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Yu_Bum_suk
Joined: 25 Dec 2004
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 Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Qinella wrote: |
John Kerry spews just as much, if not more, bs than Bush ever will. America's political scene is in an absolutely dismal, depressing state. Republicans constantly lie to make things sound great, Democrats constantly lie to make things sound awful. The other parties aren't even allowed a voice at debates, or anywhere in the media except to serve as "ooh look what the freaks are saying" headlines.
It's sickening. Most Americans don't follow the news or become educated beyond their formal schooling years, and eventually find themselves actually believing the garbage the Sean Hannity and Michael Moore toss their way. That's my opinion about most Americans: trash cans.
I love my country.
Q~ |
I really couldn't believe the platform of 'opposition' the Dems were running on last year. Do any of these anti-Bush Kerry voters think that things would be any better with their man? |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 4:38 pm Post subject: |
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| With regards to reliance on foreign energy, yes. |
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papa_geno
Joined: 26 Aug 2005
Location: Gangneung
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 4:39 pm Post subject: |
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Not really. His sole strength seemed to be that he actually thought about what he was saying, though not necessarily what he believed. Trouble is, the view he was trying to communicate doesn't translate into easy solutions, and the policy direction of America right now seems to be all about easy solutions.
I really do think a lot of this stems from a fundamental paradigm shift that has occurred over the last 15 or so years, pretty much dating back to the cold war, though perhaps some of it was already in place before. National boundaries and the political unit of the Nation state have become increasingly irrelevant as regards the most pressing issues we face: MNCs, environment, terrorism, global communication, etc., and it's pretty hard for folks to get their heads around any solution that isn't based on the nation state. When the pre-eminent global power makes a regular policy stance of saying that their interests and their citizens come first (natural enough, though I think a bit misguided...), it doesn't help other nations to shift in their own thinking as regards policy. In terms of those issues above, the notion that the problem can be held up at the border is patently absurd. Given that terrorism--which is not based upon nation states, though it may advocate for or attack one or another nation--was a crucial issue in the 2004 elections, explaining why these political units don't work to an (in my opinion) under-educated electorate would have been a difficult task for minds much greater than Kerry's--because you have to have that base for your thinking in the first place, and the policy directions that result in so casting the problem do not lend themselves to the sound-bite structure.
What was most interesting to me, about this last election, was the clear misapprehensions many had about how policy is formed in DC. Bush put forward an image of a "man of action," as if his word would be the last word in DC. In principle, most people know that this just isn't so, and that the constitution puts some fairly severe limitations on the powers of the executive. Some of the "flip-flop" comments re: Kerry were rightly addressed by him--for example, in countering the charge that he'd sponsored no significant legislation, Kerry suggested that sometimes, the most effective way to get things through the legislature was not to sponsor some showboat bill, but to work on the details, often in the form of riders on bills having nothing to do with the rider itself--and that, in fact, it's often politically expedient (read: more effective) not to grandstand with a bunch of pretty, but doomed, legislation. All of this is true enough, but it's not the sort of thing that translates into a "You're no John Kennedy" soundbite. Thus, while I really don't believe we'd be in any less of a hash if Kerry were in office, I did get the sense that he was a bit more honest about how DC works--though a lot more naive about how the electorate works. |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 5:11 pm Post subject: |
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This arrived in my in-box a while ago, and it was a good read. I never thought I'd be posting it though because I never thought the subject of Kerry's suitability to govern would ever come up here after last November.
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KERRY WOULD FIGHT TERRORISM BETTER.
Idea Man
by Spencer Ackerman
Post date: 10.20.04
Issue date: 10.25.04
ot even clear, declarative sentences--"I will hunt down and kill the terrorists wherever they are"--have saved John Kerry from the perception that he is too weak to fight the war on terrorism. An Annenberg poll released last week found that, by a 14-point margin, respondents trusted President Bush more than the Massachusetts senator to protect the nation from Al Qaeda. And it's not just Kerry's strength that is in question--it's his judgment. When Kerry accused Bush of "diverting [his] attention from the real war on terror" against Al Qaeda by invading Iraq, the president's surrogates shot back that Kerry possessed an insufficiently broad understanding of the war. "The idea that somehow you kill Osama bin Laden, and maybe Al Qaeda wraps up, and then you're done with the war on terrorism could not be further from the truth," Condoleezza Rice told CNN. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks dismissively wrote that Kerry "defined the enemy in narrow, concrete terms."
It's true that Kerry conceives of victory in the war on terrorism chiefly in terms of destroying Al Qaeda. But what Kerry understands--and the administration disastrously does not--is that Al Qaeda is not "narrow," nor, increasingly, is it "concrete." The day after the first presidential debate, Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape communiqué from Ayman Al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, directed largely at disaffected Muslim youth. "We must not wait until the American, British, French, Jewish, South Korean, Hungarian, and Polish forces enter Egypt, the Arab peninsula, Yemen, and Algeria to begin the resistance," Zawahiri instructed. "O, youth of Islam, this is our message. If we are killed or taken prisoner, continue along the path after us." This is the true face of Al Qaeda: Less a discrete jihadist organization than the vanguard of a global jihadist ideology.
Bush does not seem to understand the difference. If he did, he would realize that touting the capture of "seventy-five percent of known Al Qaeda leaders" is foolish when those remaining can draw from a pool of millions. Bush insists he understands that winning the war on terrorism involves, as he told Time in August, "a long-lasting ideological struggle" to mute Al Qaeda's allure. Yet the president's chief contribution to the ideological struggle has been the occupation of Iraq, which has horrified the very Muslims it was supposed to draw to America's side. Beyond Iraq, the president has done little to promote Middle Eastern democracy beyond giving speeches to domestic audiences. In its final report, issued this July, the 9/11 Commission practically begged the Bush administration to "engage the struggle of ideas" in order to "prevent the continued growth of Islamist terrorism." Little wonder, then, that the perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings, the Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades, proclaimed themselves "very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections" in a March statement to an Arabic newspaper.
To some, Kerry--a politician often caricatured as a narrow realist uncomfortable with the moral elements of American power--might seem ill-suited to an ideological struggle. But Kerry has made preventing the rise of future jihadists a central aspect of his war plan. "For Al Qaeda, this war is a struggle for the heart and soul of the Muslim world. We will win this war only if the terrorists lose that struggle," he said in a recent speech at Temple University. "We have to preempt the haters. We have to win the war of ideas." Which is not to say that a Kerry war on terrorism would be a purely ideological exercise. Kerry proposes to redouble U.S. military efforts to "defeat, capture, and kill those who commit terror"--and promises not to be distracted by the supposed state-sponsors of terrorism that have fixated the Bush administration. In planning both to kill the jihadists and to prevent new ones from taking their place, Kerry is presenting the victory strategy for the war on terrorism that has eluded Bush.
Waging Ideological War
ush certainly speaks as though he understands the importance of ideological combat. As he argued on the eve of the Iraq war in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, "The power of freedom [will] transform that vital region by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interests in security, and America's belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction." But the Iraq war--a top-down effort to impose democracy--has had the opposite effect from what was intended. Far from inhibiting the growth of jihadism, the invasion has spurred a new generation of Islamist extremists to take up arms against the United States. It is hard to imagine anything more counterproductive to winning the war on terrorism.
Bush, of course, rejects this assessment. After Kerry gave an interview in August warning that Bush's policies were "actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists," Bush fumed that Kerry's "logic is upside down.... We don't create terrorists by fighting back. We defeat the terrorists by fighting back." But, if Bush looked at what his policies have meant at Cairo's Al Azhar mosque, the closest thing Sunni Islam has to a Vatican, he would notice a disturbing trend. Days after September 11, 2001, Al Azhar's university rector, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, issued a Koranic condemnation of the attacks: "Attacking innocent people is not courageous, it is stupid and will be punished on the Day of Judgment." Yet fury over the invasion of Iraq turned Al Azhar's denouncement of bin Laden into approval of his ideology. On the eve of the war, the mosque's scholars wrote, "According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims' land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim."
And Al Azhar is not an isolated case. The occupation of Iraq now plays a central role in Al Qaeda's calls to murder Americans. An unknown number of jihadists, particularly from European Muslim communities, are flocking to Iraq for on-the-job terrorist training analogous to that of the "Arab Afghans" who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to combat the Soviet invasion. "The events in Iraq have had a profound impact on the entirety of the jihad movement," famed French antiterrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière recently told the Los Angeles Times. And, while it is difficult to judge with any precision the growth in Al Qaeda's ranks as a result of the Iraq war, Jonathan Stevenson of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (iiss) notes that European intelligence agencies are observing that "[terrorist] recruitment in Europe has increased since the Iraq intervention." Asked if the occupation of Iraq has driven more Muslims into the arms of bin Laden than he would otherwise have attracted, Stevenson says, "I don't think there's any doubt about it."
Other than Iraq, the president's major contribution to the ideological campaign against Al Qaeda was his Greater Middle East Initiative, floated in meetings with foreign dignitaries at the beginning of the year, which offered programs to, among other things, build civil society, strengthen the rule of law, and fight corruption. Unfortunately, as democracy promotion experts Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have observed, Bush's much-heralded initiative was "hollow," consisting of proposals "mostly already present in existing U.S. aid programs in the region," as well as in various agreements between European and Middle Eastern nations. When the region's autocracies resisted even those mild suggestions, the administration watered the initiative down even further--until it became a series of vague statements about reform without new funding or strategies for implementation. Unsurprisingly, those statements have had little impact. Last month, for example, Saudi Arabia postponed for a second time its first-ever elections, and announced this week that women won't be able to vote--abrogations of democratic reform greeted by silence from the White House.
One reason the Greater Middle East Initiative failed is that it avoided any mention of the real concerns of the Muslim world--in particular, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Political reform in the Arab world hardly depends on resolution of the conflict, but, as Egyptian liberal dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim told BusinessWeek last year, "There is cynicism about whether the U.S. is sincere [about spreading democracy]. A forceful move to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict evenhandedly has to be the yardstick by which we measure sincerity." But Bush seems to have little regard for the actual concerns of Muslims. Instead, he expects the Islamic world to adopt his agenda uncomplainingly. Bush's approach, Ottaway and Carothers wrote, amounts to "a triumph of abstract logic over political reality" and results only in entrenched autocracy and increased anti-Americanism.
erry would take the exact opposite tack. Far from imposing democracy from the top down, Kerry told a Los Angeles audience in February, "We must support human rights groups, independent media, and labor unions dedicated to building a democratic culture from the grassroots up." In this, Kerry has increasingly echoed Senator Joseph Biden, a leading candidate to be Kerry's secretary of state. Biden says he will tell regimes whose repression has indirectly bred terrorism, "I want to see you at least squint toward democracy.... John Kerry would have been funding openly, and supporting any way he could, democratic movements in these countries."
This aspect of Kerry's agenda is surprising. During his career, Kerry has earned a reputation for skepticism about the propriety and the capability of the United States to spread democracy. President Clinton's reference to the United States as the world's "indispensable nation" in his 1997 inaugural address chafed Kerry as "arrogant" and "obnoxious." As recently as May, Kerry gave a sprawling foreign policy interview to The Washington Post in which he emphasized that, in a Kerry administration, "security comes first," as the paper's headline put it. But, to interpret Kerry's focus on security as foreclosing aggressive ideological warfare misunderstands how Kerry conceives of defending the United States. As Biden argues, "Kerry has a much broader notion of national security" than either his caricature or his opponent--a notion that recognizes that only an ideological campaign against Al Qaeda can protect the United States in the long run.
As the 9/11 Commission observed, a crucial aspect of that ideological campaign must be a major public diplomacy push in the Islamic world. That effort has gone sorely neglected by Bush, who launched an Arabic TV network only this year and who, in 2004, is spending a mere $79 million for education and cultural exchanges in the entire Muslim world. The bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy last month pleaded with the administration for a "more strategic and responsive" communications effort that "reflect[s] the values and attitudes of target audiences." As it happens, Biden has one ready to go. Known as Initiative 911, it is a plan to establish "credible channels of communication with the people of the Islamic world" by developing a country-specific mix of political and cultural programming for dissemination via satellite television, radio, and the Internet. (It contains differentiated strategies for broadcasting in 23 countries and regions.) For a start-up cost of $567 million and an annual cost of $345 million--less than what the United States spends every week in Iraq--the initiative would offer not only "policy statements and explanations from senior members of the U.S. government," but also a forum for discussing "major issues in the Islamic world," such as democracy, economic development, religious strife, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In fact, in addition to communicating U.S. policy more persuasively, Kerry is likely to return the United States to a visible and active role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Kerry has endorsed the road map to a two-state solution, and, in a speech at Georgetown University in January 2003, he insisted on "leading the effort to make peace" through consistent U.S. mediation--an issue he linked with broader U.S. objectives: "American engagement and successful mediation are not only essential to peace in this war-torn area but also critical to the success of our own efforts in the war against terrorism." Indeed, a recent Zogby poll that found outsized majorities in the Muslim world disapproving of the United States also found respondents linking their disapproval to the "unfair foreign policy" that disadvantages the Palestinians.
But, even if the United States exponentially increased its credibility in the Muslim world, it still couldn't hope to discredit Al Qaeda from an Islamic perspective. That can only be accomplished by Muslim scholars and religious authorities. In an interview with Time last month, Kerry argued that winning the war of ideas means "bringing religious leaders together, including moderate mullahs, clerics, imams--pulling the world together in a dialogue about who these extremists really are and how they are hijacking the legitimacy of Islam itself." Indeed, Al Qaeda knows how isolated it truly is from the Islamic mainstream. According to Professors Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner of Rhodes College, Al Qaeda's scholars suffer from a "reputation deficit," which has led the network to attack its religious detractors--like the many scholars who denounced the September 11 attacks as un-Islamic--as "the rulers' sheiks." As a result, an opening exists to enlist Islamic authorities against Al Qaeda out of mutual self-interest, which a Kerry administration is likely to exploit.
Kerry is also proposing a frontal assault on what Rand Beers, the former Bush counterterrorism czar now serving as Kerry's national security adviser, terms "a way of indoctrination" for the next generation of potential terrorists. "We need an international effort to compete with radical madrassas," Kerry said in his Los Angeles speech. These schools are a particular problem in Pakistan, where, in Karachi alone, there are over 850 madrassas teaching an estimated 200,000 children. "One of the things that we will want to think about is an educational fund," Beers says. "The Arab Human Development report argues that educational openings represent the best way to create entrepreneurial opportunities for these Muslim youth"--and reduce the appeal of bin Laden's nihilistic entreaties. Nor does Kerry intend to shy away from a cardinal source of funding for the madrassas--Saudi Arabia. Biden in particular is prepared to confront the Saudis over their troublesome ideological adventures. "Our policy should be: Cease and desist, or we've got to figure out new relationships here," he says. "Am I going to invade your country? Hell no. Are we going to depose you? Hell no. But let me tell you: Are we going to supply the physical security for your continued existence? I don't know."
The current administration, by contrast, has utterly failed to confront Pakistan's madrassas, providing Islamabad mainly military aid when it ought to have tried to liberalize the country's civil institutions as well. Last October, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wondered aloud in an internal Pentagon memo: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?... How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?" To Beers, the fact that the administration had not answered these questions two years after September 11 shows its fecklessness. "Musharraf was saying, 'I'd be prepared to trade some of that military aid for assistance so that I can in fact deal with what I know to be a problem on my northwest frontier.... What we need is a program that puts government goods and services into those areas and allows greater entrepreneurial development among a people that don't even have a real allegiance to the government of Pakistan because they don't get anything from the center.' We didn't respond to that offer. This administration chose to make that relationship essentially a military relationship." Beers believes such errors indicate a faulty conception of the war on terrorism: "The central mistake on the part of the administration is the failure to understand who it is we're dealing with. The second thing I'd say--and it follows from the first--is the failure to be comprehensive in their approach."
Destroying Al Qaeda
comprehensive approach to the enemy doesn't mean limiting the war to a battle for hearts and minds. It means killing jihadists as well. As Kerry says at every opportunity, "My priority will be to find and capture or kill the terrorists before they get us." Ashton Carter, an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration now advising Kerry on terrorism and counterproliferation, is similarly blunt. "We're going to need to hunt down each and every person who went through the bin Laden and Al Qaeda camps," he says. "That numbers many thousands of people, but that has to be our objective. And then all of those who are now freely associating with the cause."
Bush's approach is different. Ever since his September 20, 2001, address to Congress, and especially in his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush has emphasized the need to attack state sponsors of terrorism at least as much as actual terrorists. "One of the principal strategic thoughts underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism is the importance of the connection between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors," Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith explained to Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker shortly before the invasion of Iraq. "Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states. They need a base of operations. They need other types of assets that they get from their connection with their state sponsors--whether it's funding, or headquarters, or, in some cases, the use of diplomatic pouches and other types of facilities."
Simply put, this does not remotely describe Al Qaeda. When bin Laden lived in Sudan and Afghanistan from the mid-'90s until 2001, Al Qaeda effectively propped up the ruling regimes rather than the other way around. Nor did Al Qaeda's jihadists require sympathetic governments to support them as they planned and executed attacks: The September 11 hijackers proved murderously productive during their stays in Germany and the United States. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are believed to be in the lawless Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, but the presence of a hostile regime in Islamabad hasn't prevented them from inspiring attacks in places like Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, and Madrid. Even if the United States overthrew every regime that so much as batted an eyelash at bin Laden, Al Qaeda's lethality in the three years after losing its Afghanistan sanctuary proves that a policy focused on ending "state sponsorship" will never destroy the network.
With such an inappropriate focus--which, in practice, has meant little more than a (deceptive) rationale for invading Iraq--it's no wonder Bush's record against Al Qaeda itself is so meager. At the first debate, Bush boasted that "seventy-five percent of known Al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice." This is an achievement, especially as Bush's efforts with the Musharraf government have netted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, eclipsed only by bin Laden and Zawahiri in his importance to Al Qaeda. But, even if Al Qaeda weren't able to replenish its leadership positions, and even if Al Qaeda weren't able to attract new terrorist recruits, this figure would still not represent a significant diminution in the network's latent potency. According to iiss's analysis, which is based on intelligence estimates from American and European officials, 20,000 "potential terrorists" received training in Al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps; 2,000 have been killed or captured. This means that, even under the incorrect assumption that the number of jihadists is static, Al Qaeda will survive Bush's first term with 90 percent of its potential manpower intact.
erry, by contrast, understands that the threat from Al Qaeda is not state-centric. Asked where the "center" of the war on terrorism is, Beers immediately replies, "There isn't one." He explains, "What Al Qaeda did during its Afghan period was to create a jihadist movement on a global basis. While Al Qaeda certainly has the financial wherewithal, the organizational skills, the tactical wherewithal to conduct significant operations à la the dual embassy bombing in Africa in 1998 or the World Trade Center-Pentagon attack in 2001, the fact that the major events since then have been conducted by organizations which were able to operate at a distance from and, to at least some degree, independent of central direction from Osama bin Laden is an indication. I wouldn't say that it's Al Qaeda 2.0, I'd say it's Global Terrorism 2.0. That means we're going to have to have a much broader and a much more comprehensive campaign that goes beyond the decapitation strategy that seems to excite George Bush."
Kerry and his advisers intend to refocus the nation's military and intelligence efforts on eliminating Al Qaeda directly. To achieve that, Kerry has endorsed the 9/11 Commission's plans for intelligence reform and has proposed enlarging the regular Army by 40,000 soldiers and doubling the Army's Special Forces capacity. Presently, Army Special Forces units--which include agile and innovative forces best trained and equipped to operate deep behind enemy lines and in nontraditional combat situations--total about 26,000 active and reserve personnel, or only 2 percent of the entire Army. Expanding Special Forces would expand the range of military options available when confronting jihadists in nations where large or conspicuous U.S. incursions are politically impossible--i.e., most of the approximately 60 countries where Al Qaeda operates. (Though Rumsfeld has increased U.S. Special Operations Command responsibility for counterterrorism operations, he plans to expand the Army's Special Forces by fewer than 800 soldiers by 2008.)
Eliminating Al Qaeda means using force in the area where a significant portion of the network has entrenched itself since the fall of Kandahar in 2001. "The Al Qaeda-Taliban-[Afghan warlord Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar nexus along the Pak-Afghan border represents an area of activity that we have to attend to," says a senior Kerry adviser. "One, we want to ensure that Afghanistan doesn't again become a sanctuary. And two, we want to ensure that the fundamentalists who have gained political power in the Northwest Frontier Province and who have some degree of allegiance to bin Laden don't become a more dominant political movement in Pakistan more generally." Adds Biden, "What I think you would see is John Kerry doing everything he can to build a greater consensus worldwide that will allow us, if need be, to even consider using force in conjunction with the Pakistanis against Al Qaeda in Pakistan."
Kerry's advisers won't map out everywhere they intend to use force. But they understand that the ideological campaign will bolster the military one. Policymakers in a Bush administration, a Kerry administration, or any subsequent government, will always have to consider the prospect that using force in a given situation could swell Al Qaeda's base of support instead of diminishing it, as the Iraq invasion has. But, though Al Qaeda will always portray U.S. action as a crusader's strike against Islam, when the political legitimacy of American power is on display, Al Qaeda's appeal is significantly diminished. As Biden says, "Remember all the talk that the Muslim street was going to rise up if we went into Afghanistan?" One reason it didn't was the near-unanimity of the international community in support of the invasion. What Kerry's ideological warfare is designed to do is expand the political space available to use force--which is further enhanced by expanding the stealthy and deadly capability of Special Forces. It's no accident that one of Kerry's earliest and most persistent critiques of Bush is over his failure to use American troops in December 2001 at Tora Bora, where the United States had both the political legitimacy and the military opportunity to strike a decisive blow against Al Qaeda forces. The strategy Kerry is proposing resembles nothing so much as a classic counterinsurgency campaign, where political and military measures reinforce one another against a shadowy and dispersed enemy. Against Al Qaeda, it's the only strategy that makes sense.
In a rare moment of candor, Bush conceded in an August interview, "I don't think you can win" the war on terrorism. But Al Qaeda is not invincible. It has to denounce mainstream Islamic clerics to give its religious pronouncements credibility. Its jihadists can be isolated, captured, and killed. If elected president, Kerry will inherit the Iraq occupation, a revitalized Al Qaeda, and a surge in anti-American sentiment, all of which will make prosecuting the war on terrorism extremely difficult. But he will be armed with a strategy that attacks Al Qaeda both ideologically and militarily--something the Bush administration has failed to do. Bush probably echoes many Americans when he wonders if the war on terrorism can in fact be won. A Kerry administration just might show him how to do it.
Spencer Ackerman is an associate editor at TNR. |
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joe_doufu
Joined: 09 May 2005
Location: Elsewhere
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 5:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Deconstructor wrote: |
| Nothing is better than dying for one's country and nothing is worse than dying for nothing. Iraq will forever qualify as dying for nothing. |
Freedom for a nation and peace for a region aren't "nothing". Those are the goals we went to war for and they are achievable. You can't expect something like Iraq to be easy or to wrap up within two hours like a good blockbuster movie. The people who call Iraq a "failure" are either idiots who listen to pundits, or the people who didn't want to go to war in the first place who are trying to prove "we told you so". Don't listen to this sort. Americans by and large believe freedom and peace should win out over terror.
| papa_geno wrote: |
| Personally, I'm an absurdicrant. The problem is we keep voting for politicians. I'm still looking for the perfect non-candidate. |
Arnold Schwarzenegger. |
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Wangja
Joined: 17 May 2004
Location: Seoul, Yongsan
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 5:22 pm Post subject: |
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I can see and understand that to die for one's own country is one thing - but to die for somebody else's country?
I can't square the value of that in my head. |
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papa_geno
Joined: 26 Aug 2005
Location: Gangneung
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 5:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Arnold Schwarzenegger. |
Last I checked, the man's a politician, in spite of his illustrious former career as thespian.
Come to think of it, if I followed the absurdicrant party policy to a logical extreme, as soon as we elected someone, we'd need to crank up the impeachment process. The real pity is, I think that party policy makes a lot more sense than most of what's proposed by either the Democrats or the Republicans. |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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| joe_doufu wrote: |
Freedom for a nation and peace for a region aren't "nothing".
Those are the goals we went to war for and they are achievable. |
Do you honestly see that being acheived in Iraq? The exit strategy is to withdraw US troops and handing over to Iraqi security. The US doesn't have enough troops in Iraq to prevent a civil war. Saudi and Kuwaiti funded Iraqi-Sunnis against Iranian-funded Shiites, with the Kurds and their oil happily autonomous enough to start putting pressure on Kurdish regions of Turkey. That's great regional stability. Of course it might not go that way, but it's not looking very good right now, not good at all.
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| You can't expect something like Iraq to be easy or to wrap up within two hours like a good blockbuster movie. The people who call Iraq a "failure" are either idiots who listen to pundits, or the people who didn't want to go to war in the first place who are trying to prove "we told you so". |
I suspect there will be lots of "told you so"s in the future.
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| Don't listen to this sort. Americans by and large believe freedom and peace should win out over terror. |
It's rather strange you would say that with regard to Iraq as there is no disagreement from anyone outside of the Bush administration that Iraq has become the biggest single breeding ground and training ground in the world for terrorists. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Yu_Bum_suk wrote: |
| Qinella wrote: |
John Kerry spews just as much, if not more, bs than Bush ever will. America's political scene is in an absolutely dismal, depressing state. Republicans constantly lie to make things sound great, Democrats constantly lie to make things sound awful. The other parties aren't even allowed a voice at debates, or anywhere in the media except to serve as "ooh look what the freaks are saying" headlines.
It's sickening. Most Americans don't follow the news or become educated beyond their formal schooling years, and eventually find themselves actually believing the garbage the Sean Hannity and Michael Moore toss their way. That's my opinion about most Americans: trash cans.
I love my country.
Q~ |
I really couldn't believe the platform of 'opposition' the Dems were running on last year. Do any of these anti-Bush Kerry voters think that things would be any better with their man? |
Yes, I do. Just because the Democrats do not conform to ultra-liberal ideals does not mean that if they were in power today, even in one branch, the course of US national policy would be much different. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:27 pm Post subject: ... |
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1)
Unfreeze the size of the House of Representatives.
2) Reform the electoral college.
Optimally get rid of it.
At least, let states split electoral votes.
To date, my vote has never meant didley squat.
And it pisses me off.
I didn't bother to vote in 2000. My California friends got angry.
BUT REALLY. Let's be serious. Hurray for them voting Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democrat state. YAY for practicing "democracy". My state will overwhemingly go Republican. Tested and true for more than 50 years. And surpise surprise, NO, my 1 vote in 2000 would have had no effect.
Then you get the chuckling "Democrats Abroad" dude in Itaewon 2004: "Hehe, you haven't voted for awhile have you." Where was he from? California.
I did vote.
Did my vote matter? No.
Is it some major mystery that less than half of our "American Dreamers" turn out to vote? No.
But let's spread our great system far and wide.
Soon influential Iraqis will learn how great it is to buy Congressmen instead of trembling under a dictator.
Let freedom ring.  |
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RachaelRoo
Joined: 15 Jul 2005
Location: Anywhere but Ulsan!
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Wangja wrote: |
I can see and understand that to die for one's own country is one thing - but to die for somebody else's country?
I can't square the value of that in my head. |
Well, it won't matter because either way you'll be dead. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Wangja wrote: |
I can see and understand that to die for one's own country is one thing - but to die for somebody else's country?
I can't square the value of that in my head. |
I think it's because the warriors in Iraq are hoping that like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iraq may one day be their country. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2005 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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| joe_doufu wrote: |
Freedom for a nation and peace for a region aren't "nothing". Those are the goals we went to war for and they are achievable. You can't expect something like Iraq to be easy or to wrap up within two hours like a good blockbuster movie. The people who call Iraq a "failure" are either idiots who listen to pundits, or the people who didn't want to go to war in the first place who are trying to prove "we told you so". Don't listen to this sort. Americans by and large believe freedom and peace should win out over terror. |
And what naive, silly goals they were. They've never been achieved (bringing freedom and peace to another nation). Germany and Japan post WW II you say? well it wasn't our initial goal going into the war; it was merely our goal AFTER the war.
Secondly, why does it matter what Americans believe? That is totally irrelevant. What is important is what IRAQIS believe. It is nice and all that us Americans love freedom and peace, but if the Iraqis don't buy into it, what's the point? And at the moment, Iraqis would prefer to have security, power, and water than freedom and the chaos they're facing right now.
For instance, over the weekend I read an article in the SF Chron (yes, it is left-wing, blah blah blah) about the town of Haditha. You know who runs it? Islamic fundies who force women to wear certain clothing. There is a bridge there called "Agents Bridge" now because every day there are executions of people accused of being agents of either the US or new Iraqi gov't. It is the big morning event apparently. Sounds a bit like Saddam's gov't doesn't it?
What is the US doing about it? Comes in, kills some people, then leaves again. Brilliant 
The frustrating part is we could have done SO much better had we a) actually planned what we would do after knocking off Saddam b) had more troops there, like what the former chief of the army said before the invasion. Rumsfeld's instance on a light, mobile force has bit us in the ass.
| papa_geno wrote: |
| Personally, I'm an absurdicrant. The problem is we keep voting for politicians. I'm still looking for the perfect non-candidate. |
| Quote: |
| Arnold Schwarzenegger. |
Arnold's popularity is crashing here in CA. |
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Qinella
Joined: 25 Feb 2005
Location: the crib
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 6:51 am Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| I suppose this means that a viable third party will emerge as the Republicans get slammed for the president's performance and the democrats waver? |
It's possible. I could see some of the more right-wing extremist parties picking up speed. A lot of people in the US right now like to hear extremism, so that could happen. There may also emerge a less liberal left-wing party.
What I wish is that the Libertarian party would get its act together and start gaining popular awareness and demanding a presence in the media.
| Quote: |
What's a third party?  |
A misnomer devised to maintain the status quo. |
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Qinella
Joined: 25 Feb 2005
Location: the crib
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 6:53 am Post subject: |
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| Yu_Bum_suk wrote: |
| I really couldn't believe the platform of 'opposition' the Dems were running on last year. Do any of these anti-Bush Kerry voters think that things would be any better with their man? |
They probably do. Remember, we're talking about frothing-mouth idiots. Who the heck votes against someone? That's insane.
Kerry isn't a moron like Bush seems to be, but he is worthless as a politician. |
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