I guess this is as good a place as any. I just got home and happened to actually see Cheney's um....remarks. another mc josh post... With Cheney coming out tonight to preach more falsehoods to the 30+ percent of the population still willing to listen, let's remember that this is the established, all-too-familiar strategy. How do you go after a decorated war veteran running against a quasi-draft-dodger? Hit him hard for cowardice and disloyalty to country. How do you knock out a respected juvenile court judge? Spread rumors that he's a pedophile. You can see pretty clearly that Karl Rove is back in the saddle because what we're seeing now is straight from the Karl Rove play book. You throw them off balance by charging directly into their line of fire. When the veil is finally being lifted on your history of lies, hit hard against the other side for 'rewriting history' or trying to deceive the public. According to Drudge, a knock line from Cheney's speech this evening has him saying, "yet in Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition." The up-is-downism is truly bracing -- hilarious or outrageous depending on your mood. And you can feel the belligerence and instinctual reliance on blunt force in all things that allows Cheney to say such things with a straight face or any hint of fear that sensible will see him digging himself still deeper. All there is to do is just keep cataloging this man's history of lies and attempted cons. That's all that's necessary. They can't hide. But don't forget that this latest gambit is only the first flash of what we'll see from this crew as they swing over the downward arc of Fortune's wheel. -- Josh Marshall
the man speaks the truth. Chaney's speech should be noted by all jr high debate team members. When you are under attack and you have no recourse argument wise always, resort to righteous indignation. You don't actually have to make a point; you just have to say, "How dare you". And the stupid people of the world will fall for it every time.
This is pure, classic Rove strategy. Full force ahead, smear everyone who gets in the way, go back to what worked in the past. Your either with us or against us.
I just don't follow your argument here. We're still fighting in Afghanistan and there's no indication that going into Iraq has lessened any of the strengths of our enemy in Afghanistan. I've yet to hear of any mass scale movement of fighters and resources among Al Qaeda, Taliban and Warlords. All us fighting in Iraq has done is expand our front of battle while not substantively weakening our foes in Afghanistan. YOu continually bring this up that we only had two choices but you aren't considering that it was the Admin. itself that pushed us into a situation with only two choices. What I'm saying is that it was the failure of the Admin. to consider more than just the option of invasion or leaving in sanctions. Further what was critical about the fall of 2002- spring of 2003 that invasion had to take place during that time frame? You are failing to critically assess why we were in the situation where there were only two situations in the first place. Not true at all the Clinton Admin. wasn't locked into the choices of invade or just maintain status quo. When they were faced with a crisis they chose a third choice of an air war to take out the WMD facilities. First off I'm not the President or a diplomat. If I was I would've suggest many other courses of actions. All I'm pointing out is that there were possible other course of actions that no one in the Admin even bothered to suggest to the UN as another course of action. So to say that no one supported it is a false argument when no one even presented it for public debate. Two your second point I totally agree those choices have potential negative consequences and the ones you cite are very important ones. That said as we see invasion has huge negative consequences too. What was missing though was any public debate within the US or the UN in regard to other possibilities. That is a failure on the part of leadership to be restricted to limited thinking where they can only see two choices. One other point to your argument of two choices is that your view seems to be that the status quo would've been sanctions forever which isn't necessary the case. If we hadn't invaded at the time that we did a range of other options could've been considered. The timeline was only driven by the Admin. and not by any external considerations. For that matter even regarding invasion its possible that if the Admin. had waited they could've built up more of a coalition including bringing Turkey in. You're not reading my statement. I said:
I know George W. didn't study history in school, so it must be Rove or Cheney who studied up on manipulating the masses.
Good post, Sishir. Hayes, I've never understood your fixation with having only "two choices" either, and I was one of those who mentioned our presence in SA as one of the main instigators behind AQ and bin Laden's original actions, which is one of the main points behind your argument, if I remember correctly. (I know you'll correct me if I have it wrong! ) We never had only two choices, as Sishir points out. Keep D&D Civil.
You guys seem to think there were an infinite possibility of choices. While that might be true in a vaccuum (as in let's sit around and think what other choices we could have made), an infinite possibility of choices were not on the table at the time. What I suggested earlier was that there were two main schools of thought: continue containment (which SC's Clinton example falls under, btw) or intervene. That there were not public debates about other options does not mean they weren't considered nor is it indicative of the feasibility of other options - but more likely that they did not capture that advantages of the two main schools of options (which is why they were the two main schools to begin with). The choice to intervene, however, captured many advantages that the containment choice did not - such as then being able to move out of SA. When you say 'they could have done something else' you are assuming both those were superior options and that there was support for those options. For example with your Shiite and Kurd arming scenario it is obvious there was no support for those options. Was that option discussed? Well, probably since both the Kurds and the Shiites had taken an ass kicking from Saddam already it most likely wasn't seriously considered. Giving Stingers to Shiites was probably not high on the list since we've already been down that road before. Fully arming the Kurds obviously would enflame the Turks. So while your position is that there should have been public debate about this - I don't think that would have made them viable options. Nor is the objective of a representative government to publicly debate every infinite possibility to every problem. Not only would that grind decisionmaking to a halt but you might as well have a direct democratic vote on every option. That's not the way it works, nor dare I say would it be preferrable since nothing would get done. Someone else suggested assassinating Saddam - well we could have had a public debate about that - but it had been tried and failed. Someone else suggested we could have gotten the military to coup and kill/arrest Saddam. Again tried and failed. SC suggests indefinite sanctions were unlikely, and I agree. Yet if sanctions were keeping Saddam from rearming - and they come off the table at some point - why wouldn't he THEN rearm. Further reason to act when we did. Nothing suggests he'd given up such a quest. Would that have been a good option? No, then we'd be back to 1990. Let's take another suggestion - wait for Turkey to come in. Would that have mattered? Not sure why. Assuming you could ever get Turkey to intervene (and there is no evidence that would happen - they wouldn't even give us flyover and transport rights) - why do it? We didn't need the Turkish army to crush Iraq's army and it would have freaked the Kurds out completely enflaming them. What you contend was a failure to consider other options I say is a logical progression working to two choices - continue containment or intervene. Add to that the fact that there WERE no other choices being offered by relevant parties and that is why I conclude that reflection should concentrate on those two options. France, Germany, Russia and China wanted to continue containment. They weren't on board for regime change at ALL because of the billions they had tied up with Saddam.
I agree that arming the Kurds and promoting a Kurdish state wasn't really an option at all. Turkey would have freaked out. Heck, they still freaked out, (witness the lack of invasion cooperation) and continue to be freaked out simply regarding the semi-autonomous Kurdish state that appears to be forming. I think they are way off base, but the Turkish goverment (no offense to any Turks who may read this ) has been way off base for a very long time. If we weren't currently in Northern Iraq, the Turks would be, given the present situation. As for us being in SA... where are we now? We made other arrangements, and we could have done that prior to an invasion. And there is no reason that I have heard yet that explains why we should have been in such an all fired hurry to invade Saddam's Iraq. We had no significant coalition on the verge of falling apart. Quite the opposite. Again, what was the hurry? Keep D&D Civil.
If you are asking 'why was the administration in a hurry' then I think the answer is a sense of proactivism that was spawned from 9/11. IMO their groupthink went something like: 'see what this rolling over the problem with Saddam over and over has gotten us? Troops in SA, planes into the WTC, 12 years of containment and the b*stard is still just waiting to get back to his WMD production. He's just playing his cat and mouse and the damn UN is playing along. Before we know it we'll have an India or Pakistan and a whoop there it is - nuclear Saddam. THEN what do we do? In the meantime we've got freakin AQ blowing up our embassies and our navy and our big freakin apple. Containment is real nice for the mamby pamby Euros and Chinese who are making money off Saddam and getting none of the blowback, but its a loser for us and in light of 9/11 we have to attack problems, not indefinitely draw out resolution. We're the Superpower ******* it and we should have waxed his ass a long time ago. As Alice Cooper once said 'No more mr. nice guy.' He's still killing lots of people in his own country every year. Sure its not genocide but that's only because we're not letting him do it. Add all that up and we should take his ass out. If the UN and the EU don't want to go along then screw them because they're not paying the price for this crap anyway. Hell, the Iraqis will be glad he's gone, he'll no longer be a threat, they'll be a democracy in the middle of the Middle Ages East and that can't be bad. It'll scare the crap out of the theocratic Iranians and the autocratic Syrians and maybe that'll jingle jangle their attitudes a bit.' That was their thought process IMO.
Hayes; Other than the Alice Cooper reference (maybe not Cheney might be an Alice Cooper fan) I think your analysis of group think in the Admin. is correct. The problem with that is that it totally fails to consider potential negatives with invasion. Your analysis of potential problems with other options I think is correct and agree there are problems to any potential solution. What you're doing, and probably the Admin., is to still overlook the very real problems with invasion which have proven to be as problematic as potential other solutions. Further your analysis is very limited in regard to the other solutions for instance arming the Kurds and Shiites you are right to note that would've caused problems with other countries in the region but arming those countries doesn't mean that we let them run amok. The US could still maintain some level of control over those militias and continued involvement after the Saddam regime either fell or was so weakened and bankrupt to not represent any sort of threat to anyone outside of the Sunni triangle. The problem with Afghanistan wasn't that we armed the Mujahadin it was that we completely left Afghanistan on its own after the Soviet Union withdrew. Again these were situations that didn't come up for debate. As the Executive branch the Admin. has the lead in developing foreign policy and with Congress controlled by the same party Congress will look to the Executive to direct debate so it is still largely the Admin's call what options are debated. Again I will stand by my position that they failed to consider other options. Your analysis is correct but to me just reflects the narrow thinking of the Admin..
HEY! I saw a clip of Cheney singing an Alice Cooper song: "Because I'm EIGHTY, and I just don't know what I want..."
