Posted on 11/22/2006 10:05:56 PM PST by B-Chan
He probably is on a faculty near you. He might even be in the math department. He is that disengaged, really, from the parry and thrust of anything currently of interest in the public square. In that sense, as one disengaged, he might be a savant, idiot or otherwise. Anything is possible.
It's the same crap this time with the same players only with different names and faces.
The first week we went in to Iraq I told myself it will take at least 5 years for them to get it together.
I'm not going to bitch about the military or President Bush until the 5 years are up because I did some research on WWII and found that we were hated in France and Germany for many years after they surrendered and the US military morale was horrible until Korea knocked WWII off the news !
Get some backbone and support our troops and it will work out just fine !
Amen to that!!
I'm not pessimistic at all. I believe that Good will ultimately triumph over Evil. I am optimistic about the future of myself and my loved ones, and I am convinced that our nation's best years are yet to come. Whether our nation will be known as the United States of America during this golden age is less certain.
Bravo! Dang I'm sick of the whining around here.
Who are you?
Just some guy on the Internet.
Why should I care what you think about anything?
Because it's important to sample a wide range of data from all sides of a given question before coming to one's own conclusion.
Do you know what a rhetorical question is?
Is this test going to be part of my final grade?
Happy Thanksgiving, B-Chan.
I've always wondered what it's like to be a quitter. Do you think you could shed some first-hand light on that subject.
And he did say that -- in an interview in this month's issue of Vanity Fair.
FOTFL Lawyer types? Non-lawyer types may not be as eloquent, but you won't find us arguing the finer points of the word "is".
I figured 10, though we'd begin to see the corner turning after around 7. I also thought we'd see around 20,000 good American's die before Baghdad fell.
We are winning a world war with historically low casualties and yet because it is not being won on your timeline, you want to give up -- and you are not even having to fight this thing. Beyond that, I have to say that you strike me as someone who has probably never suffered any real adversity in your lifetime. Otherwise, how can one explain your attitude that we should give up on a war that manifestly has not been lost just because it is not going the way you wanted it too.
I will put it bluntly, you should be ashamed of yourself for writing that post. There are good people, both Americans and Iraqis who right now are putting it all on the line in the fight against the Jihadists. And as long as they haven't given up, you shouldn't either.
But to do so would rip our own country apart. There would be marches, riots, burning buildings. The media would have a field day, just as they did during Vietnam. Why? Because the American people no longer support war -- ANY war.
Happy Thanksgiving, I think.
Now we conservatives are left with nothing but to proceed through the seven stages of mourning in an attempt to accept, integrate, and rationalize the loss of the war in Iraq.
Some posters are still in the denial stage, they advocate continuing the fight. These are the candidates for matriculation into the "stab in the back" rationalization for the loss which many other posters or already exhibiting. These blame either "Democrats"-a remarkable conclusion in view of the fact that we Republicans have been a control of the federal government throughout-or the press. Even more remarkably, many posters blame The People themselves.
Symptomatic of the state of mind, in which those of us (yes I include myself) who originally were so ardent for the war, now seek to place responsibility elsewhere. For example, everyone delights in giving Pat Buchanan the back of his hand when Buchanan is one of the few conservatives who has earned the absolute right to stand up on his hind legs and look the movement in the eye and say, "I told you so." I at least will say it, "Pat Buchanan, you were right and I was wrong."
We compare the mess in Iraq to the defeat in Vietnam. We conclude that you cannot fight and win a politically correct war that we must unleash the military from the structures laid upon them by the politicians. We forget that it was the policy of this Republican administration to give the military what it asked for and the serving officers have stated publicly that they always got what they asked for. Putting aside the contentiousness over general Shinschecki's view that more troops would be required, it does appear that the military got everything it asked for.
Many of us on this thread seem to instinctively recognize (although they have yet not articulated it exactly) the real root of the matter: when attempting to suppress asymmetrical resistance ("insurgency") to an occupation, the inferior indigenous enemy has one great advantage, he can always ratchet up the violence one more step. This means that the occupying force must always be a half step behind unless it is willing to leapfrog the progression and employ indiscriminate, brutal suppression of innocent and guilty alike.
There is no question that the United States was quite prepared to leapfrog into such brutality in the occupation of Germany and Japan and the occupied peoples damn well knew it. The bombings which destroyed city after city in both countries proved that beyond any doubt. There was not a man or woman, boy or girl, in America in 1945 who did not believe that the Germans and Japanese, every single one of them, deserved everything they got. But this reservoir of anger is not available to an occupying power who has just invaded in a war of choice which was the case in both Vietnam and Iraq. In such an occupation in a war of choice, the public simply will not stand for brutality even on a limited scale and the reactions to Abu Ghraib prove that. If the occupying power is condemned by its own people for conducting what amounts to little more than fraternity hijinks at Abu Ghraib, how, as one poster has advocated, can you "B-52 Falluja" ?
All of these problems were infinitely compounded when it was shown that the original reason for the war in the first place, the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, was misplaced. It matters not that Saddam, having effectively evaded the sanctions, and on the verge of breaking free of them entirely, would have used his petrodollars to buy them as soon as he had wholly evaded scrutiny. It matters only that the air went out of the balloon. The alternative justification for the war, the granting of democracy to the Iraqis, will carry the American people only so far, just as it did in Vietnam. It will not carry them through even very limited casualties if, as was the case in the last election, they do not see a light at the end of the tunnel.
So we have two kinds of wars: wars of national survival such as those waged against the axis and recognized to be such, and wars of choice. The last election demonstrates that the public no longer believes, if it ever did, that the war in Iraq is a war for national survival as part of a general war against terrorism or more precisely, Islamist terrorism. As the public began to regard the war in Iraq is a war of choice, the options of the administration and especially the grace period accorded to it by the public became very limited. In fact, George Bush is very very lucky that the clock did not run out on him for the last election. But a war of choice such as occurred in Iraq has two separate identifiable phases: the invasion and the occupation. No one can argue that the invasion was not a stunning triumph of American arms and gained us geopolitical advantage throughout the world in places like Libya and Pakistan and even Syria. The American public was unwavering in its support throughout this phase. It is only in the occupation phase that the American support ebbed away.
In the postmortems we are very likely to draw the wrong conclusion about the war in Iraq. I say it was the occupation that was the bridge too far and not the invasion. So, after apologies (literally) to Buchanan, I'm still not willing to surrender the principle of the right to use American military force in our national interest. If we are in a multigenerational, world war for a national survival as a democracy against the jihad of Islamic fundamentalism which would not shrink from the nuclear destruction of American cities by terroristic stealth, we must be able to wage war to prevent that calamity. If we fail to prevent it, we very likely to lose our democracy. Unfortunately, it is almost certain that the lesson that which will be commonly drawn from the calamity in Iraq is that America must stay home thus making our cities only more vulnerable.
But another strike against our homeland is virtually inevitable because it must be done eventually if Jihad is to be advanced.
Up until now there was not much point in attacking America while we were squandering our resources in Iraq, permitting Iran to become closer and closer to the bomb, alienating our allies, emptying our treasury, attenuated our force of men and matériel to the point where we could not, according to General Abazaid's testimony, sustain an increase of 20,000 Marines in Iraq, dividing our nation domestically, and demonstrating emphatically to the entire Muslim world that we cannot cope with phase 2 of a war of choice, the occupation phase, at a price which Americans are willing to pay. Better both for Iran and for Al Qaeda to let America continue down that path while they peel away our allies in Western Europe.
After the war in Iraq is somehow settled, the jihadists must decide whether to attack Europe or America. My guess is that they will go after Europe and attempt to achieve the victory they got from the bombings in Spain. They might increase the riots in France. In any event they will try to completely isolate America, knowing that the blue states will ultimately behave like the Europeans.
However, if they choose the alternative, to strike in the American homeland, they will make perhaps a fatal mistake if they do not do so with overwhelming weapons of mass destruction. The debacle in Iraq has made only all the more likely that Iran will succeed getting the bomb. If As pessimistic as it seems, I have no doubt that atomic weapons detonated in two or three cities, accompanied by anonymous demands for surrender to sharia, will prove untraceable, undetererable, and irresistible. Truth is, America will surrender. If they achieve only an attack on the scale of 9/11, they will have succeeded, this time for sure, in the the words of Admiral Yamamoto, only in "waking a sleeping giant" and converting a war of choice into a war of national survival thus galvanizing America into fighting a war it will win. As ghastly as it sounds, we will be lucky with another 9/11.
Actually, the will of the masses, created by mediacrats.
Unfortunately, many of the American people have succumbed to the strategic prime-time bombardment of the MSM, and the round the clock campaign of media bombardment by cable 'news'. The Iraq=Vietnam people have worked their asses off to make it so.
However I would caution against the election results being interpreted as a mandate against the war in Iraq. They were not a "mandate" against much besides 'bidness' as usual in Washington D.C., if even that, simply because some of the most notorious porksters there were a shoo-in for reelection.
Of course the Democrats will use the relatively lackluster (in historical terms) performance on a sixth-year midterm (in which the seats captured just happened to give them control of both houses), to be a mandate on anything from abortion to Xenophobia, such is the way of the propagandist.
I think the poster makes a lot of sense. Force, even ultimate force, is useless if you cannot apply it. The coalition forces have an overwhelming firepower advantage, but they cannot apply that firepower because the political will to use it does not exist at home. Terrorists, KNOWN terrorists who are virulent enemies of everything the west stands for are hiding, right out in the open, right in the centre of our societies. Rather than being vilified, they are being given open platforms to spew out their vitriol. This begs another question: How long can the tolerant tolerate the intolerant before the intolerant solve the contradiction by becoming the majority?
I think thats very modest and humble of B-Chan personally. Also very democratic - the fundamentals of which are that we use argument and reason to alter peoples opinions, rather than hit them a lot.
Pithy comment of the month. Very good.
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