On my way to work the other day, I noticed a car with a bumper sticker on the back that read, “No more Vietnams, End the war.” Isn’t that self-contradictory? Wouldn’t the only way to have “no more Vietnams” be to win the war, rather than simply end it?
Incidentally, in that same vein, I watched the final episode of PBS’s new documentary “The War” last night. I have to say that I firmly believe that if World War II were to happen today, we would lose. Not because we don’t have military might, but because we wouldn’t be willing to do what it takes to win. People would be driving around with bumper stickers saying “No more Bataans, End the war.” General MacArthur would never have returned to the Philippines, as he would have been forced to resign after lengthy congressional hearings. And, of course, the U.S. would have been bogged down in a Japanese quagmire with thousands of American troops dying every day trying to take the island nation because they wouldn’t be willing to use the bomb.
Prego man, you and others have made your point about how you feel about those without combat experience taking a stance in favor of the current Iraq war strategy. We get it. To continue pestering and insulting David is nothing more than a personal attack. Feel free to argue opinions all you want, but please be respectful of the other commentators and their opinions, too.
Prego, PeoriaGuy, is making the personal attacks, not you.
Also, I’m not advocating staying in Iraq. I’m advocating finishing the job, then withdrawing. Please understand the distinction. You’re statements are based on a premise that we can’t finish the job, and that’s your right to think that way. But don’t assume that because I or C. J. do not favor immediate withdrawal that we want to stay indefinitely for no reason.
PREGO MAN WROTE; “It’s very relevant from previous postings that oft times the person who wants to fight the most never was involved in ANY fight. It’s immaterial if I served or not… because I am not advocating staying in Iraq till the last shot falls.”
Then I suspect that you haven’t served. If that’s the case, the only disagreement between us is that you favor an immediate withdrawal of our forces from Iraq and I believe we can and should achieve victory then withdraw. Thus, my opinion is no more credible than yours.
The military is a professional organization with everyone assigned special jobs to perform. They don’t need all eligible men (that would be a lot of soldiers in a country of 300 million!). Not everyone can or should serve. It’s an all-volunteer force. Some choose to serve and some don’t. I’m one of latter.
Furthermore, there are those that have served, been shot at and advocate victory before withdrawing. Some even re-enlist. Some re-enlist and give their lives. Being shot at doesn’t make one anti-war.
It begins at the top. One does not need to be shot at to know a threat to our country. If presidents are reluctant to use our military to protect our interests because they had no military service, then they would be unnecessarily paralyzing themselves,and violating their oath to defend and protect this country. Perhaps that was our 39th president’s problem – he served in the U. S. Navy, but saw no combat.
David, in one of the above posts you stated “victory = end of war”. I am just curious as to what your definition of “victory” is.
GRISMAN WROTE: “David, in one of the above posts you stated ‘victory = end of war’. I am just curious as to what your definition of ‘victory’ is.”
(1) Terrorists no longer consider Iraq a safe haven.
(2) Iranian meddling stopped.
(3) Iraq able to provide its own security
The “Surge” is designed to accomplish the first, and so far is working. We must get serious with Iran, and show them the consequences of their meddling. As for the latter, many parts of the country are secure and IIRC the government has announced that will takoever from British troops in Basra in two months. Baghdad will be a challenge.
David Jordan: Do you really believe the surge is working? wow…
Peoria AntiPundit,
Do you believe it is not?
David why do you bother?
David, In your definition of “victory” above, I believe #1 and 3 were being accomplished by Saddam before we got there.
Isn’t this discussion really pointless? Everyone has their own position, and nothing anyone can say will change it. It’s not like both sides haven’t made valid points. But I doubt anyone is going to suddenly say “Hey, you know what? I was wrong in my thinking and he was right!” One thing this discussion does bring out, however, is how truly polarized we are as a nation today.
GRISMAN WROTE: “David, In your definition of ‘victory’ above, I believe #1 and 3 were being accomplished by Saddam before we got there.”
That’s incorrect, Grisman. As for #1, Saddam Hussein harbored the leader of the Achille Lauro hijacking, Abu Abbas, and PLO terrorist Abu Nidal (behind the 1985 Rome airport massacre). Abdul Rahman Yasin (American-born incidentally) was raised in Iraq and involved in the first WTC bombing in in 1993. He remains at large. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Jordanian-born terrorist (now dead), was in Iraq before the invasion.
Saddam Hussein had terrorist-training camps in his country, including Salman-Pak. He helped fund PLO terrorists (recall that $25,000 to each family of a suicide bomber).
When Saddam was in power, terror was state-sanctioned. It is no longer.
As for #3, I would hardly call Saddam’s death squads, use of gas attacks against his own people, his sons raping any woman they wished and other abominations, “security.”
Today, Iraq is a free society with a free press and consensual government. We need to finish the job, rather than cut and run.
It is becoming obvious that the arguments presented by Prego-Man, Grisman and others are loosing steam. You base your entire argument[s] on arm-chair history and let the media lead you by the nose the rest of the way.
C.J. made a valid point earlier. The citizens of this nation do not have to be current or former military to express an opinion about the war. However, having been there [Middle East] allows for a much more objective assessment of the real situation…at least from a military perspective.
Jordan’s assessment is pretty much right on. As for the rest of you…there is always the USO!
“When Saddam was in power, terror was state-sanctioned. It is no longer.”
That’s incorrect on both counts. To the second point … Iraqi Shia police and military units are heavily infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and other militant Shia forces. These units routinely allow death squads to carry out their genocidal business unimpeded. Sometimes police and army units ARE the death squads. Nouri al-Maliki and his allies know this, and by their inaction, sanction it. That’s why OUR military had to come back to Baghdad in strength to hold back the slaughter.
To the first point … Iraq was never a major sponsor of terrorism. Mr. Jordan mentions a couple terrorists dredged up from 15-20 years ago and Saddam’s payouts to families of Palestinian suicide bombers as a legitimate justifications for the Iraq War. Are we REALLY supposed to think those suicide bombers were motivated to blow themselves up on an Israeli bus because their family was going to get $25,000??? That’s utterly ridiculous.
Besides, if we wanted to get at the primary source of funding for terrorism in the world, by Mr. Jordan’s logic, we should invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
David mentioned one of the WTC 1993 plotters was born in Iraq. 15 of the 19 September 11 terrorists were born in Saudi Arabia. Again, by Mr. Jordan’s logic, Saudi Arabia should be our target, not Iraq.
My main point here … DPJ’s logic doesn’t work. The only reason he gives that I see as a logical and legitimate justification for the Iraq War is the removal of the tyrant Saddam Hussein from power. I don’t personally believe that was enough of a reason to unilaterally and preemptively go to war with a country, but others do, and I can see the logic in those arguments.
My retort to the Saddam justification –
(1) That job is done. Saddam Hussein is no longer in power in Iraq. In fact, he’s dead. Let’s go home.
(2) There are LOTS of other tyrants in the world, including many folks that our government calls friend. Why not Kim Jong Il? Or Castro? Or Mugabe?
The truth is that the justifications for the Iraq War are built on a foundation of quicksand.
“Today, Iraq is a free society with a free press and consensual government.”
You have to be kidding me, David. Government sanctioned murder and outright ethnic cleansing. The continued refusal to allow meaningful Sunni Arab participation in the central government. 2.2 MILLION Iraqis already fled the country, and 100,000 joining them EVERY MONTH.
Yes, Iraqis no longer live under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, but they continue to live under a tyranny of fear. They fear to speak out. They fear to assemble. They fear to practice their religion. They fear illegal search and seizure and cruel & unusual punishment. Iraqis are not free, and those with the means to do so are fleeing the country in droves.
Consensual government in Iraq??? The Iraqi people voted for “lists” of candidates that they knew almost nothing about. There was very little campaigning (because of fear and the relatively short time in which those elections were planned). Iraqis voted largely along ethnic and religious lines, and 1/3 of the population (Sunni Arabs) boycotted the voting. That’s is NOT consensual government by ANY stretch of the imagination.
To “New Voice,” there is nothing that can be posted by me, KID, Abraham Lincoln, or Jesus Christ that is going to change your mind, because your “take” on the Iraq conflict is based on right-leaning emotion. Stating the FACTS, as KID just did, has no effect upon you or David or any other conservative “brain,” because you have no interest in the facts. Emotion tells you that whatever the GOP does is right, and that anything that provides “freedom” (even if it truly is not) is the way to make the world safer.
Read KID’s posting above mine a few times through. Try and put a portion of your grey matter in check, and for ONCE in your life, try to have an semi-open mind when anything done by force on the part of the U.S. is called into question. I know that it will have no impact one way or another, but it does me good to afford you the OPPORTUNITY to see reality… not just twist it to fit into your conservative, power-first cubicle.
Prego,
I vote Democrat across the boards. I agree Bush has proven that running the military is one more thing he can’t do right! I question Bush’s strategy because I understand the flaws in it. Do you Prego? Why Bush does not advocate a containment policy is beyond me.
KID seems to think that because ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ has not been restored in Iraq over night, it will never happen. So far, all of the anti-war rhetoric coming from you guys is nothing new. Heard it from the media some time back.
My “grey matter” is just fine. Like I said, I base my humble opinion on what I have seen here in the U.S. and overseas in the Middle East. Can you say the same? Your naive take on world events is tiresome.
DAVID P. JORDAN WROTE: “When Saddam was in power, terror was state-sanctioned. It is no longer.”
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “That’s incorrect on both counts. To the second point … Iraqi Shia police and military units are heavily infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and other militant Shia forces. These units routinely allow death squads to carry out their genocidal business unimpeded. Sometimes police and army units ARE the death squads. Nouri al-Maliki and his allies know this, and by their inaction, sanction it. That’s why OUR military had to come back to Baghdad in strength to hold back the slaughter.”
Active and passive are two different things. Nouri Al-Maliki is a weak prime minister, but is not a dictator and does not have ABSOLUTE power like Saddam Hussein.
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “To the first point … Iraq was never a major sponsor of terrorism. Mr. Jordan mentions a couple terrorists dredged up from 15-20 years ago and Saddam’s payouts to families of Palestinian suicide bombers as a legitimate justifications for the Iraq War.”
The State Department’s original list (1979) of “State Sponsors of Terrorism” included IRAQ, Libya, South Yemen and Syria. Iraq was removed from the list a few years later so it could be eligible for U. S. military technology (we sided with Saddam Hussein over Ayatollah Khomeini, because he was perceived as the lessor of two evils). Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait put them back on the list, where it remained until after the invasion in 2003. Knight, there’s no need to argue this point by point because Iraq was indeed a state sponsor of terrorism under Saddam Hussein. That’s a fact. He was knee deep in it. But I never said it (alone) was justification for the Iraq War – I merely responded to Grisman’s false assertion that terrorists did not find Iraq to be a safe haven under Saddam Hussein.
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE; “Are we REALLY supposed to think those suicide bombers were motivated to blow themselves up on an Israeli bus because their family was going to get $25,000??? That’s utterly ridiculous.”
Your assumption not mine. Although the fanatical hatred that some “Palestinians” harbor toward Jews makes you wonder.
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “Besides, if we wanted to get at the primary source of funding for terrorism in the world, by Mr. Jordan’s logic, we should invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.”
Neither country is on the State Department’s list of State Sponsoring Terrorism. Whether that’s good or bad is for another debate. Saudi Arabia’s royal family is an enemy of Osama Bin Laden, who was kicked out of his native country and stripped of his citizenship. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils – the Saudi royals or Islamists who would take power and cause an oil crisis that would make 1979-1980 look like a parade.
As for Pakistan, the lesser of two evils comes into play here.
KNIGGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE; “David mentioned one of the WTC 1993 plotters was born in Iraq. 15 of the 19 September 11 terrorists were born in Saudi Arabia. Again, by Mr. Jordan’s logic, Saudi Arabia should be our target, not Iraq.”
Knight, read my statements carefully, and please understand the facts. One’s nationality is not relevant. The Shoe Bomber was British, the “20th hijacker”, French. Did Tony Blair send the shoe bomber? Did Jacques Chirac send the “20th hijacker”? No, they did not. Neither did the Saudi Royal family send those 15 hijackers of Saudi nationality. In fact, the hijackers’ leader, as I mentioned above, is an enemy to the Saudi royal family, whom he (OBL) wants to replace with an anti-western mullocracy. Bin Laden was kicked out of his country and stripped of his citizenship. Not exactly endorsement from the Royals, eh?
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “My main point here … DPJ’s logic doesn’t work. The only reason he gives that I see as a logical and legitimate justification for the Iraq War is the removal of the tyrant Saddam Hussein from power. I don’t personally believe that was enough of a reason to unilaterally and preemptively go to war with a country, but others do, and I can see the logic in those arguments.”
Thanks.
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “(2) There are LOTS of other tyrants in the world, including many folks that our government calls friend. Why not Kim Jong Il? Or Castro? Or Mugabe?”
Name these “friends” (I know, I know, Musharraf, Al-Maliki, Saudi royal family, etc.)
Kim Jong Il – Removing him from power would require a massive invasion with the permission of S. Korea (and lack of Chinese support would give Kim a place to seek asylum). Unless Kim’s actions (supplying nukes to terrorists etc.) directly threaten our security, that is not gonna happen.
Castro – Removing him from power would require an invasion. He does not threaten our national security at this time. No justification for war.
Mugabe – Evil he is, but again, he doesn’t threaten our national security.
DAVID P. JORDAN WROTE: “Today, Iraq is a free society with a free press and consensual government.”
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “You have to be kidding me, David. Government sanctioned murder and outright ethnic cleansing. The continued refusal to allow meaningful Sunni Arab participation in the central government. 2.2 MILLION Iraqis already fled the country, and 100,000 joining them EVERY MONTH.”
The Sunni Arabs boycotted early voting, and thus have themselves to blame. There are signs of improvement, though.
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “Yes, Iraqis no longer live under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, but they continue to live under a tyranny of fear. They fear to speak out. They fear to assemble. They fear to practice their religion. They fear illegal search and seizure and cruel & unusual punishment. Iraqis are not free, and those with the means to do so are fleeing the country in droves.”
This situation may be true (in part) within the Sunni triangle, but most of the country is relatively stable. Withdrawal will not make it better.
KNIGHT IN DRAGONLAND WROTE: “Consensual government in Iraq??? The Iraqi people voted for “lists” of candidates that they knew almost nothing about. There was very little campaigning (because of fear and the relatively short time in which those elections were planned). Iraqis voted largely along ethnic and religious lines, and 1/3 of the population (Sunni Arabs) boycotted the voting. That’s is NOT consensual government by ANY stretch of the imagination.”
You have to start somewhere, Knight. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. that’s why it’s foolish to withdraw before the job is done (which will happen in time).
Thank you, New Voice. Your calling my takes “tiresome” and “naive” is about the finest tribute I could possibly receive for the same. I now know that my takes are dead-on, as your pointy head has found them to be… “tiresome.”
O.K……you win.
Please explain if you would, your blog-name “prego-man.” Is this your way of promoting same-sex marriage, etc? You seem to take a liberal stance on everything!
Heck, New Voice, you vote “straight Democrat,” ya know… so you should be able to pound out all the info the area needs on same-sex marriage, right?
And, actually, I like the “take” that so many relatively bright minds have thrown out before… gay folks should have every right to be as miserable as many straight married folks are…
“I, (state your name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God).”
As you can see the oath of enlistment has little to do with your personal belief of whether or not the war in Iraq is worth fighting. It focuses on faith and allegiance to the Constitution and your commitment to defending it.
For all those of you who were questioning the right of some to argue in favor of the war due to a lack of service, you clearly don’t understand anything about military service. Its not about fighting a war, its about fighting for ideas, those ideas that are captured in the Constitution. That being the case, the real question is why don’t you serve do you not believe in the constitution and the nation that was founded as a result?
(Just to be clear, I am not saying that anyone who does not serve does not believe in the Constitution. I am just mereley trying to correct the mistake in the argument of others.)
11Bravo, I say “Bravo!” to you. You have just posted perhaps the most pointless posting in the history of blogging. Typical conservative crapola… let’s not deal with the facts, let’s run with the emotional thing. I think that this brilliant posting of yours is a perfect way to close out an argument that will never sway one side to the other, but hopefully has caused some who were on the fence to make a personal decision regrading the future of this “conflict.”
Amen.
It has nothing to do with whether or not anyone is a conservative. I am not trying to sway anyone’s opinion either way. My point was to make it known that your (and others) insistance upon the pro-Iraq war group to join up was without any concern for what service actually is about. The post actually was pretty much all fact, but since they weren’t the facts you liked you will choose to ignore them. I’d like you to point out to me where I attempted to convince anyone to take any side of this Iraq argument. Sadly, you can’t because you’d rather attack what you THOUGHT you read as opposed to what was actually written.
Rupert Murdoch’s “Times” conservative columnist compares Bush to Nazis
Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led
October 7, 2007
Andrew Sullivan
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article2602564.ece
“I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception. I didn’t believe America would ever do those things. I’d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend.
It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff, don’t they? Bottom line: I trusted the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the evidence.
From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It would torture detainees to get information.
This decision was and is illegal, and violates America’s treaty obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done more than any other nation to banish torture from the world. George Washington himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new nation that such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be anathema to Americans.
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But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick Cheney called “the dark side” was made, moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no idea how to do these things were asked to replicate some of the methods US soldiers had been trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong.
Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia, beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of terror suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown number of terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few grunts at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from investigating fully up the chain of command.
Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on extremely shaky ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers to concoct memos to make what was illegal legal. Their irritation with the rule of law, and their belief that the president had the constitutional authority to waive it, became a hallmark of their work.
They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent to the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything else was what was first called “coercive interrogation”, subsequently amended to “enhanced interrogation”. These terms were deployed in order for the president to be able to say that he didn’t support “torture”. We were through the looking glass.
After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these torture policies. The memo defining torture out of existence was rescinded. The Military Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the military itself from being forced to violate its own code of justice. But the administration clung to its torture policies, and tried every legal manoeuvre to keep it going and keep it secret. Much of this stemmed from the vice-president’s office.
Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long after Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal legal memos that asserted the legality of many of the techniques exposed there. The memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding, hypothermia and beating but allowed them in combination to intensify the effect.
The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring water over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce repeated episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not “cruel, inhuman or degrading”. We have a log of such a technique being used at Guantanamo. The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back from death, then submitted once again to “enhanced interrogation”.
George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.
So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.
The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).
The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney’s arguments. Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn’t qualify for full PoW status, but they couldn’t be abused either. The court also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and international law: “The court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment . . .”
The definition of torture remains the infliction of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” with the intent of procuring intelligence. In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics of the current president and his aides. The penalty for those who were found guilty was death. This is how far we’ve come. And this fateful, profound decision to change what America stands for was made in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many parts of his own administration.
Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what to do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely passive, although last week’s leaks about the secret pro-torture memos after Abu Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to proclaim that the memos “are more than surprising. I think they are shocking”. Yet the public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse continuing the use of torture.
One day America will come back– the America that defends human rights, the America that would never torture detainees, the America that leads the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not until this president leaves office. And maybe not even then.”
Also,what’s your opinion on Blackwater to those who support the war?(technically war was never declared so it’s an occupation)
http://tinyurl.com/3xhjag