Gels, The Bush Team will come up with something to provide the American People with a good excuse that will be accepted by the majority.
SattFocus, I read the second of the Liberal Hawks piece on Slate and found it as interesting as the first. I don't have it in front of me, but there was a comment in the first discussion, (on the 12th, I think,) where one of the discussants said, What surprises me is the lack of dissent, of comment, of foment, any attempt to stir up discussion of this war, its purposes, its indications of where this country is going.
That really rang a bell for me. Where are the voices, the marchers? What has happened to my country? Have we all become such fat rich selfish belly-gazers that we will not cry out? This country used to be the envy and hope of the world. We sought and held to allegiances and alliances and talk and consensus. We had high dreams and hopes, and the rest of the world looked to us as a symbol of the Good, of the virtuous, of the seekers of human rights, of the hope to find a way without war, without colonizing, without greed and for the simple good of humankind. We were never probably that virtuous in actuality but our dream of what we could be was out there, and people all over the world believed it. I know; I have lived in other countries and I have heard them say it. We were the hope of the world. I wonder if we can now ever find our way back to that.
We have so much power -- power to do enormous good and to do enormous bad.
The US still remains to be the hope of the world, and no one can suppose that any real existence be the ideal itself. Any real existence cannot be pure good. An simple application of an ideal to the real world is idleness, extremism, or fundamentalism. The value of an ideal is in its existence itself, but not in the simple minded application.
U.S. Death Toll in Iraq Reaches 500
Sat Jan 17,10:19 PM ET
USA Casualties in Vietnam
1962 to 1964 ... 392
------------------------------
USA Casualties in Iraq
First Nine Months ... 461
I dont know how or why we have got into this war. But it is a war we cant win and one we cant withdraw from. What we see every day in Iraq now, another suicide truck bomb today, is only the beginning. The alliance of the remnants of the Saddam regime (I thought they were supposed to give up now Saddam is captured?) with fanatical Islamists, Bush's war forging brothers in arms out of natural enemies, is a truly terrifying sight.
The very thing the "war on terror" is supposed to stop, the prevention of suicidal fanatics getting hold of nuclear chemical or biological weapons of unimaginable destructive power gets closer every day.
Morning Steve, in answer to your question ... blind alligence and acceptance and a huge dollop of naivete should about cover it.
Source
This weekend's bombing ....
Gels, That info no longer matters to the American People. They are happy to see Saddam gone as the justifcation for our aggression against Iraq. Preplanned, WMD's, and connection to al Qaida has no meaning to the American People.
c.i., that was an interesting comment. Back to talk about it later.
This was in the Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor today:
'Falling Apart' Will Be the Best Thing for Iraq
Your Jan. 12 editorial "Kirkuk Isn't Kurdish" mistakenly supposes that the U.S. government can maintain a unified Iraq and determine the balance of ethnic/religious power within it. Unwarrantedly, it assumes that determining who rules where in Iraq is important to the U.S. national interest.
Iraq is the last of the bad ideas of 1919 to fall apart. Even more than Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, the artificial construct called Iraq benefited only a minority and could be held together only by dictatorship. The last thing that peoples jumbled together by 20th century sorcerers' apprentices need is for their 21st century successors to try making sense of senseless arrangements. Your editorial wishes that the Bush team not be remembered for "blessing" the dismemberment of Iraq, and recommends "securing Kirkuk and the oil fields." This of course would mean that it would be remembered for making war on the Kurds. On whose behalf would Americans fight and die in such a war? You mention the "alarm bells" that Kurdish independence raise among Iraq's neighbors. Are those bells reason enough? And when, not if, Iraq's majority Shiites take measures against their Sunni tormentors that raise alarm bells among Sunni Saudis, Kuwaitis and Omanis, will that be sufficient warrant for America to take up arms against the Shiites? The point here is that common sense rather than any lack of resolve makes it impossible for Americans to hold Iraq together and act as arbiters of its peoples' business.
America's vital business in Iraq was to destroy a regime the very existence of which inspired, aided and abetted anti- American violence throughout the world. Successful politics was Saddam's most effective weapon of mass destruction. Excessive concern for the preservation of Iraqi unity and for the sentiments of other foreigners led the Bush team to postpone until spring, 2003 serving America's interest by attacking Saddam. Since then, the same misguided concerns have led the administration to rein in the majority Shiites' and Kurds' desire to strike at the people and arrangements that are the base of the Saddam regime.
The Journal's editorial, uncharacteristically, encourages the U.S. government to try half-heartedly to stand in the way of developments it cannot stop and that might well be in America's interest.
Angelo M. Codevilla
Professor of International Relations
Boston University
Visiting Professor of Government
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.
Updated January 19, 2004
cicerone imposter wrote:Gels, That info no longer matters to the American People. They are happy to see Saddam gone as the justifcation for our aggression against Iraq. Preplanned, WMD's, and connection to al Qaida has no meaning to the American People.
It never did matter CI. Bush & Co. kept it always on a us and them level and hell, I don't know about you but I damn sure don't want to be a part of 'them'. They never put a face on the terrorist, the axis of evil or any number of other 'thems'. They were and are the boogie man in the closet or under the bed of where ever your demons hung out when you were a child.
I'm afraid that Joe citizen is motivated largely by herd instinct and we have become a nation of sheep.
'No blister agent' in Iraq shells
