I'll go with the given a chance, but mandate? Ummm, I dunno, the margins are still pretty thin & with more conservative Dems being elected than libs....Anyway, the next two years should be interesting.
BC thought he got a mandate in '92 when he won less than 50% of the vote, so he apparently doesn't know what mandate is. :wink:
LoneStarMadam wrote:I'll go with the given a chance, but mandate? Ummm, I dunno, the margins are still pretty thin & with more conservative Dems being elected than libs....Anyway, the next two years should be interesting.
BC thought he got a mandate in '92 when he won less than 50% of the vote, so he apparently doesn't know what mandate is. :wink:
BC's a genius next to some of our poster friends here who extol the virtues of communism.
timberlandko wrote:No, not at all ... just offering observation based on experience; I'd rather not see this discussion get shut down thanks to some folks with difficulty maintaining adult, civil manner of discourse, particularly as regards direct member-on-member ad hominem attack. I would be unsurprised were that to turn out to be a futile, forlorn hope ... also based on experience.
Welcome to A2K, Monte Cargo and LoneStarMadam.
What timber is recommending, in a manner of speaking, is that you not rise to the bait of Setanta and kuvasz. Easy (and good) advice to give, but harder to follow. I certainly find myself responding to their nonsense frequently. One thing you will notice is they both often have a difficult time keeping a degree of civility in their posts.
Monte Cargo wrote:LoneStarMadam wrote:I'll go with the given a chance, but mandate? Ummm, I dunno, the margins are still pretty thin & with more conservative Dems being elected than libs....Anyway, the next two years should be interesting.
BC thought he got a mandate in '92 when he won less than 50% of the vote, so he apparently doesn't know what mandate is. :wink:
BC's a genius next to some of our poster friends here who extol the virtues of communism.
BC is a political genius, no question, he's also an exceptionally good liar....guess that's what makes him such a good politician.
Is there a philosophy more opposite of our democracy? If there is, then that's the philosophy that some here seem to adhere to.
I'll go with the given a chance, but mandate? Ummm, I dunno, the margins are still pretty thin & with more conservative Dems being elected than libs....Anyway, the next two years should be interesting.
BC thought he got a mandate in '92 when he won less than 50% of the vote, so he apparently doesn't know what mandate is. :wink:
You would be wise to listen to the words of Bill Clinton when he said, "The democrats haven't been given a mandate, they've been given a chance."
cicerone imposter wrote:spendi is on to something again! He thinks so poorly about capitalism, when he fails to tell us all the good stuff about communism. spendi also happens to live in a capitalistic country, but that's of no consequence, since all he does is frequent the local pub.
Depending on whether or not you were one of the 200,000,000 that Josef Stalin killed or spent quality time in a gulag or just had your farmlands confiscated will determine how good of a review you would like to offer on communism.
I agree with spendius on the wisdom of your post, i.e., there isn't any.
Mac-
Which question?
I will try to answer it if you could tell me what it is.
Setanta wrote:A great many people have known for a long time that the American conservative voter had been deluded by this admininstration, and that the neo-cons were motivated either by ignorance or the will to lie to get what they wanted.
What has changed is that the American electorate, including many formerly deluded conservative voters, have awakened to an ugly political morning, and have had the decency to turn the bastards out of office.
Let us hope we haven't simply exchanged one set of venal bastards for a different set--a faint hope at the best of times in electoral politics.
You would be wise to listen to the words of Bill Clinton when he said, "The democrats haven't been given a mandate, they've been given a chance."
The election results yielded the message that the voters wanted to vote out some of the incumbent republicans, but there was nothing offered in a cohesive platform by the democrats. If the dems take this too confidently, they will be extremely surprised in the '08 elections.
Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006; A01
The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.
Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."
Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.
A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.
"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."
The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.
Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.
"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.
"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."
And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.
Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."
Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."
The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.
The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.
On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.
Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.
In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."
Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."
White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.
Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."
It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."
Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."
But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.
"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."
Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.
"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."
Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."
The question, twice asked now, or three times counting this, is:
What has been the benefit to us, achieved by the invasion of Iraq?
Kissinger: No Military Victory in Iraq
By TARIQ PANJA
The Associated Press
Sunday, November 19, 2006; 7:05 AM
LONDON -- Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.
In a wide ranging interview on British Broadcasting Corp. television, Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors _ including Iran _ if any progress is to be made in the region.
"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi Government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he said on the BBC's Sunday AM breakfast show.
But Kissinger warned against a rapid withdrawal of troops, saying it could lead to "disastrous consequences," destabilizing Iraq's neighbors and causing a long-lasting conflict.
"If you withdraw all the forces without any international understanding and without any even partial solution of some of the problems, civil war in Iraq will take on even more violent forms and achieve dimensions that are probably exceeding those that brought us into Yugoslavia with military force," he said.
Iraq's neighbors, especially those with large Shia populations, would be destabilized should their be a quick withdrawal from Iraq, Kissinger said.
"So I think a dramatic collapse of Iraq _ whatever we think about how the situation was created _ would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region," he said.
Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq's neighbors and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region.
He also said that the process would have to include Iran and that the U.S. must enter into dialogue with the country.
Asked if it was time for President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to change course, he responded: "I think we have to redefine the course, but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal.
The alternatives would not be nothing, as you say. What would they be?
I hardly think any of us are in a position to provide an answer to that. There will be factors that we don't know about.
Doing nothing offered the prospect of many years of Saddam followed by many more years of one or other of his sons and from their actions I think we could make a fair guess at their intentions.
Your notion, voiced here and in the earlier post, that we are limited (or ought to limit ourselves) to merely believing, accepting and obeying the words and dictates of elected officials (and the set of advisors they bring with them, or the set of existing bureaucracies in the machinery of government) plunks you down into some version of authoritarian and emasculated sheepdom and I won't be joining you there.
Our authorities allow you to rebel against them without risk of you becoming a martyr. No Gulag even beckons for you Bernie.
Yes- I'll leave it to those who we choose. It isn't very good I know but nothing better has ever been discovered.
AP says that Secretary of State Condi Rice asserted Saturday that Iraqis only have a future if they stay within a single state. She pointed to Vietnam's success in reforming its economy and making up with the United States and held it out as a model to Iraq.
Whaaat?
Rice surely knows that the way in which Vietnam achieved national unity was . . . for the radical forces to drive out the Americans, overthrow pro-American elements, and conquer the whole country. They only went in for this capitalism thing fairly recently. Rice, a Ph.D. and former Provost of Stanford University, shouldn't be saying silly things like that Iraq should emulate Vietnam. I guess if you hang around with W. long enough, you catch whatever it is that he has.
A vicious monster rises in Iraq's sectarian war - 'the Shia Zarqawi'
By Colin Freeman and Aqeel Hussein in Baghdad
Last Updated: 12/11/2006
As the White House begins to rethink its policy on Iraq, savage new warlords are battling for power and the country is starting to splinter
As the self-appointed defender of his Shia kith and kin, his nom de guerre is "The Shield". But to his Sunni foes - and many of his own people - only one name does justice to the savagery with which Abu Deraa wages Iraq's sectarian war. He is, they say, the "Shia Zarqawi".
Less than six months after an American airstrike ended Abu Musab al Zarqawi's campaign of Sunni terror, an equally brutal fanatic has emerged on the other side of the religious divide. Abu Deraa's trademark method of killing is a drill through the skull rather than a sword to the neck, but his work rate is just as prolific as the former al-Qaeda leader's and shows the same diabolical artistry.
In the past year, he and his followers are thought to have murdered thousands of Sunnis, their victims' bodies symbolically dumped in road craters left by al-Qaeda car bombs. The rise of monsters such as Abu Deraa is another blow to American hopes that Zarqawi's death, in June, would halt the sectarian violence, which now regularly claims 100 lives a day.
In the strategy rooms of Baghdad's Green Zone, the question of how to stop the violence escalating into civil war has acquired renewed urgency since President George W Bush's losses in last week's US midterm elections, and his sacking of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
Yet, according to diplomats, the Green Zone is no longer the powerhouse of bright ideas for the future of Iraq that it once was. Until as recently as last year, every ambitious state department intern and junior Foreign Office mandarin was keen to do at least a six-month stint there, keen to help forge democracy in one of the toughest environments ever. Today, though, the brightest and the best and have left, giving it the atmosphere of a place being wound down. Few up-and-coming diplomats, it seems, want "Iraq 2006" on their CVs, much less "Iraq 2007".
"Working there is becoming like an albatross around people's necks," said one insider. "The feeling is that it doesn't matter how many hours a day they do, it won't make any difference. And nobody wants to be around if they end up getting helicoptered out, Saigon-style."
Meanwhile, out in the "Red Zone", as those diplomats now call it, residents face a future in which thugs such as Abu Deraa play an ever more prominent role. So great is the risk of being killed in tit-for-tat violence that Iraqi tattoo parlours are offering "death tags", showing names and next of kin. Such inkings are a safeguard against ending up among the countless -unidentified bodies in Baghdad's morgue.
Yet, while Abu Deraa may have replaced Zarqawi at the top of the American wanted list, Iraq's Shia-dominated government has shown a marked reluctance to sanction the kind of large-scale operation necessary to arrest him in his stronghold of Sadr City, a vast Shia slum in east Baghdad. Taking action against him could cost it valuable support among other Shia militias who, despite official disdain for Abu Deraa's bloodthirstiness, value the fear that such a loose cannon inspires in their enemies.
"We are proud of leaders like Abu Deraa," said Hassan Allami, 25, a fighter with the Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Mehdi army, which Abu Deraa quit earlier this year to form his own faction. "His drills destroy the crazy minds of the Sunnis."
The worsening of inter-religious- bloodshed reflects badly on the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose chief task when he took power in June was to win back Sunni confidence in the political process by stamping out the state's tacit backing of Shia militias such as the Mehdi Army.
Yet, increasingly, men such as Abu Deraa appear to operate beyond anyone's control at all. He is among at least 20 former Mehdi Army commanders who are pursuing their own agendas, sometimes sectarian, often simply criminal. The former commander, Moqtada al Sadr, may be a thug himself, but at least he represented a single, identifiable authority. If dozens of freelance players emerge alongside him, negotiation becomes impossible.
"The whole thing is becoming increasingly localised, with people like Sadr being outflanked by extremists whom he can't control," said Dr Eric Herring, the British author of Iraq in Fragments, a study released last year which charts Iraq's break-up into innumerable competing factions. "It's possible that we may eventually remember Sadr as a moderate."
The emergence of local warlords with their own agendas is not confined to the sectarian front lines of Baghdad. In the city of Amara, in Shia-dominated southern Iraq, local Sadrists are in a violent power struggle with the Badr Brigade, a rival Shia militia backed by Iran.
In the capital, the two factions sit together as fellow members of the Shia Unity parliamentary block. But in Amara, they have been fighting pitched battles ever since the British Army ended its permanent presence in the city in August.
Both factions have tried to stake political territory by introducing rafts of Taliban-style restrictions, including banning music at weddings, segregating schools, shutting internet cafes and stopping people watching Western satellite channels. "The Mehdi Army heard I had a satellite dish that was tuned to the Western channels," said Abu Fadl, 45, a teacher. "They went up to my roof, removed it and then beat me. Then they sold the receiver in the central market. They aren't doing this for God, just to show who is in power."
Major Charlie Burbridge, a British forces spokesman, insists that such complaints are not widespread. But he agreed that if they were happening, it was more a product of territorial squabbling than any genuine Islamisation.
"I think if someone gets their satellite dish smashed up by the Mehdi Army, it is probably because they belonged to the Badr Brigade," he said.
But was it wise for the British Army to take such a back seat? "The situation in Amara is a significant test of the Iraqi government and security forces, but we believe they can cope," he said.
"We are having to taking the wheels off the bike, but we are confident that in time, the Iraqis will be able to ride it perfectly adequately."
For the likes of Abu Fadl, however, the prospect of sitting and suffering while armed factions fight it out to rule over him has tarnished his dreams of a free Iraq.
"It sounds bad, but I wish the British would come back," he said.
Many options are being considered in the Green Zone, in Washington and in Downing- Street - but that particular scenario is not among them.
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