The US, UN & Iraq III

I WANT THAT CAT AND ITS COSTUME!!

Okay, what kind of people have hissy fits when others don't do what they want others to do? Little kids have hissy fits. The spoiled hve hissy fits. Adults who never grew up have hissy fits. Alcoholics have hissy fits and the habit of blaming something outside of themselves for anything they don't like that they've done themselves.

We have managed to "elect" an administration whose top tier is motivated by hate and blame. Hmmm. I'd like to know what helps their pretzels go down...

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The way it is

From a blogger in Iraq.




:: Thursday, June 12, 2003 ::

The king is back; well the "pretender" is here - one of them, I think there are three hopefuls.

"In Baghdad, Having A Good Heir Day"

He is the first of the wannabe-royals to arrive in Baghdad. and boy did he get an interesting reception, It was a mess fit for royalty. You would have already heard that he came in the first civilian chartered airplane, loaded with "humanitarian aid" journalists and his bags. His first stop was the royal cemetery where he was supposed to make a speech and meet "his" people. He got out of the car and immediately he had the traditional lamb-sacrificed-under -your-feet thingy happening to him, after that more sheep got the sacrificial treatment along with a couple of chickens and the meat was being distributed to the "poor". There was a moment when the crowd gathering to get the meat was bigger than the crowd cheering for him. And there was of course the brave young man who pushed his way thru and snatched a chicken and ran off, everybody was after him "who cares what the king is saying, follow the meat".
Anyway in he goes and gets instantaneously mobbed by the press, it was a scene to behold. I now have a clear understanding of what a "cluster ****" looks like. It was hot. The mausoleum is tiny and has no windows and you had those hordes of journalists-gone-mad all wanting to have that special picture. You can see the guy (sorry the Sharrif Ali) muttering: "what the hell am I doing here?" under his breath. Somehow Al-Arabiya got into the burial chamber with him and got a quickie interview right there to the annoyance of the photographers. And then the Arabiya reporter ran out of the room shouting "where is my camera man? Where is my camera man?". Oooh it was hilarious. Sharrif Ali was supposed to make a speech to the gathered honorables, sheikhs and instant-royalty types who were seated in the garden. The funny thing is that non of them saw him when he came out and stood on the podium. Cameras and reporters had him encircled. I had two people asking me if I could point him out for them.
He was sweating, it was so hot and they had him right there under the scorching sun, he had this smile pasted on his face and a tiny battery operated fan directed at his neck and held by one of his people. Have you ever tried to look dignified while you are wearing a dark suit and under a scorching sun? it doesn't work, the moment that little bead of sweat start running down the arch of your nose I will start laughing.
After a couple of verses from the Quran and some shouts of welcome, we get to the speech. I was waiting for the moment he opens his mouth and look at people's faces when they realize that he speaks pretty lousy Arabic. He has this cute accent foreigners have when they speak Arabic. OK not that bad, but he sounds strange, his Arabic sounds forced.
Very uninteresting speech, he even goes so low as to fish for cheers in the most obvious ways: better wages, no gasoline lines bla bla bla. The good thing is that he didn't get the applause he was hoping for.
Next stop: press conference in a HUGE mansion by the river. More media mobs, more nonsense. There is no flame there to inspire a mouse.

We left the press conference 15 minutes after it started. Right outside the hall where the media was trying to get anything out of the Sharrif ali we saw a huge man shouting at one of his "royal highness'" aides. This is what he was saying:
"look you asked me to drive you people around and I said OK, they promised me lunch so why are they now not letting me in?" he was talking about the banquet that they were preparing. It was a fun day, it really was.
How these guys who were not even capable of organizing a press conference will manage to run a country is anyone's guess. And I can already see how people will react to the people who will want to be called princes and princesses.

Rumsfeld has become such a political elitist, trying to measure up to Condelezza and Dick Cheney. None of them have any business pointing fingers at other nations they consider to be run by elitists. Actually, aren't all governments run by elitists? It comes with the territory -- literally. In this country, however, our top man is a hokey version of a dilettante with dubious credentials.

LW, It ain't even "dubious." c.i.

Nice cartoon in the latest New Yorker, in which mom and pop are sitting in the breakfast nook reading their papers and mom is saying: "Why doesn't Donald Rumsfeld get a hobby?"

Link to that cartoon

Rummy does have a hobby; ruin the US in four years. c.i.

Rummy has always approached the Pentagon carrying everything with a high hand. He has alienated high ranking officers, and civil employees, with the result that even if he were to suddenly get an ounce of sense, and consult with them, it is unlikely that they would any longer trust him sufficiently to offer good advice. Early last year, despite the country being ostensibly in "a war with terrorism," he was making plans to reduce the size of the military. Our armed forces are stretched way too thinly to meet the exigencies of the occupations of two countries--one still hostile after a bitter war, the other anciently and eternally hostile to all outsiders--as well as to meet the remainder of our commitments around the world, and fill staffing needs in the United States. The stress of long deployments is going to reduce the rate of re-enlistment, making it harder still to keep up staffing levels. This man is not just an arrogant s.o.b., he is incompetent: his war planning was woefully inadequate, and G.I.'s and Marines gave their lives for one another, to make possible the successes achieved with a wholly unsuitable force deployment; i hesitate to even suggest that any planning was done for the aftermath, and it is obvious that he and his toadies gave absolutely no consideration to the likely effect of the collapse of such a government, and were therefore not prepared for the looting and criminality; and finally, his alienation of the people with whom anyone in his position needs most to cooperate, as well as the stresses on our armed forces from being given too much to accomplish with too few resources, are on the primrose path to the destruction of our military as a creditable force for rapid deployment to deal with any situation. He's trashed our nations defenses, and still looks upon all around him, especially our traditional European allies, with a regal contempt hardly appropriate to a superannuated guttersnipe such as he.

Guttersnipe is a perfect word for him, positively literary, Set. I wonder why?

He has displayed an abiding contempt for everyone other than the few in power who overawe, since his days as a Reagan toady. Given that he's never displayed the least class, and hasn't an ounce of honor in his Jacob Marley soul, it should be obvious that he displays the character of a guttersnipe. Every time he opens his mouth these days, there's this angry, whiny, contemptuous display of ill-humor, like someone's oul' grandpa who imposes on the good nature of a long-suffering family.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, support for the Iraq invasion was not unequivocal. There was always a substantial minority of the public that doubted the wisdom of the invasion or were supporting it only because war had been declared and U.S. troops were moving into action.
These latest polls show that a considerable segment of the country continues to harbor doubts about the Iraq action and its aftermath, despite the military success of the operation. In the PIPA poll, 53 percent say that they support having gone to war because it was the best thing for the United States to do, 15 percent say that they were not sure going to war was the best thing but supported the war because it was the president's decision, and 22 percent flatly say that it was the wrong decision. That is basically the same breakdown of sentiments that PIPA, Gallup, Pew and others found during the war itself.
In the same poll, only about half say they are fairly certain that the U.S. government did not mislead the public deliberately about why we needed to go to war. Another 15 percent are not certain that the public was not misled and 30 percent say that they are fairly certain the public was misled.
In the Gallup poll, 42 percent say that, in the long run, the U.S. war with Iraq will end up creating more problems than it solves. And, in the same poll, 41 percent say either that the Iraq war was justified only if the United States finds weapons of mass destruction (WMD) (23 percent), or that the war was not justified even if we do find them (18 percent)...

...the big question at the moment is clearly, "Where are the WMD?" By any reasonable standard, nothing has so far been found. Moreover, it now seems almost certain that nothing will ever be found indicating a developing nuclear capability for Iraq -- the subject of the administration's most vivid scare stories. It's just too hard to hide a nuclear program so thoroughly that it would've avoided detection thus far. Will this failure to find WMD, especially the scariest ones, wind up turning a substantial segment of the public against the Bush administration?
The conventional wisdom is that, no, it won't, because most people say the war was justified even if WMD aren't ever found. But that assumes that the only reason the public might turn on the administration is if they believe the war wasn't justified.
Public Opinion Watch doesn't buy this. It's quite possible that people will continue to believe the war was justified -- basically because Saddam was a bad guy and it was good to get rid of him, especially given our history with him -- but start to doubt what they were told about it and worry that they were, in effect, lied to. If that happens, the image of Bush as a strong leader who can be trusted will erode and the GOP's fortunes with it.
You can see the seeds of that potential erosion in today's polling data -- for example, in the result cited above, where 45 percent of the public already either believes they were misled about the war or are not certain they were not misled. And in the Fox News poll, 41 percent say that, if WMD are never found, it is more likely that U.S. pre-war intelligence was intentionally misleading, compared to 26 percent who say that it is more likely that U.S. pre-war intelligence was just wrong (another 18 percent say the answer is somewhere in between). Finally, perhaps ominously for the administration, much of the public has not been following the story closely enough to know what's really going on -- 41 percent say either that the United States actually has found WMD in Iraq since the war ended (34 percent) or they are not sure (7 percent). If the issue starts reaching these inattentive members of the public, and many of them conclude that they have been misled, that could start to tip the balance of trust away from the administration. http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8057

Set, If we were occupied in only two countries, our military would be plenty enough. Let's see, we have our military stationed in Germany, Japan, Korea, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, UK, and where else? c.i.

Was it good for you, Setanta ?

Somehow I don't think you were at your dispassionate best in this and the previous pieces about Rumsfeld. Seems to me the war was rather well planned. Economy of force is important - reduces the logistical tail and adds flexibility. We responded more quickly than in 1992 and did much more with far less. The Army WAS looking backward with weapons like the Crusader and Rumsfeld was right to cancel it - in my opinion. The Defense Department was left to drift without either much leadership or redefinition of its goals and needed new methods for eight years. He had some catching up to do.

I could not agree less.

c.i. - just offered it up so one could call him "Dubious Dubya." And I don't believe he's any Ronald Reagan but that's also not saying much. I knew what Reagan was doing when he ran SAG as personal friends of mine were in close positions to that office at the time. It ain't pretty. Nancy could only get parts by use of the casting couch (how else, she was a terrible actress) and it always bugged Ronnie that she had so many gay friends. Yet he went on his own personal little witch hunt within SAG to out members. Dispicable.

That's an impressive variety of reasons, indeed, though not of all too great a diversity ... Of the 12 reasons stated, 5 mention the terrorism that victimised the US in the attacks of 9/11. That link, between the Saddam regime and the Al-Qaeda terrorists, is at least as disputed, in the face of absent or circumstantial evidence, as the presence of WMD immediately before the war. Another 4 explicitly refer to upholding the UN resolutions that deal with the WMD threat, which the UN most explicitly did not authorise the US to uphold.

So even of the "the reasons given for the war other than the WMD" that you selected, 9 out of 12 referred to either the Al-Qaeda or the Iraqi military threat. Only one (well, half of one) refers to what we are now supposed to believe was the 'real' reason for the war - Iraqi freedom - and another one refers to what many of us think was the real reason for the war - "the national security interests of the United States".

Furthermore, I've got a copy-and-paste to counter yours. Because, yes, you quote the Law that authorized the use of military force. But to argue your case that "the case for WMD was exaggerated", that it was merely "what the Media picked up on the most", you need to do better than that. You'd need to show that "the case for WMD" was not the one that the Bush government put out to the media first and foremost. That not just in the small print of the law that was sent to Congress, but also in the bold, emotional print of his appeals to the population to ready itself for war, the WMD was just one of several arguments.

FYI - it wasn't. This topic came up in another thread, too, and just out of curiosity I looked that speech back up, that speech that President Bush went on live TV with, on the eve of war, to explain to the American people, and to the world at large, why America was going to war. (This is what Craven wanted to paste in, I think). What did he say - how did he phrase his appeal to the nation to prepare for war - what was his opening argument?



The opening argument was: disarmament. That was what this war was about. And what disarmament did Iraq owe the world? "To destroy all its weapons of mass destruction".

What was the next thing President Bush said, in his address to the nation, and to TV viewers around the world?



Still, no single other argument made except for the WMD Iraq "continues to possess", about which intelligence "leaves no doubt". The danger of these WMD "is clear" - Saddam's Iraq could and would provide terrorists with them to attack the US.

And, Bush continued to explain to his people, to all of us in the world, it was because of that threat - specifically that threat, with no other issue or reasonable cause for war mentioned - that Bush was obliged, "by the duty that fell to him, as Commander-in-Chief, by the oath he had sworn, by the oath he would keep", to lead the United States into war:



I don't think you can get a more unambigous answer to the question of "who has painted this war as being about WMDs".

Did he mention other justifications for the war at all? Yes. In paragraph 14 of the speech, a first secondary argument is mentioned: "We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near." A powerful message, and one the US army has largely fulfilled - well, "prosperous" is a bit much, but otherwise.

But that was paragraph fourteen of his one main speech to justify the imminent war. It was after he had already turned away from the US listeners, to instead address the "many Iraqis [who] can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast" - "I have a message for them". The first thirteen paragraphs, the entire appeal to "my fellow citizens", was about WMD. No liberal ploy there. Fair enough to ask questions about it now, thus, I'd say.

One of the things I do like about your posts, george, is that you usually admit it when you were wrong. What on earth were you talking about here? Are you talking of wholly other gas attacks on the Kurds than the rest of us? 1987-1988 anyone, specifically the date gel' mentioned? Only cjhsa have I ever caught at the absurdity of trying to blame Clinton for the gas attacks. Explain?

You think right. That's the one.

One reflection that may perhaps effect into backing up george's point a little.

You sketch a situation that you think would be analogous to the kind of deception Bush committed, Blatham. So the question then becomes to what extent that suggested deception could conceivably be excused with reference to the results attained.

In casu: what if, say, the situation you describe occurred but the "treating his own people very poorly" involved a partially successful attempt to commit genocide against the Jews of Germany? Because "treating his own people very poorly" is quite a euphemism for mass murder.

If Roosevelt, in this hypothetic scenario, would have lied about the weapons Nazi Germany had and its intents to attack other countries, but in attaining the military victory in the war he thus gained authorization for, would have saved Germany from a regime that had already systematically killed, deported or chased out many if not most of its Jews, Roma and Sinti, gays, and Communists, apart from running an otherwise brutal dictatorship as well?

I myself don't think deceiving your people into a war is ever justified; I do think Roosevelt, in this hypothetic scenario, would still have had a case to make about the war in question having been a worthwhile, "good war".