Grip on reality? nah.
Instead of blaming Bush and the current administration for it's many failures, how about remembering that it is the enemy, hiding amongst the civilians, acting like terrorists that keep the war going.
US Forces are NOT going to leave Iraq until Iraq can defend themselves while Bush is President. He has made that clear enough. No amount of whining from the left is going to change that.
The enemy is fighting because George Bush sent in the troops and attacked a sovereign nation illegally.
Just as the Americans are fighting because their stupid leader tells them to.
Intrepid wrote:Just as the Americans are fighting because their stupid leader tells them to.
It's pointless to make any attempts at perspective.
candidone1 wrote:Intrepid wrote:Just as the Americans are fighting because their stupid leader tells them to.
It's pointless to make any attempts at perspective.
I don't care to understand the perspective of people that torture and kill people because of their religion or ethnic background.
McGentrix wrote:candidone1 wrote:Intrepid wrote:Just as the Americans are fighting because their stupid leader tells them to.
It's pointless to make any attempts at perspective.
I don't care to understand the perspective of people that torture and kill people because of their religion or ethnic background.
Abu *cough cough* Ghraib.
candidone1 wrote:McGentrix wrote:candidone1 wrote:Intrepid wrote:Just as the Americans are fighting because their stupid leader tells them to.
It's pointless to make any attempts at perspective.
I don't care to understand the perspective of people that torture and kill people because of their religion or ethnic background.
Abu *cough cough* Ghraib.
What about it?
I don't care to understand the perspective of people that torture and kill people because of their religion or ethnic background.
I wish I could have been there. Wrap 'em in bacon and send them to the virgins.
You're right...the Iraq war is nothing like WWII...particularly in the resolve and support the nation's politicians offered the President...
Source
Quote:Ned Lamont Is No Clare Boothe Luce
By Jeffrey Lord
Published 9/1/2006 12:08:35 AM
The year was 1942.
After more than a decade of losing elections to Democrats, after three straight presidential losses to Franklin D. Roosevelt -- the man conservative Republicans loved to hate -- the scent of victory was at last in the air for the GOP.
But there was a problem, and a big one at that. The previous December 7th America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. The attack was a disaster, killing 2,471 military and civilians and destroying a considerable portion of the U.S. Navy. For the second time in just over twenty years the country was now at war. Not only were we fighting the Japanese but the Germans and the Italians too.
In the partisan camps of the Republican Party there was considerable feeling that the fault for this lay personally with FDR. Some were convinced he either knew the attack was coming and let it happen to plunge the country into the war, or that he should have known and was simply incompetent. The man, they believed, was neither very bright nor very honest. Battlefields were now erupting in strange countries literally all over the world -- in Europe, Africa, Asia. So in circumstances like this, how does a political opposition approach the upcoming election?
Savage FDR? Run on a campaign of "Roosevelt lied and people died"? Should they go out and tell the American people just how dangerously incompetent the man was, that the best thing to do was make peace with Hitler and Japan's Hirohito, then elect Republicans who would simply force FDR to bring home the boys and let the rest of the world cope with chaos? After all, a few years earlier FDR himself had turned back an ocean liner filled with 937 Jews escaping the looming Holocaust. The idea of not making Hitler, Hirohito or Mussolini any angrier than they were was certainly one approach.
The Republicans did none of the above. Instead, with the President on the political ropes at last, with a burgeoning team of attractive GOP candidates all over the country they did something else.
They rallied to FDR.
<<<snip>>>>
As America readies for the traditional Labor Day kickoff of this year's election campaign, a look back tells us the world has certainly changed in 2006. In 1942, Republicans and Democrats both understood the dangers the country and the world faced.
What happened in 1942?
The Republicans won the election, gaining 44 new House seats and 10 in the Senate, not quite a majority, but erasing FDR's control. Dewey won in New York and was instantly bannered as a presidential sure thing. GOP gubernatorial candidates won across the country.
What was FDR's reaction? The news account of his post-election press conference reported FDR "laughs." Why? Said the headline: "Assumes New Congress is for Winning, So Why Should Poll Make Any Difference?"
And the Nazis and the Japanese? The so-called Axis Powers? What was their response? The New York Times editorial page trumpeted "an admission from Berlin that it would be 'harboring an illusion' to expect the Republican victory to bring any change whatever in the policy of the United States." Focusing on the silence of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the paper concluded: "His silence is proof of the fact that we have made the unity of our purpose apparent to our enemies."
We're a long way from 1942.
Goats and Hussars: A British Harbinger of American Defeat
By Chris Floyd
09/01/06 "t r u t h o u t" -- - Don Rumsfeld is fond of historical analogies when pontificating about Iraq; he particularly favors comparisons to the Nazi era and the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II. Unfortunately, any historian will tell you that Rummy's parallels are invariably false, even ludicrous. So we thought we'd give the beleaguered Pentagon warlord a more accurate and telling analogy to chew on.
Try this one, Don. Imagine that British occupation troops in, say, Hanover, had been forced to abandon a major base, under fire, and retreat into guerrilla operations in the Black Forest - in 1948, three years after the fall of the Nazi regime. And that as soon as the Brits made their undignified bug-out, the base had been devoured by looters while the local, Allies-backed authorities simply melted away and an extremist, virulently anti-Western militia moved into the power vacuum.
What would they have called that, Don? "Measurable progress on the road to democracy?" "Another achieved metric of our highly successful post-war plan?" Or would they have said, back in those more plain-spoken, Harry Truman days, that it was "a major defeat, a humiliating strategic reversal, foreshadowing a far greater disaster?"
You'd have to wait a long time - perhaps to the end of the "Long War" - to get a straight answer from Rumsfeld on that one, but this precise scenario, transposed from Lower Saxony to Maysan province, unfolded in Iraq last week, when British forces abandoned their base at Abu Naji and disappeared into the desert wastes and marshes along the Iranian border. The move was largely ignored by the American media, but the implications are enormous. The UK contingent of the invading coalition has always been the proverbial canary in the mine shaft: if they can't make a go of things in what we've long been told is the "secure south," where friendly Shiites hold absolute sway, then the entire misbegotten Bush-Blair enterprise is well and truly FUBAR.
The Queen's Royal Hussars, 1,200-strong, abruptly decamped from the three-year-old base last Thursday after taking constant mortar and missile fire for months from those same friendly Shiites. The move was touted as part of a long-planned, eventual turnover of security in the region to the Coalition-backed Iraqi central government, but there was just one problem: the Brits forgot to tell the Iraqis they were checking out early - and in a hurry.
"British forces evacuated the military headquarters without coordination with the Iraqi forces," Dhaffar Jabbar, spokesman for the Maysan governor, told Reuters on Thursday, as looters began moving into the camp in the wake of the British withdrawal. A unit of Iraqi government troops mutinied when told to keep order at the base - and instead attacked a military post of their own army. By Friday, the locals had torn the place to pieces, carting away more than $500,000 worth of equipment and fixtures that the British had left behind. After that initial, ineffectual show of force, the Iraqi "authorities" stepped aside and watched helplessly as the looters taunted them and cheered the "great victory" over the Western invaders.
The largely notional - if not fictional - power of the Baghdad central government simply vanished while the forces of hardline cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which already controls the local government, stepped forward to proclaim its triumph and guide the victory celebrations in the nearby provincial capital, Amarah. "This is the first city that has kicked out the occupier!" blared Sadr-supplied loudspeakers to streets filled with revelers, as the Washington Post noted in a solid - but deeply buried - story on the retreat.
British officials were understandably a bit sniffy about the humiliation. First, they denied there was any problem with the handover at all: the Iraqis had been notified (a whole 24 hours in advance, apparently), the exchange of authority was brisk and efficient, and the Iraqis had "secured the base," military spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge insisted to AP. But when reports of the looting at Abu Naji began pouring in, British officers simply washed their hands of the nasty business. The camp was now "the property of the Maysan authorities and Iraqi Forces [are] in attendance," said Burbridge; therefore, Her Majesty's military would have no more comment on the matter. In this casual - not to mention callous - dismissal of the chaos spawned in wake of the Hussars' departure, we can see in miniature the philosophy now being writ large across the country in the Bush administration's "Iraqization" policy: "We broke it; you fix it."
And where are Her Majesty's Hussars now? Six hundred of them have dispersed into guerrilla bands in the wilderness, where they will survive on helicopter drops of supplies while they patrol the Iranian border. The ostensible reason behind this extraordinary operation is two-fold, said the doughty Burbridge: first, to find out if the Bush administration is up to its usual mendacious hijinks in claiming that the evildoers in Iran are fuelling the insurgency among the happily liberated Iraqi people; and second, to do a little more of that Iraqization window dressing before finally getting the hell out of Dodge completely, beginning sometime next year, according to reports across the UK media spectrum.
Of course, the good major didn't put it quite like that. "The Americans believe there is an inflow of IEDs and weapons across the border with Iran," he told the Post. "Our first objective is to go and find out if that is the case. If that is true, we'll be able to disrupt the flow." The second aim is training Iraqi border guards, he added.
Yes, a few hundred men wandering through the wasteland, dependent on air-dropped rations, will certainly be able to seal off an almost 300-mile border riddled with centuries-old smuggling routes. And modern-day Desert Rats rolling up in bristling Land Rovers to isolated villages where Shiite clans span both borders will no doubt be gathering a lot of actionable intelligence from the locals. And of course it is much easier to "train Iraqi border guards" on the fly in the wild than at a long-established base with full amenities and, er, training facilities.
In other words, the British move makes no sense - if you accept the official spin at face value, i.e., that it's an act of careful deliberation aimed at furthering the Coalition's stated goals of a free, secure, democratic Iraq. But those in the reality-based community will see it for what it is: a panicky, patchwork reaction to events and forces far beyond the Coalition's intentions or control.
The other six hundred Hussars driven out of Abu Naji have retreated to the main British camp at Basra - another "safe" city that has now degenerated into a level of violence approaching the hellish chaos of Baghdad, the Independent reports. British troops who once walked the streets freely, lightly armed, wearing red berets instead of helmets, are now largely confined to the base, except for excursions to help Iraqi government forces in pitched battles against the Shiite militias that control the city. Harsh religious rule has long descended on the once freewheeling port city, again presaging the sectarian darkness now settling heavily across Baghdad.
Just a few months ago, the UK's Ministry of Defence was churning out "good news" PR stories about life at Abu Naji - such as the whimsical tale of the troop's pet goat, Ben, a lovable rogue always getting into scrapes with the regiment's crusty sergeant major, even though the soldiers "knew he had a soft spot for Ben." The goat, we were told, had enjoyed visits from such distinguished guests as the Iraqi prime minister and the Duke of Kent. Now this supposed oasis of British power has been destroyed, with the Coalition-trained Iraqi troops meant to secure it either fading into the shadows or actively joining in with the rampaging crowds and extremist militias. Meanwhile, the Hussars are reducing to roaming the countryside on vague, pointless, impossible missions, killing time, killing people - and being killed - until the inevitable collapse of the whole shebang.
The goat is gone. The canary is dying. The surrender and sack of Abu Naji is a preview of what's to come, on a much larger scale of death and chaos, as the bloodsoaked folly of Bush and Blair's war howls toward its miserable end.
Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. Visit his website www.chris-floyd.com
The true Iraq appeasers
By Peter W. Galbraith
08/30/06 "Boston Globe" -- -- IN HIS MOST recent justification of his Pentagon stewardship, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached back to the 1930s, comparing the Bush administration's critics to those who, like US Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, favored appeasing Adolf Hitler. Rumsfeld avoided a more recent comparison: the appeasement of Saddam Hussein by the Reagan and first Bush administrations. The reasons for selectivity are obvious, since so many of Hussein's appeasers in the 1980s were principals in the 2003 Iraq war, including Rumsfeld.
In 1983, President Reagan initiated a strategic opening to Iraq, then in the third year of a war of attrition with neighboring Iran. Although Iraq had started the war with a blitzkrieg attack in 1980, the tide had turned by 1982 in favor of much larger Iran, and the Reagan administration was afraid Iraq might actually lose. Reagan chose Rumsfeld as his emissary to Hussein, whom he visited in December 1983 and March 1984. Inconveniently, Iraq had begun to use chemical weapons against Iran in November 1983, the first sustained use of poison gas since a 1925 treaty banning that.
Rumsfeld never mentioned this blatant violation of international law to Hussein, instead focusing on shared hostility toward Iran and an oil pipeline through Jordan. Rumsfeld apparently did mention it to Tariq Aziz, Iraq's foreign minister, but by not raising the issue with the paramount leader he signaled that good relations were more important to the United States than the use of poison gas.
This message was reinforced by US conduct after the Rumsfeld missions. The Reagan administration offered Hussein financial credits that eventually made Iraq the third-largest recipient of US assistance. It normalized diplomatic relations and, most significantly, began providing Iraq with battlefield intelligence. Iraq used this information to target Iranian troops with chemical weapons. And when Iraq turned its chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988, killing 5,000 in the town of Halabja, the Reagan administration sought to obscure responsibility by falsely suggesting Iran was also responsible.
On Aug. 25, 1988 -- five days after the Iran-Iraq War ended -- Iraq attacked 48 Kurdish villages more than 100 miles from Iran. Within days, the US Senate passed legislation, sponsored by Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island, to end US financial support for Hussein and to impose trade sanctions. To enhance the prospects that Reagan would sign his legislation, Pell sent me to Eastern Turkey to interview Kurdish survivors who had fled across the border. As it turned out, the Reagan administration agreed that Iraq had gassed the Kurds, but strongly opposed sanctions, or even cutting off financial assistance. Colin Powell, then the national security adviser, coordinated the Reagan administration's opposition.
The Pell bill died at the end of the congressional session in 1988, in spite of heroic efforts by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to force it through by holding up a raft of administration nominations.
The next year, President George H.W. Bush's administration actually doubled US financial credits for Iraq. A week before Hussein invaded Kuwait, the administration vociferously opposed legislation that would have conditioned US assistance to Iraq on a commitment not to use chemical weapons and to stop the genocide against the Kurds. At the time, Dick Cheney, now vice president, was secretary of defense and a statutory member of the National Security Council that reviewed Iraq policy. By all accounts, he supported the administration's appeasement policy.
In 2003, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld all cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons 15 years before as a rationale for war. But at the time Hussein was actually doing the gassing -- including of his own people -- they considered his use of chemical weapons a second-tier issue.
The Reagan and first Bush administrations believed that Hussein could be a strategic partner to the United States, a counterweight to Iran, a force for moderation in the region, and possibly help in the Arab-Israel peace process. That was, of course, an illusion. A ruthless dictator who launched an attack on his neighbor, Iran, who used chemical weapons, and who committed genocide against his own Kurds was never likely to be a reliable American ally. Hussein, having watched the United States gloss over his crimes in the Iran war and at home, concluded he could get away with invading Kuwait.
It was a costly error for him, for his country, and eventually for the United States, which now has the largest part of its military bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. Meanwhile the architects of the earlier appeasement policy now maintain the illusion that they have a path to victory, if only their critics would shut up.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, is author of ``The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End."
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
