THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

i actually agree with you, sort of..? i just believe that all of the blood, cash and other resources that is being expended in iraq would go a long way towards achieving that goal globally. because as we all seem to agree, it's not just in one place. but if we enter into an armed military conflict, we have an obligation to finish it, before leaving.

so we've not finished the job in afghanistan. i want it to succeed. so far it hasn't. despite rosey chirrpings, karzai cannot leave his city.

i was not in favor of iraq, but since we are there we must succeed. there is no choice.

but that does not mean that i believe in the president who, imho, took us there in the wrong way and when the saddam issue could have waited till we had a grip on the real islamist terrorist threat, if it was needed at all.

Donttread, I had not even noticed a post from you when I wrote that. I was responding directly to Ican's post as he has gallantly and consistently, point by point, tried to keep the information accurate here despite the best efforts of those who attempt ti convolute it. It just struck me that there is absolutely nothing Bush could have done that would have been satisfactory to the anti-Bush people and I can almost guarantee you that he would have been criticized for some situation in Iraq whether or not he had encouraged an attack when he did. After all, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and virtually every other prominent Democrat were saying we had to take Saddam out prior to the last invasion.

So you and Au don't get your shorts in a wad. I was not targeting either of you specifically.

DTOM,
I agree with you, sort of.

I expect that it will take 5 to 10 years before either Afghanistan or Iraq will see a stable representative democracy capable of securing the liberty of their people without US help. But it is clearly in our interest to make sure that outcome is achieved sooner than later.

Regardless of what has been previously, repeatedly claimed by others, I think the practical justification for our invasions of both countries is the achievement of those democratic outcomes that will significantly reduce current and future sheltering of al Qaeda.

aw see? i'm not all bad





i understand and respect your feeling here. but, we do not have any guarantee that, as they are now and in the foreseeable (sic?) future, will be anything like an "acceptable" democracy by our meaning of the word.

based on the "culture, values and religion" of that region, isn't reasonable to expect that what we will wind up with will be afghanistan reverting to, and iraq becoming, islamic republics? in light of baghdad, and i think i have heard other iraqi cities adopting sharia as the core of the new laws, it is quite likely.

so then we wind up right where we started.

i still really believe that the key to overcoming the terrorist threat is expanding our intelligence capablilities in each region and developing specialized insertion teams. sort of like the israelis have done, for lack of a more immediate example.

the problem has been, and would seem to still be, that we were caught unprepared due to a 50+ year tunnel vision on the soviets.

I take perhaps a more simplistic view, but I can't shake it. I believe if the American people and their closest allies provide a united front, stand squarely behind their leaders, and put out a unified message that terrorism will not stand, there will be no place safe for a terrorist to train, operate, or hide and any terrorist attack will bring down the wrath of the coalition on the terrorists' heads, the snakes and worms will crawl back into their holes and for the most part peace will reign.

So long as the media, doves, and the faint of heart moan and wail and complain and prophecy failure, the terrorists will continue to be emboldened to do their worst. The louder the protests, the more they will step up terrorist attacks expecting us to be the ones to give up and crawl into holes. They have every reason to expect it as we have done it for decades, ever since Vietnam.

welll, yeah that is a simplistic pov. and i do understand your thinking on it. i just don't agree with it.

the way you present your thought sounds to me like you believe that we can just invade any country that we eventhink harbors terrorists. or is it only islamist terrorists that you are thinking of. wither way, that's gonna be a lot of countries.

of course we all want to end the insane violence that these people bring. but it is not an army. they are spies and bomb throwers. ya gotta fight fire with fire. imho...



m.o.s. ... anybody that doesn't kowtow to bush is a dove, a wussie or unpatriotic. there's a "folksy" saying. "there's more than one way to skin a cat".

funny. i seem to remember that there wasn't to much noise about gulf I. in fact, though i was not in favor of vietnam, i supported gulf I. and even got pissed that we didn't pick saddam up then. but bush sr. later explained why he didn't and i have to agree he was correct.

too bad junior didn't listen to his dad.

I go back to a commander from the Vietcong testifying some years after the U.S. left Vietnam. He said they were absolutely devastated by the Tet offensive and were about to throw in the towel. What kept them fighting was all the U.S. anti-war protests and Vietcong sympathizers coming from the U.S. to visit in the north. So they hung on knowing they couldn't win militarily, but they could win the propaganda war and drive us out. As it turned out they were right.

I believe the Iraqi insurgents and the terrorist organizations everywhere learned from that and, while they know they can't beat us militarily, they figure they'll win with propaganda and our peaceniks will again force us to quit.

Foxfyre wrote:

"Taking Saddam out" and attacking an entire country are two different things. Most people would agree that Saddam should have been disposed of, and who would deny that the world is better off with him in lockup than in power? What does this have to do with starting a war against Iraq? Our CIA has managed more difficult surgical removals than that, and some we did not find out about until decades later.

The removal of Saddam was not our motivation for trashing that country. It was the "show" motivation but not the real one.

DTOM wrote,


Absolutely. It was our lack of intelligence (and Arabic translators, for godsake) that lost us a heads up on 9/11.

This is where our money ought to be. Intelligence will be the make or break point for us in Iraq.

Kara, I think that applies to the whole middle east. The Arabic languages has many dialects, and not very many understand all the different nuances of the language. It's a big problem.

Foxfyre

Since we don't live neither in the Middle nor in the Darl Ages any more, I don't stand squarely behind "my leader". And if she/he does something I don't like, I protest against that ... and elect someone else the next time, if this doesn't change.

jeez, walter... again with that democracy thing.

yes. and that only makes it that more interesting that the military found it perfectly okay to dump one of the few arabic translators they had right after 9/11. because he was gay. stupid.

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U.S. military ousts gay linguists


Dec. 3 — Cathleen Glover was cleaning the pool at the Sri Lankan ambassador’s residence recently when she heard the sound of Arabic drifting through the trees. Glover earned $11 an hour working for a pool-maintenance company, skimming leaves and testing chlorine levels in the backyards of Washington. No one knew about her past. But sometimes the past found her.

GLOVER RECOGNIZED the sound instantly. It was the afternoon call to prayer coming from a mosque on Massachusetts Avenue. She held still, picking out familiar words and translating them in her head.
She learned Arabic at the Defense Language Institute (DLI), the military’s premier language school, in Monterey, Calif. Her timing as a soldier was fortuitous: Around her graduation last year, a Government Accounting Office study reported that the Army faced a critical shortage of linguists needed to translate intercepts and interrogate suspects in the war on terrorism.
“I was what the country needed,” Glover said.
She was, and she wasn't. Glover is gay. She mastered Arabic but couldn't handle living a double life under the military policy known as “don't ask, don't tell.”
After two years in the Army, Glover, 26, voluntarily wrote a statement acknowledging her homosexuality.
Confronted with a shortage of Arabic interpreters and its policy banning openly gay service members, the Pentagon had a choice to make.
Which is how former Spec. Glover came to be cleaning pools instead of sitting in the desert, translating Arabic for the U.S. government.
In the past two years, the Department of Defense has discharged 37 linguists from the Defense Language Institute for being gay. Like Glover, many studied Arabic. At a time of heightened need for intelligence specialists, 37 linguists were rendered useless because of their homosexuality.
Historically, military leaders have argued that allowing gays to serve would hurt unit cohesion and recruiting efforts, and infringe on the privacy rights of heterosexuals. In 1993, at the urging of President Clinton, Congress agreed to soften the outright ban on gays in the military with a policy that came to be known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allowed them to serve as long as they kept their sexual orientation secret.
On its 10th anniversary, “don’t ask, don’t tell” exists in a vastly changed nation. In 1993, there was no “Will & Grace,” no gay Jack on “Dawson’s Creek,” no gay-themed Miller Lite commercials. In 1993, fewer than a dozen U.S. high schools had Gay-Straight Alliance organizations. Today, there are almost 2,000. In 1993, fewer than a dozen Fortune 500 companies offered health benefits to domestic partners.
It would seem that the Army is cutting off their nose to spite their face. On the one hand the decry that fact that they do not have enough Arabic speakers in Iraq. While on the other hand they for what I can only term as an archaic reason refuse to use the services of people on hand. What do you think of the stand taken by the army?

And certainly, there is no guarantee we won't evolve acceptable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our goal for an acceptable democracy is modest. We simply demand they exterminate rather than shelter terrorists.

Any country at any time can revert to tyranny/terrorism, and some will. A key is for the US to make it clear we won't tolerate governments that terrorize or tolerate the terrorizing of innocent people.



I agree that developing competent intelligence is also a key. However, alone it is insufficient. If we are too slow to act on competent intelligence, it won't be worth much.

However, that brings up another problem. We must come to terms with the reality of intelligence. All intelligence is flawed in that it is fallible to a degree imperfectly known. It rarely if ever knows anything for certain. The best intelligence can do is reveal what is the most probable outcome for a given action, and which action or actions will most probably lead to the desired objective. Then we have to take the preferred action or actions competently. We rarely know for certain what is the most competent way to take any selected action.

There's an old saying that I think applies to our present situation:

"Life is such that one must first make the right decision, then make that decision right."

Perhaps an aviation principle also applies here. Competent flying (or living) is not avoidance of error (ain't goin' ta happen); Competent flying (or living) is the prompt detection of errors and the prompt initiation of the correction of errors.

In other words, we fallible humans would best continually look for the errors we are sure to make, rather than think we can ever attain perfection and be error free.

In response to DTOM & Walter, I think one of the most disingenous ploys is to include a scenario or make an analogy that is unrelated to what a person says and is obviously not what the person intended.

Walter, if you feel it is not important to present a united front when you have your countrymen on the ground being shot at by a determined and brutal enemy, that is your prerogative. When your leaders were more imperialistic and expansionist, I would probably have agreed with you. When the intent is to help a people and country out of a brutal dictatorship, I can't agree.

DTOM,
If you think it interferes with democracy to provide a united front to prevent giving encouragement and additional incentive to a brutal and unconscionable enemy, in my opinion you are just plain wrong. Democracy implies people are free to make choices about what is the wise and prudent thing to do. I opt for wisdom and prudence. I think those who publicly tear down the President in time of war put our military at much higher risk and are only interested in having their own way.

It's all a matter of education and culture, I think.

Obviously we Euroepans difffer here a lot from the US-Americans.

I think it's a matter of enlightened self-interest. That one has a right to express one's opinion in our democracy is undeniable. However, the question that has an uncertain answer is whether or not it is right (i.e., wise or useful) to express a particular opinion when such expression is expected to handicap and not improve the probability of accomplishing a particular mutual goal.

For example, we mutually seek an end of terrorism. Our default leadership (e.g., Bush-USA) is taking action, that you disagree with, to achieve our goal. You repeatedly express your disagreement. That repetition increases the chances that our default leadership will face increasing difficulty in leading the accomplishment of our goal. Will the expected benefits of your repeatedly expressed disagreement outway the expected burdens of your disagreement? Are you sure of that?

Added to the uncertainty of your answer is what ought to be your uncertainty about the validity of your disagreement. Also, if we debate too long before we choose how to act, we shall forfeit our goal. Generally, we can learn more from the consequences of a jointly chosen action than we can from disagreements over the hypothetical benefits and penalties of alternative actions.

The criticism that undermines the effectiveness of the leadership should be reserved for the post mortems I think. One ancient philosopher once said "All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable." The same is true of words and rhetoric.

Well, no one critizes HM The Queen, only Her Leader of Her Majesty's Government :wink:

(Brighton would be impossible in the USA, I suppose.)