blatham wrote:Advocate wrote:Monte said:
"It's only the truth as the truth is that the war being fought in Iraq is and has always proceeded splendidly from a tactical and strategic point of view, only to be undermined and savagely sabotaged by the traitorists and liberals in this country, which are two sides of the same coin."
This is about as dumb a statement as I have seen. The Bush administration went into Iraq based on false claims, and then conducted the occupation with great ineptitude. At the outset, we foolishly allowed the looting of Baghdad, dismissed the military and police (which effectively created untold insurgents to oppose us), destroyed a city of 300,000 to flush out a few insurgents, etc.
This administration has been a great, and unwitting, ally of our country's enemies.
There are a number of claims in MC's post which don't stand up to even a little inspection, but this one above, in red, is worthy of note. The second portion, in blue, is merely an unthinking generalization and cliche and not much worth taking up.
If one references
only the opinions of military commanders working in Iraq, a claim that strategy and tactics proceeded swimmingly is quite foolish. Ricks, in "Fiasco" quotes many of them, from upper levels down, and what they have to say is, with a handful of exceptions only, quite opposite. Or, we could note the testimony to congress a couple of months past from the group of generals who served in Iraq. I'm uncertain actually whether there is anyone outside of Tony Snow, Ann Coulter and related crowd who make this claim presently and speaking truth is not their goal.
All anyone needs to know about Thomas Ricks is "Thomas E. Ricks is a senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post". Obviously, anyone who writes for the Washington Post can be depended upon to suffer from
Bush Derangement Syndrome.
The Ricks book attempts to prove basically that the U.S. 4th Infantry caused a turn in the Iraqui's population's perception of the U.S....
and not the terrorists. Ricks never bothered to consider the fact that when the 4th Infantry took Fallujah, the two "other than Sunni" majority groups that the Sunni's bitterly oppose, suddenly were not under the Sunni's oppressive rule. That kind of thing might tend to color the Sunni's existing perception of U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Your attempt to pass off a Washington Post reporter as an impartial judge of the Iraq War is as likely to convince a non-liberal as much as a quote from Rush Limbaugh's website or Ann Coulter's column or opinions of the Republican National Committee would convince you.
Quote:If the comment refers to the initial project of taking the capital and deposing the Iraqi government, one could reasonably make this claim.
Well, there's at least a little hope for one poster, even if it is in incremental baby steps, and such a big concession!
Quote:But that becomes an exercise in denial and avoidance. How much sense does it make to refer to a chef's meal as successful if the first bite of the salad tastes good and all the rest is bad enough to be described accurately as near-poisonous. As if the chef is off the hook for that first bite.
I proceed with the concept firmly embedded that the leftist worldview comes down to capitalist systems are evil. Our potential humiliation in Afghanistan and Iraq would serve to confirm this view. Leftists end up helping the forces that they traditionally have opposed and this is seriously twisted.
Quote:Now, if that silly bit at the end, in blue, is to be taken seriously, then every commander in Iraq quoted by Ricks (and others) and each of those generals who served in Iraq and all others in the military who argue that this war has been run so incredibly incompetently are all themselves "traitorists and liberals".
Ex-commanders like to talk and without the stress of battle, often become great armchair quarterbacks. Take a liberal like Thomas Ricks weaving these comments into a product of his own agenda and voila! You have a second
Fahrenheit 9-11!
