Reporter: Do you accept civilian control of the military?
Patton: Of course I do. But the politicians always stop short and leave us another war to fight.
Although it is far from clear from the results of the election that that is what the people really want, all signs seem to indicate a return of "realism" to the conduct of American foreign policy, as the Iraq Study Group creates the political cover to cut and run from Iraq.
A few thoughts. As flawed as this mission turned out to be, I maintain that it was our best shot at acheiving a decisive blow against the jihad early in the conflict. Located as it is in the heart of the Mideast, with many of Islam's holiest sites, with its mix of Shia and Sunni, a comparatively cosmoplitan, educated population and of course its massive oil reserves, geopolitically Iraq is pivotal real estate. Although it may in retrospect seem quixotic, the notion of (belatedly)liberating Iraq from a heinous despot while spreading freedom and prosperity had the potential to stop the jihad in its tracks. Was it really so farfetched to believe that Iraqi's would prefer ipods to IED's? Apparently it was.
Ultimately, America ended up paying the price for prior fecklessness. We cut and ran out of Vietnam, we cut and ran out of Beirut, we cut and ran out of Mogadishu, we hung hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's out to dry after the Gulf War. We'll probably eventually throw Israel and Taiwan under the bus as well. The democracy project in Iraq was doomed because our enemies knew that all they had to do was wait out two elections and we'd cut and run in Iraq too.
So, it looks like "realism" will once again rule the day. It was realism that led Bush 41 to encourage the Iraqi's to rise up against Saddam, only to stand there with his hands in his pockets while he slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them. And we wonder why they hate us.
What does the election mean? Does it mean the American people are tired of fighting? Could be. And that's too bad, because I see no signs that our enemies are.
Patton: Of course I do. But the politicians always stop short and leave us another war to fight.
Although it is far from clear from the results of the election that that is what the people really want, all signs seem to indicate a return of "realism" to the conduct of American foreign policy, as the Iraq Study Group creates the political cover to cut and run from Iraq.
A few thoughts. As flawed as this mission turned out to be, I maintain that it was our best shot at acheiving a decisive blow against the jihad early in the conflict. Located as it is in the heart of the Mideast, with many of Islam's holiest sites, with its mix of Shia and Sunni, a comparatively cosmoplitan, educated population and of course its massive oil reserves, geopolitically Iraq is pivotal real estate. Although it may in retrospect seem quixotic, the notion of (belatedly)liberating Iraq from a heinous despot while spreading freedom and prosperity had the potential to stop the jihad in its tracks. Was it really so farfetched to believe that Iraqi's would prefer ipods to IED's? Apparently it was.
Ultimately, America ended up paying the price for prior fecklessness. We cut and ran out of Vietnam, we cut and ran out of Beirut, we cut and ran out of Mogadishu, we hung hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's out to dry after the Gulf War. We'll probably eventually throw Israel and Taiwan under the bus as well. The democracy project in Iraq was doomed because our enemies knew that all they had to do was wait out two elections and we'd cut and run in Iraq too.
So, it looks like "realism" will once again rule the day. It was realism that led Bush 41 to encourage the Iraqi's to rise up against Saddam, only to stand there with his hands in his pockets while he slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them. And we wonder why they hate us.
What does the election mean? Does it mean the American people are tired of fighting? Could be. And that's too bad, because I see no signs that our enemies are.
posted by alwaysright at
5:32 PM
7 Comments:
I think it odd and obtuse to imagine that those 'dead-enders', criminals and ex-Baathists were thinking back in '03 that all they had to do was wait out two election cycles in the US and victory would be theirs, I think they had a few more pressing concerns at the time, like how to survive in a failed and collapsing state. It is, without doubt, this administrations incompetence, stubborness and arrogance that has brought about our present predicament. If you fail to go into a hostile situation without a fucking plan to create the peace and get out with minimal damage to our prestige, treasury and ultimately our brave fighting men and women then you get what you deserve. Everything that has occured, in this country and around the world, since '03 is a direct result of the initial rush into a conflict that we had no idea how to manage, specuous intel, an undefined strategic goal and a strict policy of unaccountability. We have branded 50% of this country as 'Terrorist Sympathizers', imprisoned our own citizens indefinitely, sanctioned torture, spied on who knows who, alienated some our most staunch allies, befriended some of the most notorious despots on the planet and ultimately sold our own soldiers down the river. Yeah... fighting terrorists is a dirty business and we should not be afraid to get our noses bloodied or bloody some noses in the process but, America was always known for fighting clean and winning clean now, not so much.
In closing... I don't think Americans are tired of fighting, I think they are tired of incompetence, denial and spin. This country was totally prepared to win a war on terror, we were united and unflagging, we had been attacked and we wanted justice. The Iraq war, although sold as part of the broader war on terror has finally been exposed as a sham. No ties to 9/11, no ties to bin Laden, no WMD, no 'Mushroom Cloud, no Democracy, no Victory and no point.
So... you're back.
My response on Iraq is that history is a continuum. It didn't begin in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.
From a strategic, long term perspective, I believe the realist solution of leaving Saddam in power in 1991 was a cowardly evasion of responsibility and a crime.
You break it, you bought it. What we refused to acknowledge is that we made the purchase in 1991. We ended up as custodians of an already "failed and collapsing state" at that time as we tried to enforce sanctions that everybody broke, did nothing while Saddam flaunted the very terms of his surrender, stood by while he ripped off the oil-for-foood program for billions while starving tens of thousands of his own people, harbored and supported terrorists including Al Qaeda, attempted the assasination of Bush 41, and ordered his warplanes to fire on ours just about every day for twelve years, just to mention a few things.
As much as you believe that everything flowed from the '03 decision to go to war, I believe that everything that happened after '91--the rise of radicalism, the intifada, Mogadishu, right up to 9/11, flowed from the flawed decision to leave Saddam in power, and our abdication of responsibility to do something for the Iraqi people then.
We had a choice then, just as we do now, to pay now or pay more later. We're Americans. We decided to put it on the card.
Oh, and by the way, not everything that has occurred since '03 has been bad. We've had a miraculous economic recovery and we haven't been attacked. Qaddafi disarmed, the A.Q. Khan network was dismantled, the Iraqi people wrote a constitution and voted.
We were always going to have to do something about Iraq. We had kicked that can as far down the road as it could be kicked. Either the sanctions would be lifted and Saddam would be given the clean bill of health, at which time he would have reconstituted his WMD programs (including nuclear) within about 18 months (see the Duelfer Report), or we were going to have to take him out. I'm glad we took him out.
That it turned out badly is perhaps a matter of unrealistic expectations. Think about Bastogne or Iwo Jima. Maybe we just don't understand how bad war can really get. Casualties? We suffered more in a bad week in Vietnam. Cost? A great deal, no doubt. But the "more troops" critics conveniently leave out that 300,000 troops is about 3/4 of our entire roster of active duty soldiers, and would have raised the cost by about a factor of five. Here's a thought. Maybe the administration's biggest miscalculation was in overestimating the public's threshold of pain.
As the departed Don Rumsfeld said, you fight the war with the military that you have, not the one you might wish for.
I know the conventional wisdom is that we had "no plan for the peace". Perhaps. At the end of the day, even America's resources are not unlimited. We committed the number of troops we could afford. Meanwhile, our enemies adopted a strategy of remotely bombing trucks, filming it, and then selling the film to CNN to be broadcast back here in the US. It worked.
Was the administration incompetent, stubborn and arrogant? Fine. If it makes you feel better to think so, you go. There is another possibility, and that is that we are in a much bigger and tougher global war than we thought we were.
As far as WMD's, ties to bin Laden and 9/11 go, I'm really not convinced that that's been totally disproven. But even if it has, at the time of the invasion, we didn't know for certain, but there was good reason to believe that they existed. I still don't really see why anyone thinks that gambling that they didn't exist, and that Saddam wouldn't have passed something to al Qaeda to use on us if they did, would have been the prudent decision. When it comes to matters of life and death, shouldn't one err on the side of caution?
Anyway, what's done is done. You think we shouldn't have gone in and I think it was the least bad out of a range of sucky options.
The real question is what do we do now? Shall we gorge ourselves in some sort of orgy of recriminations, maybe make like Shiites and Sunni's and have our own little civil war? Or do we agree to disagree on some things and face our difficulties together?
As Benjamin Franklin once said, if we don't hang together, we'll most certainly hang separately.
I think you give Saddam way too much credit. If you really want to get historical we can go all the way back to '49 and the formation of the Jewish state in Palestine. Although I firmly believe in Israels right to exist we were responsible for the manipulation of Arab territories to assuage our collective guilt after WWII. Of course how were we to know that by the late eighties, early nineties the Israelies would fashion their own kind of fascist state and begin the purification of Greater Israel. Like they hadn't pissed off the entire Arab world before, now they really had at 'em. Saddam was/is a bit player in the grand scheme of things, an egotistical meglomaniac that could have - and historically was - controlled by Western 'entities'. He over played his hand, bluffed and was razed. As for Al Qaeda in Iraq, all the evidence points to the opposite, only people who religeously watch Faux News believe the contrary. And as for miraculous economic recoveries, real wages have declined, the stock market has gained 2.7% since 2001 and we have lost over 3 million jobs in manufacturing alone. And the only reason unemployment is down to 4.8% is because of the type of low paying, uninsured jobs we have created means most people in this country have to have two or perhaps even three jobs just to survive. I don't think you have been in the job market recently, I have and it's brutal and all the while our glorious leaders debated, gay marriage, Terri Schiavo, the ten commandments and flag burning, leaving our illustrious executive branch to walk all over the Constitution and execute a disastrous war plan without any accountablility to the people who were fucking paying for it, sometimes and increasingly with their lives. Yes we should move on and find a solution and I believe that with a true opposition we can do that because we have restored the historic checks and balances that this country thrives on however, this administration will have spent a trillion dollars, lost countless lives and broken so many laws before this is all over and somebody has to be held accountable... finally!
I imagine your job-hunting travails had a lot more to do with the fact that you were looking for work here in the People's Republic of New York than it did with any national trend. As I suspect you know, most of the country is booming.
And that is pretty miraculous given where we were five years ago. Bush inherited a stock market crash and a recession from his predecessor, not to mention a raft of yet to be discovered corporate scandals, i.e. Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Tyco. Oh, and 9/11.
By rights, we should be in the depths of a depression.
From 2000-2002, my household income dropped by half, and in '02 and '03, I worked two jobs, so I know a little about that. My dad worked two jobs for awhile, too,when I was a kid. Working two jobs has been a fact of American life for just about ever.
No political party is going to be able to do anything about the loss of manufacturing jobs. We've been losing manufacturing jobs for at least fifty years, and we will continue to lose them for the next fifty. Interesting factoid: last year China lost more manufacturing jobs than we did-- to technology.
In 1900, 2 out of every 3 workers was involved in agriculture. Today, it's like 1 in 200. It's called progress.
Are you hoping someday your kids wil grow up and get a job on an assembly line somewhere? I didn't think so.
The fact is that this economy is creating more skilled jobs than we can fill. We're not producing enough scientists and engineers, programmers or health care workers to fill the demand.
For a change, I'm going to agree with you. Everything really does revolve around Israel and the nonsensical borders that got drawn up. Which brings me back to '91 and the Gulf War. Think about it. We rushed over there like a bunch of madmen for what? To preserve the territorial integrity of Kuwait? Who the fuck really cares about Kuwait?
So we slaughter about a half million people and then stand aside while Saddam slaughters a few hundred thousand more, all in the name of "stability". Think about the message that sent. We'll tolerate any manner of human rights abuse, but DO NOT fuck with these nonsensical borders! We should have let Saddam take it, but if we were going to do something about it, we needed to go all the way.
One thing really does lead to another.
I can't resist taking you up on your shot at "Faux News". Why do liberals all hate Fox so much? Because they're not overtly anti-American?
Perhaps you can refresh my memory, but I don't recall any episodes of Fox running fraudulent news stories supported by obviously forged documents (CBS), or having to fire two reporters and an editor for MAKING UP THE NEWS (NY Times). Do you know a kid from just outside of Rochester was just awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously and the Times didn't even mention it?
I don't know, I guess I'm just another dopey patriot. I'm way too stupid to keep up. I would have thought that would be fit to print, as opposed to classified government programs designed to prevent more terrorist attacks. (I know, it's a violation of my rights for the government to try to keep me safe) Clearly, I'm in way over my head, but if I were you, I'd be a little skeptical about the veracity of some of your news sources, too.
righterscramp said: execute a disastrous war plan without any accountablility to the people who were fucking paying for it,
but wait there *was* a plan! the oil that we got from Iraq was going to pay for the costs incurred by the war. Remember? of course there hasn't been any oil to speak of, but yeah it was a plan.
alwaysright said: The fact is that this economy is creating more skilled jobs than we can fill. We're not producing enough scientists and engineers, programmers or health care workers to fill the demand.
My programmer husband has been out of work since February and I just got a pink slip today (education and computer technology) The economy of my state (NJ) is in the tank and thanks to cutbacks to education on the state and federal level (huuuuge cutbacks in educational technology, and No Child Left Behind has yet to be completely funded)
My M.A. is looking mighty useless and I'm thinking about what kind of job someone like me -- after 20+ years in education is going to do. A little too late to get into nursing, so maybe I should get one of those nifty jobs over at WalMart 'cause I hear they're hiring.
I'm waiting for George's economic magic to come to me.
There are thousands of stories like yours Madeline... unfortunately they are not reported on the Sunshine and Lollipops All The Time Faux News, so Alwayswrong has no idea about them. Instead he believes that we are witnessing a 'miraculous' economic recovery unseen since the Third Reich threw off the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and well, we all know what happened next. Considering we have massive deficits, unexpurgated spending, the highest military budget - in real terms - this country has ever known and we do not even include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in those numbers still translates into a robust economic miracle for him. Of course one of his heroes Dick "Darth" Cheney says 'Deficits don't matter'. Maybe not for him but they will for our children and I dare say our childrens children. What matters now is now and that is the philosophy (I use that term loosely because philosophy implies thought) of the people who have been running this country. I hope Friedman and his trickle down ilk all rot in hell.
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