— if, that is, Republican Senators weren’t being ordered by King George to stay the course. Or if Kerry’s magic hat was given a Senate office and, say, 6-10 votes.
From The Hill:
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) told The Hill Tuesday that he believes more than 60 senators would vote for a change in the Iraq strategy if they were allowed to vote their conscience on a measure to redeploy U.S. troops.
At a press conference on the measure, Kerry said it is time for senators not just to tell their colleagues in private conversations that they oppose the course President Bush has chosen, but to vote that way, too.
But he also noted that he is “pleased [that] there is growing bipartisanship on the issue of forcing a course change.â€Â
Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Gordon Smith (Ore.) joined Kerry and the cosponsors of the measure, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), at the press conference to voice their support for the amendment.
Snowe said it is critical for Congress to speak out and represent the American people, who support a course change.
Fair enough. But they should also balance what the American people “support,” in the face of an unending negative media blitz, with what military officials and the CiC are telling them — as well as with what’s in America’s best longterm interests. This is, after all, a representative democracy — and were we to run wars on polls, the only person with anything to fear from the US military would be Paris Hilton.
Right now, Petraeus’ stepped-up counterinsurgency strategy seems to be working very well — and yet the same Congress that approved the General and gave him until September to show results is now trying to walk back that leeway, while ironically speaking about “conscience.”
This is fairly simple: if the surge isn’t working, General Petraeus is sending US soldiers off to die for nothing. And he knows it — given that by his accounts, things on the counterinsurgency front are going well. So that makes him either a liar and a murderer, or an incompetent.
If he’s the latter, than why did Congress so readily approve him? And if he’s the former, why isn’t he being hurried home and brought up on charges?
As Dick Lugar was kind enough to let on, he can’t see how our continued presence in Iraq will make the job of getting his domestic agenda passed any easier on him — nor how continued military engagement in Iraq will benefit the party in upcoming elections. Partisan opportunism — the stock and trade of the professional political class.
As for Kerry, the last I checked his greatest military achievement remained the aid he provided the North Vietnamese in its propaganda war against the US. So why anyone would wish for a reprise of such perfidy is beyond me.
Says Kerry about the prospect of a course change: “This is the time, this is the moment.”
Sure. To take advantage of a concerted anti-war propaganda effort, which our left-liberals and their press sympathizers have been waging nearly non-stop for half a decade. More power politics. More opportunism.
In fact, were John Kerry a pop song, the line “It seems to me you’ve lived your life like a finger in the wind” would almost certainly turn up somewhere.
And if it didn’t, it should.
I’m watching the debate and if I hear harry Reid talk about how we have to change course one more time, as if we haven’t just done that, I’m going to go Elvis on the TV.
And which finger would that be, Jeff?
It all comes back to this: the Democrats’ worst nightmare.
why anyone would wish for a reprise of such perfidy is beyond me.
What perfidy? Were charges filed? Was he sent to jail? Did it hurt his political career? It’s not perfidy unless something bad happens. Otherwise, it’s Standing Up To The Man, and that gets praised unquestionably when it’s done by one of the Left.
People keep saying that if we withdraw precipitously from Iraq, then the blood of the slaughtered Iraqis et al. will be on the Democrats’ hands. But the blood of millions of slaughtered South Vietnamese and Cambodians is also on their hands, and nothing bad happened to the Democrats because of it. What’s one blood stain more?
If flight not fight wins out, I would ask Senator Kerry if you were a US ally, why would you ever believe that America would help you with anything that took more than 30 days to solve?
Guess he wants to add “Arabs” to his list of betrayed people alongside “Asians”. Bah.
I’m puzzled as to what the “change in Iraq strategy” is that they keep babbling about. Is “Run away! Run away!” now considered a strategy? How will we know if it works? What are the benchmarks? Is there an exit strategy from the Run Away strategy? What if we get bogged down in a quagmire running away?
Just askin’.
First of all, is there anybody left in the world who believes this arrogant prick when he opens his mouth? I’d just as likely go to Cameron Diaz to get a “sense of the heart of the Senate.”
I’m going to keep this simple; despite timb’s and Harry Reid’s bleating, the Congress agreed to give the Surge until September to show real results both in counterinsurgency and Iraqi Government benchmarks. STFU until September and the good General’s report. Period.
When you want refreshment like no other. *sound of beer pouring*
“It seems to me you’ve lived your life like a finger in the windâ€Â
More like a finger in the next successively richer woman’s…
Does it strike anyone else but me that the Dems seem terrified that we might…succeed in Iraq?
And Reid declared moths ago that he isn’t going to he isn’t going to believe Petraeus, declaring the surge a failure before it had ever started.
Speaking of pop songs, the line “This is the time, this is the moment.” is the chorus from a really bad Dennis DeYoung song (“This Is The Time”) from the Karate Kid II soundtrack. “Daniel-Son” never turned and ran, so I’m confused with Johnny’s usage. Not surprising since Hillary has hooked her wagon to a gawd-awful Celine Dion ditty.
They’re showing rows of cots on CNN being rolled into the House for this silly debate pajama party the Dems are staging.
Amazing these people are taken serious about anything.
“Does it strike anyone else but me that the Dems seem terrified that we might…succeed in Iraq?”
I mentioned it earlier this morning.
BTW – It ain’t all Petraeus any more than it was all Meade at Gettysburg. The folks responsible for training and turning out those Iraqi companies, battalions and finally divisions month after month after month deserve a big round of applause.
I’m not knocking Petraeus at all. He certainly appears to be the right man. Without the steady training efforts it still wouldn’t be the right time.
For some reason my computer will not let me type Kerry and “conscience” in the same sentence.
Well it isn’t like Kerry has ever lied before…….
Clarice,
Try adding “lack of” or “without”.
If-they-were-allowed-to-vote-their-concience???!!!
Maybe it’s just another botched joke, but Kerry just implied that 60 or so of his Senatorial cohorts are under some kind of confining mind control which prevents them from voting from the heart.
So, Heavens be! What supreme force could force all these fine Senator-folk to vote so unconscientiously? It’s as if they’re being blackmailed perhaps.
Sometimes I really wonder about that Kerry, guy…he’s an odd ball.
This is not the least bit surprising, coming from the political class. Quite simply, I think it is better that they just start making these arguments now. Do any of you actually believe that if General Petraeus’ report shows definable success, that the Dems are going to back away from their calls for a change in strategy, withdrawal, and that we are losing. Essentially, they are playing their hand now, and saving the feigned surprise when they stake out these same positions after the report. To date, no amount of data has managed to change their position one iota, and shows no sign of doing so in the future, given Sen. Reid’s expressed opinion that the surge failed before it started, and he would simply disregard Petraeus’ report come September.
I am all for them showing their true colors. BTW : Has anybody noticed a trend with Sen. Kerry? Any shooting war he sticks his nose, given his choice, will end with a premature American withdrawal and a whole shit load of dead brown people.
Sen. Kerry, why do you hate the brown people so much?
Who or what, exactly, is keeping anyone from voting their conscience. For months, if not years, we have heard the bleating about how Pres. Bush is politically neutered, given the ginned up unpopularity of the war. He is clearly not capable of keeping the free will of a US Senator under his thumb. So, what keeps them from doing so ?
John Kerry is a war hero, not to the extent he claimed, which is the basis for the Swift Vet ads – but a war hero none-the-less.
Kerry also happens to also be an insufferable prick and, no matter the outcome of the Bush Presidency, a Kerry presidency would have been infinitely worse, both at home and abroad.
Though Theresa would have done a bang-up job decorating the White House.
–
I’m not sure why you’re calling him a War Hero, given that he was in ‘Nam for all of four months, during which time he wrote the reports that awarded him his many medals. (Sometime you should ask him about them!)
Usually, I give a guy credit for putting himself in harm’s way even if only for four months, but given that he was narcissistically collecting material for his presidential campaign most of the time, I can’t give him that credit.
Isn’t taking John Kerry’s advice on anything, but possibly marrying for money, like asking Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees on how to create the perfect country/western album? Sure both are technically involved w/ their industries, but neither has accomplished anything on their own, but staged fraud. At least Mickey was the funny one, intentionally.
Wasn’t the Surge itself a change from the previous strategy?
I despise these people and their cowardice. When asked questions about Iraq, they should just respond “Its all Bush’s fault”. Nothing substantive, just the answer to everything.
Its interesting how many conservatives have abandoned Bush but not the war.
Hmm, Jeff G’s posts are usually so fluffy that he must have written them in his bunny slippers. This is different, serious. Of course, there’s the usual right-wing feinting of dumping on John Kerry without actually disagreeing with his claims. He’s claiming that the current counter-insurgency campaign is “succeeding.” On what basis? Is Baghdad secure? That was the publicly-stated objective of the surge. We’re six months into the surge and neither Democrats nor Republicans are seeing a secure Baghdad. Have the Shiite militias been crushed? That was one of the underlying objectives. But the answer is “no” there. For some reason, the militias didn’t want a confrontation. Well, if the Shiite militias haven’t been destroyed, haven’t they been at least driven out of the government, army, and police forces. Negative on that as well. Like the Soviets in Afghanistan and ourselves in Vietnam, we’re fighting a bad war in Iraq that we can’t win with the tools at our disposal. The surge’s lack of success is just more confirmation of that. Maybe Jeff G should put his bunny slippers back on and go back to writing the funny stuff.
Oops, editing error. The reply should read.
Hmm, Jeff G’s posts are usually so fluffy that he must have written them in his bunny slippers. This is different . . . serious. Of course, there’s the usual right-wing feinting of dumping on John Kerry without actually disagreeing with his claims. But Jeff G is also claiming that the current counter-insurgency campaign is “succeeding.†On what basis? Is Baghdad secure? That was the publicly-stated objective of the surge. We’re six months or one Friedman unit into the surge and neither Democrats nor Republicans are seeing a secure Baghdad. Have the Shiite militias been crushed? Certainly, that was one of the underlying objectives. But the answer is “no†there also. For some reason (mostly because they’re not completely stupid), the militias didn’t want another confrontation with the U. S. military. Well, if the Shiite militias haven’t been destroyed, haven’t they been at least driven out of the government, army, and police forces. Negative on that as well.
Like the Soviets in Afghanistan and ourselves in Vietnam, we’re fighting a bad war in Iraq that we can’t win with the tools at our disposal. The surge’s lack of success is just more confirmation of that.
Maybe Jeff G should put his bunny slippers back on and go back to writing the funny stuff.
“Its interesting how many conservatives have abandoned Bush but not the war.”
It’s not surprising at all. No Child Left Behind, Free Prescription Drugs for Everyone, Immigration Immolation, Signing Mcain-Feingold, Not Restraining An Overspending Republican Congress…those all add up to a not-very-Conservative President.
“We’re six months into the surge …”
We are? I thought we didn’t have all the troops in place for the Surge until June. True or false?
War hero? In what universe? I was in college at the time and lucid enough to know tha ‘swiftboat’ is just another word for truth. War hero, no.
Of course the Left is howling. They’re up against the wall. Depsite their finest efforts, Bush may just pull this thing off. The only way they can stop George from winning–and themselves from looking like the craven, despicable, assholes they are–is by pre-emptively declaring defeat. They’re in a panic.
They’ve been backing the wrong horse for so long, you’d think they’d learn.
Les,
That’s the current narrative (“We’re six months or one Friedman unit into the surge”)… How DARE you dispute that?
Ric Caric,
Trolling causes global warming.
So we’re six months into the surge? And still no baby? Abort, abort, abort…
Your folks should really look into a better junior high school. The Soviets in Afghanistan, America in Nam analogy is a dead give away.
Ric Caric, Vietnam and Soviet Afghanistan? You really think you are quite the historian, eh? The reality is that there is almost nothing in common between Iraq and Vietnam, nor Soviet Afghanistan. Completely different battles, complete different enemies. Only someone truly ignorant of insurgency warfare would make the equivalence.
Ric,
Bilgewater.
Oops, editing error. The reply should read.
Twatwaffle.
Just to recap, a man with a pure conscience:
Harry Reid knows more than Petraeus…
Of course, Harry Reid had a week earlier than that comment staked out a position, and probably felt obligated to continue on that path:
And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that a week before that statement…Reid was given an electoral reason to hold that position…
Comment by Les Nessman on 7/17 @ 4:22 pm #
“We’re six months into the surge …â€Â
We are? I thought we didn’t have all the troops in place for the Surge until June. True or false?
The President, when he announced the surge in January said “we should in 6 months whether the surge is working. The first troops began arriving in February; the last arrived in June. It’s six months since January. Ric is just using the President’s own words to judge the President’s strategy. You guys should try it.
H&R,
Well at least Senator Reid has a principled stance. Miserable, rotten-in-the-soul principles. But principles nonetheless.
Man, I only wish Ric would have been one of my instructors during ILE-CC. I had to get all these boring, fact-oriented, logical, well versed in history lecturers from the CGSC…bah.
TIm,
So your measure of when the surge started was before the troops to carry it out got there? Please stay out of my chain of command, OK?
Perfesser. Ya really shouldn’t post after a couple of cocktails. Ya make yerself look kinda stupid.
tw; ques freedman’s Indeed!
Actually Major John, and as much as it pains me to stick up for Timmah,He was misquoting LES,who was actually quoting RIC..who is a total moron who purposely misquotes and cherry picks documents to prove….exactly what escapes me…
Blitz,
That makes it worse – he is deliberately sticking up for someone he either knows is worng, but supports anyways, or he cannot tell and should then stay away from sharp objects or fast moving vehicles for the rest of his life.
TW: McAdoo skinny. Not when I saw him play.
“The President, when he announced the surge in January said “we should in 6 months whether the surge is working.”
Hey dumbshit, does September ring any bells for you?
Is Baghdad secure? … Is the Shiite insurgency crushed?
No, honey, but Al Anbar province has changed from being Hell On Earth to only A Very Hot Place In July. The local sheiks are turning against al Qaeda and people are ratting them out. Are you suggesting that only the two landmarks you cited mean anything? Is it logically correct to use the phrase “is succeeding” when any progress at all is made?
Because I’m pretty sure that using the present progressive tense suggests an ongoing process, not a fait accompli.
See, if Jeff had said that the surge “has succeeded,” he would be wrong and you would be right. And yet…
Isn’t it amazing how much difference one little verb tense makes?
dicentra,
I hate to break it to you, but your stubborn adherence to the rules of language and logic is…well…mean spirited. In the spirit of multiculturalism and diversity, I urge you to suffer fools gladly.
Take Harry Reid…please…and Ric, and Timmah.
dicentra, you need to ask yourself whether the surge actually led to the al-Anbar tribal leaders coming over the American side. Were the Sunni tribal leaders intimidated by more American troops? Did U. S. troops defeat al-Qaida so decisively that the tribal leaders were “inspired” to switch sides? Were the Sunni tribal leaders super-impressed with American military leaders?
The answer is none of the above. In fact, the Sunni tribal leaders switched sides for their own reasons which had nothing to do with the surge.
But the Sunni tribal switch certainly is a big break for the American side. Another big break for our military was when the Shiite militias decided to go underground rather than fight.
That’s two extremely favorable developments for the American military and American policy-makers. Yet, American forces have made very little if any progress in securing Baghdad, nullifying the Shiite militias, or getting the political benchmarks enacted. Why not? They haven’t had nearly as much to do in Anbar or as much militia opposition as they expected? It’s a measure of the enormity of the surge’s failure that we’ve accomplished so little despite catching two very big breaks.
By the way, it’s only six weeks until September. What are the chances of Baghdad being secure by then? Of the Shiite militias being suppressed? Of the Maliki government solving it’s political problems?
Ric, yet the Sunni tribes changed sides because …. err, because …. hmmmm, because … oh, I know! They were frightened by Nancy Pelosi’s stern rhetoric! That’s it!
And of course, the Shi’ite militia went to ground because … hmmm, because they feared their efforts were worsening global warming – that’s it!
You really need to find something in life to be serious about, because your comments show a real problem with reality.
Yes, developments your camp declared unthinkable, right up until they became indisputable fact. While dim witted militarily romanticists such as Mike Yon saw them aappening and told us about them.
tw: hearing things
um, somebody is living in a time warp. just FTR, I couldn’t find anything about number of months in this speech.
Watching the Dem caucus today is like being in the green room at the auditions for the role of Lord Haw-Haw.
The goalposts for the surge were set in concrete by the Copperhead Congress. The Copperhead’s premature ejaculations of defeat will soon be accompanied by shrill accusations that they have once again snookered themselves by setting the benchmarks too low.
It will be the AUMF all over again but this time they can’t whine about having thrown faux principles over the fence because they were facing election. I guess their best bet this time is just to claim sheer stupidity – they can sell that one.
John Kerry comes to this debate with mixed motives to be charitable. His father, a trust fund child of sorts, the detached cynical Cold War era
diplomat had staked out opposition to the Vietnam War, which was a logical
although flawed extension of containment policies (Read MarK Moyar’s Triumph Delayed for all the flaws in US policy pre 1965; hint, listening
to David Halberstam’s bad mouthing Diem’s counterinsurgency efforts, delaying responses to provocations, etc) The son followed the already established New Left narratives with the Winter Soldier motif. His
diatribes, in Navy mufti; made people believe there would no consequence
to our deserting the South East Asian Theatre of Operations. As early
as 1976, he was visiting Middle Eastern capitals, despite his problematic
ethnic background. When he entered the Senate, he harnessed this contempt against American allies; by incorporating Church Committee investigators
like Jack Blum; who saw the US Government as the only foe, as they did in 1975. This attitude ran parallel to the Christic Institute (Truther movement; 9/11 denialist predecessor) theories of CIA drug runners; which
seeped into the infoculture from Steven Segal to Miami Vice) One brief
encounter with the truth was the whole BCCI racket; which he benefited
indirectly from. This front group of Saudi, Pakistani & Emirati former
intelligence figures ran a global ponzi scheme that reached into Washington
under Clark Clifford & Miami; the latter a shell for Saudi middleman Ghaith Pharoan with front man David Paul; who in point of fact, became the
Senate Campaign Finance Chair in 1986. This experience informed his view
of terrorism, as the product of organized crime; not a transnational ideological movement; the Vietnam experience cushioned him against any
belief in the effects of counterinsurgency.
Say for a moment you are right; my question to you is, “so what?” They changed sides. I don’t much care why and I’m confident tnat it’s unlikley that they chose to side with losers.
You say,a s may have, that little progress is being made. Yet, that’s not what the commanders are saying, it’s not what my fiends who are there are saying, it’s not what is being reported to units preparing to go.
It’s just not so. the reported “percentage” of Baghdad that is under control is increasing ay about 10% each week. Iraqi security forces continue to grow and improve. The space and time is being forced open to allow municipal services to be restored. And, of course, bad guys continue to die at a rate of dozens per day, bomb making faclities are uncoverd and dismantled, weapons and explosives caches are uncovered and destroyed….
And the average Iraqi sees this and gains confidence in the ISF and their government. Refugees are starting to return to cleared neighborhoods.
You, and all the others who isnsit on “no progress” are simply wrong.
And the “benchmarks are just theater anyway. 4 of them (the begin with teh word “ensuring”) are strictly matters of opinion. They will go unfillfilled so long as there is a white flagger willing to shout “no you haven’t.” 5 others (2 “providing” 2 “establishing” and 1 “increasing”) have been done. I don’t know the state of a Consitutional Review, so can’t comment, but the remaining 6 are “Enacting.” These are laws that the Iraqi parliament are supposed to pass (and with a gun to their heads). That gun is being wielded by our Congress. Our Congress which is itslf unable to enact legislation on timetables, withdrawls and surrenders. Unable to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Unable to bass ethics reforms for governing its own memebers. And that body wants to hold another, sovereign, legislature to a timetable for passing extermely complex legislation that must be both fair and percieved as fair aby all parties. Our Congress couldn’t do it, and we aren’t faced with the prospect of a genocide here if they fail.
The cances of Baghdad being completely secure by September? Not so great. Before you seize on that as an admission, however, first cite anyone who has said that that was the standard to be expected. Instead, what will have happened and what has been promised is that the security of Baghdad will be greatly enhanced and will be more than ever in the hands of the Iraqis, conditions that will allow the “surged” troops to be drawn back down.
LG Mixon in Nineveh province has said that he is recommending provincial control be handed off to Iraq in August and says that his troops can be drawn down soon. That’s the model and I encourage you to look it up.
dicentra, you need to ask yourself whether the surge actually led to the al-Anbar tribal leaders coming over the American side.
But first, I need to ask you where you get your information. I get mine from people on the ground. They all say that the situation is improving. I believe them over a politician who will gain tremendously if Iraq fails.
How do you know that the changes have not been effected by our troops? If things were getting worse, wouldn’t you blame them for being ineffective? What evidence do you have that the new counterinsurgency measures (which are independent of troop levels) aren’t working?
Remember that the COIN measures involve the soldiers befriending the locals, including living with them sometimes, and working the existing system to find the bad guys and selectively pick them off instead of carpet-bombing the place (which would have lead to Instant Victory in Iraq, but you wouldn’t have approved of that either, would you?). They’re actively enlisting the sheiks to fight al Qaeda. But I guess cause and effect isn’t good enough, is it?
By the way, it’s only six weeks until September. What are the chances of Baghdad being secure by then? Of the Shiite militias being suppressed? Of the Maliki government solving it’s [sic] political problems?
That wasn’t the deal. The deal was to wait until September to see if the COIN measures and added troops were making a positive difference. So far, word on the street is that they have.
You’re citing the Final Goals instead of listing all of the intermediate steps that need to be taken to achieve them. Give the troops and the Iraqis a break, eh?
But see, good will never be good enough for the Left. Any progress made will be measured against moved goalposts and found wanting. Please, Mr. Caric, explain to me why Kerry’s position DOESN’T constitute moved goalposts?
[I]BAGHDAD  The top target for al Qaeda in Iraq south of Baghdad was killed July 14 in Arab Jabour by precision-guided munitions, the Excalibur.
Shortly after 12 p.m., 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, received a call that Abu Jurah and 14 anti-Iraqi forces were meeting at a house in Arab Jabour.
Abu Jurah was an AQI cell leader and was responsible for improvised explosive devices, vehicle-borne IED and indirect fire attacks on Coalition Forces in Arab Jabour.
At approximately 1:12 p.m., the house was positively identified allowing 1st Battalion, 9th Field Artillery Regiment to fire two Excalibur rounds destroying the meeting house.
An unmanned aerial vehicle observed persons leaving the house, loading injured individuals into a sedan and fleeing the scene.
An AH-64 Apache helicopter engaged the sedan destroying it.
Three people were observed running from the meeting house to a nearby house.
A U.S. Air Force F16 Fighting Falcon dropped two 500-pound GPS-guided bombs on the second house.
[/I]
Nope, not working……..
Tw: testa persons, patience?
Let me quote this from RTO trainer–
Iraqi security forces continue to grow and improve. The space and time is being forced open to allow municipal services to be restored. And, of course, bad guys continue to die at a rate of dozens per day, bomb making faclities are uncoverd and dismantled, weapons and explosives caches are uncovered and destroyed….
People on the right have been claiming these things since 2004 and things have still gotten worse. That doesn’t mean that the claims aren’t true, because this is what soldiers observe on the ground. But the strategic situation deteriorated throughout the period as Iraqi forces were infiltrated by militia members and insurgents, al-Qaida was strengthened by new streams of Islamic crusaders, the Sunni insurgents got stronger, the Shiite militias became more entrenched and better trained, and the democratically elected government proved corrupt and ineffective.
American soldiers were doing a lot of good things on the ground, but the incompetence of American policy-makers and trends beyond American control kept making the situation worse anyway.
In my opinion, the surge has had the positive effect of keeping highly negative trends in civilian deaths, death squad activity, and the growing power of the Shiite militias from spiralling completely out of control. But keeping things from getting even worse does not mean that the surge is a success. In fact, the situation looks largely like a stalemate. And from the U. S. point of view, stalemate is failure because we have a big chunk of our military resources tied up in an enterprise that isn’t getting anywhere.
Myself, I don’t see the big deal about leaving. Businesses abandon unprofitable or marginally profitable enterprises all the time. And that’s what Iraq has become, an at-the-best very marginally productive enterprise that’s tying up an enormous amount of our manpower and material resources. It just makes common sense to use our resources for other things.
That’s not the same GPS-guided artillery munition that was on FutureWeapons, is it?
What the Hell, use my name again. I don’t think anybody will be confused.
1) Prof. Caric, I realize he’s your Party’s Guy, and that if it floats to the surface you’re obliged to call it cream and smile while eating it, but anybody trying to peddle John Kerry as a war hero has nothing to say to us about mistaken persistence.
Where do you guys get these people, anyway? John Kennedy’s WWII exploits were very much exaggerated by the PR machine Daddy’s money could buy, but he did, in fact, do a few things. Remarkable to go from “…pay any price, bear any burden…” to IT’S TOO HAAAAARD! AND TOO EXPEEEEENSIVE! RUN AWAAAAAAAY! in a single generation.
2) The original strategy in Iraq was, I believe, dubbed “Light Footprint”. Americans were to stay mostly in fortified bases, patrolling as necessary, making occasional forays to take down nasty areas, and let the Iraqis get on with it. That strategy has been sneered at and vociferously derogated from the beginning, especially from the Left: not enough Troops! it doesn’t provide Security! they didn’t stop the Looting! It’s a Failure! Surrender and go home! –well, as it turned out, that strategy didn’t work. With Democrats continually shrieking Illegal! Immoral!, with Michael Moore and the Mooreonic Convergence lionizing the head-choppers and baby-torturers of the Ba’ath as Freedom Fighters Defending Their Beloved Country, and the entire Left hollering IMPERIALISM! IMPERIALISM! BUSH IS GONNA STEAL YOUR OIL! at the top of their lungs, Iraqis weren’t inclined to pick up the ball.
Now we’ve moved in additional troops and gone to a much more proactive strategy — one in which Americans try to stay ahead of the game and keep the other side reacting; in other words, precisely what the more credible detractors of “light footprint” have been calling for all along. So what happens? The Democratic Party produces, and is trying to ram through, a resolution requiring Americans to abandon the new strategy and stay mostly in fortified bases, patrolling as necessary, making occasional forays to take down nasty areas, and let the Iraqis get on with it. With a straight face. You can not parody those people.
Regards,
Ric
An so our brave senate leaves us with the mental image of Teddy K. walking the floor, toothbrush in mouth, towel draped over his shoulder, gingerly tucking his tiny useless balls back into his threadbare boxers. He sits on his cot next to Durbin’s, examines the coffe stain on his crew neck t-shirt, and then rolls his huge ass over, letting the gas of scotch and manicotti escape with the hiss that is audible only to dogs and Barney Frank.
I’ll be yorking on the boxwoods if anyone needs me.
“Comment by BumperStickerist on 7/17 @ 2:55 pm #
John Kerry is a war hero, not to the extent he claimed, which is the basis for the Swift Vet ads – but a war hero none-the-less.”
Yeah, well so was Benedict Arnold.
It takes a special kind of moral depravity to compare the sunk costs in a business to human lives in a war.
While calling it a “necessary change of course” that Bush has been unwilling to undertake. No, you really can’t parody that.
Can anyone hook me up with an average Iraqui who’s OK with hundreds dying randomly every day? Would that be fine here in Anytown U.S.A.? Oh, and:
“Fair enough. But they should also balance what the American people “support,†in the face of an unending negative media blitz, with what military officials and the CiC are telling them  as well as with what’s in America’s best longterm interests. This is, after all, a representative democracy  and were we to run wars on polls, the only person with anything to fear from the US military would be Paris Hilton.”
Does this dribble mean something?
How’s our Cambodia stock holding up?
tw: hits distant
That thing is uncanny.
It has been getitng better all along. Can you be so ignornat of history and the development of nations and the progress of warfare that you don’t know that these things take time?
20 years to build a new country–minimum. 9 years to defeat an insurgency–minimum. Yes, since 2004 it’s been getting better, but it’s not complete yet.
blockquote>American soldiers were doing a lot of good things on the ground, but the incompetence of American policy-makers and trends beyond American control kept making the situation worse anyway.
Insincere and cynical, obligatory “the troops are great” comment noted. You get no points for it however.
We keep reenlisting, so we must be brilliant but simultaneously stupid for continuously buying into an obvioulsy failed enterprise. Unless, of course, we simply know something you don’t, or, more likely, someting you simply won’t acknowledge.
Please delineate the measure you use to come to that conclusion.
N.O’Brain, on balance, Benedict Arnold did the United States more good than John Kerry did.
“Can anyone hook me up with an average Iraqui who’s OK with hundreds dying randomly every day? Would that be fine here in Anytown U.S.A.?”
Hey cynn,
We have well over a hundred automobile fatalities every day in the US. Very few of them planned, or said another way, mostly random. Quagmire?
If you believe in moral equivalence, that one culture can never be inherently more moral than another, then this kind of thinking is the inevitable result. Not only that, they cannot comprehend someone disagreeing with it.
The inscription on The Boot Monument at Saratoga National Battlefield:
“In memory of the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army who was desperately wounded on this spot the sally port of BORGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT 7th October, 1777 winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General.”
He goes unnamed on the monument, only his boot is depicted commemorating his injury in the foot, because of his later actions.
Benedict Arnold was a hero, at least once upon a time. It’s a denigration of his memory to compare him to John Kerry.
Would that be fine here in Anytown U.S.A.?
40,000 die each year in the US in highway accidents. That’s just over 100 per day.
Myself, I don’t see the big deal about leaving. Businesses abandon unprofitable or marginally profitable enterprises all the time. And that’s what Iraq has become, an at-the-best very marginally productive enterprise that’s tying up an enormous amount of our manpower and material resources. It just makes common sense to use our resources for other things.
Like what, for example? Stopping genocide in Darfur? We’re stopping genocide in Iraq. Because yeah, it CAN get worse. Much worse.
Can anyone hook me up with an average Iraqui [sic] who’s OK with hundreds dying randomly every day? Would that be fine here in Anytown U.S.A.
What alpuccino said.
Plus the fact that they were being methodically tortured, raped, and slaughtered by their own government and couldn’t do a damned thing about it. Now there’s still killing, but the people have a chance to fight back. Which scenario would you prefer?
We divested before the bottom fell out.
Funny, though how a large scale sell off by a major stakeholder can precipitate the collapse of a stock’s market price though, eh?
I wonder though, what our esteemed Senators have learned from consulting with the other shareholders; Poland, UK, Coratia, Bulgaria and the like. I’d bet they haven’t even been considered, let alone consulted. And as of teh IRaq’s, they’re just the employee analog here–perparing for another major RIF.
Alppuccino, I can’t account for road rage, cell phone, or Slurpee incidents. But I don’t recall a single road bomb death in the last 16 months. Clearly, we’re keepin’ it over there. Well done, slavering hordes!
“Comment by Robin Roberts on 7/17 @ 9:23 pm #
N.O’Brain, on balance, Benedict Arnold did the United States more good than John Kerry did.”
I guess. He actually served in battle, e.g.
Just not in Cambodia.
And of course I’ve heard that before, just not phrased with such nuance: “Aw, Hayul <hrrrch!spit> let the damn sand niggers kill one another if they want tuh. Hain’t no skin offa my ayuss.” <fx:nods and mutters of agreement, punctuated by the tink!hss of beer cans being opened> Prof. Caric, you should change your name to “Billy Bob”. Or perhaps “Dub”.
And there it is — the same thing: Only America Matters. Nobody else on the planet has an agenda; every swingin’ sex organ (primary or secondary) on the whole damned blue marble simply reacts to what Americans do. I will admit to sometimes-excessive self esteem, but I simply cannot muster that level of egoistic jingoism.
Regards,
Ric
Pablo – I’ll bet the Perfesser knows as much about how businesses make decisions as what’s going on in Iraq. Pretty much zippo. Apart from the classless attmept at equivalency, abandon is not a word frequently used in business circles. Usually some value can be found in the winding down involvement in a business venture at the appropriate time or in the appropriate manner.
Moving the golaposts, Cynn.
You said putting up with hundreds of deaths a day. Now you want to specify modality in those deaths once it was shown that it does happen here.
Here’s ATF’s Arson and Explosive news page. Tell me how many of these incidents you actually heard about. And these are just the few that make it onto ATF’s radar and jurisdiction with many many others only being handled by local law and fire departments.
SO, not only intellectually dishonest, just plain uninformed as well.
TW: sobriety time! Hear that Cynn?
Folks, I admire your desire to confront and refute the drivel produced by the likes of timmah and the esteemed Profesor Caric, a Ric certainly not cut from the same cloth as our friend Mr. Locke. As I have said repeatedly, I believe it to be important that their outright lies, and twisting of the language to fit The Narrative be refuted at every turn.
However, Sen. Reid did us the favor of declaring their position that The Surge had failed, prior to it starting, and the rest of the numb nuts continue to admirably stick on message, reneging on their September timeline, and doing their best Chicken Little impersonation. Did any of us really believe that come September, their arguments will look any different than they do today?
Arguing with them is like going to a mediation where only one party wishes to negotiate in good faith, and the other’s participation can be best described as bad faith. For fuck’s sake (sorry, fucker), they are arguing over when the surge started, and have shown an inability to even follow the standard calendar. Should we expect any better from them?
Y’all leave mi perfesor alon. He shoor is won purty fella an damm, he shoor duz hav a perty mouth on him. perfessor rik iz tha smartst weenee in our kountee, bekuz Bow and Look Dook muved out uv the holler over yonder bekuz they’re cuzin moved. It is knot sew hard to be a akadimik jeyent in a land of lilliputians.
I love it that a guy who’s read my site for, what? Two weeks? — is confident enough to state that what I usually write is “fluff”. Precisely the opposite of the complaints of most of my lefty critics, who accuse me of being too academic and obfuscatory, or (per semanticleo) of trying to “dazzle” my readers with a lot of big words and wild analogies.
Meanwhile, the good prof gnashes his teeth and curses the plebes who don’t understand the deep cultural significance behind his “weenie man” piece — the very plush heights of fluff.
Cynn–
The “dribble” is pretty straightforward: we live in a representative democracy, not a straight democracy. Elected officials are answerable in elections to their constituencies; but that is not the same as saying that, once elected, they can’t hold fast to principles, or else convince their constituencies that the current course of action is in our best longterm national interests.
You can’t — and should not — fight wars by poll. Wars are unpleasant, unsavory business; and people weary of hearing about death and destruction every day, leading to the kind of war fatigue that shows up in polls.
Doesn’t mean the goal is honorable and necessary.
As for your choice of words, I’ll remember them the next time I respond to one of your nearly incoherent digressions.
No, RTO, you’re mistaken. There are no goalposts. There never were.
You see, in cynn’s world Only America Matters. No goat is milked or stone turned in the remotest village of Ulan Bator without intent to either frustrate (YAY!) or support (boo!hss) the United States. It therefore follows that all the dying from whatever source in Iraq is because Americans are there. When the Americans leave they will all relax, gather in a group hug, and go fly kites, and become immortal.
And of course from her point of view she’s absolutely correct. The mopping-up operations of the victorious, as they liquidate the quislings and fellow travelers of the damned Americans, will join gassed Kurds, mass graves, tens of thousands of scarred, maimed, and crippled from torture at Abu Ghraib under the Previous Management, and the rest of it in that grand category: Not Newsworthy. Cynn, unbothered by annoying news reports, will sleep the sleep of the Just and Unimpeachably Virtuous.
I spent the first third of my life believing implicitly that black people were inferior and doing my part to oppress them, but I swear to God that neither I nor anybody I knew, however crude, simply dismissed them as negligible, not to be even thought about.
Regards,
Ric
RTO–Grow Up. Anybody who does a risk/reward calculus with human lives is engaged in a monstrous thing. But that’s done at many levels of both military functioning and civilian thinking about the military. Think tank types used to throw around casualty estimate of 50 million plus in their nuclear war scenarios for Christ sakes.
The war hasn’t been continually getting better. How naive for a guy who’s as well informed as you. The situation regressed in 2004 with the insurrection in Fallujah and the Mahdi Army rebellion (both sparked by stupidity). And things didn’t get much better in 2005 because the sweep campaigns in Anbar were a bust (because the enemy kept moving to new territory). And the situation seriously deteriorated in 2006 after the Samarra bombing.
I hate to burst your bubble on this, but the nine-year average is for successful anti-insurgency campaigns. There have been plenty of such campaigns that have failed going back to the American Revolution.
I’ve got another bit of news for you. There isn’t going to be a nine-year counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq. The year 2008 is it. The Democrats are probably going to win and that definitely will be the end of the Iraq War as we know it. But even if a Republican sneaks into the White House, the war’s going to end because Republican patience with the war is also drying up.
However you slice it, warmongers like yourself have visited a serious defeat on this country.
Jeff, guid whisky doesna mak ye drunk, but the difference is sometimes too nuanced to be detected from the sidelines.
Regards,
Ric
No, no, the Dems don’t want to sell out the Iraqis. They want BUSH to sell out the Iraqis! If the Dems don’t get Bush to cut and run then they will have to either do it themselves, or stay and slug it out, you see. Neither taking a principled stand or fighting a good fight is really a Dem specialty, so they really need Bush to fuck up, and fast. Dems know how to play the game, no matter what the cost.
Besides, can you imagine how it would burn their rectums for Bush to be idolized by millions of Iraqis, and then a chain reaction toward overthrow of dictators in the M.E. start? All the professional cynics here and in Congress “know” it cannot happen, sure, but I suspect they just think it would be prudent to, you know, help things along however they can.
You have to pity them – imagine how heartbroken they are waking up every damn morning, after dreaming all night of finally being allowed to suck Satan’s cock…
Weenie-man Caric – I would rather Jeff write fluff, than be a moonbat fluffer like yourself.
Clearly, weenie-man is the pinnacle of academic thought in Eastern Kentucky.
Ric – Your fellow travelers, before the war, were predicting in excess of 100,000 dead. What time frame were they using for their predictions? Can you describe for us any other war in history where we actively pursued a course of action with the goal being a minimization of enemy casualties?
2008 is the end of the war? I thought it was September. Or July. Or when Harry Reid declared it lost. 2008? Don’t sell yourself short there, o venerable professor of womyn’s studies. By the way, how does your knowledge of women’s studies, lack of knowledge of history, and fundamental lack of knowledge of the military give you the stones to call out RTO. You, professor, are a sad sad person.
Oohhh. Name calling. Warmonger, am I? Not at all. I’m a Soldier. I do not advocate war. War, however is where we are and I do advocate winning.
You can tell how a COIN op is going to turn out before the nine-year mark?
If you look at the failed operations I think you’ll find that the predominant characteristic of the failure was a decision to quit, not an inability to continue. I’ve never understood choosing to lose, though I know it has happened. ANd I suppose that we did so in Vietnam makes it easier to do this time, no matter who gets hurt.
I acknowledge setbacks along the way, but of the things you cite, only the Samarra bombing do I view as significant. And it’s been overcome to the extent that a second attack on the mosque had zero effect.
Patience is the lacking factor. You get that much right. That sole virtue is all we need to win. I fear you may be right about 2008 as well. I want to win. If we quit, we lose. I blame the degenerate 50% who have gone from supporting the war to opposing it. But if it’s really such a foregone conclusion, why do you, and SEN Reid adn Speaker Pelosi work so hard at accellerating what you say is inevitable? I think that you, and they, desire to lose. Can’t for the life of me fathom why. Surely it’s got to be something more important than an election.
I’ll counter your prediction with one of my own. I have no idea where you stand on Afghanistan (it shouldn’t be differnt, just another campaign in the same war), but I’ll promise you this; If we abandon the Iraqi people we will also abandon the Afghans in not more than 18 months from that date.
The only real difference between the two places, with regard to US opinion, is that the bad guys in Iraq have been somewhat more successful (by way of volume) at shooting at us (“shooting” being very broadly defined). When we leave Iraq, the terrorits won’t come here–no need. They can much more easily go to Afghanistan to fight us. And when the level of violence rises there, you’ll scream failure once again. And we’ll quite, once again, because it gets easier each time.
RTO: whatever; I’m drunk off my ass because I disagree with you. That’s your great Chinese Wall; no one can ascend it, because you determine the height.
Home of the Fightin’ Colonels!
TW: wedge sensibly. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Y’know, I’m not at all sure you aren’t right. I am sure that if you are right the result will not closely resemble anything you appear to anticipate, and that’s especially true if you elect an ideologue with no feel for politics and an empty suit with good hair.
I’m not sure you are right, either. Democrats won in 2006 on the solemn assurance that it was all about corruption and misfeasance, and had nothing to do with Iraq, cross their hearts and hope to die; once in office the only thing we’ve heard from them is IraqIraqIraqImpeachBush! and their attitude toward corruption is clearly an avid, even greedy desire to make sure they get their cut, plus a bit. It’s not impossible that memory will last that long.
Yes, you and your friends will have a good time blaming it all on the people you betrayed. I’m just not sure it will be enough to compensate for the rest of it.
Regards,
Ric
I think we are going to have to climb the ivory tower, and create a weenie-man designation for the Left. How about we call them pussies. Ric, when I call you a pussy, I say that in a completely objective way, as I define it to be – 1) a purported man teaching Women’s Studies, 2) never volunteered to serve his country, 3) sits in his position in academia and has self-delusions of moral superiority, 4) is willing to give up on a noble cause because it is difficult, and 5) has the temerity to call out actual heroes like Major John and RTO while talking directly out of your rectum. Much like your weenie-man forulation, this is an objective construct, backed by your stated positions.
In short, Ric Caric, you are a pussy.
Teachable Moment:
Cynn, Sun Tzu said that the greatest general was the one who won without fighting. By offering up the drunk line, you fold every time. I can count on you to be offended, squeel once and withdraw.
When you leave the field, I no longer have to counter you and I have free rein to engage other targets.
IOW: When you quit, I win. That’s the way conflict, rhetorical or military, works.
wait, who’s the drunk one here? ;p
I should no longer be able to be surprised by these clowns, but I really do not see why they are so invested in our failure, and how they can view our withdrawal as anything other than a failure.
JD, I’m no hero. I’m the guy watching the heros roll out the gate, knowing that their radios work, who asks them to “Shoot something for me, will ya?”
well, JD, as Harkin just pointed out, Vietnam is great today! people take cruises there! so you know, it all works out eventually.
RTO – Your response is the sign of a true hero. Unlike people like Sen. Kerry, did you know he served in Vietnam and received multiple medals that he threw away on the White House Lawn in protest, who pull that crap out of their ass.
Maggie – My wife is from Viet Nam, and left when she was 6 from the roof of the American embassy where her father was employed. Recently, they found some pictures of their family being pulled into the helicopters, and some more pictures from the aircraft carrier that they were taken to. I have been learning broken Vietnamese since I met my better half, and only recently have been able to get her father to talk about that experience. The sheer numbers of family members that were unable to get out, and were subsequently killed, is staggering to him to this day, and will always be a painful horrific memory. They were able to get 2 of their next door neighbors kids out with their family, and are now “cousins”.
Regardless of whether or not Viet Nam and Iraq are comparable, should we follow our prior horrible decision with another premature withdrawal, the similarities in results, and numbers of dead, will likely be all too familiar.
RTO: I don’t care to fight one way or the other. But Ric “I’m a Telegenic Sillyhead Locke” needs correction. I do not live in his world of deletion, and thank god he doesn’t inhabit mine.
And, BTW, Viet Nam is really not so bad. That nagging fear of TB, and the fact that they try to charge Americans more for the same products than Vietnamese, are not so great. Our trips there have always been spectacular, except when we had passport problems and had to fly to Hong Kong for 3 days to get them fixed.
TW : avoidable states – anywhere Ric Caric is.
Actually, the number of successful insurgencies is fairly low.
The “good” perfesser suggests that the American Revolution was a failed counter-insurgency campaign. No doubt this helps him equate the Iraqi insurgents with the Founding Fathers. The reality, however, is that the war was won by a formally organized and trained army—consider looking up the contribution of von Steuben. The core were the Continentals, who fought at Brandywine and Guilford Courthouse and Cowpens.
Perhaps the perfesser is thinking of the Chinese Civil War and Mao Zedong? BZZZTTTTT. The war was won in 1947-1949, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army fielded regular field armies which routed the Nationalists from the field.
Vietnam? In 1975, it was an eminently conventional armored thrust down the coastal plain that unified the two Vietnams. That was a tank, not a bunch of guerrillas, that rolled through the Presidential Palace gates that April. Similarly, General Giap defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, not through guerrilla action, but again a fairly conventional siege, replete with regular forces assaulting the Elianes, Gabrielle, etc.
cynn – step away from the bottle …
Well, I’d say that an argument or debate is a fight as surely as fisticuffs or war, there’s just less to clea up afterward. So I’m not sure what you’re doing then, by positing opposing views, if not “fighting.”
And, I’m happy to have Ric Locke in my world. SEN Tom Harkin I can do without. (BTW: What is it you think he’s deleting?)
Sillyhead ? Did you go to the Ric Caric School of Bad Name Calling, cynn ?
In Week 2 you will study 1) Toot-toot head and Poopie Head – How to address your father after way too much firey salsa and green tea.
JD reminds me of one of those yappy dogs that ankle-bites but doesn’t really hurt.
This is fun! Do me next, cynn!
Oh, the horror. Cynn, such blasphemous statements simply cannot, and will not be tolerated. Such language. What ever will I do now that I have been insulted in such a manner? Must go call my mommy.
TW : bitterness 1908, as in, Cubs fans have much bitterness since their last title in 1908.
With Ric’s newly revealed military expertise, I suggest he be referred to by his appropriate honorific, Herr Doktor Generalissimo Womyns Studies Perfesser Ric.
Very manly and unweenie like.
Just a thought.
“If you look at the failed operations I think you’ll find that the predominant characteristic of the failure was a decision to quit, not an inability to continue. I’ve never understood choosing to lose, though I know it has happened. ANd I suppose that we did so in Vietnam makes it easier to do this time, no matter who gets hurt.”
A slight correction, if I may, RTO.
It was the Democrats who chose to lose VietNam, they’re the ones with blood on their hands.
The perfessor just doesn’t like brown people. Counter insurgencies have been very successful, if allowed to be completed. I pity your students.
tw; events. Henry you bet yer ass.
Caric is just another wretched product of the so-called university system he’s so competently undermining even as we write. timb is another example. The universities turn them out like butter cookies. Can you imagine the sheer triviality of a life devoted to studying something as intellectually slight as ‘gender studies’? It’s a shame.
They’ve been not so much ‘educated’ as they’ve been ‘indoctrinated’: they know nothing of intellectual liberality, the earnest assessment of contrasting and intractable ideas in an attempt to uncover truth. I’d go so far as to say they don’t love Truth because they were taught it doesn’t even exist. The very idea is foreign to them. In consequence, a whole universe of intellectual freedom is lost to them, and they haven’t a clue. It’s like The Matrix.
“RTO–Grow Up. Anybody who does a risk/reward calculus with human lives is engaged in a monstrous thing.”
Not until that statement did I realize the profound immaturity of your intellect, perfessor. Grownups do risk/reward analysis with human lives every day of their life. If is a consideration in the design of the car you drive, the building you work in, and the food you eat. Does your car have a roll cage? A six-point safety harness? A fire-suppression system? No? Possibly because you don’t consider the additional safety to be worth the expense and inconvenience? How about your house, does it have the absolute best fire and intruder protection money can buy? Why not? Do you not love your family?
Risk/reward calculus is how most of us earn our money, out here in the real world. Your self-righteousness belies a profound ignorance, I wonder who makes your decisions for you since your ability seriously atrophied.
“It’s like The Matrix.”
Or maybe the ‘Marxix’, the Matrix for brain-dead zombie leftoids.
Because it isn’t their failure, JD. It’s George Bush’s failure. It’s a dirty Rethuglican weenie man failure. It’s the outcome they want, so it’s a win for those who really don’t give a shit about our troops and their mission, America’s standing in the world or the people of Iraq.
tw: citizen afflicted
Thing is, B Moe, the perfessor is doing the risk/reward calculus without considering the human lives. Just the dollars and his uninformed metric of success.
No, that’s an error. What he’s doing is weighting. That is, each item in the risk/reward calculation gets multiplied by a factor of how important it is.
In Prof. Caric’s analysis, k(frustrating George Bush) is very large because the k, the weighting factor, is infinite or nearly so. He is thus prepared to sacrifice any number of little brown people, because k1(dead little brown people) 2(frustrating Bush), and because k3(his being blamed for dead little brown people) is vanishingly small; k3 being f(p(anybody knowing about dead LBP)), which is vanishingly small if k3 is assumed nonzero.
Regards,
Ric
RTO Trainer wrote, re Caric:
Caric is the one who refers to political opponents as a cancer. I’m sure he can do moral depravity quite well.
[…] the local populace, but let’s not these items obscure the fact that overall, the surge is an abysmal failure.” Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
With all respect, Ric, I fail to see where the weight he’s accorded them is any higher than none whatsoever. LBP’s don’t seem to matter at all, and as with our Cambodian experience, they simply do not exist within the narrative.
tw: freedom vigilance
Damn!
An intstructive quote: “What you don’t understand is that I didn’t want us to win the [Vietnam] war.” –George McGovern
Every Senator participating in the silly slumber party should be asked if they agree or disagree. (Oddly enough, the junior Senator from Virginia is the one that got that quote from McGovern back in 1995.)
(oh and here’s another “not working” moment: US forces capture head of Islamic State of Iraq)
….Unless of course we kill them, in which case they should be multiplied by twelve and their blood stains our hands and damns our souls.
Actually, Pablo, he’s merely parsing the casualty equation to include American servicemen and Iraqi civilians killed because American servicemen are there. We’ve already seen several examples of our trolls either ignoring the impending calculus of Iraqi civilian deaths or downplaying the same if the unprepared home forces were left to fend for themselves. How about 2-3 years of Baathist insurgents, Shiite militias, al qaeda thugs and tribal forces given relative free rein to work each other over? Casualties into the hundreds of thousands, mostly civilian, and a real oppotunity for either Iran or Syria to establish a significant presence.
These potential pitfalls are irrelavent as all will be blamed on the decision to invade and the subsequent failure that caused us to withdraw in shame and defeat. When the good professor attempts to frame a comparison with business, knowing full well that the results of business decisions have nowhere near the potential for lives lost indicates a conscious decision to support the narrative and damn the bodies, they being far away and brown after all.
It’s a beautiful formula: Withdraw because of all the casualties and ignore the almost certain result of massive casualties. Bemoan every single death, both civilian and military, and ignore the historical perspective that this war has been low in loss relative to other, similar conflicts. All of this serves The Narrative™ that states, without challenge, that the entire enterprise was wrongheaded from the start and nothing, NOTHING, can work.
The level of moral relativism is breathtaking.
*sigh* I miss preview because ric made my point better, sooner and with less words.
Damn you, locke! Again!
I think the worst part of the thread was RTO’s comment about John Kerry. I know you all love RTO for his bravery and jargon, but someone should have stepped up him to him and point out that Arnold was a traitor for Christ’s sake, who almost gave the English West Point, thus handing them the Continental Army and George Washington (you know, the Father of our country).
I understand many of you don’t like Kerry. But, Kerry was never a traitor to his country. I know, I know, Baby Boomer conservatives love the hate the anti-war movement, but there should be a limit on silly rhetoric like RTO posted.
Of course, since that was his follow up to comparing bombing deaths to US traffic deaths and pasting of a link to an arson reporting page, a serious observer of this thread would conclude it was not his finest hour.
With that said, you may resume your slander of a decorated war hero…
BJ – Though Mr. Locke is always bitingly to the point, I think your explanation really managed to capture the essence of their perfidy.
timmah – Many could, and would argue that Sen. Kerry acted in a manner contrary to the stated objectives and policies of the US military and the US government when he went to meet with the North Vietnamese during the war, and while he was still a non-active member of the US military.
And, BTW, he did not compared bombing deaths to arson deaths, in the manner in which you imply. The claim he was responding to was about the unexpected and unplanned nature of the casualties, and how that would be unacceptable in our society, and he pointed out that there are as many, if not more, unexpected and unplanned tragedies that occur on a daily basis here.
Well, timmah, as further proof of your invincible stupidity, the Kerry comment was mine.
And I only repeated it because it was one of John Kerry’s Presidential slogans….
“Remember, Benedict Arnold was a war hero, too!”
I can still see the poster.
Powerful, man.
timb
OK, maybe the whole traitor thing was a little over the top but stop with the “we hate everything to do with the antiwar movement which is why we hate John Kerry” bullshit.
Many of us loath John Kerry because he is a self centered, sanctimonious, elitist, lying Brahman who quantifies the essense of arrogance. From Christmas in Cambodia to thrown metals to visiting North Vietnam to accusing troops of war crimes his history has been about John Kerry and personal calculation, not about any lofty principles.
Oh, and rich widows.
I’m happy to engage in a debate about the surge but spare me the handwringing for jon cary. Even if I thought the traitor thing was a bit much, the accusation couldn’t have fallen to a more deserving asshat.
Does emotion cloud my opinion of cary? You betcha!
“With that said, you may resume your slander of a decorated war hero…”
Well, the hero part is questionable.
He did, however, have several medals.
Which he threw over the White House fence.
Or not.
The Narrative is not clear on that point.
Who called Kerry a traitor?
tw: Brahmin of.the Year? Moment? Vietnam War?
Pablo:
I included Brahmin just for you, man. From one former citizen of the Socialist State of Taxachusetts!
test??
This is precisely the kind of idiocy from Sen. Kerry that makes me despise him. He has yet to release his full military record, despite multiple promises to do so. He has yet to reveal his plan to win in Iraq, because since he lost the presidential race, I guess we are not entitled to his wisdom.
I never really felt all that bad about losing the Senate, but this is one instance where it would be nice to be in charge. I would force and up or down vote on each and every one of the Dems BS talking points. De-fund the war? Here’s your chance. Immediate withdrawal? Vote for it. Vote your conscience? Shouldn’t you always do that. More troops? Here you go. Less troops? Here ya go. They never get called on their perfidy.
The demanded a change in strategy for over a year. Then they get that change in strategy, and declare it a failure before it ever starts, and then start calling for the prior strategy, followed by withdrawal. Their playbook really has not changed since the early 1970’s.
Ok… seems more than one embedded link is kicking my comments into the bit bucket… Third try:
Prof “conservatives are a cancer” is definitely a P2 [here —
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/07/the_war_about_the_war.html
]
and cynn should consider
France deals with 100 cars burned per night by
Islamistsdisaffected youths … HO HUM. The Brit response toIslamistAsian DOCTORS trying to car bomb includes banning the word “Islam” being connected to terrorism and ban the phrase “War on Terror.”Reid wants to yank by the neck* American troops back to [leaky] Fortress America and Kennedy, Prof. Caric, Ted Rall, timmah, kosskiddies, MoveOn, Murtha, Byrd, all step up and do the Islamists’ propaganda points for them.
*[photoshop here http://www.darleenclick.com/weblog/archives/2007/07/harry_reids_rus.html ]
Why shouldn’t Islamists feel encouraged when Westerners are busy denigrating and hamstringing Western military forces?
Islamists don’t have to seek hudna with the West … we’re offering it up on a silver platter.
Look to how the tiny minority of Christians are being treated in Gaza and see the future of the rest of us if we continue to not take Islamism seriously.
Imagine my surprise when the TW thingie kicked it out. I’m still a bit confused as to how “of.the” became a word.
Fortunately, I’m just a neighbor. Unfortunately, it’s like having neighbors with the Ebola virus.
timb
Veteran status, decorated or not, is not an Absolute Moral Authority Card forevah.
Kerry keeps flogging his, even when it expired long ago.
Sen. Kerry’s moral authority card on this issue should have expired the day that he threw the medals away, if not previously, when he circumvented policy and procedure in meeting with the North Vietnamese.
Guess he wants to add “Arabs†to his list of betrayed people alongside “Asiansâ€Â.
Major John — it’s a simple as Black and White: White people in Kosovo, the Democrats will stay there ten years. Not so white people in Asia and the Middle East — Pull out! Pull out now!
Yeah, but he’s a war hero to the Vietnamese Communist Party.
TW: “dependent caves”. OK, that’s just scary.
With the cloture vote over, Kerry’s 60+ votes equals 52 votes. Lurch must be taking math lessons from Timmah!
The pajama party is LOST!! The sleepover is a failure!!
Odd; this talking point conflicts with the one about terrorism not being that big of a deal so we should all just learn to live with it.
Well, outside of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by acting as their willing mouthpiece.
Just what was Kerry doing in Paris with the North Vietnamese delegation?
But, Kerry was never a traitor to his country. No? Look in the Constitution – Article III, Section 3 defines treason as “levying war against them, or in adhereing to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” IIANAL, but it seems to me that slandering our troops during time of war meets that definition.
“Swift Boats” were never a unit of major effort or importance. There are, or were, somewhat fewer than three hundred people on the planet who could be reasonably named “swift boat veterans.” Of that number, approximately five-sixths were willing to offer and defend their opinion of John Kerry — a remarkable fact in itself, in a country where people tend to avoid public exposure. Of the roughly 250 who did express and defend their opinion, IIRC five were approving, with the remainder decisively on the side of calling him a scumbag, with apologies to scum.
Forget the specifics. That’s a pretty lopsided “poll” result. I thought you guys were democrats.
Regards,
Ric
It’s not about melanin, but fingerprints. Clinton’s are all over Kosovo so it is, by definition, A Good Thing. Bush’s are all over Iraq (along with those of the perfidious Mr. Theresa Heinz, but let’s not bring that up), so it’s just as surely A Bad Thing.
The Democrats could simply win the Presidency in 2008 and put and end to the war on January 20, 2009. According to them, such a withdrawal would make them heroes in the public’s eye. Yet instead they are desperate to the point of panic to make Iraq a failure and to do so on Bush’s watch. Why? They know what the consequences of such a failure are and are determined to have those consequences and – far more importantly – the political fallout from the resultant genocide fall on the shoulders of Bush.
In a sense, the Democrats want to pursue a catastrophic policy but don’t want to accept the responsibility for the catastrophe that follows. Pure cowardice, IOW.
Well, smart guy, you’re entirely deluded about that one. I realize you may have read that idea some place, but it’s wrong. I was a liberal back when Kerry was pulling his horseshit. I wised up. You may yourself one day.
As for ‘silly rhetoric’, I wouldn’t press thast point too hard if I were you. You’re an exercise in it.
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Comment by JD on 7/18 @ 8:40 am #
Sen. Kerry’s moral authority card on this issue should have expired the day that he threw the medals away, if not previously, when he circumvented policy and procedure in meeting with the North Vietnamese.
To anybody with even half a brain it did. The weighing of the moral calculus simply shows they know the cost, not the value.
tw; abhorrence Rory
That thing really is spooky.
Harry Reid voted against his own bill. SUPPORT THE DEMOCRATS’ WAR!
Timb, you don’t understand the comments made by RTO and I about Benedict Arnold and Kerry for one simple reason. You don’t understand the actual history of the contributions of either of them.
There is of course one similarity between Benedict Arnold and John Kerry besides their assistance to our enemies … both were doing so because of their ego’s need to be the center of attention.
Pop song? If John Kerry was a new dance craze …
First you flip-flop to the right
Then your flip-flop to the left
Say you were in Vietnam
With every other breath
Stick your finger in the wind
Spin ’em what they wanna hear
Doesn’t matter if it will not work
You jet on outta here …
… yeah you do the John Kerry.
The desire for a “course change”, of course, is derived from what is the true “faulty intelligence” of this war … the skewed reporting — and polling — of the MSM and their academic allies.
Try asking this as a poll question, instead of “Do you think the war is a mistake …”
“Do you wish to see America leave Iraq in a state where it can again be hijacked to foment terror, or do you want to see America leave Iraq in a state where it can repel such attempts to hijack it?”