what it is, I don’t hear any retractions or explanations from the other side; any apologies for the usual irresponsible and ubiquitous Karl Rove-style character assassination.

The discussion about Kerry’s protesting the war and mentioning atrocities is rather critical to the way we understand his character. Was he a traitor selling out his government just so he could make some headlines? Or was he a man of such character that he had the courage to stand up for his own beliefs and try and stop a wrong and immoral war?

I thought that it was essential to understand his actions in the context of that war and the general zeitgeist. I was afraid that, in light of what’s happened in Abu Ghraib, it would be natural to think of the “atrocities” Kerry had mentioned as comprising comparatively minor cases of abuse and disrespect of human rights as we saw in Iraq. I thought it was important to remind people of the enormity of those atrocities in Viet Nam, that they were not trivial, and that the barbarism of the war was infecting not only everything back home, but the soldiers who were fighting in it too.

I chose that article simply because Somme had posted a link to it on another thread, so it was there at hand. Of course it had a bias. However, if you think that his bias invalidates his information, or that the author of that piece is so lacking in integrity that he's just prevaricating or lying and making things up out of whole cloth, well, then I suppose there’s nothing anyone can say that would change your mind.

---dr.M.

I will return to this only because I majored in history and it's important to me. Feel free to ignore this Raphy

Biase in a piece is not only accepted in historical disscussion, it's almost demanded. In fact, having an axe to grind can be a very good thing for you, if you are successful enough in grinding it to have your interpretation recieve some formal acceptance.

Interpretation of the facts is what makes history fun and leads to different schools of thought. It's 90% of what being a historian is about. Not so much remembering facts and figures as trying to place those facts and figures into a mosaic that explains why something occured.

History, very much like journalism, is based up on trust. We trust each other to be careful with the facts. Most historians, when we read a monograph, don't go out to the local library and check each footnote and cross check facts. We presume the author knows proper methodology and is going to be intellectually forthright.

In historian circles, your very ability to present is based on your reputation. Get caught in an intellectual lie just once and no reputable journal will ever publish you again. It isn't as draconian as it sounds, it's a matter of neccissity. Most of the good journals can't employ a staff of thousands to check behind every contributor's facts. It's very much a one strike you're out deal.

Many of the books mass marketed as history are written by such pharriahs, because publishing houses just want to make a buck and the average joe who picks up a book on history is usually not so into it that he wants to go digging through archives to check facts, he just wants to know more.

Journalism is far less stringent. The idea there is plausiblie deniability and abscense of malice. Screw up in a grand way and you might even get your own talk show. It's all about the money and while a reputation helps, practically any crumb-bum can get published as long as his tripe sells papers or air time or whatever.

Having a biase when you write is almost a must. Totally objective presentations of fact are not only few and far between, they are pretty dry. It is accepted that when you have a biase you present the facts that support it more strenuously than those that do not. What is not acceptable is to make up the facts or alter them to fit your purpose. This author did just that, altering the wording in the facts to make the facts fit his agenda, rather than altering his agenda to fit the facts.

Can I characterize his interviews as blatant falsehoods or ruinouly altered? No. Can anyone here (who isn't prepared to do a mass of searching for cobboration that is independant of this wirter) say with any certainty that they are not blatant falsehoods. Again the answer is no.

Would you buy a car from a man you knew would lie through his teeth to you sight unseen? If you would you are at the least not a very critical thinker, at worst gullible enough to have people interest you in some waterfront proprerty in death valley.

The exact same skeptisism must be applied here. I know the author is prepared to alter the words to fit his agenda. What evidence is there that I should accept his interviews as verbatim or even as havng been done in the first place? There are no grounds for accepting them, there are grounds for doubting their veracity.

I don't expect Doc to go out and support this writer's work with independant information. His point is well made and no one is argueing that the nature of atrocities in vietnam warrant the word atrocity and were horrific. His point was strong enough to be made insptie of the article rather than because of it.

I don't expect it to make much difference to the majority of you here, the author's agenda is represenative of the majority opinion here at the lit forums. So his playing hard and fast with the facts dosen't really cause any consternation. Perhaps I am just showing my history-nerdness. In any event I have belaored the issue long enough. Take from it what you will or trash the whole thing as me being nitpicky.

-Colly

 

[raphy]

I used to do that too. Unemployment was a bitch, though, what with COBRA costing $400 a month. Now I agree with my bosses nine times out of ten. The other companies went out of business anyway, and if this one bites the dust I at least won't have an ulcer.

In any job-security shootout between a Straight Shooter and a Team Player, you know who to bet on, right?

We are heading off the subject somewhat here, don'tcha think?

And as much as I do agree with Belegon's statement, that wasn't exactly what I was saying in the post I wrote that spurred his post.

I wasn't necessarily talking about 'saying it how it is' or being a 'straight shooter'

I was talking about cutting through the extraneous bullshit that always surrounds arguments. Digging down to find the 'real' argument and thrashing that out, without being distracted by all the rest of the crap.

Arguments are usually based on one single pivotal point. The problem is, not enough people ever take the time to find out what the opposing person's pivotal point actually is.

I'd rather cut through the crap, get straight to the pivotal point and deal with that. The rest of the bullshit can fall as it may.

In this example - I asked specific questions of Colly until I found out exactly what her pivotal point about that article was.

It wasn't that she disagreed with the existence of atrocities in Vietnam. It was purely and simply that the article reported witness statements in a flawed way.

Now, I think that's a pretty small thing to get worked up about, considering that there are dozens of other more acceptibly accurate sources, but Colly's the history geek and I suppose it's the principle of the thing, rather than the message.

Me, I try not to get hung up on principles like that. I find that it distracts one from the real issues at hand.

 

[raphy]

The exact same skeptisism must be applied here. I know the author is prepared to alter the words to fit his agenda. What evidence is there that I should accept his interviews as verbatim or even as havng been done in the first place? There are no grounds for accepting them, there are grounds for doubting their veracity.

Then don't accept them. You don't need to. I imagine that there's lots of other sources that are not flawed that give the same message.

I think, Colly, the reason why I was wondering why you were making such a fuss about it was this:

This is going to be a poor analogy, but bear with me.

You have 10 men. Each one is saying the sky is blue. One of those 10 men you know to be a liar. You're pointing your fingers at him and shouting 'Liar, liar, he doesn't prove the sky is blue.'

When really, it's unimportant what he says, because you have 9 other men there, who you know to be NOT liars also saying the sky is blue.

You see, whether that 1 man was lying or not doesn't change what the 9 other truthful men are saying. If I was you, I'd just ignore the liar. he's of no consequence when it comes to determining what color the sky is.

And that's the real issue. Not whether the guy is a liar, or whether the 9 men have aligned themselves with a liar, but in my head, the real issue, after you've cut through all the prevarication and smokescreen stuff is - What color is the sky?

 

[Wildcard Ky]

Yes, we beat the snot out of Saddam and his regime. They are defeated. We won. But as I said before, having won, we no longer have a real objective or definition of "winning", which is exactly what happened in Vietnam, and which is exactly why this is now a quagmire. We could use our overwhelming military power to reduce Baghdad and Falluja and Basra and the rest of Iraq to rubble. We could kill tens of millions of Iraqis, and we could destroy every mosque in the country. Would that constitute victory? Would we be safer? Would the world?

That's the trouble, you see. Having the most powerful military in the world just isn't enough anymore. War is no longer that simple.

I'm not interested in how throughly we beat Saddam's regime, because again, you are absolutely right in that we routed them. But the war isn't over and the enemy we face now is one we have no way to defeat. We need to get the soldiers out because the job they are being asked to do is impossible.

As to the Saudis, there too we are up shit creek. We need a national energy policy and we need it now. We need to treat our reliance on Middle-Eastern oil the same way we responded to the realization that Hitler was trying to develop nuclear weapons. We need a Manhattan Project to develop alternate energy sources. And we need to stop selling the Saudis our advanced military technology (the reason the Saudi government buys so much of it is because they know they are hated throughout the Arab world, and by many of their own citizens), because if Saudi Arabia implodes as it well might, our solders in Iraq might well be facing American weapons rather than the old Soviet junk that Saddam had.

The government of Iran was our ally too, just like the government of Saudi Arabia. Look where that got us.

I agree 100% that this has become a quagmire. It has all the early makings of another Vietnam. Unless someone gets a plan on how to effectively handle and end it, another Vietnam is exactly what we will have.

I must make one big disagreement with you though. You said that we need to pull our troops out now. IMO that is the absolute worst thing that we could do. Once again we would be tucking tail and running as soon as things didn't go our way. We've been doing that for the last 30 years and look where it has gotten us. If we pull out our troops groups like Al Queda will become even bolder in their attacks. They will once again have evidence that we don't have the stomach for a fight. We need to stay the course and eradicate them. We have a way to defeat the enemy we now face. We simply must be willing to follow through with it. We aren't willing to do that. We can use our vastly superior military to root out these people where ever they are. We aren't doing it. If they are in a Mosque, they are completely safe. Our troops can't even fire a rifle at a Mosque.

Should we flatten every Mosque? Of course not. However if our troops are taking heavy fire from a Mosque, they should be able to do SOMETHING about it.

Saudi presents a quandry. They are one of our few allies in the region. The government works with our government. If, as you suggest, we stop selling them weapons, how much more fragile will Saudi become? Chances are without our support, the Saudi government will fall. Is that what you want? Saudi really is a catch 22. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Saudi will continue to produce terrorists, but we can't afford to let the government fall either.

Yes we need a big time program to develop alternate energy sources, but that is it's own political monster of a thread.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

Re: Kerry deserving votes

Hightower

I ran across a little thing for this thread, and came back, but having read a few more pages, I now see the thread is about something else.

Not complaining, just needed to reorient. Wanna talk nuclear war? I had a thought about it not long ago...

It seems to me that the existence of The Bomb and also The Cold War, between them, probably prevented world war three several times over.

No one could posit a big war going to its end, one of the blocs about to lose, and then be sure that the loser wouldn't shift ground and turn it into a nuclear firebath, since they were cooked anyhow. If they didn't do it before that. And since that scenario was unacceptable, people went out of their way to prevent war in the first place, for better than thirty years.

Without the bomb, it would have been messy. So why ban the bomb? It's kept us out of war so far...

Does this make sense?


cantdog

It was a concept called MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. Both us and the Soviet Union knew full well that both sides would be destroyed. That is why a shot was never fired. While many people protested these weapons during the cold war, they truly kept the peace.

In todays climate, I'm not so sure MAD applies anymore. Al Queda can't lose a Nuclear war. They are incapable of being destroyed in a Nuclear blast because they don't have a defined geographic area to defend. They scattered about in other peoples countries.

N. Korea, Pakistan or any other organized govt won't use Nukes because they know that they will lose everything. Terrorist groups have nothing to lose by using a nuke.

I heard a quote somewhere, but I can't remember who said it. It went something like this:

I'm not afraid of a world full of nuclear weapons, I'm afraid of the one man that's crazy enough to use one nuclear weapon.

I think there's a whole lot of truth in those words.

 

[raphy]

I must make one big disagreement with you though. You said that we need to pull our troops out now. IMO that is the absolute worst thing that we could do. Once again we would be tucking tail and running as soon as things didn't go our way. We've been doing that for the last 30 years and look where it has gotten us. If we pull out our troops groups like Al Queda will become even bolder in their attacks. They will once again have evidence that we don't have the stomach for a fight. We need to stay the course and eradicate them. We have a way to defeat the enemy we now face. We simply must be willing to follow through with it. We aren't willing to do that. We can use our vastly superior military to root out these people where ever they are. We aren't doing it. If they are in a Mosque, they are completely safe. Our troops can't even fire a rifle at a Mosque.

That statement about the Mosque got refuted earlier in this thread. Someone make up their mind about whether that's true or not.

And far be it for me to actually enter the debate proper, but I had to comment on this part:

We simply must be willing to follow through with it. We aren't willing to do that. We can use our vastly superior military to root out these people where ever they are. We aren't doing it.

Who exactly do you mean by 'these people'? The terrorists? Kill them, and breed more terrorists?

Remember, you can't fight an ideal with a bullet.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

That statement about the Mosque got refuted earlier in this thread. Someone make up their mind about whether that's true or not.

And far be it for me to actually enter the debate proper, but I had to comment on this part:


Who exactly do you mean by 'these people'? The terrorists? Kill them, and breed more terrorists?

Remember, you can't fight an ideal with a bullet.

"these people" are the insurgents, terrorists or what ever one wants to call them that we are fighting in Iraq right now. Yes, kill them. Eradicate them. Treat them like the vermin that they are.

You can fight an ideal with a bullet. We fought the axis ideals with bullets in WW2. Japanese imperialism, the Kamikazee and the like were defeated with a bullet. The bullet wins the war. The fruits of winning the war usually take a generation to develop. Look at Germany and Japan by the mid 60's. We defeated them in the mid 40's. We stayed the course in seeing things through after the defeat. We installed a democratic government in both places. We kept forces in place. By the mid 60's both became prosperous democratic societies.

What's the difference? We eradicated those that would try to start any form of insurrection. We were willing to stay the course and do what was necessary to ensure societal change. We don't do that anymore. Societal change doesn't happen quickly anywhere. It always takes a generation. Look at the U.S. The government decided in the 50's to end segregation. It took a generation for that to be accepted. Places like Mississippi were changed, but it took a generation.

From Vietnam up until now, we go into a military action hot and heavy, then we look to get out as quickly as possible. The reality is things don't work that way. After the "war" is won, then comes the long battle of changing the society.

 

[raphy]

"these people" are the insurgents, terrorists or what ever one wants to call them that we are fighting in Iraq right now. Yes, kill them. Eradicate them. Treat them like the vermin that they are.

You can fight an ideal with a bullet. We fought the axis ideals with bullets in WW2. Japanese imperialism, the Kamikazee and the like were defeated with a bullet. The bullet wins the war. The fruits of winning the war usually take a generation to develop. Look at Germany and Japan by the mid 60's. We defeated them in the mid 40's. We stayed the course in seeing things through after the defeat. We installed a democratic government in both places. We kept forces in place. By the mid 60's both became prosperous democratic societies.

What's the difference? We eradicated those that would try to start any form of insurrection. We were willing to stay the course and do what was necessary to ensure societal change. We don't do that anymore. Societal change doesn't happen quickly anywhere. It always takes a generation. Look at the U.S. The government decided in the 50's to end segregation. It took a generation for that to be accepted. Places like Mississippi were changed, but it took a generation.

From Vietnam up until now, we go into a military action hot and heavy, then we look to get out as quickly as possible. The reality is things don't work that way. After the "war" is won, then comes the long battle of changing the society.

The difference? WW2 was a war. Hitler was motivated by dreams of conquest, not by blind hatred of the west, per se. You can win a war with a bullet, but you can't stamp out ideals... Unless you want to kill every single person that holds that ideal true?

You really think it's possible to kill every single arab that hates America and the west?

And remember, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

edited to add: There are subtle, but important differences between WWII and what's happening in Iraq. The fight in world war two was against a country. The fight in the middle east is against terrorists, not specifically Iraq.

Our beef is with the terrorists who caused the tragedy on 9/11, not with the the standing army of Iraq. And fighting terrorists is like trying to nail jello to the wall.

 

[shereads]

We need to stay the course and eradicate them.

Nooooooo, not STC! Can't we at least ALTER the course? Jesus, guys. If you're about to have a head-on collision with a train, do you stay the course?

Saudi presents a quandry. They are one of our few allies in the region. The government works with our government. If, as you suggest, we stop selling them weapons, how much more fragile will Saudi become? Chances are without our support, the Saudi government will fall. Is that what you want? Saudi really is a catch 22. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Saudi will continue to produce terrorists, but we can't afford to let the government fall either.

Wild, the governments who have been our allies over there either turned on us - as the Saudis will when their own people put enough heat on them - or they've been toppled by people who hated us for supporting dictators. The Shah of Iran was our boy, so when they got rid of him they hated us. Saddam was our boy, which means we had no credibility when we criticized him for using weapons we helped him acquire. Palestine has nuclear weapons because Reagan knew they were acquiring the materials and hid it from Congress so that mandatory economic sanctions wouldn't kick in, depriving Reagan of a source of funds for the people who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan - who turned into the Taliban. We can't win by doing the wrong thing and then proclaim ourselves to be the Bringers of Democracy.

Consider the long-term consequences of some of these alliances: The government of Pakistan is friendly to the U.S. They have nuclear weapons, in part thanks to an earlier administration who could have stopped them but wanted the alliance. Their people increasingly distrust the U.S. since we invaded Iraq; nukes in the hands of frightened people, if their U.S.-friendly government falls, is not the stuff they write Hallmark cards about. But that's just one strand of the web. We couldn't even raise an objection when their science minister confessed to having sold nuclear technology to U.S. enemies over the course of a decade - and received only a stern scolding from his superiors.

Being exposed as hypocrites when we're trying to earn the trust of people whose cities we bombed is not helpful. If there were even an honorable explanation, it might be doable, but the truth is too self-serving and too much of a contrast with who we say we are. At some point, we should try being the good guys in a consistent way, and maybe years from now we'll be hated less and will simplify our lives a bit.

Letting the Saudi royal family dance us around like puppets while we help finance their oppression of their people has obvious dangers, and so does the alternative. But what would you do if it could be proven that people in the Saudi elite were directly connected with 9/ll? Not just what we already know, which is that contributions were made to a charity that turned out to be a terrorist organization with links to Al Queda; what if we knew that some of the Saudi royals or the "good" Bin Ladens were guilty of a conspiracy that led to 9/ll? Would we let it go because we need these people as our allies?

Is it beyond credible that we chose not to take the investigation in that direction for political reasons? The Bush family and the Saudi royal family have been close business associates for decades. Did you know that a brother of Osama Bin Laden's was one of the investors in GWB's first company?

Of course anyone in the oil industry has ties in the middle east. But what makes all of this so bizarre is that nobody in the administration is on record even once as mentioning Saudi Arabia in the same discussion as 9/ll, despite the nationality of the hijackers. It would be only natural to say, "We've looked for a link there, and didn't find one," before changing the topic to Iraq.

When I read that article in Vanity Fair last year, the one that exposed the secret flights out of the country for dozens of Saudis (including a newphew of Bin Laden's who was being investigated by the FBI) I thought people would be irate about it, and would demand to know why so many people with links to Osama were not even interviewed while people from other Arab countries were detained indefinitely. Or course we couldn't jail our allies, but to let them leave so quickly and secretly, without interviews by the FBI? When the story came out, the only explanation was from Cheney who said, "The Saudis wanted to leave because they feared discrimination." Well, duh.

 

[shereads]

Look at Germany and Japan by the mid 60's. We defeated them in the mid 40's. We stayed the course in seeing things through after the defeat. We installed a democratic government in both places. We kept forces in place. By the mid 60's both became prosperous democratic societies.

Not even close to the same situation. In Germany and Japan, there were no feuding ethnic groups living within borders drawn by other countries, which is what exists in Iraq. They've been held together as a nation by the power of a dictatorship, not because the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Etceteras wanted to live under the same flag.

Additionally, we were prepared to rebuild those countries, for years in advance. We spent two years teaching GIs the language and culture before sending a them to occupy Germany or Japan - and when they did go, they were among people whose governments had officially surrendered.

Not a single Japanese citizen ever threatened an American G.I. Their emperor had surrendered, and culturally it would have been unthinkable to attack one of us.

In Germany and Japan, you had people who had been at war with us and our allies long enough to have at least pondered the consequences of losing. The Iraq invasion was a shock to more people than just Saddam and his henchmen. A lot of the people we're keeping prisoner over there are just men who took arms and fought alongside their country's military - because they were afraid of us, and didn't trust us.

 

[KenJames]

Our troops can't even fire a rifle at a Mosque.

Yes they can and they have!

If you're wrong about that, what else are you wrong about?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I have to come in here on Wildcard’s side, at least partially. Although I think the chances of Iraq forming any kind of working democracy (or anything even close) are zilch for the forseeable future, there’s no way we can just load up our shit and get out of Iraq now. You know: here’s your freedom; enjoy it. So long.

But I disagree with Card that the problem comes down to no more than zapping a bunch of badguys so that the goodguys can come out from under their beds and live in peace and harmony. You’ve got some really deep-seated factional hatreds there, and we’re making new badguys every day. What’s worse, you’ve got a population that, the longer we stay there, the more they hate us, so finally we’ll find ourselves in the position of trying to help people who hate our guts. There’s your Viet Nam analogy.

We should have more troops over there, if only to protect the ones who are already on the ground, but this isn’t a military problem anymore and there’s no military solution. It’s a human relations problem.

Our best chance is to get the UN involved. Or NATO. Or someone. I see that they’ve recently made overtures to the Arab League who turned them down flat, because no Arab government wants to be associated with the US now.

I want our guys out of there, and I’m trying to be positive and trying to see a way out of this, but every time I think about it I’m so overwhelmed with outrage that they didn’t know what they were getting into, that I end up railing about the administration.

I think what’ll probably happen is we’ll set up some figurehead and scram, and he’ll be deposed and all hell will break loose for a while, then some new Saddam will appear.

---dr.M.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

Nooooooo, not STC! Can't we at least ALTER the course? Jesus, guys. If you're about to have a head-on collision with a train, do you stay the course?

You're right, let me rephrase that. Get a plan, then stay the course. Staying the course with the status quo is foolish at best.

I still say that pulling out now would be the mistake of all though. It would simply embolden AQ and others like them even more. We've been pulling out of hot spots for 30+ years. It's obvious that tactic doesn't work. It only invites further aggression by those that would do us harm.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Regime change: Check
Saddam captured: Check
WMD rumors dealt with: Check
Iraq's army no longer a threat to anyone but each other: Check

Smells like victory to me. Time to jump into the old Abrams and get the hell out of dodge before Shite, Sunni and Kurd start killing each other with reckless abandon. No need to hang around here & give em a foerign invader to waste that ammo on.

You can't make them like each other. You can't make them respect each other. The only way to make them tolerate each other is to be a bloody handed bastard like Saddam.

You can't enforce democracy on a people where one of the most basic tenets of any democracy, the guy across the street has the same rights you do, even if he is an evil infidel who worships allah the wrong way, is incomprehensible to them. Western style democracy is a hell of a lot like Guiness Extra Stout. It's an aquired taste. You have to get used to it. You have to experience it, at least in my case several times, before you begin to appreciate it.

Following my very juvenile little analogy, Arabs are drinking natural light. (what do natural light and sex in a canoe have in common? They are both fucking close to water.)We are pouring them up a big ole fashwasher of Guniess at room temperature and saying here guys, have a beer! It is any wonder they are choking?

I say lets do as one shepard said to the other and get the flock outta here. If Democracy is the governmental form they want and if it is the one they desire, then they will have to grow into it. If it isn't what they want or desire who the hell are we or anyone else to tell them how they shouold run their country?

Saddam was a bloody handed monster, a monster we made. We did no more than clean up our own mess in Iraq when we took him out. Leaving our serivice people over there, like ducks in an effing shooting gallery isn't doing one thing but getting them killed. Bring em home. If Iraq ends up a repressive anti-american, islamic thocracy, oh well. That's the price you pay for regime change.

Sorry for the rant. But I am sick of our servicemen being tasked with an impossible job and getting killed for trying to do it.

-Colly

 

[shereads]

I say lets do as one shepard said to the other and get the flock outta here. If Democracy is the governmental form they want and if it is the one they desire, then they will have to grow into it. If it isn't what they want or desire who the hell are we or anyone else to tell them how they shouold run their country?

There is a teeeeeensy little problem with leaving. All those millions of dollars in rebuilding contracts, awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton etc.

Can we really let those kids down when we've been promising them a pony and it's so close to Christmas morning?

 

[shereads]

You're right, let me rephrase that. Get a plan, then stay the course. Staying the course with the status quo is foolish at best.

Bless you. I'm so relieved. For a moment it felt like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I picture the entire country walking around zombie-style, bumping into things and chanting, "Stay the course....America must stay the course."

I have a feeling we won't be pulling our troops out of Iraq anytime soon, for the reason I just posted in reply to Colly. Somebody has to protect the gifts Santa wrapped for the kids and put under the tree, and if it's not an international coalition it probably won't be the Felujah Highway Patrol.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

There is a teeeeeensy little problem with leaving. All those millions of dollars in rebuilding contracts, awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton etc.

Can we really let those kids down when we've been promising them a pony and it's so close to Christmas morning?

Iraq is still there. It bloody well will need some rebuilding after whatever faction comes to power and puts it's rivals down. While I know you are being facetious, why not just pay them their contract monies out of frozen Iraqi assets, give the rest to the first stable government that gets in and present rebuilding as a fait acompli?

You've already paid for services. If you don't want em cause you hate Americans, that's fine. No refund though. If you do want em Haliburton owes you X dollars worth of repairs, Bethel owes you X dollars worth, etc. Just tell em what you want rebuilt. If those companies don't want to go do the work, they can give the money back.

Iraq get's its repairs or money back. The big companies get their money, although they will be required to earn it. And American servicmen & women get the hell out of a bad situation.

Not the most Just of solutions, granted. But workable and while all parties are getting screwed, they are all getting kissed at least.

-Colly