Here’s how leftwing blogger Tbogg (whom I imagine sits in a “study” papered with posters of Bill Maher and George Carlin, cursing Steve Colbert for landing a gig that was rightfully his) interpreted my post on the Interpol story from last evening. The story noted that al Qaeda is preparing to launch a biological weapons attack:
Shorter Jeff Goldstein
It is a damn shame that there is neither a leader nor a country that is taken seriously enough enough to lead the War on Terror…. so we’re all gonna die.
Seems Tbogg is really committed to this “neo-con bedwetter” trope –so much so, in fact, that he and his fellow Iraq war critics have started pretending to pretend that the threat from al Qaeda doesn’t exist, and instead spend the majority of their time poking their sticks into the sides of those who aren’t quite so sanguine about al Qaeda’s intentions.
Of course, the irony here is that you’d think this would work the other way around: the Bush Kultists, so confident in their flight-suited superhero’s power to cowboy up and protect us all from harm with his nuclear-strapped utility belt and army of super soldiers, would fear nothing from the feeble and impotent robed bluster of a tiny network of bearded hyper-fundamentalist Islamist cranks.
And yet, it seems those who claim to despise Bush are secretly so confident in him and his administration (“hell, when that man says he’s gonna invade a country, by God he does it—none of this feckless, furrow-browed Jimmy Carter bullshit!”) that it is they who regard 911 as a lucky blow. And now that Dear Leader is in charge, there’s simply no way al Qaeda could hit us with anything dangerous like bioweapons. Not under Dubya’s steely watch! And most certainly not with Swinging Dick Cheney second in command!
Or maybe it’s just that they’d rather not think about the implications of a bio attack. Which, hey, I can understand that. Sometimes children like to close their eyes and go to their happy place—which, when it comes to people like Tbogg, is a place where the world is just as it was before 911, not the terrifying world they see before them now, even as they try gamely to project their fears onto conservatives through hackneyed irony. And let’s face it: taking shots at ideological opponents from behind an assumed name (“conservatives R teh c0wards1!!”) is so much more pleasant than thinking about those meanies in al Qaeda, so far away, tucked in caves in exotic lands, eating figs and drinking sweet teas…
Either way, what people like Tbogg won’t do is engage the question. Which, to remind everyone, was this: if al Qaeda manages to launch a biological attack, what should the US response be? What should the UN response be? What precautions should be taken to prevent such an attack from happening in the first place? What response would Tbogg and his pals be comfortable with, and how should the civilized world go about coming to a consensus on said response?
We know how Atrios feels, for instance: He’d nuke the shit out of the miserable brown motherfuckers (whom he respects immensely, incidentally, and has worked so hard to make sure we neo-con thugs don’t dehumanize!) But what about Tbogg?
Dunno. And maybe it’s unfair to ask. After all, maybe Tbogg does his best strategic thinking in hindsight. Or covered in pustules.
Either way, posing the question seems to bring out a kneejerk reaction from him and his ilk. Which is why I recommend he stop reading my site. Because I sometimes like to pose these hypotheticals, and frankly, his responses do nothing to inspire confidence in the seriousness of a good portion of our electorate.
Then you’re clueless to how tihs works. Kultists work on fear. Pie in the sky everything is allright doesn’t work.
Where do you get this idea from? From your ‘everything is due to dubya’ kultish head? Is it possible that there are factors besides dubya?
Because Bush would need to know what Tbogg thinks. Don’t you think there’s a little bit of fantasy to argue about what is the competent thing to do with these guys in charge?
Hey, man, when you got nothin’ you either ridicule those that do or your keep your mouth shut. Guess which way he went.
Remember, “You cannot reason with an unreasonable person.”
tw: door – Which door do I go out?
An easy way to expose anti-Americanism in a debate.
Forward this to any leftist, and it is bound to irritate them greatly.
It is fast becoming BlogTruth that whenever someone starts a post with “Shorter (blank),” what follows is bound to be a spun-like-cotton-candy mischaracterization of such striking proportions that we all become stupider for having read it.
I propose a moratorium on “Shorter…”
Which reminds me, don’t feed acthole. Maybe he’ll go away instead of flying over and drop turds on the thread.
tw: away – Maybe he’ll go away.
Hey, why worry about Osama & the Al Qaeda? Can’t do nothin’ about ‘em. They’re too far away (or close-by but incognito), they’re mostly “little brown people” (of whom we should all be respectful), they hate Jews (er, sorry, Zionists), and they’re so fucking ornery that they’ll cut a guy’s head off as much as look ‘em. In short, Al Qaeda is dangerous.
Now compare that to one’s own countrymen on the right (well, the non-left). They care about facts and shit, they react to snark as if they’re offended (all hurt-like), they can’t write snark, and they are mostly law-abiding, moral dunces who wouldn’t cut a guy’s head off so much as look at him. They’re also not willing die trying to cut another guy’s head off so much as look at him either. In short, one’s own countrymen, generally speaking, are not particularily dangerous.
Makes perfect sense to me.
The supposed policy of the US was to respond to WMD with WMD—nukes, specifically. That’s what the policy should be.
Unfortunately, in 2001, we learned that’s a bunch of bullshit. We’ll roll over and take it up the ass, is what we’ll do.
It’s not that the Left has any confidence in Bush’s ability to defend them. It’s that they seem to think there is no threat. At all.
It’s all either a made up, Reichstag fire designed to provide cover for Haliburton’s seizure of our precious vibrators; or Bush and his killbots are just vicious, racist, redneck crazy eyed killers who are over-reacting to what is essentially a law enforcement issue.
Either way, the Left lives in another dimension from the rest of us. Conversation with BDS victims is pointless. The contagion will simply have to be allowed to run its course. Prognosis for recovery before January 1, 2009 is very grim.
C’mon actus, mid-terms got you down? You are slipping lately.
Why is it so effing hard for persistent critics to offer up ANYTHING besides criticism. Ideas, solutions, something besides snark and bitching. THAT is why TBogg and yourself are held in slight regard by the crew here. Jeff asks what should the US or UN do and we get nothing from you and your ilk.
Kee-rist, it’s like talking to a camel. All we get back is groaning, spitting and bad smells.
Is a postule what a postulate emerges from when it’s fully grown?
I think you meant “pustules”.
I did offer something on the previous thread: attack a country with some connection to the attack. And then if we still have an army, attack a country some in the government have wanted to attack for about 10 years. Helps if their population is of a similar ethnicitity of the attackers.
And you know, its really hard to have a discussion about this when people bitch about critiques of mass internment, genocide and subjugation fantasies as ‘idealism.’
Wow. i am constantly amazied at actus, justsayin’ and the other leftists who comment here. Actus, the statement you just made in the comments proves Jeff’s point about your confidence in the administration. You continued to ignore the question of “how would you react?” and made the same old tired point that “kultists rely on fear.” You have yet to make any coherent point proving the truth of your conclusory statement. I really hate to drag this down to the personal insult type of argument that the left now relies upon, but did any of you guys go to high school? It doesn’t show in your debating tactics.
The “progressives†are just denying reality so they don’t have to deal with it. It’s too dangerous and chaotic for them to process. They would rather foist a false reality in which Bushitler is the real/only threat because that’s safe.
Solutions, policies, ideas: these are things developed by people who accept a given situation. Until the “progressives” do that we’ll get nothing from them but back-biting.
The stated US policy towards WMD attack on our country is to respond in kind. Whether we would do this or not is only half the question. The more important question may be whether our enemy believes we would and if they are willing to take the chance.
Eno & Major John,
Best tactic is to ignore acthole. Regulars know that he/she/it offers nothing other than dropping turds on the thread. I ignore it and thus it bothers me not.
Fine actus, I await your support of such policy. But the bigger question is what we should do to prevent these attacks from happening in the first place. I would love to see the “progressives” develop a *plan* for that. But I bet it’s difficult to form a policy agenda for a problem that supposedly doesn’t exist.
Why? There are other forces shaping this world besides our elected leaders. Your statement is consistent with the Kult—that everything is due to dear leader.
I actually don’t support such a policy, but I do think it is what would happen. Everyone on the last thread was all about how we should nuke mecca or iran or syria or something.
My policy is to go after someone with some goddam connection to the attack. After that though, I’m sure we’d end up going after someone else.
Actus, the “attack a country with a connection to the attack” argument has two problems:
(1) it presumes that the only justification for any attack was direct response to 9/11. This is an error; Bush’s point, which he made clear and explained in detail to the people who are willing to actually listen to what he says, was to make the whole approach of supporting third-party terrorism too expensive and risky for traditional states to contemplate. I did a fairly detailed comment — should have made it a post on my own blog — below that describes the steps take so far in terms of the logistic and strategic effects. Ending the Saddam government makes perfect sense in that context.
(2) it presumes that Saddam’s government was not directly attacking us, or liable to in the near future. While there may not have been a check cut from Saddam’s account “Pay to the order of UBL for attacking US by hijacked aircraft”, there are increasingly large piles of documents showing that Saddam was (a) attacking us directly by shooting at our forced in the no-fly zones; (b) directly attacking us via third parties, as eg the assassignation plot against Bush pére; (c) providing material support to UBL (as, eg, medical treatment for his lieutenants); and (d) was preparing direct attacks through training “martyrs”, see, eg, recent translations.
So, if direct attack is your criterion, then we have satisfied it and the attack was justified; if material support is the criterion, as Bush has defined it, then we’re even more justified.
Not really no. There’s lots of reasons to attack iraq. Some good, some bad.
That also has nothing to do with whether we should strike agaisnt those that struck us.
By why are you talking about saddam? Aren’t we speaking of Jeff’s hypothetical bio-warfare?
Any discussion of ‘direct links’ also assumes the absence of an obsfucating fifth column that is constitutionally incapable of connecting dots but equally able to disconnect or ignore inconveniently connected links.
Personally I have no problem with an in-kind response to any WMD attack and in the absence of a smoking gun would readily choose some or all from the list of usual suspects. However, I do strongly doubt the will of the people/government given the events of the last three years and our inability to tolerate low intensity conflict. That many progressives will not even entertain real debate also does nothing for my confidence level.
As Defense Guy mentions, it’s not so much what we would do, but what our enemies think we would do. I’m afraid it’s going to get alot worse before it truly gets better.
Hmmmm.
@ Jeff
1. You do realise Jeff that to ward off all pestilence all you need do is speak the ancient algorithms of the Dread Masters of the Kabbalah:
“
“Ain’t no fear of no Chimpy McHitlerHalliburonBush.”
“Ain’t no fear of no Chimpy McHitlerHalliburonBush.”
“Ain’t no fear of no Chimpy McHitlerHalliburonBush.”
And thus all diease is cured, weakness replaced with strength, hunger with satiation and thirst with the wellspring of love, joy and the wonder of watching your neighbors choke on their own bodily fluids as their lungs suffer necrosis and they drown.
2. People who don’t believe in the potential danger won’t prepare for it. And anyone who doesn’t prepare for 6-8 weeks of quarratine plus the 2 weeks for the transportation network to restart is basically setting themselves up for a serious problem.
They’re obviously not hip to the threat like the rest of us rational folk.
That’s not true at all. The Instapundit post you linked to disingenuously omitted the first half of Atrios’s statement, which completely changed what he was saying. Either you never clicked through to read the full post, or you’re being just as dishonest as Glenn is.
So you’re opposed to people having emergency supplies on hand?
Or are you just being a smartass because you think it proves something?
Truly unless you have 6-8 weeks of quarantine and 2 weeks of no transport, you’re setting yourself up for problems. How are you on that front? Acting rational? Hip to the threat?
Beat me to it, Robert Crawford…
Did Katrina teach us (and by us I don’t actually mean me, since I pretty much do have my supplies on hand, provisioning for emergencies being a good idea even when you just live in the country up north anyway) anything? Geez, actus… I keep hoping you’ll take the next little step from some of your posts and continue a discussion beyond the occasional reasonable comment, but you always seem to descend into ivory-tower (mixed metaphor alert! How do you descend into a tower? Nevermind) down-the-nose non-critique.
Back to the point at hand, still addressing you, actus, though you tried to play all coy about whether we were talking about Iraq or hypothetical bio-warfare and such: In your view, the appropriate response is to “go after someone with some goddam connection to the attack.” Fine. Finessing the fact that you were very clearly talking about Iraq there, and ignoring the clearly-stated Bush administration policy about how a nation demonstrates its connections to terrorism and what we’re actually fighting, you still haven’t said what “go after” means, nor how you deal with non-state actors who may nonetheless be acting in behalf of a state on the Q-T, so to speak. Let’s say, for instance, that a terrorist organization has been secretly funded and provided material support by (oh, I don’t know) Iran. Intelligence susses out that fact, but because of the way they found it out, they can’t make the evidence public – let’s say, for instance, that to do so would be like a destructive test in physics: tell what you know and the human resource from which you found it out is now useless. So you’re the POTUS: what do you do? Do you act against Iran, with a whole lot of journalists screaming that your attack is unjustified? Or do you treat the terrorists as a criminal organization and try to round them up and/or roll them up, then slog through the judicial process for each one?
And back to that other critical point: let’s say that you do decide to act against Iran militarily. Conventional weapons only, or do you respond in kind, even though it wasn’t Iran, per se, that attacked us? You’ll have a hard time using a biological agent against an al Qaeda without also in fact using it against another nation, but you’ll also have a hard time just conventionally attacking an al Qaeda militarily without the attack being both a perceived and real attack against another nation.
I hope you answer for real… I so want to know how a person on the other side from me really thinks on this subject, minus all the raised-eyebrow irony.
Several points: Why would the press say there was no connection if our intelligence says otherwise? I’m sure the president can make the case for war. If not, then he’ll just have to rely on the great amount of trust that the people have for him. Thankfully our presidents don’t go around wasting trust, since our national security may, as you say, depend on it.
And why would we need to retaliate in a tit-for-tat fashion, mimicking how we were struck? Have we done that in the past? Is it even rational to think in those terms? The answer to 9/11 wasn’t to blow up some big buildings full of civilians. Only an idiot would think along those lines. The answer to a WMD strike against a civilian population won’t be a WMD strike against a civilian population.
The fact that people’s first reaction is to think in terms of this rather illogical (and sometimes rater disproportionate) tit-for-tat is quite disturbing. Specially when they think they’re the ones so serious enough to be having this conversation.
Okay, Actus, but once more without the detached irony thing or the “what does it matter, we’re all on a blog here” trope: what do you think would be a suitable response under the conditions Jamie outlined? What do you see as a potentially promising deterrent policy, or is there one?
we get nothing from you and your ilk.
Not true. We get a lot of energies and resources and triumphalism in saving the WAPO from a 24 year old plagiarist. I’d say that’s a substantial contribution to politics and foreign affairs, a force in the debate to be reckoned with.
I think its quite clear that we have a deterrent policy that we will attack governments that attack us. That’s basically what we did in response to 911. And basically what we will do if we figure out that iran has attacked us. Is this shocking? Is this even worth discussing?
Huh?
here is atrios’ statement:
The other night during the SOTU when I was at CAP Action Fund with Sam Seder I was on for a bit with Amy Sullivan from the Washington Monthly. Seder asked us both to name the biggest threat to the Republic, aside from George Bush and Dickey Cheney. Sullivan responded, with all seriousness, Iran.
Look, I just don’t get this stuff. I don’t want Iran to have nukes. I don’t think that’s a good thing for the world. I certainly didn’t want Pakistan or India to have nukes. But is a nuclear Iran really a threat to us? Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn’t mutually assured destruction, it’s you fuck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!
How does that change what he meant?
Damn Tomb you beat me to it. Atrios is confounded that Amy Sullivan would think Iran is more of a threat than Bushitler?!? And that’s supposed to provide the proper context?
What to do with a bioweapons attack? I can’t see the Actus “strategy” – gather strong evidence of a direct connection between a country and the terrorist attack before taking action against it – working. If I understand Actus correctly that would require much more evidence than was gathered for Iraq.
But here is the political reality. Additional terrorist attacks of similar magnitude to 911 will result in a reduced threshold required to consider a suspect terrorist country in some way responsible. The public, both dems and repubs, will demand it. And the result will be an edging closer to holocaust. This is why the current policy is so damned important. Somehow we have got to figure out a way to disarm the most dangerous abettors of terrorism such as Iran before we descend to savagery.
Duh.
Did we gather evidence they attacked us on 911?
actus is wrong. it happens.
If you come up to me and punch me in the back of the head, I am not going to limit my response to an in-kind attack. I am going to pummel you until you either promise never to do it again, or until I am sure you cannot.
So what is the proper deterrant policy against a non state player, like al Quada?
An attempt was made to find that evidence but it wasn’t there. What did seem to be there was evidence of consorting with terrorists. At least wrt to ties to Islamic terrorism this was argued to be enough justification in a post 911 world to go to war (along with the other reasons given).
Now my point is that this threshold will no doubt be lowered in a post bioweapon-attack world.
Actus- “My policy is to go after someone with some goddam connection to the attack.”
I trust when we “go after someone” that you’re going to join the military; otherwise you’re just a fucking chickenhawk!
Defense Guy,
Actus believes in a policy of active non sequitur.
The beauty of actus’ strategy is that, no matter what evidence we collect, he can unconditionally delcare it “not enough” or “a lie” and state our retaliation was wrong.
It’s the same as WMDs. I asked someone screaming about “no WMDs!!!” what would happen if we did eventually find them. His answer was that Bush would have obviously planted them.
There you have it, all tied up in a nice little straightjacket.
It always helps your debate tactics when you aren’t burdened by reality.
TW: I expect nothing less of actus and his ilk.
“what would happen if we did eventually find them”
Still hoping after all these years, that’s rather cute.
You rightists remind me of the partner of an abusive spouse, no matter how many times you get lied to you always come back for more, “this time will be different, he told me, he really means it”
Wake up.
Yeah, I thought I saw THE TRUTH(tm) that all those Righties didn’t know when I was 14, too. Then I got perspective.
Yeah, I used the same schtick twice. Yeah, I don’t care. It is a good schtick. Comes from personal experience. You all can bite me.
Seriously though, you’ve been a great audience.
When I was 14 I used to think that claiming someone eslse was childish was a great argument, then of course I grew up.
Hold on, just heard on the radio, They have found them! found the bombs and the missiles! they were buried under the sand. Saddam had Anthrax and nukes and all those other things you all so confidently predicted.
You were all right, all the time. It’s the left that are going to have to eat crow now.
Congratualtions Warmonger Bloggers of America, your trust has been rewarded!
Exactly. So an attack against a building full of civvies wasn’t retaliated against with an attack against buildings full of civvies. Likewise it won’t be the case with a bioterrorist strike.
Oh, I’m a big believer in people outside of the military telling the military what to do. Jingoism is another matter. Orwell was onto that.
While linear thinking is not a requirement for the Left and the adherents of the Reality Sphere seem to wish to escape the discussion of the possibility of further attacks on the United States, I must say that holding several contradictory thought at one time seems to be a specialty of some of its adherents.
Otherwise, why would they maintain that Bush “Kultists†(love the KKKKK theme, so subtle) rule by creating an atmosphere of fear, while ducking the question of whether there really is anything to fear? If the Kultists are promoting false fears, it logically follows that there are no real fears, at least from the direction of Islamofascism. Or is there a suggestion that there are things to be feared from the adherents of the Religion of Peace, but they are different from the fears that the Bush Kultists are promoting?
As Wormtongue snarks away, the inhabitants of the Reality Sphere inhabit a cocoon in which external threats do not exist, internal politics reigns supreme, answers to genuine policy questions need not be addressed because the only reality is a juvenile mind playing with a computer terminal.
Just as children endlessly wishing to play knock-knock jokes eventually gets on my nerves and I send them off to bed, childish prattle from people who are beyond the infant stage gets on my nerves. It adds nothing to the discussion. But the child does get ego gratification; they get to be the center of attention.
Jeff, at some point, it’s time to send them off to play by themselves to let the adults talk.
“If the Kultists are promoting false fears, it logically follows that there are no real fears”
Thats an amazing new use of the word logically. So just to be clear if I, for example, say you should fear being eaten by an invisible purple elephant anyone that disagrees is arguing that there is nothing to fear from anything else?
Great stuff, you really do learn something every day.
What always gets me about what might be paraphrasee as “the actus attitude” is the poverty of concept. Canalized would be more like it.
Vicious George attacked Iraq, and Iraq never done nothin’. Down at the bottom of that, there’s the assumption that they never question because it never occurs to them to question it—and they have absolutely nothing resembling an alternate concept: Iraq as Westphalian nation-state, the equivalent of (say) France or Italy, a cohesive group of identifiable ethnics.
The really funny thing is, they can hear and appear to process the data. Tell ‘em that Churchill drew the boundaries while he was drunk, and they’ll nod and expostulate about vicious white guys. Tell ‘em that the boundaries are really the boundaries of influence of infighting Imperial bureaucracies and they’ll riff on Marxist principles until everybody’s bored (five or six seconds, max). But, still, as soon as that echo dies out they’re right back to it, like flatworms trained to where the food is—Iraq isn’t the villain! You shouldn’t attack anybody but the identifiable Bad Guys! And Iraq never done nuthin’!
It’s a lie, as silly and wrong as phlogiston or impetus. “Arabia” is all one culture; it begins at the Shatt al-Arab (which is what that means; more or less the western border of Iran) and sweeps across south of Turkey and north of the Sahara, all the way to the Atlantic. It’s called “Arabia”, and has been for centuries. The fact that the Brits, French, and Germans whacked it up into synthetic polities means very little. These are people who never invented feudalism, much less the “nation-state”. Westphalian concepts don’t apply.
In fact, fourteen centuries of Islamic proselytization has extended that. The social and sociopolitical structures of Islam are those of Arabic culture, imposed upon the conquered and “converted” areas along with Allah. That’s why the Iranian ayatollahs have to be so nasty: Persian culture is quite different from Arabian, so the strictures of Islam make a difficult fit. It’s why we can sort-of-get-along with Kurds and Pakistanis: they, too, are assimilating an alien culture along with the religion, and tend to backslide. But if you have to insist on Westphalian concepts applying to the situation, you’d have to call it one country or empire from the Hindu Kush to Dakar. The different administrative units tend to squabble more than American States do, but it’s all one “nation”.
What we are attacking is Arabia. The beachhead happens to be between the mother rivers. The fact that a British bureaucrat christened the area “Iraq” is non sequitur. Note that when it suits them (that is, when it’s suitably doomlike) the moonbats are perfectly able to handle the concept. The “Arab street”, remember? Why should Egyptians care if Iraq gets invaded? Frenchmen never cared if the Dutch got overrun; in fact, they’d help. The only way the concept of the “Arab street” makes any sense whatever is as outliers of a single culture.
Oh, and by the way, welcome sonic! Folks, a better example of a rigid, singleminded, reactionary-Left polemicist you’ll never find. Treasure sonic’s posts as works of art, like “Piss Christ” or piles of cowflop in an urban setting. The purity and unbudgeability are truly mindboggling.
Regards,
Ric
Jeff is educated quite a bit in fiction writing. We all come here for these clevernesses.
Some of us, Wormtongue, come here to view snark.
Actus, your reference to Orwell is hilarious as his best work was exposing the hypocrisy of people just like you.
“What we are attacking is Arabia”
And how has that been working out for you?
All good news I would assume.
Since you know me so well, I quote:
Fun Facts about Sonic? Yeah, it’s Ace’s gig, but it seems appropriate somehow. I believe the traditional beginning is:
Sonic splits atoms …. with his mind.
I’m still shocked that Actus is a law student. I mean, all that cynicism, that intellectual superiority, and the sophistry. In a law student? Who woulda thunk it. Gobsmacked I is.
The giant Grof was struck in the eye by a stone, so that his gaze turned inward, and he died of what he saw there.
actus, do be careful of flying rocks.
Regards,
Ric
[First Class No-Prize to anyone identifying the quote]
Oh, and Fun Facts about sonic:
Sonic refutes relativity. Sonic’s opinions are a fixed pole upon which the Universe flails like a butterfly that isn’t quite dead yet.
Regards,
Ric
Sonic wins the argument leaving you all clutching at straws.
Not one of you able to say the war is going well?
sad little men.
Byeee!
sonic–What war have you been looking at?
This post by Adam Felber, How I Won the War could be highly educational to the fear addicts who cling to W and his fear-mongering policies. One can understand danger without being a slave to the fear of danger.
My personal example of “fear management” is motorsports. I sometimes drive a race car, and have even slammed into concrete. (That’s when you realize that steel is pretty soft, all things considered.) But I don’t surrender to fear. I manage risk and go about my tasks, rather than allowing irrational knee-jerk reactions that will get me into deeper shit.
U.S. foreign and domestic policy is too often driven by fear, an emotion based in the reptilian part of the brain. It’s really pathetic to see a nation of smart people acting so effing stupid.
Yeh, we were effing stupid at Gettysburg..and Iwa Jima..and Dunkirk..and the battle of the bulge..and the libertion of the death camps. Now you want us to shirk away from “the great IED skirmish of 2006?”
Mark,
Do be careful.
A mirror is not quite the same thing as a window.
Regards,
Ric
I sometimes drive a race car, and have even slammed into concrete.
Not hard enough.
Ric – mainly because I want to say at one point in my life I won a No-Prize (great disappoitment of my youth was never being able to wrest one from Stan Lee’s “Bullpen”)- I’m going to say that one came from Patricia McKillap. Now which McKillap….was it from one of the books in the Hed trilogy, or maybe Forgotten Beasts of Eld? Memory doesn’t go back that far, but I’m still pretty sure Giant Grof is mentioned somewhere in McKillap’s works. Maybe a runner-up No-Prize?
Wow, so many words when you’ve completely missed TBogg’s point.
Jeff, you said in your first post:
If you look at TBogg’s complete post:
If only there were such a man…
A leader… a country… who could lead the War on Terror…
If only there were such a man…
What leader? What country? Could Lead? Before we’re all dead.
If only there were such a man…
In your astonishment, you’ve missed the obvious answer.
Too bad Bush’s United States of America is too incompetent to face this challenge and has left the solution to Protein Wisdom.
Ohhhhh….. so Tbogg is saying it is all George Bush’s fault.
Geez, JG, what were you thinking, impugning such a deep and original thinker?
Khan,
WE HAVE A WINNAH!
[detail: the Hed trilogy, a.k.a. Earth Masters]
Regards,
Ric
Dear PW readers. I have concluded my beta testing of the actus program.
As many of you figured out, actus (Automatic Canned Trotskyite Utterance Synthesizer) is a sophisticated program which is taught to generate meaningless responses with the intention of irritating Conservatives.
Unfortunately, I am unable to de-activiate it. So please feel free to ignore it from this point on.
Whoever told you that, lied.
Which is why I recommend he stop reading my site.
Jeff, what you you doing? Trying to stifle his dissent?
You reigh-wingers are all alike.
Robert, the day I fell for you was when you asked me about my statistical education. Was that you? I think it was you.
You Dare Question Bush’s Brain? Its simplisme makes it sophisticated; it can lower the IQ of everyone in the room, in six different languages, including Spanish!
The actus 1.0 is just a training dummy to keep Rove’s wingnut hordes strong…like a Cybex, or a tabby-toy. Go ahead, bat it around. Its essentially inert.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22044&l=i&size=1&hd=0
Imagine a politician lying about conditions in Iraq in an attempt to fool the American public.
Shameless.
Thank Gawd for Trebor, speaking truth to photographs…
Next
Its the photograph’s fault. Traitorous photographs!
No.Body.Cares.Act.Us.
Yes, imagine some local politician aspiring to be a Congressweenie being clueless about that which he’s completely clueless.
Shocking, that. Shocking, I mean, that I really, literally cannot imagine myself caring less. Remove (what’s-his-name? Galoogian? Gilligan?) from the race and life changes for me not one bit.
And there you are. Posting about anti-american photographs ruining the war on terror.
I’m confused. Besides the obvious assumption that Howard Kaloogian is apparently border-line retarded, what exactly does the picture prove?
It proves Republicans are liars, of course. And that there’s a vast right-wing conspiracy to delude the American public into believing that Baghdad is just exactly like Paris.
Have I got it right, I wonder?
He should lose and the democrat should win.
I’m pleasantly surprised to receive such thoughtful responses to my comment. You guys are great!
Now a contest for teh fear-addled keyboard kommandos. Who said this?
answer
waw wa…still, my give-o-fuck-o’meter is registering approximately ZERO.
Google Smedley Butler and Hackworth, fuck off, and call me in the morning about military guys, not exactly liking war.
Civilians don’t like to show up to work, military folks don’t like to work 80 hr work weeks in 130 degree deserts with assholes trying to murder them.
Go figure. Sergeant Major has earned his due, we’ve made mistakes, but he’s wrong.
Excellent analysis of Haney’s comments about cynical use of fear as a political tool to manipulate the rubes. You guys are deep!
Y’all have fun with that fear-addled, pre-1776 mindset.
And you have fun pretending that there are not people in the world actively trying to murder us. Simply because of who we are.
TO: Jeff Goldstein
RE: Excellent Column
I’m engaging someone who thinks a lot like Tbogg on a similar vein. I find the parallels between their thoughts quite interesting and your approach quite amusing.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
TO: All
RE: Biological Warfare
I think probability is high that we’ll see this turn of events from our friends in al Qaeda. The rationale would make a tome that I will not take up Jeff’s bandwidth to explain.
Suffice it to say, it’s a lot easier to dump 20 gallons of ricin into a small town’s drinking water than fly several commercial airliners into big buildings.
Witness the incident in Massachusetts this week. See <a href=”http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/03/29/D8GL9V3G5.html for details” target=”_blank”> for details….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
TO: All
RE: Hmmmm
Seems like the Link button doesn’t do what I was expecting it to do, very well. Therefore….
…try THIS.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. Jeff….how did you get the buttons into your comments?
“Y’all have fun with that fear-addled, pre-1776 mindset”
That was 1775 and it turns out we had reason to be paranoid.
So. The liberal logic supposes that, left to his own devices Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the middle east or to the west?
Isn’t that like assuming,when confronted by someone armed with a gun, that the gun isn’t loaded?
“Cynical use of fear as a political tool to manipulate the rubes”
I was wondering why at every anti-liberation rally I counter-protested I would encounter those who piously believe we should all fear jackboot-wearing right-wing christers who are sending us all back to the dark ages where females will be stuck in the oppressive kitchen enslaved by patriarchy parasite pregnancy imposed by The Man yet blinded to the barbarism which has entered the gates of civilization.
Thanks Mark for pointing out the problem.
mark continues to call “pest control” by the grossly inaccurate “fear.” Whatever. mark, pests can be terribly dangerous; I’m not seeking to minimize the threat. But what we’re engaged in is first, recognizing that our society, our culture, our Way Of Life(TM), is under threat, and second, trying to manage that threat. As far better minds than mine have put it, the battle is for the moderate Muslims: demonstrating to them that Westernizing to the extent of adopting certain Western forms (such as representative government) is a better deal than putting their eggs into the shari’a/theocracy basket. The strategy is full of risk but is better than bombing huge swathes of desert to slag. Don’t you think?
actus, what I get from your answer is this:
1. You don’t believe a situation could exist where ties between a non-state actor and a state might be strongly suspected, even strongly supported by intelligence that could not be made public without serious damage to future intelligence-gathering. So you stick with “we’d determine who’s responsible, publicize it, and go after that state.”
2. You misunderstand the “tit-for-tat” thing: the question wasn’t “Do we respond precisely in kind, to the extent of (for instance) kidnapping and beheading random civilians?” (which makes as much sense as your thing about how we didn’t fly planes into tall buildings filled with civilians after 9/11). It was, instead, if we’re attacked with unconventional weapons, are unconventional weapons on the table for our response, or only conventional ones? What about in a WWII scenario in which planners could reasonably conclude that the sheer horror factor of using a nuke, for instance, and killing many thousands more (and probably many, many thousands more civilians) at a single blow than a conventional battle, might nevertheless result in less loss of life to both sides in the longer term? What I’m getting at is, are you 100% reflexively conventional-or-nothing, or can you envision a scenario in which our use of unconventional weapons could be justified?
And further, if our hypothetical non-state actor were the one(s) using the unconventional weapons, and this non-state actor were sheltering in a populated area of a nation that couldn’t be definitively proven (or perhaps publicly demonstrated) to be its prime supporter, what weapon(s) or tactic(s) do you see as on the table there? These aren’t trivial questions, and they go to our ultimate goal of making state sponsorship of terror untenable.
What do you think?
I’d like to add that my own opinion about unconventional weapons use by the U.S. is highly contextual… I can see it but it gives me the shivers and I hope we never come to the threshhold of it (again). But as a realist, I can acknowledge that we probably will, and it makes me deeply relieved that I myself will never be the one who has to make The Decision, and profoundly grateful to those who are willing to take on that crushing responsibility.
Actus- “My policy is to go after someone with some goddam connection to the attack.”
So I assume he would have opposed the Normandy invasion, on the grounds it was Japan that attacked us, not Germany or Italy or Vichy France. (Yes, Germany “declared war” on us. So did Saddam, every week for 12 years. Neither was any closer to actually invading us.)
But really, the response at the time would have been that FDR brought the war on us with Lend-Lease and the embargo of Japan.
So, just to wing this bad boy back to course, what exactly would actus et al. have had us do with regards to 9/11?
So far, I’m hearing “Get the ones responsible, not ones with no involvement!”
Let’s take this as it stands, and consider, for a moment, the simplicity of that policy, and the virtue of that simplicity. Al-Qaeda did it? Get al-Qaeda!
Do not read any of the above as sarcasm. Keep It Simple, Stupid has its merits. Nor is this a policy without precedent. Rome kept the Germans at bay for several centuries by responding to their raids with punitive expeditions; killing those immediately responsible and putting fear into the rest. Even Marcus Aurelius regarded such as his duty.
The President has, of course, decided upon another plan, that of note merely cutting one head of the hydra off but of bringing a shake-up, and hopefully, a reckoning, to the breeding ground of Islamic fundamentalist terror. This is what the Romans did with the Gauls: Romanized them, and thus neutralized them as a threat. (I know these are imprecise analogies. You are free to point out the differences between then and now if that makes you feel better).
The latter is the riskier course (in terms of danger to our military), and certainly the more expensive. One would have to be a fool to pretend that it has all gone swimmingly. One would be equally foolish to pretend it has been an unmitigated disaster, either.
The chief problem is the fact that much of the argument seems to center on one’s position vis-a-vis President Bush. If this is to a degree natural, it is also distracting. The problem of 9/11 is bigger than the Bush Administration. It very well may be bigger than Bush’s next several successors put together.
I expect that the back-and-forth between the Deterrant Strategy and the Liberationist Strategy will mark the foreing policy debates of the next several decades, as Detente and Containment did during the Cold War.
But there are other problems. How much deference to we really need to show to the UN, given Oil-For-Food and the general terrible record of peacekeeping missions? How far are we willing to go to limit personal freedom for the sake of security? How much blood are we willing to shed abroad for it? For how long?
A bit of my post was circumcized:
It is the answer to these questions, and not merely “But what would YOU do?” to which actus and all critics of the current strategy owe a response. They are the questions of our age. To ignore them or seek to escape them with accusatory rhetoric invites the charge of unseriousness.
If Americans fail in their resolve to fight a pre-emptive war against Islamic Fascism and thereby allow its followers to acquire and use WMDs in their war against western civilizations, it would likely result in the demise of the freedoms that we all enjoy and signal the rise of a new theocratic/dictatorial world order. If WMDs are successfully used by the Islamic Jihadists in our major cities, the economic fallout alone would place western economies on the path to total collapse. Response-in-kind would soon become moot as world governments crumbled under the weight of massive unrest/riots and decayed into total anarchy. This is what the Islamic radicals want. They cannot defeat western civilization, as long as our military and economic dominance remains intact. They know that the only hope for their vision of the future is for us to lose our resolve and allow them to create a chaotic world environment that enables them to establish themselves as a world power that is capable of defeating us. Islamic Fascism is a cancer that must be vigorously and proactively opposed and destroyed before it destroys freedom and democracy everywhere.
And what, exactly, would that plan look like in real life?
Robert Crawford:
This brings back memories of stuff I wrote before the blog went dark. See here and here, for example.
We don’t have a deterrent for WMD attack on the US. It was true when I wrote it in 2003, and that hasn’t changed. Nuking Mecca probably isn’t it, but we need to figure out something, and let it be known – otherwise, it isn’t a deterrent. And if we don’t have a retaliation plan in pocket, the aftermath of a nuclear attack is a bad time to figure one out. The whole “anger of the Arab street” thing has gone out of vogue, but there is such a thing as the American street. Here is something else I wrote:
That’s good stuff! I need to start blogging again!
An article on which countries hate America, and which don’t. Forward this to any left-wing anti-American in order to really irritate them.
Here is also a great article on how the stunning defeat of socialism is the biggest news event of the last 15 years.
Surely if we just explain to these terrorists that we’re sweet people they will leave us alone. There is too much violence in the world! The only way to stop it is to lay down arms and love one another!