# Anyone read the Iraqi Study Group report? It's fantasyland.



## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

Seriously, these people are going to get Americans and British people killed. By endorsing a surrender approach (which I hope Bush is smart enough to avoid) they will be giving a template to Al Qaeda to continue the insurgent style of warfare like they have in Iraq. More damaging is that we look weak which will further their intentions.

Okay, the report. Recommendation #15. It provides that the American deal with Syria include the full cooperation in investigating the Hariri assissination, verifying cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah, and support for persuading Hamas to recognize Israel.

This is absurd. Syria won't do any of that. This report is a complete and dangerous joke.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> This is absurd. Syria won't do any of that. This report is a complete and dangerous joke.


I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Syria is perhaps quite ready to engage, but Isreal doesn't want to link any Palestenian issues with Iraq.

Watching the press conference yesterday it seemed clear that they don't necessarily think any of this will be easy, but that doesn't mean it's not necessary.

Calling it "surrender" perhaps plays more into the hands of terrorists than taking it for what it really is. The Bush Administration rhetoric has held the bar so high for so long they've pretty much ensured failure.

This is a PR game as much as anything else. Look at the mistakes Isreal just made this summer...Hezbollah seems to have been empowered politically as a result.

-spence


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## Connemara (Sep 16, 2005)

Artisan Fan said:


> Seriously, these people are going to get Americans and British people killed. By endorsing a surrender approach (which I hope Bush is smart enough to avoid) they will be giving a template to Al Qaeda to continue the insurgent style of warfare like they have in Iraq. More damaging is that we look weak which will further their intentions.
> 
> Okay, the report. Recommendation #15. It provides that the American deal with Syria include the full cooperation in investigating the Hariri assissination, verifying cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah, and support for persuading Hamas to recognize Israel.
> 
> This is absurd. Syria won't do any of that. This report is a complete and dangerous joke.


It's a reccomendation, chief. Doesn't mean it's written law.

A surrender approach? LOL. Trying to minimize American deaths has nothing to do with "surrender".

The part that kills me is that you're concerned about looking weak. What a shame if the big bad unbeatable U.S. is forced to pull out for practical and logical reasons. Probably makes your e-pen0r shrivel up, doesn't it?


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

Warfare by committee. That's an interesting concept. The whole point of a study group is absurd. Its as though someone were in the middle of building a house and a committee of inspectors came by and began pointing out how there's no running water, the roof has holes in it and the front yard is a mess. Its as though we have become a nation of women!


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Spence said:


> This is a PR game as much as anything else. Look at the mistakes Isreal just made this summer...Hezbollah seems to have been empowered politically as a result.
> 
> -spence


I'm not sure what you're getting at by stating this - but, I think I disagree in any case :icon_smile:

If you're saying we can get out of Iraq without providing for some amount of stability and spin it in such a way that it's deemed a victory, I think the islamists will see it for what it was - a loss to the U.S. and proof that, once again, America can not do something over the long haul and is highly sensitive to military casulaties.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> Syria is perhaps quite ready to engage


I see little evidence of that.



> It's a reccomendation, chief. Doesn't mean it's written law.


Yes I know that, but there are fundamental foreign policy mistakes littered throughout the report.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> The part that kills me is that you're concerned about looking weak. What a shame if the big bad unbeatable U.S. is forced to pull out for practical and logical reasons.


This is a big concern of mine because the only way to fight terrorism is with FORCE! This will be perceived as a weakness and show we cannot endure a long drawn-out insurgent campaign. It will become the template for future terrorist activity and it will ENCOURAGE Al Qaeda to kill more "infidels".


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Connemara said:


> The part that kills me is that you're concerned about looking weak. What a shame if the big bad unbeatable U.S. is forced to pull out for practical and logical reasons. Probably makes your e-pen0r shrivel up, doesn't it?


Appearing weak invites attack. Rare are the instances in history where a nation attacked another knowing that the other nation was stronger.

You need only go so far as Bin Laden and his citation of instances (e.g Somalia) of when America has cut and run, as it were, to see the effect that appearing weak has had in encouraging people to attack the U.S.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> This is a big concern of mine because the only way to fight terrorism is with FORCE!


That's just silly...

Sure there's a need for force at times, but without using all means available (economic, political etc...) we will never prevail in a global economy.

Old rules don't apply here. We can't put all the terrorists in a box and drop a bomb on them.

And Rocker, my point was about expectation setting...and the consequences of doing it poorly.

-spence


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

I propose we seriously look for alternatives to oil, and then cut off all ties to the Middle East. Let's see how much they hate us when they no longer have US dollars or support.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> Sure there's a need for force at times, but without using all means available (economic, political etc...) we will never prevail in a global economy.


I am referring to two things here: 
***Lack of effectiveness from diplomacy. Check the historical record.
***Using force in the middle of warfare.

Unfortunately we are tied to their oil for the foreseeable future. No real alternatives in the volume needed.


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

Spence said:


> Sure there's a need for force at times, but without using all means available (economic, political etc...) we will never prevail in a global economy.


What does the global economy have to do with fighting terrorists? But nevermind that for now. What economic and political methods would you use against terrorists? The U.N.? Reliance on other countries? They have their own interests and perhaps since terrorism doesn't effect them directly they are more than happy to do business with those states. One needs only to look at China and Russia to see evidence of that.

It once again comes down to America and the rest of the English speaking nations to get the job done.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> One needs only to look at China and Russia to see evidence of that.


Amen.


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## Connemara (Sep 16, 2005)

Artisan Fan said:


> This is a big concern of mine because the only way to fight terrorism is with FORCE! This will be perceived as a weakness and show we cannot endure a long drawn-out insurgent campaign. It will become the template for future terrorist activity and it will ENCOURAGE Al Qaeda to kill more "infidels".


Regardless of what we do, al-Qaeda's not going to disappear or be defeated anytime soon. Nor is terrorism. It's an ideology, not some corporeal enemy we can target with missiles.

Get with the program!


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

pt4u67 said:


> What does the global economy have to do with fighting terrorists?


Everything. You have to look no further than our funding of terrorisim though energy dependence. I believe it was Tom Freidman who recently commented that the USA was the first nation ever to fund both sides of a war!



> What economic and political methods would you use against terrorists? The U.N.? Reliance on other countries? They have their own interests and perhaps since terrorism doesn't effect them directly they are more than happy to do business with those states. One needs only to look at China and Russia to see evidence of that.


And China and Russia have no interest in the US?

It's about building global coalitions through leadership, impossible to do when you're flipping the rest of the world the bird most of the time.

I'm not saying I'd trust the UN or any organization to do what's in our interest on their own, but global institutions can certinaly be used to influence.

First we need to fix our PR problem.

-spence


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> It's an ideology, not some corporeal enemy we can target with missiles.


You can be proactive and target cells and use profiling and surveillance to catch cells before they are set up. It's a sort of invisible but very real war in my mind.


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

Spence said:


> Everything. You have to look no further than our funding of terrorisim though energy dependence. I believe it was Tom Freidman who recently commented that the USA was the first nation ever to fund both sides of a war!


The notion that we're funding terrorism is absurd. We purchase oil on the open market and those that use that money to fund terrorists are the ones funding terrorists. We don't need to apologize for anything to anyone. We're not the problem.



> And China and Russia have no interest in the US?


They do. But they also have interests elsewhere and seem to think, and rightfully so, that they can have their cake and eat it too.



> It's about building global coalitions through leadership, impossible to do when you're flipping the rest of the world the bird most of the time.
> 
> I'm not saying I'd trust the UN or any organization to do what's in our interest on their own, but global institutions can certinaly be used to influence.
> 
> ...


_We_ are the coalition. Once we bring disparate interests into the mix we have to give and take. We are the prime targets of global terrorism. We bear the risk and therefore we can call the shots on how to deal with it. We're not flipping the bird to other nations but other nations don't have as much at stake. Therefore they don't get as much of a say. With a lack of responsibility comes a lack of international recognition. Certain countries made that choice long ago and have to deal with it now. You don't get to sit at the grown up table when you still need someone to cut your meat into little pieces.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> You can be proactive and target cells and use profiling and surveillance to catch cells before they are set up. It's a sort of invisible but very real war in my mind.


Agreed, but without addressing root issues you may just end up creating more cells and terrorists. We've certainly seen this in Iraq.

-spence


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> but without addressing root issues


But how can you address root issues when the underlying ideology mandates extinguishing all Christians?


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> But how can you address root issues when the underlying ideology mandates extinguishing all Christians?


Do you think that the average Muslim wants to kill all Christians?

-spence


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## Acct2000 (Sep 24, 2005)

What do "average Muslims" do to discourage those who do want to kill all Christians?

Since I see very little of this, why do "average Muslims" fit into the question?


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

forsbergacct2000 said:


> What do "average Muslims" do to discourage those who do want to kill all Christians?
> 
> Since I see very little of this, why do "average Muslims" fit into the question?


Because the issues surrounding average Muslims are frequently cited as justification for violence by the fringe. If this isn't the root cause, it certianly might be a good place to look for clues 

-spence


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## rnoldh (Apr 22, 2006)

*Raison d'etre behind the ISG report?*

Hi AF,
Without arguing the merits or deficiencies of the ISG report, would you agree with the following editorial as to the genesis and justification for doing a report. (yes, I know it's from the NY Times!)

Here's the well thought out editorial, Re: The Baker report and it's import on GWB:

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/op...07thu1.html?hp

Here is it's core opinion:

"Its ( the Baker Report's), real mission was to avert the worst scenario, in which a stubborn George W. Bush spends the next two years blindly insisting he will accept nothing short of victory, while Iraq keeps spiraling out of control and the Iraqis get no closer to being able to contain the chaos after the Americans leave"

This is America, and we are free to agree or disagree. I feel the editorial is definitely a realistic take on the current situation.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Rocker said:


> I'm not sure what you're getting at by stating this - but, I think I disagree in any case :icon_smile:
> 
> If you're saying we can get out of Iraq without providing for some amount of stability and spin it in such a way that it's deemed a victory, I think the islamists will see it for what it was - a loss to the U.S. and proof that, once again, America can not do something over the long haul and is highly sensitive to military casulaties.


The "Islamists," and everyone else in the world, already know this. The only people in the world with any illusions about the extent of American power are the enervated and baffled citizens of the United States. This "war" is completely lost, and has been from the day it began. For sheer cross-eyed stupidity, the only rival in last 100 years to this Adminstration's decision to invade Iraq is Hitler's declaration of war on the US in December 1941 (Barbarossa was probably dumber in the long run, but at least it made some sense at the time it was launched.) Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world. The Bush administration, and its congressional allies, will evenutally achieve a level of infamy that not even the American propaganda machine will be able whitewash, which is saying something. The Baker report is intended to provide a cover under which the US administration can partially extricate itself from this incredible fiasco without completely losing the confidence of the American people. This is necessary because some residual confidence will be needed in a decade or two when the next fiasco moves from the drawing boad to the battlefield.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Lushington said:


> The "Islamists," and everyone else in the world, already know this. The only people in the world with any illusions about the extent of American power are the envervated and baffled citizens of the United States. This "war" is completely lost, and has been from the day it began. For sheer cross-eyed stupidity, the only rival in last 100 years to this Adminstration's decision to invade Iraq is Hitler's declaration of war on the US in December 1941 (Barbarossa was probably dumber in the long run, but at least it made some sense at the time it was launched.) Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world. The Bush administration, and its congressional allies, will evenutally achieve a level of infamy that not even the American propaganda machine will be able whitewash, which is saying something. The Baker report is intended to provide a cover under which the US adminstration can partially extricate itself from this incredible fiasco without completely losing the confidence of the American people. This is necessary because some residual confidence will be needed in a decade or two when the next fiasco moves from the drawing boad to the battlefield.


hyperbole and nonsense.


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## Étienne (Sep 3, 2005)

pt4u67 said:


> Its as though we have become a nation of women!


I am surprised nobody has commented on that rather extraordinary expression.


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

Its unclear to me why the United States should address the root causes of religious fanaticism anymore than it addressed the root causes of Nazism. Those who which to join the forces aligned with such a hate filled ideology are clearly free to do so and I would argue that if we do not maintain our determination in eradicating these forces the consequences (namely the fear of a painful death) for these potential converts become less and less, thereby compounding the problem. In fact I'd be more than willing to hear from critics of our policies which ideas, outside of fighting for and promoting democracy in the ME, actually would help in addressing the root causes and defeating our sworn enemies. 

Our current inadequacy, namely our unwillingness to see the forest from the trees in places like Iraq, ensures the Jihadists and Baathists years of fighting will. They know from our history in places like Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia that our determination to fight for lasting peace and security under the banner of democracy is cheap and we've become apt to prefer to avoid the barracks bombing and rather keep the problems of the world compartmentalized to 30 second updates on CNN headline news. Its much easier to change the channel than it is to find the courage to take on the enemies of freedom head on.

While an estimated 40,000 have died in Iraq with less than 3,000 US deaths in three years of intense fighting not seen since Vietnam we’ve been met criticism and scrutiny not seen in history. At the same time hundreds of thousands have died in Sudan with little to no fanfare to a point of utter negligence. Yet we do not put a price on the cost of this negligence nor look in the dark places of humanity to find the answers to the root causes of such senseless and indiscriminate violence for the simple reason that we haven't made it our problem, or to put it bluntly we just don't care. 

When we do care in the case of Iraq, when we understand the need to change the status quo of backhanded oil deals and the support of oppressive regimes, we're met with endless criticism and hindsight about the collateral damage of our efforts, of the mistakes and reminded at each and every turn about the dead of our fighting forces as they are paraded around like political tokens. The true cost of war is thrown in our face with such reckless abandonment that’s its hard to understand if we'll ever have the will again to fight for what is right in the world. But the cost of negligence and willful ignorance is hardly a whisper. If we do what our critics demand and retreat Iraqis just as the Vietnamese three decades prior will be left with the scars of the power vacuum which will ensue as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey tussle for influence; first through ideology and later through the sword. And after the smoke has cleared and instead of 40,000 the talk becomes 400,000 or 4,000,000 we'll just shrug and wonder how the world because such a scary place until of course we're dragged away from these thoughts by Grey's Anatomy re-runs.


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

Spence said:


> Because the issues surrounding average Muslims are frequently cited as justification for violence by the fringe. If this isn't the root cause, it certianly might be a good place to look for clues
> 
> -spence


I bet the issues surrounding the "average muslim" is the same as those surrounding anyone else. You won't find many clues there I'm afraid.

It reminds me of Hans Gruber in _Die Hard_ when he demanded of the police that members of revolutionary movements be freed when all he really wanted to create was a diversion to steal money. Bin Laden and the bunch have their own intrinsic reasons for doing what they are doing. If using the plight of the average Arab/Muslim as a rhetorical tool to make a confused and self doubting West, running around wondering what it can do to appease the fury, hesitate then so much the better.


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

pt4u67 said:


> It reminds me of Hans Gruber in _Die Hard_ when he demanded of the police that members of revolutionary movements be freed when all he really wanted to create was a diversion to steal money. Bin Laden and the bunch have their own intrinsic reasons for doing what they are doing. If using the plight of the average Arab/Muslim as a rhetorical tool to make a confused and self doubting West, running around wondering what it can do to appease the fury, hesitate then so much the better.


Indeed, at the end of the day it becomes an issue of money and power.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Rocker said:


> hyperbole and nonsense.


Like hell. A massive understatement would be more accurate. Why the hell do you think the report was commissioned in the first place? Because the Adminstration wanted public advice on the centerpiece of its foreign policy? Christ, what innocence. It's a propaganda campaign to give the architects of this disaster some additional wiggle room.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Spence said:


> Do you think that the average Muslim wants to kill all Christians?
> 
> -spence


It's my understanding, and I certainly claim no expertise and have to rely on the analysis and writing of others, that the koran requires that all GOOD Muslims should either convert or subjugate all non-muslims and to the extent they can do neither, to then kill all who will not convert or live in dhimitude, i.e. subjugation.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Lushington said:


> Like hell. A massive understatement would be more accurate. Why the hell do you think the report was commissioned in the first place? Because the Adminstration wanted public advice on the centerpiece of its foreign policy? Christ, what innocence. It's a propaganda campaign to give the architects of this disaster some additional wiggle room.


No - what's hyperbole and nonsense were the following comments from you:

"This "war" is completely lost, and has been from the day it began."

"For sheer cross-eyed stupidity, the only rival in last 100 years to this Adminstration's decision to invade Iraq is Hitler's declaration of war on the US in December 1941 (Barbarossa was probably dumber in the long run, but at least it made some sense at the time it was launched.) "

"Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world."


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Étienne said:


> I am surprised nobody has commented on that rather extraordinary expression.


The extraordinary expressions generated on this forum are virtually without number. If one responded to them all, it would become one's life work. This thread alone, even in this early stage, has produced some spectacular specimens of rank stupidity. That's what makes this place so fascinating.


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## rnoldh (Apr 22, 2006)

*How did Blair and the UK get into the "Fiasco"?*



Lushington said:


> The "Islamists," and everyone else in the world, already know this. The only people in the world with any illusions about the extent of American power are the envervated and baffled citizens of the United States. This "war" is completely lost, and has been from the day it began. For sheer cross-eyed stupidity, the only rival in last 100 years to this Adminstration's decision to invade Iraq is Hitler's declaration of war on the US in December 1941 (Barbarossa was probably dumber in the long run, but at least it made some sense at the time it was launched.) Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world. The Bush administration, and its congressional allies, will evenutally achieve a level of infamy that not even the American propaganda machine will be able whitewash, which is saying something. The Baker report is intended to provide a cover under which the US adminstration can partially extricate itself from this incredible fiasco without completely losing the confidence of the American people. This is necessary because some residual confidence will be needed in a decade or two when the next fiasco moves from the drawing boad to the battlefield.


Read my posts and you'll know where I'm coming from. I'm certainly not a supporter of the current administration.

But my question is. Does Tony Blair share in the "sheer crossed eye stupidity", as GWB and the administration, and how did he and the British public get led into this?

I do sense that Blair and the British public were not nearly as willing as GWB et. al., to get involved, but they did and they pretty much remain steadfast.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> Do you think that the average Muslim wants to kill all Christians?


I think Islamic terrorists certainly want to kill all Christians. For them it is a jihad.

I might add that many Imams were silent after the 9/11 attacks which speaks volumes by itself.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Rocker said:


> No - what's hyperbole and nonsense were the following comments from you:
> 
> "This "war" is completely lost, and has been from the day it began."


This is a statment of demonstrable fact.



> "For sheer cross-eyed stupidity, the only rival in last 100 years to this Adminstration's decision to invade Iraq is Hitler's declaration of war on the US in December 1941 (Barbarossa was probably dumber in the long run, but at least it made some sense at the time it was launched.) "


Well, the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 should perhaps be added to the mix, but that had some internal logic. Both Hitler's declaration of war on the US and the decision to invade Iraq are examples of what Paul Johnson has called "pure insensate folly," born of hubris and delusions of omnipotence. "Our children will sing great songs about us" and all that bullshiit. Again, this is indisputable.



> "Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world."


It doesn't? It becomes less expensive, less humiliating, less murderous (tell that to the 12 servicemen who died yesterday), and less damaging to the US and the world everyday? Perhaps in your world. Not in this one.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

rnoldh said:


> Read my posts and you'll know where I'm coming from. I'm certainly not a supporter of the current administration.
> 
> But my question is. Does Tony Blair share in the "sheer crossed eye stupidity", as GWB and the administration, and how did he and the British public get led into this?
> 
> I do sense that Blair and the British public were not nearly as willing as GWB et. al., to get involved, but they did and they pretty much remain steadfast.


The British under Blair, and in general, have been betting on the US. And they're losing. Did Blair, Brown, et al., share the same delusions as the Americans? Probably not. However, they weren't about to jeopardize the "special relationship."


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

Save the Blair and Bush battles for another thread...the question here is one of national security for both the U.S. and the U.K.

I think this goes beyond politics. The problem here, in fact, is that Democratic party politics and fans of consensus are putting their well being and personal power ahead of holding off a serious enemy in Al Qaeda.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> This is a statment of demonstrable fact.


No, it isn't only parts of the country are in crisis and the war is not lost.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Lushington said:


> This is a statment of demonstrable fact.


 Fine - demonstrate it if it's so clear. On purely military terms, it was a pretty impressive victory. The Iraqi military was annihilated, the regime overthrown, their capital occupied, in a matter of weeks at the cost of what? 150 or so American lives - the problem is the bogus Powell doctrine of "you break it, you fix it." The war was not "lost from the beginning" - and I'm not sure it's "lost" now.



> Well, the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 should perhaps be added to the mix, but that had some internal logic. Both Hitler's declaration of war on the US and the decision to invade Iraq are examples of what Paul Johnson has called "pure insensate folly," born of hubris and delusions of omnipotence. "Our children will sing great songs about us" and all that bullshiit. Again, this is indisputable.


 Why not the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, why not Vietnam, why not the first Gulf War which really set all this in motion not the least of which because we kept a permanent military presence in the "holy land" of Arabia? Why not Korea which cost 52,000 lives and accomplished very little in the greater scheme of things?



> It doesn't? It becomes less expensive, less humiliating, less murderous (tell that to the 12 servicemen who died yesterday), and less damaging to the US and the world everyday? Perhaps in your world. Not in this one.


 Well, what you wrote was "Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world." Granted, you said "stay the course" - on my first reading I interpreted that to mean you think we should withdraw - perhaps you didn't mean that? If you did, I'm not sure that withdrawing wouldn't, in the long run, be more damaging for the U.S. and for the world. Leaving creates a vacuum to be filled by Iran. There are all kinds of possibilities - who knows what will happen - do you? Once Iran gets nukes they're untouchable and they know it from ours and the world's response to N. Korea. So, say we withdraw, Iran through the majority shias in Iraq probably at a minimum gains a satellite state. Say in a couple of years, they get nukes - they then decide to re-create the Persian Empire and they invade Iraq which will have no real conventional military with which to resist them. So, now Iran has what about 30% of the known oil reserves in the middle east. Now, suppose they take a disliking to Saudi Arabia because its Sunni and because they're decadent and too western; Iran decides Mecca would be better run in their hands - are we going to fight to protect Saudi Arabia or the UAE when Iran has nukes? Not likely. So we have increased political destabilization, energy prices through the roof, and increasing Iranian hegemony with no real ability to counteract it. Further, this ignore all kinds of incidentals such as Iran's increased ability to fund terrorist activities. We've seen how bad the world is at enforcing sanctions and how largely ineffective they are. I really don't know what could happen - but neither do you. It's best to count on unintended consequences and I'm simply saying I don't know that staying in Iraq is more damaging to the US or the world in the long run.


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## crs (Dec 30, 2004)

Hmmmmmm. You guys don't trust James freaking Baker? St. Ronnie sure did. So did Bush's daddy.

Well, GWB apparently didn't like the report much. He's going to commission a new one, chaired by Sean Hannity, who will tell you what you want to hear.
That should make you happier.


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## crs (Dec 30, 2004)

Almost forgot this. Our $10 for 10 weeks subscription to the right-wing (and always tasteful) New York Post is still in effect, and today's front page looked like this:


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

crs said:


> Hmmmmmm. You guys don't trust James freaking Baker? St. Ronnie sure did. So did Bush's daddy.
> 
> Well, GWB apparently didn't like the report much. He's going to commission a new one, chaired by Sean Hannity, who will tell you what you want to hear.
> That should make you happier.


Well, Baker helped start the whole mess didn't he - becasue of the first gulf war.

Given 20/20 hindsight it seems to me relatively clear that not only should we have not stopped Hussein from going into Saudi Arabia during the frist Gulf War, we probably should have encouraged him to go in and overthrow the house of Saud. Given what we know about Saudi Arabia and their funding activites as it relates to radical islam (not to mention the number of Saudi Arabian individuals who particpated in 9-11), it might well have been in our intereast to let the relatively secular Baathists control Saudi Arabia in exchange for low oil prices. It also would have given Bin Laden one less ground to gripe about with repect to the US becasue we wouldn't have had troops in Saudi Arabia (though, I aknowlegde Bin Laden uses whatever convenient rationale comes to mind to justify his actions and to motivate his thugs).

The fact that Baker, via his law firm, lines his pockets with Saudi money doesn't much help his credibility either.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> You guys don't trust James freaking Baker? St. Ronnie sure did. So did Bush's daddy.


He fell from grace. Reagan would not have surrendered.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

The way to win this thing is to increase the number of troops and kill Muqtada Al Sadr and his Madi (sic?) army. He is one of the primary destabilizing forces.

This BS about talking to Iran and Syria is silly because we have done that and it never works. Remember Carter's diplomacy?


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## DocHolliday (Apr 11, 2005)

Artisan Fan said:


> I think Islamic terrorists certainly want to kill all Christians. For them it is a jihad.
> 
> I might add that many Imams were silent after the 9/11 attacks which speaks volumes by itself.


So let me ask this: If the foes of America are fanatics who cannot be molified, why the concern about looking weak? Will they not keep killing regardless, whether we fight them tooth and nail or simply withdraw? And how does one ultimately stop the problem other than killing every single one of them? Is that even feasible? And why stay in Iraq if the enemy knows no boundary?

(I'm not trying to push an agenda either way, but genuinely curious about folks' thoughts.)


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> So let me ask this: If the foes of America are fanatics who cannot be molified, why the concern about looking weak? Will they not keep killing regardless, whether we fight them tooth and nail or simply withdraw? And how does one ultimately stop the problem other than killing every single one of them? Is that even feasible? And why stay in Iraq if the enemy knows no boundary?


Easy question. When we look weak, they become emboldened. If we win by eliminating stateside and other based terrorist cells then much less recruiting into the fanaticism occurs and the world becomes safer as does the U.S. and U.K.


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

DocHolliday said:


> So let me ask this: If the foes of America are fanatics who cannot be molified, why the concern about looking weak? Will they not keep killing regardless, whether we fight them tooth and nail or simply withdraw? And how does one ultimately stop the problem other than killing every single one of them? Is that even feasible? And why stay in Iraq if the enemy knows no boundary?
> 
> (I'm not trying to push an agenda either way, but genuinely curious about folks' thoughts.)


I would tell that the answer to your question is that ultimately there are a lot of people on the fence in the ME, waiting to jump on whichever bandwagon will deliever them security and stability. We've become in the eyes of many in the ME a fickle ally and most quite clearly view us with a great deal of skepticism, just look to the 20th century history of Iran and Iraq for examples of our blunders and miscalculations.

Therefore we owe it to them to see things right in places like Iraq, even though its hard and even though it requires sacrifice. The only way to ensure a lasting peace is through the democratic process, that process in some parts of the world is only achievable militarily. We simply don't have the time to wait around anymore and let the people of the ME sort it out.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> I would tell that the answer to your question is that ultimately there are a lot of people on the fence in the ME, waiting to jump on whichever bandwagon will deliever them security and stability.


I think Bill is right here. We have to make Iraq a shining example of democracy. Clearly there are people in Iran who are very unhappy of the harsh theocracy there.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Rocker said:


> Fine - demonstrate it if it's so clear. On purely military terms, it was a pretty impressive victory. The Iraqi military was annihilated, the regime overthrown, their capital occupied, in a matter of weeks at the cost of what? 150 or so American lives - the problem is the bogus Powell doctrine of "you break it, you fix it." The war was not "lost from the beginning" - and I'm not sure it's "lost" now.


Defeating the Iraqi military, after years of sanctions and embargo, was a foregone conclusion. If the US military cannot defeat a debilitated force in open warfare in a theater of operations as conducive to the "American way of war" as the Mesopotamian desert, then it has no _raison d'etre_ at all, and should be immediately disbanded. It was obvious at the time that the elimination of the Iraqi state would lead to an irregular insurgency of the kind that would negate American firepower and render the country ungovernable and chaotic. Hell, Hiz'bullah had just finished running the IDF out of Lebanon; why would we do any better than the Israelis? Go to the archives of Counterpunch, Antiwar.com, the World Socialist Website, Zmag, Left Business Observer, for starters, and you'll see numerous articles predicting a disaster similar to one that has been unfolding. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of the history of the region could foresee this catastrophe. And many did.



> Why not the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, why not Vietnam, why not the first Gulf War which really set all this in motion not the least of which because we kept a permanent military presence in the "holy land" of Arabia? Why not Korea which cost 52,000 lives and accomplished very little in the greater scheme of things?


If you wish to elevate these debacles to the level of "insensate folly" go right ahead. I won't argue too much. But they don't quite make the grade. They were all profoundly foolish, but each of them had some strategic logic, some slim rationale. For instance, Japan basically had to attack the US after Roosevelt froze Japanese assets and cut off oil supplies, or it would have had to cede primacy in the Far East to the US. Well, it probably should have done that, because it ended up doing it in any case; but if they were going to attack the US, the Pearl Harbor operation was at least worth the effort. Had our carriers been in port, the operation might have been a second Tsushima. But they weren't, so the Japanese sank a bunch of obsolete battleships and headed home. It was a huge gamble that failed, but it made _some _sense. The same can be said of your other examples. Iraq made, and makes, none; if for no other reason than it occurred after these other examples of blind stupidity (as distinguished from cross-eyed stupidity.)



> Well, what you wrote was "Every day we "stay the course" the disaster becomes more expensive, more humiliating, more murderous, and more damaging, both to the US and the world." Granted, you said "stay the course" - on my first reading I interpreted that to mean you think we should withdraw - perhaps you didn't mean that? If you did, I'm not sure that withdrawing wouldn't, in the long run, be more damaging for the U.S. and for the world. Leaving creates a vacuum to be filled by Iran. There are all kinds of possibilities - who knows what will happen - do you? Once Iran gets nukes they're untouchable and they know it from ours and the world's response to N. Korea. So, say we withdraw, Iran through the majority shias in Iraq probably at a minimum gains a satellite state. Say in a couple of years, they get nukes - they then decide to re-create the Persian Empire and they invade Iraq which will have no real conventional military with which to resist them. So, now Iran has what about 30% of the known oil reserves in the middle east. Now, suppose they take a disliking to Saudi Arabia because its Sunni and because they're decadent and too western; Iran decides Mecca would be better run in their hands - are we going to fight to protect Saudi Arabia or the UAE when Iran has nukes? Not likely. So we have increased political destabilization, energy prices through the roof, and increasing Iranian hegemony with no real ability to counteract it. Further, this ignore all kinds of incidentals such as Iran's increased ability to fund terrorist activities. We've seen how bad the world is at enforcing sanctions and how largely ineffective they are. I really don't know what could happen - but neither do you. It's best to count on unintended consequences and I'm simply saying I don't know that staying in Iraq is more damaging to the US or the world in the long run.


We either withdraw now, on something like our terms, or we withdraw later, in ignominious fashion a la Viet Nam. Those are the only choices. Iran is going nuclear, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it - aside from attacking the country with nuclear weapons ourselves. Some might find that palatable; I don't. Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen, no matter what we do. The belief that American might is going to indefinitely delay these developments is precisely the kind of hubristic nonsense that will lead to our irrevocable decline.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Artisan Fan said:


> I think Bill is right here. We have to make Iraq a shining example of democracy. Clearly there are people in Iran who are very unhappy of the harsh theocracy there.


I'd settle for stability.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> I'd settle for stability.


Stability with a democratic process would be a shining example at this point.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> We either withdraw now, on something like our terms, or we withdraw later, in ignominious fashion a la Viet Nam.


What evidence do you have that the future in Iraq will further deteriorate? What will keep the democratic government from gaining control?

It might happen but I think it is speculation to assume the worst. I think it is dangerous to think that we should surrender and let the situation go bad is that will create a victory for terrorists, plain and simple.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> What evidence do you have that the future in Iraq will further deteriorate? What will keep the democratic government from gaining control?
> 
> It might happen but I think it is speculation to assume the worst. I think it is dangerous to think that we should surrender and let the situation go bad is that will create a victory for terrorists, plain and simple.


Oh please. The "terrorists" have already won. Unless they get bored or bought off, "terrorists" practically always win. How many examples would you like: the IRA, the FLN, the Viet Minh and NLF, the Tamil Tigers, the mujihadin, FARC, Hiz'Bullah, the PLO, Hamas, the Nepalese maoists, the Irgun and LEHI - or for that matter, the Mob, La Cosa Nostra, The Crips, the Bloods, Eme, and on and on. For Christ's sake, we can't stop "terrorism" in American prisons: we're going to eliminate it in Fallujah and Sadr City? Not in this lifetime. If nothing else, our enduring presence in Iraq gives the "terrorists" a continuing reason to exist. Do you seriously believe the that United States invaded Iraq to establish democracy? *No* country would go to war on the far side of the world to establish democracy; one will do such a thing to establish a puppet regime, but no country has ever undertaken an enterprise like our Babylonian adventure simply to ensure that the benighted inhabitants of some distant land can bloody vote. Why don't we work on making the United States a shining example of democracy? Then we might not have to export "democracy" via gunships, and fail in the bargain.


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## crs (Dec 30, 2004)

Rocker said:


> The fact that Baker, via his law firm, lines his pockets with Saudi money doesn't much help his credibility either.


Ohhhhhhhh ... you really don't want to open that can of worms, do you? You're starting to sound like Michael Moore talking about the Bushes.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> Why don't we work on making the United States a shining example of democracy?


What?? It already is.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> What?? It already is.


I've yet to employ this acronym in 10 years of internet rambling, but I guess there is a first time for everything:

ROTFLMAO!


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

Lushington,

It seems you are not willing to give any credit to the United States at all. But to deny that the U.S. is a democracy demonstrates you have no clue about the workings of political systems.


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## Kav (Jun 19, 2005)

A popular saying is 'the military is always preparing to fight the last war.' I think our politicians are also manuevering for equally obsolete status quos. The former PM erroneously called 'Lady" in another's post and some corrupt argentine Generals exchanged a political fortunes saving war over what? A former coaling station for a vanished world navy, her husband Dennis' controlling shares in the Falkland Island's Holding Company and latin machismo. A lot of fine young argentine and british died for sheep profits. We talk of moving beyond a fossil fuel based system to fix the onerous oil producers. Yet in other threads Global Warming is a silly at best, or deep conspiracy by leftists at worst. You can't have a pan islamic empire or a republican preppy worldview in a deeply wounded world. In a hundred years bin ladin's descendants will be gathering camel pies for fuel under an even more withering desert sun. What we will be doing in Crawford Texas or Massachusets is still optional. Who were the last great western conquerors of this region? Rome? When in Rome, or a roman empire situation do as the romans do. Decimate or withdraw.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> Lushington,
> 
> It seems you are not willing to give any credit to the United States at all. But to describe the U.S. as anything other than a democracy demonstrates you have no clue about the workings of political systems.


Wrong. The United States is essentially a plutocracy featuring democratic forms; but that is neither here nor there. Even conceding that the US of A is a democracy of sorts, it is hardly a "shining example" of such a thing, to borrow your term; and remaking the United States into a "shining example" of democracy should be the primary concern of most citizens - not trying to impose democracy by force of arms on foreign nations.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

I'm not sure we are imposing anything. The Iraqis clearly wanted to vote in their election. Or did you think Saddam was doing a good jobs as dictator with rape rooms for his sons?


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> I'm not sure we are imposing anything. The Iraqis clearly wanted to vote in their election. Or did you think Saddam was doing a good jobs as dictator with rape rooms for his sons?


Do you seriously believe that the United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a dictator and had "rape rooms" available for his sons' sport and pleasure? Do you seriously believe that the United States would undertake an enormous military expedition to the far side of the world to put a stop the individual atrocities of a brutal despot and his immediate family? Do you seriously believe that any person associated in any way with the United States government, and responsible in any manner for the decision to invade Iraq, gave a solitary damn what Saddam Hussein and his sons do, or did, for amusement? Do you seriously believe that the existence of Saddam's "rape rooms" was a factor in the decision to invade Iraq, in any way, shape, or form? (Aside from propaganda purposes, of course.) You cannot be a sentient being and answer "yes" to any of these questions. That being the case, what purpose does even mentioning Saddam's "rape rooms" serve for this, or any other, discussion?


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## mikeber (May 5, 2004)

*Please help me understand your opinion*

Can someone who still supports the US invasion of Iraq help me understand their position by clarifying the following?
1) What steps do you think the US should take now (military and political)? Should we add more troops/ bomb them with more explosives/ or use nuclear weapons?
2) Will you still be supporting the US presence there if it will add $200B more to the national deficit? What about $500B more?
3) Is there a point when we should admit that there is nothing more we can do, or there is no such point in principle? For example, if in 5 years from now, the situation is still unstable, should we decide to withdraw or not? What about 10 or 20 years? Or, should the US military always be present in Iraq?
4) If the elected (and democratic) government of Iraq will formally ask the US forces to leave, should we do so, or refuse?

Thanks,
Mike


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

Lushington said:


> Oh please. The "terrorists" have already won. Unless they get bored or bought off, "terrorists" practically always win. How many examples would you like: the IRA, the FLN, the Viet Minh and NLF, the Tamil Tigers, the mujihadin, FARC, Hiz'Bullah, the PLO, Hamas, the Nepalese maoists, the Irgun and LEHI - or for that matter, the Mob, La Cosa Nostra, The Crips, the Bloods, Eme, and on and on. For Christ's sake, we can't stop "terrorism" in American prisons: we're going to eliminate it in Fallujah and Sadr City? Not in this lifetime.


I think you are mistaken. There are ways of stopping any action if they constitute enough of a grave threat to our existence, just ask the Japanese. This of course is what we are trying to avoid and while your busy throwing in the towel more courageous people are fighting and dying so that day will never come.


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

mikeber said:


> Can someone who still supports the US invasion of Iraq help me understand their position by clarifying the following?
> 1) What steps do you think the US should take now (military and political)? Should we add more troops/ bomb them with more explosives/ or use nuclear weapons?


Very broad question. I can tell you what has been effective in fighting guerrilla movements, whether it is implemented is another story. I node system of 50 - 100 troops tied together by forward operating bases and plugged into the local populace would be a good start. Giving these nodes flexibility of movement and rules of engagement would go a long way in building trust among the general populace. We also have to have more realistic views about what constitutes success and be able, amidst the politicking, to acknowledge progress is being made.



> 2) Will you still be supporting the US presence there if it will add $200B more to the national deficit? What about $500B more?


This is a baiting question. You can apply it to anything really...how much is enough for AIDS? In my view, as long as the threat of Islamic radicalism remains we should use our capital in ways to fight it.



> 3) Is there a point when we should admit that there is nothing more we can do, or there is no such point in principle? For example, if in 5 years from now, the situation is still unstable, should we decide to withdraw or not? What about 10 or 20 years? Or, should the US military always be present in Iraq?


By way of historical perspective we've keep troops in Europe since the end of WWII, which was 60 years ago. Years after a peace was settled our troops in Germany were still being killed, this after 90% of the male population was destroyed. We still have troops on the border of South Korea. We should keep troops in theater until our commanders on the ground feel comfortable leaving. 


> 4) If the elected (and democratic) government of Iraq will formally ask the US forces to leave, should we do so, or refuse?


If they ask us to leave then we should at once.

Thanks,
Mike[/QUOTE]


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## jackmccullough (May 10, 2006)

Anthony Zinni came to Montpelier to speak last night and it was very interesting. He didn't speak primarily about the war, but about how we fit into the world the way it is now, and what we need to do about it. I think a lot of this conversation is about what Zinni was talking about rather than being limited to Iraq, so you might be interested in what he had to say.

First, Zinni's thesis was that we are living with the results of the third great global transformation of the Twentieth Century. The first was after World War I, the second was after World War II, and the third was at the end of the Cold War. As Zinni put it, "The world did not change on 9/11, it changed in 1989-90 when the Soviet Union dissolved."

Second, Bush 41's New World Order did not bring the stability that was anticipated and promised, due to forces as diverse as globalization, revolutions in technology and communications, and the rise of regional hegemonies, and the conclusion he draws is that "Instability is the primary enemy."

Third, with regard to the war, he had a couple of things to say: First, we went off track in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, which made the problem worse. By invading Iraq we got involved in the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Second, the war was not conducted right. Third, to put it charitably, the administration abused the intelligence. Finally, "we made the same mistake as in Vietnam: if you have a strategic vision, don't hide it from the public. Once you lose the credibility of your rationale it's very hard to recover from it."

His prescription was not a pure anti-war or "out now" prescription.

If you're interested you can read more about it here:


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

jackmccullough said:


> Second, Bush 41's New World Order did not bring the stability that was anticipated and promised, due to forces as diverse as globalization, revolutions in technology and communications, and the rise of regional hegemonies, and the conclusion he draws is that *"Instability is the primary enemy."*


I agree that connectivity is key but the status quo of proping up oppressive non-democratic regimes for the sake of stability doesn't seem to me a long-term solution.


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

whnay. said:


> I think you are mistaken. There are ways of stopping any action if they constitute enough of a grave threat to our existence, just ask the Japanese. This of course is what we are trying to avoid and while your busy throwing in the towel more courageous people are fighting and dying so that day will never come.


Was Imperial Japan a "terrorist" nation? Or was it competing imperial power that launched a conventional war for economic supremacy in the Far East and lost? Competing imperial powers can be defeated by conventional means; irregular insurgencies cannot, as we should have learned long ago. And what you meant to say was that "more courageous people are getting blown up for no good reason, but it provides sanctimonious 'patriots' with a good excuse to weep crocodile tears by the bucketful while they pontificate on 'grave threats to our existence.'"


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

jackmccullough said:


> First, Zinni's thesis was that we are living with the results of the third great global transformation of the Twentieth Century. The first was after World War I, the second was after World War II, and the third was at the end of the Cold War. As Zinni put it, "The world did not change on 9/11, it changed in 1989-90 when the Soviet Union dissolved."


A very interesting book along these lines is "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"...the same context (terror and the cold war) is talked about in great detail from an internationalist perspective.

-spence


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Artisan Fan said:


> This is a big concern of mine because the only way to fight terrorism is with FORCE!


What kind of mass psychosis exists in the American extreme right fringe that causes them to get so positively horny about killing lots of people, and doubly so if those people happen to be brown?



pt4u67 said:


> Warfare by committee. That's an interesting concept. The whole point of a study group is absurd.


I disagree. The point of the ISG was to give bipartisian political cover to change tactics from the ones that have to date failed so abysmally. Even in a democracy, but especially a democracy run by people who are ideologically closer to Trotsky than Hamilton or Jefferson as ours currently is, saving face is often necessary.



Artisan Fan said:


> But how can you address root issues when the underlying ideology mandates extinguishing all Christians?





whnay. said:


> Its unclear to me why the United States should address the root causes of religious fanaticism anymore than it addressed the root causes of Nazism.


Because religious fanaticism (Christianism, Islamism, Jewish supremacism, Hindu fanaticism, etc.) is the single most corruptive force today, the one (aside from the odd spate of Lou Dobbs-style antitrade faux-populism) most likely to derail the global economy. And taking any one of their sides (as the American right wants to force is to do on the side of Christianist crusaderism) is only going to make things much, much worse for everyone except the fanatics themselves (who will get more and more people with them, as the issue is violently forced upon them) and the war profiteers each side patronizes.

(Moreover, one may well argue that had the root causes of Nazism - German humiliation at Versailles, etc - been addressed in 1919 and 1920, th



Artisan Fan said:


> I think Islamic terrorists certainly want to kill all Christians. For them it is a jihad.


And American Christianists want to kill all Muslims. For them, it is a crusade. (Along with collecting all the Jews in Israel/Palestine so they can be converted en masse or subjected to a Superholocaust if they dare to continue to defy the Messiah's followers, but that's another topic for another day.)

Certainly, the Christianist have killed many more Muslims than the converse. So basically you have two extreme fringes of psychotic murderous idiots who are killing civilized people (religious or secular) by the score, and your solution is more of the same.



Artisan Fan said:


> I might add that many Imams were silent after the 9/11 attacks which speaks volumes by itself.


You might add that if you had lived in a hole since about 9am on 9/11, but if you had any inclination to actually research the topic you would very, very quickly learn that the overarching majority of the Muslim ulema condemned 9/11 in unequivocal terms.


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

SGladwell said:


> What kind of mass psychosis exists in the American extreme right fringe that causes them to get so positively horny about killing lots of people, and doubly so if those people happen to be brown?


Are Serbians brown? Clinton continuously had Serbians bombed, and I highly doubt that all of those killed were millitants.

I have a question for you: where are the Christian Palestinians using themselves as bombs? If the Palestinians have it so bad, why is it only Muslims who do the bombing?


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

SGladwell,

You are the Vladimir Posner of your era. He shilled for the Soviets, you shill for the Islamists. Its apologists like you who enable the dysfunction and chaos in the Arab world. Only when Arabs wake up and realize that they are responsible for 99% of their problems will the situation improve. You and your type took great glee after 9-11 saying that the US policy of supporting oppressive but stable regimes in the Arab world fueled hatred and radical viewsbut when Bush chose to at least try and change the dynamic in the region you complained thatliberating and allowing Iraqis to choose their own destiny was anti-Muslim. Is the situation in Iraq now worse than it was under Saddam? Yes but only in the sense that the Civil War was worse than slavery. 

Perhaps your own hostility towards Christianity and Judaism clouds your judgement but you and your type enable only the most destructive Islamic behavior. And "Christianists" have killed more Muslims than vice-versa? Go tell that to the Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Russians and a host of other nationalities. Just remember that you and your type would be the first ones put up against the wall in an Islamist society - they won't have much use for secular lefties like yourself if they win.

Karl


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## Kav (Jun 19, 2005)

In the early 70s I read a fascinating book, Geronimo is alive and well in Vietnam. I sadly cannot recall the author. The premise was a comparison with the Apache wars and the repeated mistakes. Guerillas can be defeated, and without going into the political particulars of each the many 'victories' are well worth studying. Iraq is no longer an issue of America 'losing' but one of the world at large descending into ever greater kaos.This President will leave office in two years. The burden will fall on another president, Republican or Democrat, and those world leaders who choose to lead. Most of the national dialog is Oliver and Hardy " Well, heres another fine mess you've got me into." Thats fine for a laugh, but of little import when the lights come back on. I remember the painfully slow wind down of Vietnam, the articles about nobody wanting to be 'The Last combat death in Vietnam' a D.J. on the old KRLA station in L.A. trying, and failing to grasp the official date of our final pullout with a weary if not disinterested audience and my own ironic participation in the 'evacuation' and not wanting to get killed in some stupid way. Likewise, I fear our politicians er 'leaders' post Bush will be thinking as much about their own survival, not 19 year old Kids.


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## BertieW (Jan 17, 2006)

LOL. I have never read this lot. I thought there had to be at least some pretense to sanity. Nice photo! What a larf. Do people actually buy/read/believe this stuff? I thought it was an Onion spin-off at first.



crs said:


> Almost forgot this. Our $10 for 10 weeks subscription to the right-wing (and always tasteful) New York Post is still in effect, and today's front page looked like this:


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

Lushington said:


> Was Imperial Japan a "terrorist" nation? Or was it competing imperial power that launched a conventional war for economic supremacy in the Far East and lost? Competing imperial powers can be defeated by conventional means; irregular insurgencies cannot, as we should have learned long ago. And what you meant to say was that "more courageous people are getting blown up for no good reason, but it provides sanctimonious 'patriots' with a good excuse to weep crocodile tears by the bucketful while they pontificate on 'grave threats to our existence.'"


Here is the difference, your concerned about defeating their intent while I'm concerned about defeating their capability. You want hearts and minds I want bodybags. The insurgents in Iraq are defeated insofar that they hold no legitimate power, they can influence policy as they are doing here in the States with the help of folks such as yourself but they cannot make policy.

In the times they've tried, case in point Tal Afar, they have been defeated.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Laxplayer said:


> Are Serbians brown? Clinton continuously had Serbians bombed, and I highly doubt that all of those killed were millitants.
> 
> I have a question for you: where are the Christian Palestinians using themselves as bombs? If the Palestinians have it so bad, why is it only Muslims who do the bombing?


Laxplayer - it's really not worth addressing SGladwell. He verbally kicks in the door, uses a scattergun of accusations of racism to clear the room, and to finish off those merely stunned, he beats them over the head with cliches, falsities, and invective.


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## Rocker (Oct 29, 2004)

Lushington said:


> Oh please. The "terrorists" have already won. Unless they get bored or bought off, "terrorists" practically always win. How many examples would you like: the IRA, the FLN, the Viet Minh and NLF, the Tamil Tigers, the mujihadin, FARC, Hiz'Bullah, the PLO, Hamas, the Nepalese maoists, the Irgun and LEHI - or for that matter, the Mob, La Cosa Nostra, The Crips, the Bloods, Eme, and on and on. For Christ's sake, we can't stop "terrorism" in American prisons: we're going to eliminate it in Fallujah and Sadr City? Not in this lifetime. If nothing else, our enduring presence in Iraq gives the "terrorists" a continuing reason to exist. Do you seriously believe the that United States invaded Iraq to establish democracy? *No* country would go to war on the far side of the world to establish democracy; one will do such a thing to establish a puppet regime, but no country has ever undertaken an enterprise like our Babylonian adventure simply to ensure that the benighted inhabitants of some distant land can bloody vote. Why don't we work on making the United States a shining example of democracy? Then we might not have to export "democracy" via gunships, and fail in the bargain.


So, Lushington - what do you think the REAL motiviation was for Bush to get the US in Iraq?


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

Rocker said:


> So, Lushington - what do you think the REAL motiviation was for Bush to get the US in Iraq?


I love how he uses quotations every time he uses terrorism and terrorist. As if blowing oneself up in the middle of a crowded market is merely a form of self-expression.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

whnay. said:


> You want hearts and minds I want bodybags.


Without winning enough hearts and minds do you think there's enough body bags?

Look at Iraq.

-spence


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Rocker said:


> So, Lushington - what do you think the REAL motiviation was for Bush to get the US in Iraq?


Because he was pushed into it.

Now those that did the pushing I don't think were doing it for evil reasons, but their idiology prompted a tremendous lapse in reason, and their arrogance insulated them from outside thought.

At the core is the desire to maintain the American way of life, but the means are quite un-American.

-spence


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

Spence said:


> Without winning enough hearts and minds do you think there's enough body bags?
> 
> Look at Iraq.
> 
> -spence


I really wish the term "hearts & minds" would be striken from our lexicon. It's the most absurd term when used in reference to armed conflict. Who cares whether we win hearts or minds. I'm sure incinerating Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not win us hearts and minds in Japan but it did bring them to surrender. After they surrender then hearts and minds can begin to be won over.


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## fenway (May 2, 2006)

Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunnis 



So our own petrodollars are coming back to kill us, with the complicit help of the Iranians and the Syrians.

A pox on all their houses.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

pt4u67 said:


> I really wish the term "hearts & minds" would be striken from our lexicon. It's the most absurd term when used in reference to armed conflict. Who cares whether we win hearts or minds. I'm sure incinerating Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not win us hearts and minds in Japan but it did bring them to surrender. After they surrender then hearts and minds can begin to be won over.


Well, this gets back to the same issue you and I have hashed over several times now.

But just to be clear, I'll say it once again.

I don't believe terrorisim is fueled by some fringe that just wants to kill the infidels. It is as Michael Scheuer describes it, a "global insurgency" with a number of motivators that is waging war against the world.

The motivators fall on a spectrum. Some are globally viewed as more legitimate (i.e. Palestenian suffering) and some are less (i.e. US support for Saudia Arabia) but the simple fact is that there is tremendous empathy due to the perception (valid or not) of Muslims suffering at the hands of others.

Religion is critical in the mix because faith binds Muslims together in defense of Islam.

Terrorisim feeds off of this to empower itself drawing energy from mainstream issues and redirecting it into violent acts intended to influence the policy of those who they believe to be oppressors of Islam.

This isn't saying that we're at fault, it's just reality.

Complicating this is the growing civil war within Islam. With the end of the Cold War, the shakeup in the Middle East and new nuclear states coming online...it's a completely new ballgame.

If this were as simple as just putting bad guys in cross hairs I'd be all for it...but it's not.

-spence


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

Spence, 
Once again you have put forth a lucid explanation for what drives Islamic terrorists and why they have the tacit support of many Arabs. I won't deny the multi-factorial origins of this movement however my point is how we fight it. 

Your explanation does not offer a solution. The solution is not in understanding them. The solution is battering to a pulp the terrorists and the governments that support them. Do you really think that as fanatical as Islamic terrorists are that their hearts and minds can be won over? I seriously doubt it and so I think it is a waste of time, effort and resources to attempt to do so. In fact when we do it is viewed as weakness and further fuels their notion that if they hold out just a little longer they will win. Wars are fought when the enemy, and civilian population, see that their is no hope. An enemy must be crushed, brutally if need be, and only then will they realize that a change of ways is necessary. The Romans demonstrated that against Carthage, Sherman proved it again against the South and the Allies did it against Germany and Japan.


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

Spence said:


> Without winning enough hearts and minds do you think there's enough body bags?
> 
> Look at Iraq.
> 
> -spence


No. By storming Iraq and overrunning the military in three weeks we did not decimate Iraqi military manpower. This was done at the time because we believed if caught in a crunch Saddam would use WMD, our rush to Baghdad therfore ensured that large elements of Baathists would survive and thus helping create ample manpower for the Insurgency.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> And American Christianists want to kill all Muslims. For them, it is a crusade.


What nonsense! Our Bible tells us that we shall not kill. We only want to defend ourselves from terrorism by killing terrorists!

You cannot equate Christianity with Islam. Islam is decidedly more prescriptive for violence in its advocacy of jihad. There is no equivalent in the Bible. Even more, there is no equivalent in what is being preached by the leaders of each religion.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

pt4u67 said:


> Do you really think that as fanatical as Islamic terrorists are that their hearts and minds can be won over?


I don't believe I've ever said that...and the solution is as obvious as it can be. For the 90th time...to control terrorisim we must create a divide between mainstream and fringe issues. Only then can the removal of terrorists deliver a net gain.

-spence


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

Spence said:


> I don't believe I've ever said that...and the solution is as obvious as it can be. For the 90th time...to control terrorisim we must create a divide between mainstream and fringe issues. Only then can the removal of terrorists deliver a net gain.
> 
> -spence


Then how, kind sir, would you propose we do that?

/sound of crickets


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## pt4u67 (Apr 27, 2006)

whnay. said:


> Then how, kind sir, would you propose we do that?
> 
> /sound of crickets


And that's the rub isn't it. We here this all the time on the news with analysts who provide these very sophisticated academic solutions with no practical way of achieving them. Defeat the enemy and then impose YOUR peace on them, not just some mushy compromise ala the armistice of 1918.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> And that's the rub isn't it. We here this all the time on the news with analysts who provide these very sophisticated academic solutions with no practical way of achieving them.


Hence my new signature line.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

pt4u67 said:


> And that's the rub isn't it. We here this all the time on the news with analysts who provide these very sophisticated academic solutions with no practical way of achieving them. Defeat the enemy and then impose YOUR peace on them, not just some mushy compromise ala the armistice of 1918.


And yet you throw out the word DEFEAT like there's a plan for that?

Quite simply we need to start acting like a moral leader. Recognize in our policy there actually are reasons we are hated that have nothing to do with our freedom. Demand our government does their homework before dropping bombs and demand accountability. Follow the International laws we helped to form (or seek to have them changed). Stand up for the rights of women and civil liberties in the countries we oppose. Demand more energy independence and when it is time for bloodshed don't let PC get in the way.

Etc...etc...etc...

Now feel free to rip this apart but please don't say there's nothing else we could be doing.

-spence


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

There is a report that a suspect has been arrested for a Chicago shopping mall terror plot...maybe this is a good indication of what may be at stake.

"*A 22-year-old Chicago man has been charged with plotting a terrorist attack on a Rockford suburban mall. The suspect is accused of planning to use guns and explosives during the holiday shopping season. The suspect is described as an unaffiliated 'lone wolf-style terrorist'. A press conference is forthcoming... Developing..."*

*Perhaps this is non-Al Qaeda related so it may not be the best example but you get the message.*


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> Follow the International laws we helped to form (or seek to have them changed).


Most of these laws are being followed but many like the Geneva Convention are sorely lacking in the new terror environment.


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Artisan Fan said:


> Most of these laws are being followed but many like the Geneva Convention are sorely lacking in the new terror environment.


I think there are many who would argue that point.

-spence


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

This is an interesting article on the policy differences between Rice and Baker:

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/...&ex=1166245200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Rocker said:


> So, Lushington - what do you think the REAL motiviation was for Bush to get the US in Iraq?


Do you want the long answer, or the short answer? The long answer will take more time than I have at the moment. The short answer is: power and money.


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

Lushington,

What was the reason that NASA faked the moon landing while you are at it?

Karl


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## Lushington (Jul 12, 2006)

Karl89 said:


> Lushington,
> 
> What was the reason that NASA faked the moon landing while you are at it?
> 
> Karl


The invasion of Iraq wasn't based upon money and power? Really Karl, how fascinating. You *are* a riot.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> What was the reason that NASA faked the moon landing while you are at it?


Good one Karl. :teacha:


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## crs (Dec 30, 2004)

Jeez, give it up, you conservatives, you. You were duped -- it's not your fault! The war was and is a stupid idea, but you made the understandable mistake of believing what you were told, same as the politicians who voted for the war before they voted against it. No one really blames you for being wrong, but the stubborn refusal to admit it is goofy. I think most of the backlash of the recent election wasn't so much against Bush in the greater sense but against his refusal to recognize mistakes, admit them and learn from them. People are honked off that the prez is being such a stubborn jackass while people are dying, that's all. Other than that, I think most of the people who voted for him still like him.

Edit: What, are you afraid someone's gonna call you a liberal if you change your mind about the war? Changing your mind on one issue is not a repudiation of all things conservative.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

crs,

Why can't you handle people having a different opinion than you?


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## crs (Dec 30, 2004)

Artisan Fan said:


> crs,
> 
> Why can't you handle people having a different opinion than you?


I can handle that. I just feel bad that you guys think we'll think you're weak if you admit the whole thing was a bad idea. I'm trying to give you an easy out.


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

Crs,

I will admit that I am starting to think that the invasion under this administration was a bad idea bc they have been fairly incompetent in everything they have touched - the big exception is the 2001 tax cuts which staved off a much deeper recession. But getting rid of Saddam was a good idea, some people like to pretend that Iraq was akin to Switzerland or Sweden before the invasion - it wasn't. It was a brutal regime that oppressed its own people, invaded two of its neighbors and made a mockery of the UN. I think its folly to believe that the region would be less toxic had we not invaded and the Muslim world would hate us less. But the Bush administration should have listened to General Shinseki (now there would have been a bold choice for SecDef) and had the proper force posture. Big mistakes were made but ultimately, if Iraq is a lost cause, history will say it was the Iraqis who lost Iraq and not Bush. Once again the Arab world has missed an opportunity. 

Karl


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## Spence (Feb 28, 2006)

Karl89 said:


> some people like to pretend that Iraq was akin to Switzerland or Sweden before the invasion


No. Nobody believed that. Even on commondreams.org or thenation.com nobody believed that.



> if Iraq is a lost cause, history will say it was the Iraqis who lost Iraq and not Bush.


Given what hindsight we have today I don't see how you could make this statement. Regardless of how the Iraqi's have or have not done their fair share...the Pottery Barn rule still applies...

Does it not?

-spence


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

Spence,

We didnt break Iraq. It was already broken, with only the thuggish regime of Saddam keeping a lid on the chaos. But this was bound to happen anyway - what do you think was going to happen after Saddam? That Iraq would suddenly turn into some Jeffersonian democracy or the Oxford Union? I think that unless we had committed 500,000 (as General Shinseki suggested) or more troops. civil war was inenvitable - either now or in five or ten years when Saddam was internally overthrown or died. So now Iraq will have to sort itself out, at least they have begun the process. And if one is going to be a sanguine about it and embrace a realpolitik view of things, a Shiite-Sunni civil war is not the worst thing for US national security, though its hardly the most desirable or humanitarian outcome.

Karl


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## clothesboy (Sep 19, 2004)

Artisan Fan said:


> I think Islamic terrorists certainly want to kill all Christians. For them it is a jihad.
> 
> I might add that many Imams were silent after the 9/11 attacks which speaks volumes by itself.


And many Christian churches were silent about the Attack on Iraq.


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

Clothesboy,

So you think that Christianity has a duty to support the status quo that leaves dictators in power who oppress their people, invade their neighbors, support terrrorism and ignore binding UN resolutions? Easy does it big fellow - stick to the clothes.

Karl


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> And many Christian churches were silent about the Attack on Iraq.


When did Christians blow up 3,000 Middle Eastern citizens via a terror attack?


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## clothesboy (Sep 19, 2004)

Karl89 said:


> Spence,
> 
> We didnt break Iraq. It was already broken, with only the thuggish regime of Saddam keeping a lid on the chaos. But this was bound to happen anyway - what do you think was going to happen after Saddam? That Iraq would suddenly turn into some Jeffersonian democracy or the Oxford Union? I think that unless we had committed 500,000 (as General Shinseki suggested) or more troops. civil war was inenvitable - either now or in five or ten years when Saddam was internally overthrown or died. So now Iraq will have to sort itself out, at least they have begun the process. And if one is going to be a sanguine about it and embrace a realpolitik view of things, a Shiite-Sunni civil war is not the worst thing for US national security, though its hardly the most desirable or humanitarian outcome.
> 
> Karl


Karl,

You're mixing apples and oranges with this one. An Iraqi civil war is one thing; an invasion by western christian nations isn't merely adding fuel to the fire it's stacking the wood and lighting the match.


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## clothesboy (Sep 19, 2004)

Karl89 said:


> Clothesboy,
> 
> So you think that Christianity has a duty to support the status quo that leaves dictators in power who oppress their people, invade their neighbors, support terrrorism and ignore binding UN resolutions? Easy does it big fellow - stick to the clothes.
> 
> Karl


All religions have a responsibility to speak out against unprovoked violence. While it is currently in vogue to hold only Islam to this standard all this accomplishes is to highlight the hypocrisy of the critics.



Artisan Fan said:


> When did Christians blow up 3,000 Middle Eastern citizens via a terror attack?


????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. It doesn't matter how many times this lie is repeated it doesn't make it true it only makes it's repeaters liars.


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## Étienne (Sep 3, 2005)

Karl89 said:


> But getting rid of Saddam was a good idea


That doesn't follow necessarily from the (true) premise that Iraq was a brutal dictatorship. The point is that after one previous invasion and years of sanctions, its capacity for disruption on an international scale was pretty much nil. Maybe we could even have eventually turned Hussein the way we did Khadafi. Furthermore, as hindsight proved, there was no guarantee that we (Western powers) could manage the followup of an invasion. So a cost-benefit analysis in terms of US interests, in terms of interest of the Iraqi people, or in terms of gobal stability, was not necessarily in favour of an invasion.

At the time (in 2002-2003) I did not buy the BS about weapons of mass destruction, but I still supported an invasion (not that my opinion mattered much of course). My reasoning was "at least, that's one less dictatorship in the world, even if it was not the most urgent to remove". I was wrong, unfortunately.

In any case there were many other bloody dictatorships that I would have put before that one on the list of invasions to conduct.


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

Etienne,

I disagree. Iraq was pretty toxic to the region under Saddam. First we both agree that his was a brutal dictatorship. Second he was supporting terrorism by offering a $25,000 USD bonus to Palestinian suicide bombers and he did harbor people like Abu Nidal. Did he collaborate with Al Qadea? Certainly not on 9-11 but the possibility did always exist that going forward he could and he certainly did offer safe harbor to some of their operatives. Third the sanctions regime was failing as evidenced by the Oil For Food program, the calls to end the sanctions (which were widespread in some circles starting in 1999) and the humanitarian disaster that befell Iraq bc Saddam did not use his oil revenues as he was suppossed to, And finally it was Iraq's constant violation of UN resolutions which seriously eroded respect and fear of international law among rogue states. The 12 and half years that Iraq had monopolized the world's attention since the 2 August 1990 invasion of Kuwait was far too long.

Now that being said, this administration has handled the occupation in a terrible fashion. I for one hoped that Iraqis would embrace some sort of pluralism and that Iraq could emerge as a relatively moderate and tolerant state in the Middle East. I was wrong and my illusions about what progress can be made in the Arab world have been shattered. But you at least have to give Bush credit for trying to change the dynamic. Critics of American policy have stated that it is American support for brutal Arab regimes that has fueled hatred of America in the region. Many of those same critics now say it was our overthrow of a brutal Arab regime that now fuels hatred of America in the region. From this I take two things - we will never be able to do anything right according to critics of American policy and much of the Arab and Muslim world will hate us no matter what we do and all Arab regimes will be brutal, its only the degree of brutality and not the nature of it that will differ from country to country.

Iraq has missed an opportunity to make itself a new. It is doubtful that it will get another chance in our lifetime.

Karl


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Artisan Fan said:


> When did Christians blow up 3,000 Middle Eastern citizens via a terror attack?


Iraq. Only it was much more than 3000, even excluding the sectarian bloodbath that we opened up thereafter.


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Laxplayer said:


> Are Serbians brown? Clinton continuously had Serbians bombed, and I highly doubt that all of those killed were millitants.


Please clear something up for me: when we used air power to lift the siege of Sarajevo and make Sniper's Alley safe for people to walk down (and later to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo) who was in power here? Was it the "extreme right fringe" I mentioned in the text you quoted, i.e. Christianists and militarist neocons fresh off of the campaign trail for Jewish supremacist Bibi Netanyahu?

My point is, I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here unless you're just confused about what ideology Bill Clinton, Wes Clark, etc. subscribed to in the 1990s.

And "continously had the Serbs bombed?" You might want to go back and check your notes. The only people "continously bombed" in the Balkans during the Clinton era were the Kosovar Albanians, who suffered under Milosevic until 1999. Even the Bosnian Muslim victims of Serbian terror-aggression in Serajevo and other such places were only continuously bombarded until 1995 or so, when NATO finally destroyed the Chetniks' heavy weaponry. Or perhaps it's just a difference in the way people define things. Maybe the phrase "continually had...bombed" means something different to you than to me. Perhaps it means "bombed for a short period in the second quarter of 1999" to you. True, there was also a short (and far too late in coming) bombing campaign in Bosnia of the Chetnik irregulars (supplied and trained by the Serb-dominated JA) who were effecting the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at Sebrienca, and the reemergence of concentration camps in Europe. Not one American (or NATO) bomb fell on Serbia proper before March of 1999, nor did was a single American (or NATO) bomb targetted at anything other than Chetnik artillery before that point. Does the phrase "Sniper's Alley" ring a bell for you? Have you seen the "Sarajevo roses"? Have you ever touched one of them? Do you even know what they are? What about the plaques honoring the people who died because the Chetniks found people standing in line to buy bread or fetch some water to be such an intolerably inviting target? Have you ever visited the old soccer stadium in Sarajevo? It's a haunting place. They had to turn it into a graveyard because it was the only open space they had that was protected enough to keep the gravediggers from being picked off. Have you ever visited the museum for the tunnel that the Bosnians courageously dug under the runways of the Sarajevo airport (occupied and sealed off by the JA on Milosevic's orders) to get wounded people, pregnant women, etc. out of the besieged city and food, medicine, and materiel into the city? If you haven't, you should. Maybe read Samantha Powers' account of her time in beseiged Sarajevo in her book about genocide, "A Problem from Hell" before you go, to help give you some perspective.



Laxplayer said:


> I have a question for you: where are the Christian Palestinians using themselves as bombs? If the Palestinians have it so bad, why is it only Muslims who do the bombing?


If you had actually spent any time in the West Bank (which I have; I wrote my dissertation on the place) you would know that Christian Palestinians have it much better than Muslims do. Why? The Israelis employ the classic technique of divide and conquer. That said, there are Christian youths killed by the Apartheid regime with appalling regularity.



Karl89 said:


> SGladwell, You are the Vladimir Posner of your era. He shilled for the Soviets, you shill for the Islamists.


And you, sir, seem highly redolent of Rodney Dangerfield.

"Shill for the Islamists?" Please, sir, find the shilling in the following sentence: "Because religious fanaticism (Christianism, Islamism, Jewish supremacism, Hindu fanaticism, etc.) is the single most corruptive [I meant to write "corrosive"] force today, the one...most likely to derail the global economy."



Karl89 said:


> You and your type took great glee after 9-11 saying that the US policy of supporting oppressive but stable regimes in the Arab world fueled hatred and radical views


Glee? Sorry, but the only glee in evidence is in the eyes of people who see current events as an excuse to set up a good ol' fashion lynching party. Nobody sane is gleeful that global events have transpired as they have since the summer of 2000 when Ariel Sharon invaded the Haram as-Sharif, no matter what her/his ideological orientation or religious confession may be. If you are intellectually incapable of distinguishing cold-eyed reality-based analysis from glee, well, that is your shortcoming and not that of the analysts.



Karl89 said:


> but when Bush chose to at least try and change the dynamic in the region


You meant to write "when he incompetently embarked on an ill-considered Trotsky-style "permanent revolution" orgy of bloodshed, to no realistic end." Yeah, you better believe I opposed this fiasco from well before Day 1!



Karl89 said:


> Is the situation in Iraq now worse than it was under Saddam? Yes but only in the sense that the Civil War was worse than slavery.


I believe in God. Everybody else better show me data. You're making wild assertions, with nothing to back them up except the talking points of a propaganda machine and some wishful non-thinking. The data show that there is more torture going on now than went on under Saddam Hussein. The data show that more people are dying violent deaths now. There is less electricity produced and distributed. The data show that water and sanitation are bigger problems now than they were before the American attack against Iraq. And I could go on but this message will be long enough as it stands and I've made my point.

If reality doesn't agree with a sane person's ideology, a sane person does not attempt to modify her or his perception of reality to fit the ideology. The sane person modifies her/his ideology to accommodate knowledge gleaned from the real world. We made a complete hash of the place. (Though at this point "the place" could just as well refer to Afghanistan, where we had a real opportunity to make an important difference but miserably dropped the ball due to incompetence and obsession with Iraq.) Everybody in the world except the most ideologically blinded Americans recognize that. It's amazing how powerful a force denial can be: when even Rummy and Bush realize that they made a hash of things, there are still shrill partisan automotrons out there who think they can stand athwart reality, yelling Stop!



Karl89 said:


> Perhaps your own hostility towards Christianity and Judaism clouds your judgement but you and your type enable only the most destructive Islamic behavior.


Hostility towards Christianity and Judaism? Seriously, where do you people come up with this material? It is straight out of Samuel Beckett! Only not as creative and not as funny. A half-witted farce of a farce, perhaps. I'm a practicing Christian (who's been to church more often since 1/2001 than one George W. Bush) who will very likely marry into a wonderful Jewish family in the near future.

Not to say you were wrong to miss an undercurrent of hostility. My hostility is towards murderous fanatical idiots no matter what their claimed confession is. Why? Because I know that all such people really worship the exact same horned beast anyway, whether it's a cross or a crescent or a star of David or an "om" around their necks. And that beast is definitely amused by the tortured gyrations some people go through to claim that their murderous fanatics are somehow less odious than the next guy's. Getting people to act like devils in the name of God has to be his favorite game. And it's why Christianists like Pat Robertson can be best buddies with high-ranking generals of Satan like Charles Taylor, who was possibly the single worst villain of the latter half of the 20th century. And that includes Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and their ilk.



Karl89 said:


> And "Christianists" have killed more Muslims than vice-versa? Go tell that to the Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Russians and a host of other nationalities.


Bulgarians? They lived under Ottoman rule for how long? Now, compare the fate of the non-Muslim Bulgarians under Muslim rule to the fate of Muslims and Jews under Catholic rule in Hungary and Spain during the same time period.

Greeks? There were definitely ethnic tensions between Greeks and Turks, but I don't seem to recall any parties where the Muslim rulers laid out spreads during Lent and killed anyone who refused to partake, as the minions of the Spanish Hapsburgs did with people who refused to eat pork offered to them.

Serbs? You seriously have to be kidding me. Last I checked, when the Balkans were under Muslim rule, there were significant Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish populations at the beginning of their rule, and lo and behold, there were just as significant Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish populations remaining when Austria occupied the region in 1878. One might even be so craven as to say, far more native-born Orthodox Christians there than, say, native-born Jews or Muslims in Andalusia. In Ottoman Serajevo, the central square housed a mosque, a Catholic church, an Orthodox church, and a synagogue, all of which flourished. How many functioning mosques were left in Cordoba after 1492 exactly? 
Perhaps it would also be prudent not to forget who, for the better part of the 1990s, waged a brutal war of ethnic cleansing against the human beings living in Bosnia and Kosovo. Perhaps it would be fair and balanced to remember who erected the concentration camps, who kicked the UN out and proceeded to eradicate the male population of Srebrenica in the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazis rampaged, who set up rape camps to systematically humiliate Bosnia's female population, who kept Sarajevo's wells and markets under constant mortar fire and picked off grandmothers and children who dared leave their flats. I'll give you a hint: they weren't Muslims.

And ah yes, the Russians, who destroyed Chechnya once in the 1990s, then decided that there wasn't enough blood on their hands so they blew up a Moscow apartment building and blamed it on the Chechens so they could take another go of it. (We are, of course, entirely ignoring the Chechen trail of tears under Stalin.) In world history, with the possible exception of Genghis Khan's hordes no people's leaders and armies have caused more horror to those of a different ethnicity or religion as the Russians. Are you crazy psycho righties so full of hatred for the "other" that your brains can't even hold the history of the last 15 years?

Armenians, though. You got me there. I'm no apologist for genocide.



Karl89 said:


> Just remember that you and your type would be the first ones put up against the wall in an Islamist society - they won't have much use for secular lefties like yourself if they win.


What is it with you fanatic types and fantasies about people being "put up against the wall?" Speaking of such things, that's an awfully Communist looking avatar you've got there, Karl. What is it with far righties and their collective fetish for the iconography of Communism? From Ayn Rand and her Socialist Realism book covers to the Kristol clan and their wholesale adoption of Trotsky's mantle to Grover Norquist and the giant picture of Lenin that dominates his home, they all seem to draw tremendous inspiration from surrounding themselves with the trappings of totalitarianism. Circular theory of extremism, anyone?

Not to say you are wrong. My type - people who use their brains for something other than downloading murderous fanatical thug talking points and regurgitating them on command - will be the first put up against the wall by Islamists. Or by Christianists, or Jewish supremacists, or any other group of murderous theo-fanatics with guns. That has always been the case throughout history. The greatest enemy of the murderous rampaging fanatic is not the different murderous rampaging fanatic, but the person with ostensibly the same beliefs as the fanatic but a mind as well. The fundamental difference between you and me, it seems, is that you're not smart enough or aware enough of history to think beyond the second sentence of this paragraph.



Artisan Fan said:


> You cannot equate Christianity with Islam. Islam is decidedly more prescriptive for violence in its advocacy of jihad. There is no equivalent in the Bible. Even more, there is no equivalent in what is being preached by the leaders of each religion.


You may not find any support in scripture, but all of you certainly find it in the modern Christanist clergy. Like it or not, you Christianists are a very bloody-minded lot indeed. Support for that assertion can, sadly, be found on every single page of this thread. Moreover, the facts (as opposed to the wishful thinking) is that our confession was spread far more bloodily than Islam ever was. All throughout the old Caliphate there were large and established communities of minority religions. They (Armenians during WWI excepted) tended to pay their defense tax and otherwise be left alone. That was not true of Christian-controlled parts of the world until the end of the 19th century. Muslims were destroyed. Jews were occasionally tolerated but regularly subjected to pogroms. Until arguably recently, there has never been a "Muslim Inquisition."


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## Étienne (Sep 3, 2005)

Karl89 said:


> I disagree. Iraq was pretty toxic to the region under Saddam.


It might be, although we obviously disagree on the extent of that. Still Sudan, North Korea, Lybia or Burma (sorry, "Myanmar") all were worse in that respect.

Sanctions might have failed in the sense that they did not threaten the regime's stability, but they did prevent any modernization of its military force.



> And finally it was Iraq's constant violation of UN resolutions which seriously eroded respect and fear of international law among rogue states.


Now that makes no real sense. Many states ignore and violate UN resolutions. Israel does, North Korea does, Sudan does... I don't think the Iraqi example had much to do with that.


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Laxplayer said:


> Are Serbians brown? Clinton continuously had Serbians bombed, and I highly doubt that all of those killed were millitants.


Please clear something up for me: when we used air power to lift the siege of Sarajevo and make Sniper's Alley safe for people to walk down (and later to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo) who was in power here? Was it the "extreme right fringe" I mentioned in the text you quoted, i.e. Christianists and militarist neocons fresh off of the campaign trail for Jewish supremacist Bibi Netanyahu?

My point is, I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here unless you're just confused about what ideology Bill Clinton, Wes Clark, etc. subscribed to in the 1990s.

And "continously had the Serbs bombed?" You might want to go back and check your notes. The only people "continously bombed" in the Balkans during the Clinton era were the Kosovar Albanians, who suffered under Milosevic until 1999. Even the Bosnian Muslim victims of Serbian terror-aggression in Serajevo and other such places were only continuously bombarded until 1995 or so, when NATO finally destroyed the Chetniks' heavy weaponry. Or perhaps it's just a difference in the way people define things. Maybe the phrase "continually had...bombed" means something different to you than to me. Perhaps it means "bombed for a short period in the second quarter of 1999" to you. True, there was also a short (and far too late in coming) bombing campaign in Bosnia of the Chetnik irregulars (supplied and trained by the Serb-dominated JA) who were effecting the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at Sebrienca, and the reemergence of concentration camps in Europe. Not one American (or NATO) bomb fell on Serbia proper before March of 1999, nor did was a single American (or NATO) bomb targetted at anything other than Chetnik artillery before that point. Does the phrase "Sniper's Alley" ring a bell for you? Have you seen the "Sarajevo roses"? Have you ever touched one of them? Do you even know what they are? What about the plaques honoring the people who died because the Chetniks found people standing in line to buy bread or fetch some water to be such an intolerably inviting target? Have you ever visited the old soccer stadium in Sarajevo? It's a haunting place. They had to turn it into a graveyard because it was the only open space they had that was protected enough to keep the gravediggers from being picked off. Have you ever visited the museum for the tunnel that the Bosnians courageously dug under the runways of the Sarajevo airport (occupied and sealed off by the JA on Milosevic's orders) to get wounded people, pregnant women, etc. out of the besieged city and food, medicine, and materiel into the city? If you haven't, you should. Maybe read Samantha Powers' account of her time in beseiged Sarajevo in her book about genocide, "A Problem from Hell" before you go, to help give you some perspective.



Laxplayer said:


> I have a question for you: where are the Christian Palestinians using themselves as bombs? If the Palestinians have it so bad, why is it only Muslims who do the bombing?


If you had actually spent any time in the West Bank (which I have; I wrote my dissertation on the place) you would know that Christian Palestinians have it much better than Muslims do. Why? The Israelis employ the classic technique of divide and conquer. That said, there are Christian youths killed by the Apartheid regime with appalling regularity.



Karl89 said:


> SGladwell, You are the Vladimir Posner of your era. He shilled for the Soviets, you shill for the Islamists.


And you, sir, seem highly redolent of Rodney Dangerfield.

"Shill for the Islamists?" Please, sir, find the shilling in the following sentence: "Because religious fanaticism (Christianism, Islamism, Jewish supremacism, Hindu fanaticism, etc.) is the single most corruptive [I meant to write "corrosive"] force today, the one...most likely to derail the global economy."



Karl89 said:


> You and your type took great glee after 9-11 saying that the US policy of supporting oppressive but stable regimes in the Arab world fueled hatred and radical views


Glee? Sorry, but the only glee in evidence is in the eyes of people who see current events as an excuse to set up a good ol' fashion lynching party. Nobody sane is gleeful that global events have transpired as they have since the summer of 2000 when Ariel Sharon invaded the Haram as-Sharif, no matter what her/his ideological orientation or religious confession may be. If you are intellectually incapable of distinguishing cold-eyed reality-based analysis from glee, well, that is your shortcoming and not that of the analysts.



Karl89 said:


> but when Bush chose to at least try and change the dynamic in the region


You meant to write "when he incompetently embarked on an ill-considered Trotsky-style "permanent revolution" orgy of bloodshed, to no realistic end." Yeah, you better believe I opposed this fiasco from well before Day 1!



Karl89 said:


> Is the situation in Iraq now worse than it was under Saddam? Yes but only in the sense that the Civil War was worse than slavery.


I believe in God. Everybody else better show me data. You're making wild assertions, with nothing to back them up except the talking points of a propaganda machine and some wishful non-thinking. The data show that there is more torture going on now than went on under Saddam Hussein. The data show that more people are dying violent deaths now. There is less electricity produced and distributed. The data show that water and sanitation are bigger problems now than they were before the American attack against Iraq. And I could go on but this message will be long enough as it stands and I've made my point.

If reality doesn't agree with a sane person's ideology, a sane person does not attempt to modify her or his perception of reality to fit the ideology. The sane person modifies her/his ideology to accommodate knowledge gleaned from the real world. We made a complete hash of the place. (Though at this point "the place" could just as well refer to Afghanistan, where we had a real opportunity to make an important difference but miserably dropped the ball due to incompetence and obsession with Iraq.) Everybody in the world except the most ideologically blinded Americans recognize that. It's amazing how powerful a force denial can be: when even Rummy and Bush realize that they made a hash of things, there are still shrill partisan automotrons out there who think they can stand athwart reality, yelling Stop!



Karl89 said:


> Perhaps your own hostility towards Christianity and Judaism clouds your judgement but you and your type enable only the most destructive Islamic behavior.


Hostility towards Christianity and Judaism? Seriously, where do you people come up with this material? It is straight out of Samuel Beckett! Only not as creative and not as funny. A half-witted farce of a farce, perhaps. I'm a practicing Christian (who's been to church more often since 1/2001 than one George W. Bush) who will very likely marry into a wonderful Jewish family in the near future.

Not to say you were wrong to miss an undercurrent of hostility. My hostility is towards murderous fanatical idiots no matter what their claimed confession is. Why? Because I know that all such people really worship the exact same horned beast anyway, whether it's a cross or a crescent or a star of David or an "om" around their necks. And that beast is definitely amused by the tortured gyrations some people go through to claim that their murderous fanatics are somehow less odious than the next guy's. Getting people to act like devils in the name of God has to be his favorite game. And it's why Christianists like Pat Robertson can be best buddies with high-ranking generals of Satan like Charles Taylor, who was possibly the single worst villain of the latter half of the 20th century. And that includes Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and their ilk.



Karl89 said:


> And "Christianists" have killed more Muslims than vice-versa? Go tell that to the Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Russians and a host of other nationalities.


Bulgarians? They lived under Ottoman rule for how long? Now, compare the fate of the non-Muslim Bulgarians under Muslim rule to the fate of Muslims and Jews under Catholic rule in Hungary and Spain during the same time period.

Greeks? There were definitely ethnic tensions between Greeks and Turks, but I don't seem to recall any parties where the Muslim rulers laid out spreads during Lent and killed anyone who refused to partake, as the minions of the Spanish Hapsburgs did with people who refused to eat pork offered to them.

Serbs? You seriously have to be kidding me. Last I checked, when the Balkans were under Muslim rule, there were significant Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish populations at the beginning of their rule, and lo and behold, there were just as significant Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish populations remaining when Austria occupied the region in 1878. One might even be so craven as to say, far more native-born Orthodox Christians there than, say, native-born Jews or Muslims in Andalusia. In Ottoman Serajevo, the central square housed a mosque, a Catholic church, an Orthodox church, and a synagogue, all of which flourished. How many functioning mosques were left in Cordoba after 1492 exactly? 
Perhaps it would also be prudent not to forget who, for the better part of the 1990s, waged a brutal war of ethnic cleansing against the human beings living in Bosnia and Kosovo. Perhaps it would be fair and balanced to remember who erected the concentration camps, who kicked the UN out and proceeded to eradicate the male population of Srebrenica in the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazis rampaged, who set up rape camps to systematically humiliate Bosnia's female population, who kept Sarajevo's wells and markets under constant mortar fire and picked off grandmothers and children who dared leave their flats. I'll give you a hint: they weren't Muslims.

And ah yes, the Russians, who destroyed Chechnya once in the 1990s, then decided that there wasn't enough blood on their hands so they blew up a Moscow apartment building and blamed it on the Chechens so they could take another go of it. (We are, of course, entirely ignoring the Chechen trail of tears under Stalin.) In world history, with the possible exception of Genghis Khan's hordes no people's leaders and armies have caused more horror to those of a different ethnicity or religion as the Russians. Are you crazy psycho righties so full of hatred for the "other" that your brains can't even hold the history of the last 15 years?

Armenians, though. You got me there. I'm no apologist for genocide.



Karl89 said:


> Just remember that you and your type would be the first ones put up against the wall in an Islamist society - they won't have much use for secular lefties like yourself if they win.


What is it with you fanatic types and fantasies about people being "put up against the wall?" Speaking of such things, that's an awfully Communist looking avatar you've got there, Karl. What is it with far righties and their collective fetish for the iconography of Communism? From Ayn Rand and her Socialist Realism book covers to the Kristol clan and their wholesale adoption of Trotsky's mantle to Grover Norquist and the giant picture of Lenin that dominates his home, they all seem to draw tremendous inspiration from surrounding themselves with the trappings of totalitarianism. Circular theory of extremism, anyone?

Not to say you are wrong. My type - people who use their brains for something other than downloading murderous fanatical thug talking points and regurgitating them on command - will be the first put up against the wall by Islamists. Or by Christianists, or Jewish supremacists, or any other group of murderous theo-fanatics with guns. That has always been the case throughout history. The greatest enemy of the murderous rampaging fanatic is not the different murderous rampaging fanatic, but the person with ostensibly the same beliefs as the fanatic but a mind as well. The fundamental difference between you and me, it seems, is that you're not smart enough or aware enough of history to think beyond the second sentence of this paragraph.



Artisan Fan said:


> You cannot equate Christianity with Islam. Islam is decidedly more prescriptive for violence in its advocacy of jihad. There is no equivalent in the Bible. Even more, there is no equivalent in what is being preached by the leaders of each religion.


You may not find any support in scripture, but all of you certainly find it in the modern Christanist clergy. Like it or not, you Christianists are a very bloody-minded lot indeed. Support for that assertion can, sadly, be found on every single page of this thread. Moreover, the facts (as opposed to the wishful thinking) is that our confession was spread far more bloodily than Islam ever was. All throughout the old Caliphate there were large and established communities of minority religions. They (Armenians during WWI excepted) tended to pay their defense tax and otherwise be left alone. That was not true of Christian-controlled parts of the world until the end of the 19th century. Muslims were destroyed. Jews were occasionally tolerated but regularly subjected to pogroms. Until arguably recently, there has never been a "Muslim Inquisition."


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## whnay. (Dec 30, 2004)

SGladwell said:


> Iraq. Only it was much more than 3000, even excluding the sectarian bloodbath that we opened up thereafter.


ROFL.


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## Martinis at 8 (Apr 14, 2006)

Actually Haditha is a case in point of why we are not prevailing. The city provides 100% partisan civilian support to the insurgents. It should have been levelled long ago, with several other enclaves in Anbar province. Same principal at work here as civilians working in ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, Germany during the 3rd Reich. A strategy that tries to separate the wheat from the chaff is a strategy doomed to failure.

Rules of engagement in this war, dictated by McClellan-type generals is one of the main causes of the current quagmire. Gens. Abizaid, Casey, and several other generals with fancy follow-on Harvard/Princeton degrees after West Point need to be purged. Put one of those fighting colonels in charge of this thing, like Dave Perkins, and get some fresh combat-tested leadership into the higher ranks now. We should not forget that Ike was a mere Lt.Col. when WW2 started. There's other capable military leadership ready to move up and take over now. I hope Gates initiates a purge as soon as Rumsfeld skedaddles. No more Kasserine Pass type failures. The current crew of generals no longer instills confidence in their troops. Abizaid and Casey need to take a trip around town in a Hummer, outside of the Green Zone for Casey, and away from Doha for Abizaid.

My concern is with the insurgents vs. US troops. As for the sectarian violence, I'm with Napoloeon Bonaparte, "never interfere with an enemy in the process of committing suicide."

M8


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## Martinis at 8 (Apr 14, 2006)

whnay. said:


> No. By storming Iraq and overrunning the military in three weeks we did not decimate Iraqi military manpower. This was done at the time because we believed if caught in a crunch Saddam would use WMD, our rush to Baghdad therfore ensured that large elements of Baathists would survive and thus helping create ample manpower for the Insurgency.


Sure, but dropping leaflets saying, "gentlemen stand away from your vehicles" wasn't too brilliant either. You kill an army by killing its soldiers, not by destroying its equipment. Fact is, we let that army melt away into the civilian population. Same great generals with the "hearts & minds" strategies.

Time to go find a "drunken store keeper" to replace Abizaid.

M8


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

SGladwell,

Blame the Dutch for Srebrenica. Actually the Dutch blame themselves and the government took responsibility and resigned over the matter. Little consolation for the victims though.

You seem to think there is some Christianist (and don't rank me among their numbers please) conspiracy yet you continually discount or explain way the real threat Radical Islam poses. Do you think Jerry Falwell is trying to build a nuke in the physics lab at Liberty and nuke Mecca? You cite the Habsburgs as an example of Christian oppression of Muslims yet last I looked they haven't been in power since 1918 (excepting a brief attempt during the twenties at restoration in Hungary and Otto's membership in the European parliament.) I wonder who treats religious minorities better today? Austria - just visit the 10th district in Vienna - or Turkey where Christians are routinely prosecuted for defaming Islam? Reaching back to the 15th and 16th centuries for examples that justify Muslim rage toady is pretty weak BUT perhaps if Islam returned the Levant, which it acquired through military expansion, then we could call things even.

And now we hear it from you - Ariel Sharon is to blame for all the world's problems. I would blame Arafat and his rejection of peace in 2000 but that's another debate and you probably want to go over your Hamas talking points before you reply. The Arab world should be thankful for Israel bc without Israel they might have to blame themselves for the sorry state they find themselves perpetually in. 

What do you think was going to happen in Iraq after Saddam or do you just favor brutal dicatorships forever in the Arab world? Yes things in many respects are worse than they were under Saddam - but they weren't so peachy keen to begin with. Iraq has made the choice to get worse before it gets better. Thats a maxim should be familiar with.

Your comments betray a serious ignorance about Bulgarian history. I lived in Sofia for nearly three years and they still discuss the Ottoman yoke. And Bulgarians are not conspiracy crazed nutcases like so many Serbs. Ottoman rule in Bulgaria was brutal. You also seem unable to make a distinction between how the formal nations and great powers of Europe conducted relations with the Islamic world and how the Ottomans briutalized their Christian subjects in the Balkans.

Greeks may hate the Turks even more than Bulgarians. But why not do a little research into Smyrna and see how civilized Greek-Turkish relations have been. 

And yes you are correct about the Russians but does that justify the Chechen response at Beslan? Or the Nord Ost theatre? Of the bombing of two civilian planes in 2004? If you have read any of my posts then you will know that I have been critical of Russia's policy in Chechnya. But don't paint the Chechens as angels either. And lets not forget the Chechen attempt to explode a dirty bomb in Moscow in 1995. Same goes for the Kosovars. Kosovo and Albania are leading transit points for the illicit traffic in women from the FSU (mostly Ukraine and Moldova.) And there have been plenty of atrocities against Serbs and they have legitimate concerns as well.

And about my Reagan avatar if you would think for a second before patting yourself on the back for making what you think to be a witty and salient point you would realize that it is a play on Che iconography and meant to be ironic.

Karl


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

SGladwell said:


> And "continously had the Serbs bombed?" You might want to go back and check your notes. The only people "continously bombed" in the Balkans during the Clinton era were the Kosovar Albanians, who suffered under Milosevic until 1999. Even the Bosnian Muslim victims of Serbian terror-aggression in Serajevo and other such places were only continuously bombarded until 1995 or so, when NATO finally destroyed the Chetniks' heavy weaponry. Or perhaps it's just a difference in the way people define things. Maybe the phrase "continually had...bombed" means something different to you than to me. Perhaps it means "bombed for a short period in the second quarter of 1999" to you. True, there was also a short (and far too late in coming) bombing campaign in Bosnia of the Chetnik irregulars (supplied and trained by the Serb-dominated JA) who were effecting the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at Sebrienca, and the reemergence of concentration camps in Europe. Not one American (or NATO) bomb fell on Serbia proper before March of 1999, nor did was a single American (or NATO) bomb targetted at anything other than Chetnik artillery before that point. Does the phrase "Sniper's Alley" ring a bell for you? Have you seen the "Sarajevo roses"? Have you ever touched one of them? Do you even know what they are? What about the plaques honoring the people who died because the Chetniks found people standing in line to buy bread or fetch some water to be such an intolerably inviting target? Have you ever visited the old soccer stadium in Sarajevo? It's a haunting place. They had to turn it into a graveyard because it was the only open space they had that was protected enough to keep the gravediggers from being picked off. Have you ever visited the museum for the tunnel that the Bosnians courageously dug under the runways of the Sarajevo airport (occupied and sealed off by the JA on Milosevic's orders) to get wounded people, pregnant women, etc. out of the besieged city and food, medicine, and materiel into the city? If you haven't, you should. Maybe read Samantha Powers' account of her time in beseiged Sarajevo in her book about genocide, "A Problem from Hell" before you go, to help give you some perspective.


Yes, I consider 78 days of bombing continuous. 
The US led NATO bombings of 3000+ sorties on the towns of Sarajevo, Tuzia and Lukavica etc. 
It's amusing that Clinton is given a free pass with regard to Yugoslavia. The conflict was not the humanitarian campaign that it was made out to be. Clinton didn't care about the Bosnians anymore than Bush cares about Iraqi democracy. This campaign was just an attempt to break up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and gain control of the Balkans and Caspian Sea (read: oil). Civilians were deliberately targeted (Radio Television Serbia), terrorists supported (the KLA), and Milosevic tortured (at least by Abu Ghraib definitions). 
Interesting that Clinton's war was ok, but Bush's is not.


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## Artisan Fan (Jul 21, 2006)

> Iraq. Only it was much more than 3000, even excluding the sectarian bloodbath that we opened up thereafter.


You can't equate a war situation with a terrorist act.


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Karl89 said:


> Blame the Dutch for Srebrenica. Actually the Dutch blame themselves and the government took responsibility and resigned over the matter. Little consolation for the victims though.


Oh, you mean the Chetniks who actually marched the Bosnian men to their deaths and mass slaughtered them aren't responsible? Hello! Yes, the Dutch forces on the ground should have laid their lives on the line to save the city, and yes that they didn't will forever be a stain on their whole nation's manhood. But "blame" them for it? They're accessories at best, not the ones who committed the acts.



Karl89 said:


> you continually discount or explain way the real threat Radical Islam poses.


I do, because I think it's severely overstated. Doing so does good things for the Christianists, because it gets their cannon-fodder fired up for the next Crusade. Doing so does good things for the government, because it bolsters government power and stops people from whining about things like the idiotic procedures in place at our airports. Doing so does good things for the media, because rampant paranoia gives them more eyeballs and more things to rail against (both the supposed threat and the government reactions to it). It's not a conspiracy, just a mutually reinforcing web of BS.



Karl89 said:


> You cite the Habsburgs as an example of Christian oppression of Muslims yet last I looked they haven't been in power since 1918


And you cite the Ottomans as examples of Christian oppression of Muslims, repeatedly. What's the difference? None, except that in former Ottoman lands there are still native Christians, and in lands under sway of the Inquisition the native Muslim populations were subjected to genocide.



Karl89 said:


> Austria - just visit the 10th district in Vienna - or Turkey where Christians are routinely prosecuted for defaming Islam?


Funny you should mention the 10. Bezirk, because I (briefly) lived there, in a bright yellow building on the Neilreichgasse, a little south of that giant Merkur supermarket and the Don Gil outlet that occasionally had some phenomenal deals, like Helmut Lang jeans for under 700 ATS. And if you don't think there's institutionalized bigotry against Turks and Kurds in Wien-Favoriten, well, one must surmise that you've never been there or bothered to talk to anyone there. Admittedly, I've never lived in Turkey but I have spent time in Istanbul and the Turkish Riviera. Somehow, I doubt you even have that much direct contact with the country. Or enough knowledge of its history to realize that its army is a pretty thuggish bunch in general. Just talk to a Kurdish refugee sometime.



Karl89 said:


> And now we hear it from you - Ariel Sharon is to blame for all the world's problems.


Sharon had nothing to do with 9/11 or (mostly) Iraq, but he (along with the growth of Apartheid-style policies in the illegally-occupied territories since the Oslo so-called peace process) did light the fire that's been burning under that corner of the mideast. Had Israeli governments not used Oslo as a cover to massively expand the illegal land-grabs in Palestine and institute Apartheid, that end of the Med might have a very different recent history. (I haven't read it yet, but President Carter's book will likely go into some detail. If it got one of my old profs, Ken Stein, to complain, it's probably pretty accurate.)



Karl89 said:


> What do you think was going to happen in Iraq after Saddam or do you just favor brutal dicatorships forever in the Arab world?


There are a number of things that could have happened after Saddam. All but this one did not involve wholesale destruction of their infrastructure and mass murder by an outside force.



Karl89 said:


> You also seem unable to make a distinction between how the formal nations and great powers of Europe conducted relations with the Islamic world and how the Ottomans briutalized their Christian subjects in the Balkans.


Now isn't that just a little bit bigoted, to call the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire and the like "formal nations and great powers" but not accord the same status to the Ottoman Empire?



Karl89 said:


> And yes you are correct about the Russians but does that justify the Chechen response at Beslan? Or the Nord Ost theatre?


First, I think we can agree that compared to the horrors visited by Yeltsin and Putin upon the Chechens, Beslan and the theater are incidences that compare about as well as a bee-sting on a non-allegric person somewhere in the US and 9/11. Also interesting to me is who the terrorists were in both cases: widows of people murdered by the Russians. (If you want to call them radical Islamists, that's an interesting fact to reconcile, isn't it?) Also, I think we can agree that most of the actual carnage in both cases came from the incompetence of the Russian security forces. As someone whose earliest exposure to the bloodiness of world history was the last gasp of the Apartheid government in Rhodesia - and who has an auntie who lost her legs from a presumably ZANU mine - can empathize with the feeling on the part of severely oppressed people that they need to somehow, anyhow, lash out at their oppressors. Such feelings aren't based on religion or even nationalism so much as just hatred from constantly getting beaten up. Unfortunately, innocent or even good people (like my auntie, who was anti-Apartheid and to her credit continued to be against it after she lost her legs) suffer because they belong to an oppressor group, even if they condemn their group's barbarism. But look at it from an outsider's perspective: what would the greater tragedy be, a group of black "terrorists" group capturing and booby-trapping a white school in Alabama ca. 1855, or slavery; a Jewish "terrorist" group hijacking a Nazi theater in 1942, or the Holocaust? Not that I condone any attacks on schoolkids, whether it's Chechens attacking Russian kids or Americans and Pakistanis blowing up kids and their schools in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Or even hypothetical Mauthausen escapees finding guns and their way to a Nazi school in Vienna. But I understand where they come from, and do not see them as anything like the global Crusade you seem to want to pile them into.



Karl89 said:


> And there have been plenty of atrocities against Serbs and they have legitimate concerns as well.


I never claimed otherwise. There was certainly some ethnic cleansing of Serbs in the 1990s, such as the Krajina tragedy. And obviously the Nazi quisling government was barbaric towards the Serbs. However, one must note that the perpetrators of the Krajina ethnic cleansing and the leaders of the UTC were not Muslims. They were Catholic Croatians.



Karl89 said:


> And about my Reagan avatar if you would think for a second before patting yourself on the back for making what you think to be a witty and salient point you would realize that it is a play on Che iconography and meant to be ironic.


Ironically intended or otherwise, it's still yet another example of "vanguardist" right-wingers' fetishization of Communist iconography.



Laxplayer said:


> Yes, I consider 78 days of bombing continuous.
> The US led NATO bombings of 3000+ sorties on the towns of Sarajevo, Tuzia and Lukavica etc.


I hope I'm wrong, but your post has the acrid stench of apologism for the Serbian genocide and ethnic cleansing of the last decade. To correct two of your most basic errors of fact:
-The Caspian Sea lies between Russia, Iran, and some Central Asian states. "Yugoslavia" is about as geopolitically crucial for control over the Caspian as Bangladesh is.
-Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Gornja Lukavica are cities in Bosnia, not Serbia. Moreover, Sarajevo and UN "safe haven" Tuzla were never bombed. _Hardened positions in hills around the cities,_ from which Chetnik war criminals were laying siege to both cities, denying them access to utlities, and raining hell onto their civilians, were bombed, and rightly so. That is an important difference. I don't know much about Gornja Lukavica, except that it was near a Chetnik KZ-Lager for Bosnian Muslims and purportedly a site from which terror was wreaked upon the citizens of Sarajevo. is an article that may be of interest to you.



Laxplayer said:


> It's amusing that Clinton is given a free pass with regard to Yugoslavia. The conflict was not the humanitarian campaign that it was made out to be.


To some, such as Joschka Fischer, it clearly was a case of "never again" being an overriding issue of international politics.

We agree that Clinton "didn't care about the Bosnians," though. He acted as he the did because of the torrent of evil images entering American homes. Remember the Chetniks because the Chetnik terrorists were brazenly shelling civilians.) Also, because the conscience of his administration (SACEUR Wes Clark) kept bringing it (and Rwanda) up, and because (unlike in Rwanda) the victims were ultimately too white to ignore. In Kosovo, I think that ultimately anti-genocide forces within our government (e.g. Wes Clark) and pressure from civilized leaders elsewhere (Joschka Fischer, etc.) are what forced Clinton's hand.



Laxplayer said:


> Civilians were deliberately targeted (Radio Television Serbia),


Your ignorance (or hypocrisy) shows through because one of the first targets of the Chetniks besieging Sarajevo was the local media, including the television tower and PTT building. Have you ever stood at the foot of this building?

Also, in order to intimidate courageous Western reporters staying at the Holiday Inn across the street (Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Samantha Power of the Washington Post, and others) and get them to flee the city, the Chetniks shelled the hell out of the apartment building across the road. (Which, as a testiment to the courage of these reporters, only strengthened their resolve.) The Chetniks also mercilessly shelled hospitals (the Kosovo Hospital, French Hospital, Jezero Hospital, and others whose names I'd have to look up), wells, and marketplaces. 
Note that I'm not attempting to justify the American/NATO attacks on Serbian infrastructure in 1999 not directly related to commanding, equipping, or moving military forces about (bridges, TV/radio stations, tank factories, legit targets; powerplants, water treatment facilities, Chinese embassies, not so much). I remember screaming at my TV a few times in 1999, as we were hitting Serb civilians, "**** this! Hit the ******* tanks!" I think that alongside those who pervert religion into a cause for sadistic attacks on "others" in the lowest circle of hell are going to be the archetects and practitioners of "strategic bombing" (Douhet, et al.) because of their legacy of untrammeled misery and destruction. To appallingly little, if indeed any at all, real end. I'm not against war a priori. I'm not against violent struggle to achieve something that's fundamentally just, such as the end of poisonous institutions (e.g. slavery, Apartheid), arresting a genocide, or even in some rare cases effecting regime change. (Examples of a "just" regime change in today's world would be the Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe.) I am, however, against psychopathic murder, which is all that "strategic bombing" is.



Laxplayer said:


> Milosevic tortured (at least by Abu Ghraib definitions).


Do you have any actual evidence to that point, or are you just blowing smoke?



Laxplayer said:


> Interesting that Clinton's war was ok, but Bush's is not.


Clinton acted, with much prodding and too little, too late, to end an in-progress genocide. That is a worthy use of national power. Bush committed America to a quagmire on a container ship full of lies, and that is arguably treason against this country.



Artisan Fan said:


> You can't equate a war situation with a terrorist act.


1) Dead people tend not to care why they're killed. Nor do their families. They primarily care that a loved one has been stolen from them.

2) The greatest terrorist act of all is the use of state power to murder people based on a big lie. That, sir, is the Iraq attack in a nutshell. You may not think that all those Iraqi lives are worth as much as American lives, but hopefully you are alone in that delusion.


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Karl89 said:


> Blame the Dutch for Srebrenica. Actually the Dutch blame themselves and the government took responsibility and resigned over the matter. Little consolation for the victims though.


Oh, you mean the Chetniks who actually marched the Bosnian men to their deaths and mass slaughtered them aren't responsible? Hello! Yes, the Dutch forces on the ground should have laid their lives on the line to save the city, and yes that they didn't will forever be a stain on their whole nation's manhood. But "blame" them for it? They're accessories at best, not the ones who committed the acts.



Karl89 said:


> you continually discount or explain way the real threat Radical Islam poses.


I do, because I think it's severely overstated. Doing so does good things for the Christianists, because it gets their cannon-fodder fired up for the next Crusade. Jewish supremacists love it, because it lets them justify Apartheid, their pogroms in Gaza, and anything else they wish to inflict upon subject populations. Doing so does good things for the government, because it bolsters government power and stops people from whining about things like the idiotic procedures in place at our airports. Doing so does good things for the media, because rampant paranoia gives them more eyeballs and more things to rail against (both the supposed threat and the government reactions to it). It's not a conspiracy, just a mutually reinforcing web of BS.



Karl89 said:


> You cite the Habsburgs as an example of Christian oppression of Muslims yet last I looked they haven't been in power since 1918


And you cite the Ottomans as examples of Christian oppression of Muslims, repeatedly. What's the difference? None, except that in former Ottoman lands there are still native Christians, and in lands under sway of the Inquisition the native Muslim populations were subjected to genocide.



Karl89 said:


> Austria - just visit the 10th district in Vienna - or Turkey where Christians are routinely prosecuted for defaming Islam?


Funny you should mention the 10. Bezirk, because I (briefly) lived there, in a bright yellow building on the Neilreichgasse, a little south of that giant Merkur supermarket and the Don Gil outlet that occasionally had some phenomenal deals, like Helmut Lang jeans for under 700 ATS. And if you don't think there's institutionalized bigotry against Turks and Kurds in Wien-Favoriten, well, one must surmise that you've never been there or bothered to talk to anyone there. Admittedly, I've never lived in Turkey but I have spent time in Istanbul and the Turkish Riviera. Somehow, I doubt you even have that much direct contact with the country. Or enough knowledge of its history to realize that its army is a pretty thuggish bunch in general. Just talk to a Kurdish refugee sometime.



Karl89 said:


> And now we hear it from you - Ariel Sharon is to blame for all the world's problems.


Sharon had nothing to do with 9/11 or (mostly) Iraq, but he (along with the growth of Apartheid-style policies in the illegally-occupied territories since the Oslo so-called peace process) did light the fire that's been burning under that corner of the mideast. Had Israeli governments not used Oslo as a cover to massively expand the illegal land-grabs in Palestine and institute Apartheid, that end of the Med might have a very different recent history. (I haven't read it yet, but President Carter's book will likely go into some detail. If it got one of my old profs, Ken Stein, to complain, it's probably pretty accurate.)



Karl89 said:


> What do you think was going to happen in Iraq after Saddam or do you just favor brutal dicatorships forever in the Arab world?


There are a number of things that could have happened after Saddam. All but this one did not involve wholesale destruction of their infrastructure and mass murder by an outside force.



Karl89 said:


> You also seem unable to make a distinction between how the formal nations and great powers of Europe conducted relations with the Islamic world and how the Ottomans briutalized their Christian subjects in the Balkans.


Now isn't that just a little bit bigoted, to call the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire and the like "formal nations and great powers" but not accord the same status to the Ottoman Empire?



Karl89 said:


> And yes you are correct about the Russians but does that justify the Chechen response at Beslan? Or the Nord Ost theatre?


First, I think we can agree that compared to the horrors visited by Yeltsin and Putin upon the Chechens, Beslan and the theater are incidences that compare about as well as a bee-sting on a non-allegric person somewhere in the US and 9/11. Also interesting to me is who the terrorists were in both cases: widows of people murdered by the Russians. (If you want to call them radical Islamists, that's an interesting fact to reconcile, isn't it?) Also, I think we can agree that most of the actual carnage in both cases came from the incompetence of the Russian security forces. As someone whose earliest exposure to the bloodiness of world history was the last gasp of the Apartheid government in Rhodesia - and who has an auntie who lost her legs from a presumably ZANU mine - can empathize with the feeling on the part of severely oppressed people that they need to somehow, anyhow, lash out at their oppressors. Such feelings aren't based on religion or even nationalism so much as just hatred from constantly getting beaten up. Unfortunately, innocent or even good people (like my auntie, who was anti-Apartheid and to her credit continued to be against it after she lost her legs) suffer because they belong to an oppressor group, even if they condemn their group's barbarism. But look at it from an outsider's perspective: what would the greater tragedy be, a group of black "terrorists" group capturing and booby-trapping a white school in Alabama ca. 1855, or slavery; a Jewish "terrorist" group hijacking a Nazi theater in 1942, or the Holocaust? Not that I condone any attacks on schoolkids, whether it's Chechens attacking Russian kids or Americans and Pakistanis blowing up kids and their schools in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Or even hypothetical Mauthausen escapees finding guns and their way to a Nazi school in Vienna. But I understand where they come from, and do not see them as anything like the global Crusade you seem to want to pile them into.



Karl89 said:


> And there have been plenty of atrocities against Serbs and they have legitimate concerns as well.


I never claimed otherwise. There was certainly some ethnic cleansing of Serbs in the 1990s, such as the Krajina tragedy. And obviously the Nazi quisling government was barbaric towards the Serbs. However, one must note that the perpetrators of the Krajina ethnic cleansing and the leaders of the UTC were not Muslims. They were Catholic Croatians.



Karl89 said:


> And about my Reagan avatar if you would think for a second before patting yourself on the back for making what you think to be a witty and salient point you would realize that it is a play on Che iconography and meant to be ironic.


Ironically intended or otherwise, it's still yet another example of "vanguardist" right-wingers' fetishization of Communist iconography.



Laxplayer said:


> Yes, I consider 78 days of bombing continuous.
> The US led NATO bombings of 3000+ sorties on the towns of Sarajevo, Tuzia and Lukavica etc.


I hope I'm wrong, but your post has the acrid stench of apologism for the Serbian genocide and ethnic cleansing of the last decade. To correct two of your most basic errors of fact:
-The Caspian Sea lies between Russia, Iran, and some Central Asian states. "Yugoslavia" is about as geopolitically crucial for control over the Caspian as Bangladesh is.
-Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Gornja Lukavica are cities in Bosnia, not Serbia. Moreover, Sarajevo and UN "safe haven" Tuzla were never bombed. _Hardened positions in hills around the cities,_ from which Chetnik war criminals were laying siege to both cities, denying them access to utlities, and raining hell onto their civilians, were bombed, and rightly so. That is an important difference. I don't know much about Gornja Lukavica, except that it was near a Chetnik KZ-Lager for Bosnian Muslims and purportedly a site from which terror was wreaked upon the citizens of Sarajevo. is an article that may be of interest to you.



Laxplayer said:


> It's amusing that Clinton is given a free pass with regard to Yugoslavia. The conflict was not the humanitarian campaign that it was made out to be.


To some, such as Joschka Fischer, it clearly was a case of "never again" being an overriding issue of international politics.

We agree that Clinton "didn't care about the Bosnians," though. He acted as he the did because of the torrent of evil images entering American homes. Remember the Chetniks because the Chetnik terrorists were brazenly shelling civilians.) Also, because the conscience of his administration (SACEUR Wes Clark) kept bringing it (and Rwanda) up, and because (unlike in Rwanda) the victims were ultimately too white to ignore. In Kosovo, I think that ultimately anti-genocide forces within our government (e.g. Wes Clark) and pressure from civilized leaders elsewhere (Joschka Fischer, etc.) are what forced Clinton's hand.



Laxplayer said:


> Civilians were deliberately targeted (Radio Television Serbia),


Your ignorance (or hypocrisy) shows through because one of the first targets of the Chetniks besieging Sarajevo was the local media, including the television tower and PTT building. Have you ever stood at the foot of this building?

Also, in order to intimidate courageous Western reporters staying at the Holiday Inn across the street (Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Samantha Power of the Washington Post, and others) and get them to flee the city, the Chetniks shelled the hell out of the apartment building across the road. (Which, as a testiment to the courage of these reporters, only strengthened their resolve.) The Chetniks also mercilessly shelled hospitals (the Kosovo Hospital, French Hospital, Jezero Hospital, and others whose names I'd have to look up), wells, and marketplaces. 
Note that I'm not attempting to justify the American/NATO attacks on Serbian infrastructure in 1999 not directly related to commanding, equipping, or moving military forces about (bridges, TV/radio stations, tank factories, legit targets; powerplants, water treatment facilities, Chinese embassies, not so much). I remember screaming at my TV a few times in 1999, as we were hitting Serb civilians, "**** this! Hit the ******* tanks!" I think that alongside those who pervert religion into a cause for sadistic attacks on "others" in the lowest circle of hell are going to be the archetects and practitioners of "strategic bombing" (Douhet, et al.) because of their legacy of untrammeled misery and destruction. To appallingly little, if indeed any at all, real end. I'm not against war a priori. I'm not against violent struggle to achieve something that's fundamentally just, such as the end of poisonous institutions (e.g. slavery, Apartheid), arresting a genocide, or even in some rare cases effecting regime change. (Examples of a "just" regime change in today's world would be the Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe.) I am, however, against psychopathic murder, which is all that "strategic bombing" is.



Laxplayer said:


> Milosevic tortured (at least by Abu Ghraib definitions).


Do you have any actual evidence to that point, or are you just blowing smoke?



Laxplayer said:


> Interesting that Clinton's war was ok, but Bush's is not.


Clinton acted, with much prodding and too little, too late, to end an in-progress genocide. That is a worthy use of national power. Bush committed America to a quagmire on a container ship full of lies, and that is arguably treason against this country.



Artisan Fan said:


> You can't equate a war situation with a terrorist act.


1) Dead people tend not to care why they're killed. Nor do their families. They primarily care that a loved one has been stolen from them.

2) The greatest terrorist act of all is the use of state power to murder people based on a big lie. That, sir, is the Iraq attack in a nutshell. You may not think that all those Iraqi lives are worth as much as American lives, but hopefully you are alone in that delusion.


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

SGladwell said:


> To correct two of your most basic errors of fact:
> -The Caspian Sea lies between Russia, Iran, and some Central Asian states. "Yugoslavia" is about as geopolitically crucial for control over the Caspian as Bangladesh is.
> 
> Do you have any actual evidence to that point, or are you just blowing smoke?


I know where the Caspian Sea is, that was not my point.
https://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3771c83c3fbf.htm

https://www.serbia-info.com/news/1999-12/23/16358.html

I do not believe that Milosevic's treatment was torture. I compare the 24 hour lighting in his room to the "torture" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. All I was saying is that with Clinton as President this treatment of prisoners is ok, but with Bush it is not. 
https://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/09/milosevic.lawyer/

No WMDs found, No mass graves in Kosovo found. Why criticize Bush, but not Clinton?


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## fenway (May 2, 2006)

Excerpt from Andrew C. McCarthy's article "Can We Talk?" on the National Review Online:

When I grew up in The Bronx, there were street gangs. You mostly stayed away from them, and, if you really had to, you fought with them. But I never remember anyone saying, "Gee, maybe if we just talk with them ..."

Nor do I remember, in two decades as a prosecutor, anyone saying, "Y'know, maybe if we just talk with these Mafia guys, we could achieve some kind of understanding ..."

Sitting down with evil legitimizes evil. As a practical matter, all it accomplishes is to convey weakness. This spring - after trumpeting the Bush Doctrine's "you're with us or you're with the terrorists" slogan for five years - Secretary of State Rice pathetically sought to bribe Iran out of its nuclear program with a menu of all carrots and no sticks &#8230; and certainly no demand that the mullahs stop fomenting terror. The result? They're still laughing at us, even as they build their bombs, harbor al Qaeda operatives, and arm the militias killing American soldiers in Iraq.

While our rhetoric blathers that we'll never let them have a nuke, our talk begs them, pretty-please, to stop building one. And our actions all but hand them one. If all that makes you wonder who's the superpower, what do you suppose they're thinking?


https://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDEyMmY0YTJkMzZjZGNiY2ZiMzE4NWIyNjliMjQ4MDQ=


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## SGladwell (Dec 22, 2005)

Laxplayer said:


> I know where the Caspian Sea is, that was not my point.
> https://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3771c83c3fbf.htm
> 
> https://www.serbia-info.com/news/1999-12/23/16358.html


Yes, there are wacky conspiracy theories about everything. A few rantings from the loony bin does not reality make.

Also, you might want to consult a map before you give credence to such wacky claims...



Laxplayer said:


> I do not believe that Milosevic's treatment was torture. I compare the 24 hour lighting in his room to the "torture" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. All I was saying is that with Clinton as President this treatment of prisoners is ok, but with Bush it is not.
> https://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/09/milosevic.lawyer/


Do you really think that one aspect of the Abu Ghraib experience that may or may not have been repeated with Slobo makes the situations identical? Was he waterboarded? Did he have electrodes attached to his genitals? Did people attack him with dogs? Was he posed in compromising positions so his picture could be taken? Please, man, have some perspective!


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