THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

Cakewalk crowd abandons Bush

Posted: January 5, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, said a rueful John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. George W. Bush knows today whereof his predecessor spoke.

For as he prepares to "surge" 20,000 more U.S. troops into a war even he concedes we "are not winning," his erstwhile acolytes have begun to abandon him to salvage their own tattered reputations.

Case in point, the neoconservatives. As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen have confessed to Vanity Fair's David Rose their abject despair over how the Bushites mismanaged the war that they, the "Vulcans," so brilliantly conceived.

Surveying what appears an impending disaster for Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, the neocons have advanced a new theme. The idea of launching an unprovoked war of liberation, for which they had beaten the drums for half a decade before 9-11, remains a lovely concept. It was Bushite incompetence that fouled it up.

"The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless," wails Ken Adelman, who had famously predicted in the Washington Post that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."

Bush's team of Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, says Adelman, "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." Their incompetence, he adds, "means that most everything we ever stood for ... lies in ruins."

Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, whose book on war leaders Bush used to carry about, says his mistake was in not knowing "how incredibly incompetent" the Bush team would be.

Richard Perle is sickened by the consequences of the war he and his comrades so ardently championed. "The levels of brutality ... are truly horrifying, and, I have to say, I underestimated the depravity."

Calling the Bush policy process a "disaster," Perle blames Bush himself: "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible. ... I don't think he realizes the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

This is the second fallback position of the War Party. Not only incompetence, but treachery made a nightmare of their vision.

Doesn't this sound like Hitler in the 30's blaming Germany's defeat on treachery. Did't he use that same excuse to explain his own defeat in WWII?

Uber-hawk Frank Gaffney also hits hard the theme of sabotage and disloyalty: "This president has tolerated, and the people around him have tolerated, active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skullduggery that translates into subversion of his policies. ... He doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course."

David Frum, the cashiered White House speechwriter who co-authored the "axis-of-evil" phrase, faults the president. While he provided the words, says Frum, Bush "just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of maybe everything."

Where Frum, four years ago, accused anti-war conservatives of being "unpatriotic" haters of America and President Bush, he is now saying that that same president either lacked the I.Q. to realize what he was saying or lacked a belief and commitment to follow through.

As Rose writes, this is "the most damning assessment of all." Moreover, it is an indictment of Bush's judgment that he could clasp so many such vipers to his bosom.

Rose describes James Woolsey, the ex-CIA director who was ubiquitous on the op-ed pages and national TV making the case for war, as "aghast at what he sees as profound American errors that have ignored the lessons learned so painfully, 40 years ago" in Vietnam.

How can a bunch of arrogant chicken hawks learn anything from a war they ran away from?

Conspicuous by its absence from disparagements of the president by these deserters from his camp and cause is any sense that they were themselves wrong. That they, who accuse everyone else of cutting and running, are themselves cutting and running. That they are themselves but a typical cluster of think-tank incompetents.

No neocon concedes that the very idea itself of launching an unprovoked war against a country in the heart of the Arab world - one that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us - might not be wildly welcomed by the "liberated." No neocon has yet conceded that Bismarck may have been right when he warned, "Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death."

"Huge mistakes were made," says Perle, "and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives. ... I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war."

Almost all the neoconservatives have now departed the seats of power in the Bush administration and retreated to their sinecures at Washington think tanks, to plot the next war - on Iran.

Meanwhile, brave young Americans, the true idealists and the casualties of the neocons' war, come home in caskets, 20 a week, to Dover and, at Walter Reed, learn to walk again on steel legs.

...
I firmly believe that this would end with a supermajority asking us to leave.

I hope you are right that a supermajority would ask us to leave as soon as possible.
...
What would cause you to believe a secret ballot over said polls?

My first distrust of polls developed when I learned how they were taken: that is, the process for selecting and interviewing who is ultimately polled. The repeated failures over time of the results of US exit polls to even closely match their corresponding multiple-recounted secret ballot results in so many US voting districts, further supported my distrust of polls. Then when I read how those actually polled in the Iraq "super-majority" poll were selected and interviewed, I dismissed those results immediately.

More recently, I read how some polls were manipulated by Soros people in other countries. That nailed it for me.

Who would be conducting the balloting? The US or Iraqi gov't? I would say that neither of those two groups can be trusted to give a straight answer on this question, so it would have to be some third group...

If what you say--and I hope--about the probable results is true, I don't think it will matter whether the US or Iraqi gov't conducts the ballot. But let's as before have the US and Iraq governments invite the representatives of each province to conduct paper ballot balloting in their own provinces, and see if there are any post-plebiscite protests over the results. I doubt there will be unless the results are very close.

As far as the US government is concerned, I bet it would be delighted if it were asked by the plebiscite to remove its troops as soon as possible.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

...
I firmly believe that this would end with a supermajority asking us to leave.

I hope you are right that a supermajority would ask us to leave as soon as possible.
...
What would cause you to believe a secret ballot over said polls?

My first distrust of polls developed when I learned how they were taken: that is, the process for selecting and interviewing who is ultimately polled. The repeated failures over time of the results of US exit polls to even closely match their corresponding multiple-recounted secret ballot results in so many US voting districts, further supported my distrust of polls. Then when I read how those actually polled in the Iraq "super-majority" poll were selected and interviewed, I dismissed those results immediately.

More recently, I read how some polls were manipulated by Soros people in other countries. That nailed it for me.

Who would be conducting the balloting? The US or Iraqi gov't? I would say that neither of those two groups can be trusted to give a straight answer on this question, so it would have to be some third group...

If what you say--and I hope--about the probable results is true, I don't think it will matter whether the US or Iraqi gov't conducts the ballot. But let's as before have the US and Iraq governments invite the representatives of each province to conduct paper ballot balloting in their own provinces, and see if there are any post-plebiscite protests over the results. I doubt there will be unless the results are very close.

As far as the US government is concerned, I bet it would be delighted if it were asked by the plebiscite to remove its troops as soon as possible.

ican711nm wrote:

...
As far as the US government is concerned, I bet it would be delighted if it were asked by the plebiscite to remove its troops as soon as possible.

You seriously think they would be delighted?

Yes I do "seriously think [Bush] would be delighted. He has shown me all the symptoms I have observed in the past of some of our presidents looking for graceful ways to fail in both war and peace.

Leaving would mean abandoning the military bases we've built; abandoning the economic investments that we've made. There is a huge part of the government that would die before they left Iraq (which is what is going to happen in the end, but not the governement stooges, regular soldiers).

Yes it would mean all that. What the hell, it ain't Bush's money, property or life.

I find it difficult to believe that you think Bush would welcome a ballot of Iraqis showing that we should leave. It would be a repudiation of everything he has stood for for all these years.

Yes it would be such a repudiation. But prior presidents have handled that the same way Bush can now. Like, for instance, in Clinton's case, all Bush has to say repeatedly is: "I tried."

Yes, that would be pathetic, but it would be pathetic not without precedense.

Cycloptichorn

Israeli Experts Say Middle East Was Safer With Saddam in Iraq
Orly Halpern | Fri. Jan 05, 2007

Jerusalem - Although few tears were shed in Israel over Saddam Hussein's death last week, a small but growing chorus ?- including government officials, academics and Iraqi émigrés ?- is warning that Israel could find itself in more danger with him gone, and that it might even regret having welcomed his toppling.

"If I knew then what I know today, I would not have recommended going to war, because Saddam was far less dangerous than I thought," said Haifa University political scientist Amatzia Baram, one of Israel's leading Iraq experts.

Saddam was feared and reviled in Israel, both as a tyrant and as an enemy of the Jewish state. He demonstratively supported Palestinian terrorists, and few have forgiven his bombarding of Israel with Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War.

"Retrospectively, justice has been done," Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh told Israel Radio this week. Still, he cautioned, Israel must now be concerned "about what is liable to happen in the future."

Saddam's death, Sneh warned, could lead to "a reinforcement of Iranian influence in Iraq." He said that Iraq had turned into a "volcano of terror" following the war, with "destructive energies" that could spill over into Jordan and Israel.

Such misgivings, though rarely aired publicly for fear of offending Washington, reach high into Israel's security establishment. Yuval Diskin, director of the Shin Bet security service, told a group of students in a military preparatory program last May that Israel might come to regret its support for the American-led invasion in March 2003.

"When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," Diskin said, unaware that the meeting was secretly recorded. "I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam." The tape was later broadcast on Israeli television.

Although Iraq was long feared as a formidable enemy of the Jewish state, on the eve of the invasion it was poor and powerless. Palaces across the country were made of cheap plaster. Nuclear and biological weapons seen as threats by the Bush administration were nonexistent.

Baram, the Iraq expert, said that before the war started, he advised American officials of problems they might face afterward. What he did not anticipate, he said, was the scale of terrorism that would spread across the country, calling it "much, much more than I expected."

Since the invasion, chaos has swept Iraq. Terrorist bombs in public places, sectarian attacks between Shi'ites and Sunnis, and ordinary criminal violence kill tens of people daily. One study estimates that some 650,000 Iraqis have died violently since the war, killed either by American and allied forces, terrorists or criminals.

Even some of those who suffered directly from Saddam's brutality told the Forward that in retrospect, Israel was better off with him than without.

Baghdad-born Avraham Eini was a teenager when his father was arrested and tortured by Saddam's security agents in the 1970s. "He later died of his wounds," said 54-year-old Eini, who had escaped with his family and settled in Ramat Gan. Two decades later, in 1991, Iraqi Scud missiles fell 200 yards from his house.

Eini said he felt a sense of "revenge and relief" when Saddam was executed last week. Yet, he said, "Israel would be safer today if Saddam stayed in power."

Saddam and his Ba'athist revolutionary colleagues came to power in 1968, a year after the crushing defeat of Arab armies by Israel in the Six-Day War. Vice president and strongman of the regime, Saddam had an attitude that was decidedly anti-Israel, following Ba'athist ideology and postwar Arab sentiment. One of his first notorious moves was to hang 17 alleged spies, nine of them Jewish.

Throughout the 1970s Saddam's anti-Israel rhetoric continued, along with his hounding of Iraqi Jews and his support for the Arab Liberation Front, a militant Palestinian group that shelled Israel from southern Lebanon. He took full control as president in 1979, escalating his rhetoric and brutality. Shortly afterward, Iraq was invaded by neighboring Iran, touching off a bloody, eight-year war that inflicted huge hardship on Iraqis and Iranians alike. Saddam further tightened his regime and launched a furious arms race.

In 1981, alarmed at Iraq's nuclear weapons project, Israel sent warplanes to destroy the nuclear plant at Osirak, fueling the dictator's hostility.

A few years into the Iran-Iraq war, however, Saddam moderated his anti-Israel stance. Some observers believe he merely hoped to curry favor with Washington. Others say that even so, it might have led to a thaw. Jews in Iraq were now protected by a special unit and had a phone number to call if harassed. "Nobody could touch us," said Emad Levy, who lived in Iraq at the time.

In 1982 Saddam told a visiting congressman that he supported the "existence of an independent Palestinian state accepted by the Palestinians." He added, "It is also necessary to have a state of security for the Israelis." Israeli officials publicly dismissed the feelers as a smokescreen.

Soon after, Saddam moved closer to Egypt, which he had previously snubbed for making peace with Israel. Iraq's government-controlled newspapers began using the word "Israel" in place of "the Zionist enemy."

In early 1986, Israel's then-prime minister, Shimon Peres, a supporter of secret American-Iran arms deals, stopped supplying Iran and sent aides to meet secretly with Iraqi officials. The contacts were reported in the Israeli press but firmly denied by both sides. "Nothing came of the meetings," Baram said, "but they showed that something was moving."

Later in 1986, when the hawkish Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister, the meetings were shut down.

Today such talks are inconceivable. There is no one to talk to in a nation collapsing into warring factions.

Following the invasion, Israel no longer faces a military threat from Iraq. But terrorist threats have moved closer. Last year, Iraq-based terrorists staged a deadly triple bombing attack on Amman hotels, and Al Qaeda attacked an American naval target in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, next door to Eilat.

The Iraqi threat was once quite serious. Iraq sent troops to fight in three wars against Israel, beginning in 1948. After the Iraq-Iran cease-fire in 1988, Iraq started rebuilding its arsenal ?- including its nuclear project.

But after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, America led an attack in 1991, forcing it to withdraw and to accept intrusive arms inspections, and punishing economic sanctions.

Even at their peak, Saddam's nuclear ambitions were not necessarily aimed at Israel, experts say. "I never believed that Iraq stood to attack Israel," said Yoram Meital, a professor of Middle East studies at Ben-Gurion University. Even when it lobbed 39 Scuds at Tel Aviv, "Iraq attacked Israel in the first Gulf War in order to cause Israel to attack Iraq and bring the disintegration of the international coalition against Iraq" by prompting Arab states to withdraw.

"He could have shot chemical weapons at Israel, but he didn't," said political scientist Eitan Barak, a security specialist at Hebrew University.

Exaggeration of such threats and grievances, Barak and others say, led American policy-makers, with Israel's blessing, to replace a bad situation with a much worse one.

"Saddam's regime was preferable ?- not only for us but for all the states in the region, except for maybe the Iranians," Barak said. "Saddam held together a divided, tribal, hostile state of Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. He was a single man who made all decisions, and he was a rational leader. The moment he was gone, everything fell apart."

McTag wrote:

And a happy new year to you; but I suspect you're always happy there, in your secure environment.

What do you think Mr Bush is going to tell us now? More troops?

What constitutes a secure environment? What constitutes an insecure environent?

I don't even have a guess about what Mr. Bush is going to tell us.

What do you guess Mr. Bush is going to tell us?

A State Department official leaked word this week that President Bush is considering sending "no more than 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops" to Iraq. "Instead of a surge, it is a bump," the official said.

This claim was bolstered last night by CBS's David Martin, who reported that military commanders have told Bush they are prepared to execute a troop escalation of just 9,000 soldiers and Marines into Iraq, "with another 10,000 on alert in Kuwait and the U.S."

The Washington Post reports today that "deep divisions remain between the White House on one side and the Joint Chiefs and congressional leaders on the other about whether a surge of up to 20,000 troops will turn around the deteriorating situation." The Post also provides more context about an administration official's recent claim that the escalation is "more of a political decision than a military one.":

The U.S. military is increasingly resigned to the probability that Bush will deploy a relatively small number of additional troops ?- between one and five brigades ?- in part because he has few other dramatic options available to signal U.S. determination in Iraq, officials said. But the Joint Chiefs have not given up making the case that the potential dangers outweigh the benefits for several reasons, officials said.

Escalation backers have already begun distancing themselves from this plan. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said yesterday that not sending enough troops would be "worse than doing nothing."

William J. Fallon: Wrong Man For The Job
At a time when the United States is engaged in protracted ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the worst moves the Bush administration could make is to appoint someone with no background in land warfare to oversee these operations. In another baffling move, President Bush has decided to do just that, by replacing retiring Army General John Abizaid, the current head of Central Command, with Navy Admiral William J. Fallon.

Since its inception, Central Command, which oversees the Middle East and South Central Asia, has been led only by a Army or Marine Corps General. The Navy has been largely on the sidelines while the Army and the Marine Corps have borne the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; both are starting to crack under the strain. Admiral Fallon is a fine officer and by all accounts has done a good job as head of the Pacific Command, the Navy's traditional area of responsibility. But with little background in the Middle East or land warfare, his appointment appears to be based more on diffusing opposition to the military escalation in Iraq than on what is best for the soldiers and Marines on the ground and the country.

Set to make the disastrous decision to escalate our presence in Iraq, the President is in need of a military commander to support his decision. While General Abizaid publicly opposed the surge in troop levels in Iraq, it would be surprising if Admiral Fallon is not more agreeable.

All of my political and philanthropic activities are directed towards one goal--fostering the open society. To be truly open a society must accord equal respect to all beliefs, showing no favoritism toward any particular one. A truly open person never assumes that his beliefs are superior to someone else's and never forgets his own fallibility.

Open society stands for freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea.

Pure reason and a moral code based on the value of the individual are inventions of Western culture; they have little resonance in other cultures.

America's military response was actually worse, morally, than the original crime, because the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than have the attacks on the World Trade Center.

I do not accept the rules imposed by others. If I did, I would not be alive today. I am a lawabiding citizen, but I recognize there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don't apply. One needs to adjust one's behavior to the changing circumstances.

The principles of the Declaration of Independence are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding. Because these principles hve no special sanctity and represent no timeless truths, they are disposable. They can be changed at will to fit the fashion of the day.

The Constitution in 2020 is a progressive vision of what the Constitution ought to be. It will be evolved by court decisions and not by procedures specified by the current Constitution.

Any president who embraces the bubble of American supremacy is an enemy of the open society.

It is time to puncture the bubble of American supremacy.

We own the Democratic Party.

I don't think we can run markets on patriotic principles.

My goal is to become the conscience of the world.

GYORGY SCHWARTZ alias GEORGE SOROS alias GEORGE WILL SOAR.

Not too much of a surprise here:

Future of Iraq: The spoils of war
How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2132569.ece

McTag wrote:

Not too much of a surprise here:

Future of Iraq: The spoils of war
How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2132569.ece
...

[last paragraph of the article]
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a former chief economist at Shell, said it was crucial that any deal would guarantee funds for rebuilding Iraq. "It is absolutely vital that the revenue from the oil industry goes into Iraqi development and is seen to do so," he said. "Although it does make sense to collaborate with foreign investors, it is very important the terms are seen to be fair."

This really doesn't seem to be of much of surprise for A2K's

ican711nm wrote:

GYORGY SCHWARTZ alias GEORGE SOROS alias GEORGE WILL SOAR.

You say that as if it was a bad thing

GYORGY SCHWARTZ alias GEORGE SOROS alias GEORGE WILL SOAR

Quote:

All of my political and philanthropic activities are directed towards one goal--fostering the open society. To be truly open a society must accord equal respect to all beliefs, showing no favoritism toward any particular one. A truly open person never assumes that his beliefs are superior to someone else's and never forgets his own fallibility.

Many human beliefs are self-evidently destructive or even evil. The belief that that those people must be killed that do not believe what you believe, is an example of an ubiquitous destructive and evil belief. The belief that you must not defend yourself by killing those deliberately trying to kill you, if such defense will result in the killing of non-killers, encourages deliberate killers to deliberately kill more. Those are but two examples of beliefs I do not respect.

Quote:

Open society stands for freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea.

Yes, an open society does stand for those ideas. America is such a society. It stands for those ideas by securing those ideas against those who would deny their validity.

Quote:

Pure reason and a moral code based on the value of the individual are inventions of Western culture; they have little resonance in other cultures.

Pure reason and a moral code based on the value of the individual are valid values regardless who invented them.

Quote:

America's military response was actually worse, morally, than the original crime, because the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than have the attacks on the World Trade Center.

In war of any kind, one must risk life to save life. America's military response in Afghanistan and Iraq was directed at deliberate killers while risking the lives of non-killers. These non-killers were not innocents in that it is their culture and society that bread their deliberate killers, and it is their culture and society that did not prevent their deliberate killers from deliberately killing.

Worse, since the US invaded Iraq, many of the non-killers there ceased being non-killers and began killing each other. The net result is that almost 80% of those killed by violence in Iraq were killed not by Americans, but by Iraqis themselves, or by Iraq's neighbors.

Quote:

I do not accept the rules imposed by others. If I did, I would not be alive today. I am a lawabiding citizen, but I recognize there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don't apply. One needs to adjust one's behavior to the changing circumstances.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq needed to be opposed rather than accepted because they allowed sanctuary in their midsts to deliberate killers.

Quote:

The principles of the Declaration of Independence are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding. Because these principles hve no special sanctity and represent no timeless truths, they are disposable. They can be changed at will to fit the fashion of the day.

I believe the principles of the Declaration of Independence are self-evident truths derived from a rational analysis of what principles must guide the behavior of humanity, if humanity is to survive.

Quote:

The Constitution in 2020 is a progressive vision of what the Constitution ought to be. It will be evolved by court decisions and not by procedures specified by the current Constitution.

What is that progressive vision? Is it the vision that humanity ought to be governed by an atheist collective? If so, what justifies such a vision? More to the point, what justifies evolving such a constitution outside of prevailing American Constitutional Law. Absent an open description of such a vision, and absent an open and rational justification for such a vision, I believe such a vision is pseudology.

Quote:

Any president who embraces the bubble of American supremacy is an enemy of the open society.

What American supremacy is being referred to? If it's America's supremacy in the openness of its society, I embrace it, and I want every American president to also embrace it. If it's America's supremacy in its ability to defend itself, I also embrace it, and I want every American president to also embrace it.

Quote:

It is time to puncture the bubble of American supremacy.

Supremacy over what?

Quote:

We own the Democratic Party.

If that is true, what do the other Democrats own?

Quote:

I don't think we can run markets on patriotic principles.

It depends on what the patriotic principles are. I believe the principles of the Declaration of Independence are self-evident truths derived from a rational analysis of what principles must guide the behavior of humanity in and outside of markets, if humanity is to survive.

Quote:

My goal is to become the conscience of the world.

My goal is that the world be that which is governed by the principles of the Declaration of Independence or principles rationally derived from the Declaration of Independence.