AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Bush was very smart about that... never, ever go to war with a pre planned exit strategy.

Maybe, but you never hear the right wing going on about 'Operation Bribe.'

Cycloptichorn

Perhaps that's because your own exposure to, and willingness to hear, conservative voices is so limited.

Most of the descriptions of Gen. Petraeus' new policy and the "surge" that I've read very candidly described both aspects of the plan. While you describe it as merely a "bribe", others describe it is restoring some local self rule and participation in government to a Sunni population that, owing both to their own foolish decisions and the hostility of Shiites, were effectively lefty out of the new regime.

Their active participation still continues and all of the Iraqi people have benefitted from it.

That's true if we only look at current events. However, Iraq was an unnecessary war from its onset, and that was the biggest mistake. What followed were also disasters such as torture and the killing of innocent Iraqis.

To make an honest analysis of the Iraq war, we need to look at the benefits/cost issues involved.

We all know now that the justification for the war was Saddam's WMDs that never existed.

Bribe or not, the so-called surge did little or nothing to bring a lull in the fighting. It was the Shiite truce and the "payments" to the Sunni militiamen.

How do you presume to know this? I spend hours, every day, reading Conservative voices on the web. Every day. And the mention of the bribes as compared to the surge runs about 1 to 10.



Yes, some gussy it up with flowery talk, you are correct.

Cycloptichorn

Oh, but they did and do exist.
You are forgetting that he used them against his own people and that he had
plenty of time to hide them in the desert and move them out of his country.

Did the Surge Work?
by Ivan Eland posted on Wednesday, 30 July 2008No CommentThe media, egged on by John McCain and his campaign, are going to twist the arm of Barack Obama until he cries “uncle” and admits the U.S. troop “surge” has worked in Iraq. So far, Obama has not cracked under the pressure and, for reasons of political expediency, admitted this dubious proposition.

The smart political course of action for Obama"but not the correct one"would be to admit the surge has worked to reduce violence but to observe that that’s little solace after a needless invasion and five-year (and counting) occupation that has cost more than 4,000 lives and about $600 billion. So far, Obama has stuck to the correct, and maybe even charitable, conclusion that the surge is only one of many factors that has reduced the carnage in Iraq.

Using logic, if the U.S. troop surge had been the cause of the diminished violence, then why did the mayhem go up in 2005 when the United States undertook a troop surge of similar magnitude? Moreover, because little true political reconciliation has occurred in Iraq since the surge began, if the additional troops were the cause of the new tranquility, that calm should be evaporating now that U.S. forces are being reduced to pre-surge levels. Yet so far, no spike in violence is occurring. Thus, the logical conclusion is that other factors are likely to have been more important in improving conditions than the addition of more troops.

For example, many experts believe that the prior violent cleansing of ethno-sectarian populations has separated the battling Shi’i and Sunni groups and thus reduced the internecine warfare. Also, the U.S. military finally implemented a true counterinsurgency strategy in which it eschewed killing lots of guerrillas (and civilians collaterally) with heavy firepower and moved toward holding ground and winning the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi population. One would have thought it would not have taken the U.S. military so long to relearn this lesson after the searing experience of the Vietnam War.

Finally, and maybe most important, the U.S. decided to negotiate with (Moktada al-Sadr and his Shi’i militia) and pay off (the Sunni guerrillas) enemies to get their forces to quit attacking U.S. troops. U.S. politicians, thinking it is not macho to do either, have either downplayed these factors or preferred to refer to the latter by euphemism. The former is especially embarrassing to the politicians because the United States has criticized the new Pakistani government for negotiating with, instead of fighting, the Taliban and other Pakistani militants, while the U.S. government has pursued the same strategy in Iraq with the al-Sadr Shi’i militia. The latter is embarrassing because it is considered wimpy to pay off, rather than do battle, with your enemies.

Make no mistake: paying off your enemies is always a better and cheaper strategy than expending the blood and treasure to fight them. For example, if Abraham Lincoln had offered the South compensated emancipation of its slaves"which he had advocated before becoming president"before the Civil War started, he might have avoided the killing of more than 600,000 Americans (38,000 of whom were African-American) in a war that provided freedom for blacks only in name.

Yet paying off enemies to reduce the violence is not a long-term solution to stability in Iraq. In that part of the world, if you quit making the pay offs or conditions change in such a volatile and fractured society, violence could quickly escalate again. The reconciliation occurring in Iraq is largely cosmetic and forced by U.S. pressure. It is analogous to two sets of parents arranging a marriage between two young people who don’t get along and locking them up in a room together until they like each other. To get out of the room, they will go through the motions of amity, but probably will eventually end up divorced.

If the United States is smart, it will avoid the consequences of the likely future divorce among Iraqi groups and move toward Obama’s tendency to declare victory and start leaving while things are going better. Such a policy would leave a better chance of U.S. forces avoiding the likely coming storm of resumed violence. If the United States wants to give Iraq the best chance of stability in the post-U.S. era, it should use its withdrawal to negotiate a radically decentralized government in which exiting armed militias maintain security in their own autonomous regions.

Above all, the U.S. should avoid John McCain’s conclusion that the surge worked in Iraq and should be tried Afghanistan. Obama and McCain are engaged in a bidding war to see how many U.S. troops they can add to another lost war in Afghanistan, which has even lower prospects for future stability than Iraq. The Taliban are much more ideological and militant than most of the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq and far less likely to agree to be paid off. Also, the Taliban have a sanctuary (Pakistan) that the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq never had.

The al Qaeda that threatens the United States is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan or Iraq. The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan merely helps al Qaeda gain support in Pakistan. Thus, the U.S. should withdraw all of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrate on dealing with al Qaeda in Pakistan.

by Ivan Eland

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University.

Rationalizations on top of denials on top of rationalizations -- it's the neo, or whatever, conservative's sandwich. It sticks in their throat if there's mention of payola, which is exactly what it is. Take our taxpayer's money and play the music we want to hear. So they fall back on "military intelligence," probably the most famous oxymoron of all time, with the accent, again, on moron.

Almost mirrors my thinking about Iraq. I also remember when al-Sadr called a truce before the surge. As I've said before, the "surge" should have happened immediately after our invasion to control the country and Saddam's military equipment that was later used against our troops. Another failure that most people seem to forget. I was also angry at our generals, because they didn't provide our troops with the right kind of training and equipment from the start of this war that got our men and women killed for incompetence from Bush's administration and the generals who were in charge. They were all scared of Bush and what he did to General Shinseki for speaking out out about troop levels, and they all feared for their own careers over the safety of our soldiers.

Also, I remember Bush telling us that he would provide more troops if the generals asked for them, but most people knew there were no extra troops to send. They were already spending more time in war zones than any war before Iraq. Yeah, generals, ask for more troops.

Our military presence is permeating the globe -- we have troops in so many places, people don't even know where they are geographically. It's GWB geography which was nearly non-existent before he took office and I don't believe it got any better. His military briefings must have been a comedy suitable for a SNL lampoon. I'm sure troop locales around the world mostly went in one ear and out the other.

NOTE: GPD$Billion x SurplusGPD% = Surplus$Billion

The sum of Bush's $billion dollar positive and negative surpluses, Jan. 20, 2001 to Jan. 20,2009:

2001 +130.8
2002 -155.7
2003 -378.3
2004 -414.0
2005 -318.2
2006 -247.3
2007 -164.0
2008 -415.0
-1,961.7 = less than $2 trillion over 8 years.

According to TV news, Obama has been promising a deficit of more than $1.0 trillion per year over his terms of office.


Parados, from where did you get your projection?

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

I am waiting for George to now tell us that al-Sadr's unilateral truce was part of the surge.

ican, You're so f...kn stupid, I'm not sure how your brain works.

Your wrote:


You gave Bush credit for 2001 with a 1.3% surplus, but ignore the subsequent years of his administration. You're not only dumb, but an ignoramus who refuses to see the obvious.

You claim democrats had a majority in congress for 2007 and 2008, but you also ignore all of the filibuster of the republicans that hampered any legislation from being initiated.

You only make yourself look the fool you really are with almost every post you make on a2k. I encourage you to continue in that stupid vain.

Those budgets do not include Iraq and Afghanistan war costs, and cannot be seen as anything other than some sort of joke. They don't reflect the actual financial state of the country at all.

Cycloptichorn

On a Simpleton Scale, 0 to 100, GWB is a 10 and BHO is a 50.

Note:
GWB = George W. Bush
BHO = Barach H. Obama

Somebody sent me this old clip of President Reagan going straight to the people the last time Congress tried to accomplish socialized medicine. It takes a little bit of time to hear the whole thing--some of the best comes right at the middle--and toward the end he said what those folks at all those tea parties were saying, among other things:

Paraphrased:
Congress does not tax to do what it needs to do. Congress comes up with something to do with whatever it can get. (And it does not restrict itself to just what it gets.) But Congress will listen to the people if the people insist on making themselves heard.

For those who still have a mind to think and are willing to hear one well thought out and reasoned argument, here it is:



It also illustrates how Reagan got around a strongly Democratically controlled Congress that had little sympathy for his agenda.

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Old clip is spot on! Reagan is dead, and the GOP is close to it. LOL