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Bush supporters' aftermath thread II

 
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Apr, 2006 08:17 am
Among tens of thousands of personnel, if a reporter asks enough people, he or she will almost certainly find a few who will express strong criticism of their situation, mission, leaders or whatever. Fail to report what the supporters say but report what those few say and you can make it look like there is widespread consensus among military leadership re negative criticism of their mission and their Commander in Chief.

If you ask one person about details of what he or she does not like, that person may be quite happy and appreciative of his/her situation, but will almost certainly think at least one component of his/her situation is unsatisfactory. Fail to report any of the positives but emphasize the one negative, and you can make this person look like a disgruntled employee, soldier, or whatever.

Until the MSM starts reporting some of the good stuff along with any negative they can dig up, I'm going to remain highly skeptical of the media's integrity, honesty, or ability to report anything accurately.
0 Replies
 
squinney
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Apr, 2006 06:33 pm
Here's another view from retired Army Col. and former Colin Powell chief of staff. Just how many does it take and from what level, for people to get it?


Quote:
Is U.S. being transformed into a radical republic?
By Lawrence Wilkerson
Originally published April 23, 2006

We Americans came not from a revolution but from an evolution.
That is in large part why our so-called revolution produced success while most throughout history did not. We came as much from the Magna Carta as from our own doings, as much from British common law and parliamentary development as from the Declaration of Independence and Continental Congress.

Unlike the true revolution on the other side of the Atlantic that led to Napoleon's dictatorship and strife and conflict all across Europe, our evolution founded the greatest country the world has ever seen. That was true in every element of power and in the uniqueness that makes us great, our constant striving for "a more perfect union" and, as we do so, our open arms for the other peoples of the world "yearning to be free."

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical irresponsibility.

This administration has expanded government - creation of the Homeland Security Department alone puts it in the record books - and government intrusiveness. It has brought a new level of sleaze and corruption to Washington (difficult to do, to be sure). And it has done the impossible in war-waging: put in motion a conflict in Iraq that in terms of colossal incompetence, civilian and military, and unbridled arrogance portends to top the Vietnam era, a truly radical feat.

In Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight, Richard Perle, head theoretician for the neo-Jacobins who masquerade under the title "neoconservatives," claims that America was changed forever by 9/11. He tells us that those attacks are responsible for all this radicalism. The Jacobins were members of a radical political club during the French Revolution that instituted brutal repression in what became known as the "reign of terror."

Mr. Perle says that we may think we can go back, but we cannot. "We are not the same people we were before," he says emphatically, as if he were our king. If he's correct, then our country is as spent as was Rome, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and a host of other great powers before each toppled from the mountain.

Mr. Perle is not correct.

First, it was Mr. Perle and people such as he who put us where we are today, not the terrorists of 9/11. A somnolent Congress assisted - a Congress that, as Democratic Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia said as the Senate failed to debate in the run-up to the Iraq war, was "ominously, ominously, dreadfully silent."

Second, people such as Mr. Perle do not represent the bulk of Americans, who are anything but radical. Instead, they represent the Robespierres and Napoleons of this world, the neo-Jacobins of today. Robespierre was a leader of the reign of terror.

We can turn back; moreover, we must if the world is to continue on a trajectory of more freedom and more prosperity for increasing numbers of people. Without American leadership - the good America - the world cannot progress.

If we are in some way the indispensable nation that a few Americans have said we are, then that is why. And it is no arrogance of power to say it; rather, it is to admit abiding reverence for the way the world works.

Such awesome responsibility generates not the swaggering ineptitude of which we have witnessed so much of late, but the abject humility that should flood us when we confront such unprecedented responsibility. I imagine the feeling to be something akin to what Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower felt moments before the invasion of Normandy began June 6, 1944.

Congress can awaken and discover that the Constitution is correct, that Congress is in fact a separate and equal branch of government. The American people will find a way to deal with the remainder of the radicals, whether at the ballot box, in the courts or in the Senate.

We can halt the precipitate slide in our standing around the world, convince the majority of the Islamic world that we can and must co-exist - and eventually prosper together - and at the same time confront, confound and defeat the small element in Islam's midst that lives to murder innocents, Christian, Jew and Muslim alike.

All we need do, in reality, is return to our roots. Never in our almost 800-year history since the Magna Carta have we been radicals.



Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a visiting professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.


Source
0 Replies
 
squinney
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Apr, 2006 06:34 pm
Oops! A2K error - entered same post twice.

Excuse.
0 Replies
 
okie
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Apr, 2006 07:16 pm
Quote:
In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.


Lawrence Wilkerson is dead wrong on most of what he says. Some of his assertions, as I've quoted in the above, are totally outlandish. I have to ask how he ever got to be in the position he was with Colin Powell? It is my understanding that although Powell has disagreed with Bush at times in terms of approach, he loves and admires Bush. This Wilkerson guy sounds so similar to Michael Moore, its scary. I would recommend talking to Tommy Franks to get a more sane view.
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 07:00 am
Quote:
I would recommend talking to Tommy Franks to get a more sane view.


Laughing
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 08:07 am
revel wrote:
Quote:
I would recommend talking to Tommy Franks to get a more sane view.


Laughing



Let me guess ... you would suggest talking to Wesley Clark?
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 09:57 am
Ticomaya wrote:

Quote:
Let me guess ... you would suggest talking to Wesley Clark?


Over Franks, you bettcha.
0 Replies
 
okie
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 10:34 am
Laughing
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 11:20 am
okie wrote:
Laughing


Franks was the planner of the Iraq war according to Woodwards and an interview of Rumsfeld. Clark was the head of NATO in the kosovo war, which turned out a heck of lot better than Iraq.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/15/60minutes/main612067.shtml

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/t03302003_t0330sdabcsteph.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Clark
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 03:26 pm
Revel wrote:

Quote:
Quote:
Laughing


Franks was the planner of the Iraq war according to Woodwards and an interview of Rumsfeld. Clark was the head of NATO in the kosovo war, which turned out a heck of lot better than Iraq.

...



Iraq II was a tremendous victory ... militarily speaking. Winning the war was not an issue ... winning the peace has proven more difficult, but that's more a function of the determined insurgency than the war plan of Franks.

Kosovo turned out "a heck of a lot better" in your view because it was a sanitary bombing campaign ... no ground forces, and no occupancy. But it has also been heavily criticized and controversial, and through the campaign only around 50 Serbian aircraft were destroyed, and only 13 tanks/armored vehicles.
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 04:39 pm
Ticomaya
Quote:
Kosovo turned out "a heck of a lot better" in your view because it was a sanitary bombing campaign ... no ground forces, and no occupancy. But it has also been heavily criticized and controversial, and through the campaign only around 50 Serbian aircraft were destroyed, and only 13 tanks/armored vehicles.


It stopped the ethnic cleansing which was the reason for the war.

Ticomaya
Quote:
Iraq II was a tremendous victory ... militarily speaking. Winning the war was not an issue ... winning the peace has proven more difficult, but that's more a function of the determined insurgency than the war plan of Franks.


The planners of Iraqi war did not plan for what happens after the war because they thought they would greeted as liberators. They ignored intelligence which told them of all the difficulties they would have after removing Saddam Hussien. Furthermore, it was not a "tremendous victory, the forces of Iraq just went into hiding and started fighting from there and have been doing it ever since.

Anyhow, I imagine you are going to have a spin for this, ahead of time, I know I am going disagree. My only point was that Franks is hardly an unbiased (or credible) source to ask about insights into the Iraq war since he was part of the planning from the beginning.
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 05:19 pm
Quote:
Anyhow, I imagine you are going to have a spin for this, ahead of time, I know I am going disagree.


You call it "spin" ... I call it correction. :wink:

Quote:
My only point was that Franks is hardly an unbiased (or credible) source to ask about insights into the Iraq war since he was part of the planning from the beginning.


Which is why he can provide insights into the Iraq war, and he can hardly be any more biased than Wilkerson.
0 Replies
 
okie
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2006 09:08 pm
I've been listening to the war critics for a long time, and I do not agree that more troops or executing the war any differently would have changed much of anything in terms of limiting the car bombing and other terrorist activities. Double the troops and I think approximately the same would have happened and would be happening. The terrorists have their connections within the society there in certain areas, perhaps similar to the connections of the VietCong in the society of Vietnam. In that case, 500,000 troops did not eliminate the placement of landmines in the roads or the booby traps outside the villages. A few scattered terrorists can operate in Iraq as long as there is an adequate network of sympathizers around, and it does not take that many, percentage wise, to do it.

The ultimate key to success is the perserverance of the Iraqi people in weeding out the terrorist connections within their own society. They hold the ultimate answer to the problem. Our mission was successful, and now it will fall on the shoulders of the Iraqis as to just how much they value their freedom from the repressive government that they've lived under, and whether there are enough of them that value progress over their previous way of life. As I see it, it is crucial for us to support them in their time of transition and re-organization.
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2006 06:10 am
Ticomaya wrote:
Quote:
Anyhow, I imagine you are going to have a spin for this, ahead of time, I know I am going disagree.


You call it "spin" ... I call it correction. :wink:

Quote:
My only point was that Franks is hardly an unbiased (or credible) source to ask about insights into the Iraq war since he was part of the planning from the beginning.


Which is why he can provide insights into the Iraq war, and he can hardly be any more biased than Wilkerson.


Since he (Franks) was part of the planning, he would have a vested interest in shading any insights favorably to his (and the administrations) point of view. I would think that would be obvious.

I think we have gone as far as we can with this, so I'll just agree to disagree.
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Tue 9 May, 2006 09:43 pm
I feel it's important to mention that President Bush has a clear and defined strategy for victory in Iraq.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Tue 9 May, 2006 09:51 pm
Yes, most of us remember his speech on USS Abraham Lincoln.
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 May, 2006 05:39 am
Ticomaya wrote:
I feel it's important to mention that President Bush has a clear and defined strategy for victory in Iraq.


As differentiated from "clear and undefined" perhaps?

But aside from that, it's oddly comforting to find you still quite unimpressed by the real world.
0 Replies
 
Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 May, 2006 09:11 am
I, for one, applaud Tico's statement. President Bush is leading the benighted people of Iraq to the sunny uplands of peace, freedom and democracy. He is erecting a shining city on the hill with his resolute plans for victory in Iraq.
0 Replies
 
FreeDuck
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 May, 2006 09:13 am
One great big resolute shining city erection. Yessiree.
0 Replies
 
blacksmithn
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 May, 2006 09:17 am
I, for one, applaud the President's planned erection! Thank goodness for this Great Helmsman of our ship of state AND his audacious plan for inevitable victory in Iraq! It's just around the corner!
0 Replies
 
 

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