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Kerrey: Clarke wrong about Iraq

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by basso, Apr 8, 2004.

  1. basso

    basso Member
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    Finally, a democrat who gets it. anybody for a McCain/Kerrey national unity ticket? i hope he can maintain his bipartisan spirit during today's questioning of rice. (underlining is mine)

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004923

    --
    The Search for Answers
    Richard Clarke is wrong about Iraq.
    BY BOB KERREY

    The 9/11 Commission's objective is to answer the following question: How--at the end of a summer of high terrorist threat--did 19 men with a few hundred thousand dollars manage to utterly defeat every single defensive mechanism we had in place that September morning and murder 3,000 innocents on American soil?

    The search for this answer is especially painful because these 19 men were part of al Qaeda, a radical Islamic army called to war against the United States by Osama bin Laden in August 1996 and again in February 1998--and because Sept. 11, 2001, was not their first success.

    On Aug. 7, 1998, six months after Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against Americans world-wide, al Qaeda terrorists attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with truck bombs, killing more than 250 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and wounding thousands more. Attempts to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and the USS The Sullivans in Yemen were prevented by a combination of skilled spycraft and good luck.

    But our luck did not hold.

    On Oct. 12, 2000, a bomb ripped through the USS Cole in Yemen killing 17 American sailors. And less than a year later, Mohamed Atta and his suicidal crew crashed civilian aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa.

    I believe Chairman Tom Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton will lead our commission to write a bipartisan report that will provide Americans with the clearest picture yet of how this happened. I believe they will lead the commission to produce a report that will contain specific recommendations of what we need to do to make certain that nothing like the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ever happens again.

    As a member of the commission, authorized under federal law as a consequence of the persistence and perseverance of the families of the victims of that terrible day, I sincerely hope our efforts will meet their highest expectations.

    Today's appearance of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will test the commission's resilience to the partisan pressures which threaten to collapse the goodwill needed to achieve consensus. Among the most dangerous forces is the tendency in politics to become personal and question motives instead of confronting the substance of the argument made by any individual. If we yield to this tendency, all hope for an honest and constructive report is lost. We will most certainly fail.

    The best example of this came two weeks ago, when all the key national security officials of both the Clinton and Bush administrations, except Ms. Rice, testified under oath before the commission. This testimony came immediately after Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism director under both presidents, spoke.

    Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have been more terrorist attacks against the United States in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when he went on to say that this happened because we substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war against al Qaeda.

    That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home.

    Mr. Clarke's views on Iraq notwithstanding, after 9/11 we could not afford either to run the risk that Saddam Hussein would be deterred by our military efforts to contain him or that these military deployments would become attractive targets for further acts of terrorism. I supported President Bush's efforts to persuade the United Nations Security Council to change a 10-year-old resolution that authorized force to contain Saddam Hussein to one that authorized force to replace his dictatorship. And I believe the president did the right thing to press ahead even without the Security Council's support. Remember, the June 25, 1996, attack on Khobar Towers that left 19 American airmen dead happened because of our containment efforts. Sailors had also died enforcing the Security Council's embargo and our pilots were risking their lives every day flying missions over northern and southern Iraq to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shiites.

    It is my view that a political victory for terrorism in Iraq is a much greater danger to us than whether or not we succeed in capturing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Victory in Iraq will embolden radical Islamists as much as our failure to recognize the original danger of their declaration of war against us.

    This debate becomes all the more important since the work of this commission--to examine an attack against the U.S. that occurred nearly three years ago--has been overshadowed by the events taking place in Iraq. The war there is not over. Twelve marines were killed in Ramadi Tuesday night in what has become a dramatic escalation of violence against coalition forces. I believe this escalation is taking place precisely because the country is about to be handed over to the Iraqi people to run themselves.

    More importantly, I believe this commission must try to provide a foundation for bipartisan agreement on what should be done in Iraq and the broader war against radical Islamists who use terror as a tactic to destroy our will.

    Whether you disagree with me or with Mr. Clarke, the only way for the 9/11 Commission to succeed is to confront every fact and every argument on its merits. If we do, the world will be safer. If we don't, we will have exercised our freedoms poorly.

    Mr. Kerrey, president of New School University in New York and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11" Commission).
     
  2. GladiatoRowdy

    GladiatoRowdy Member

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    I am all for a Kerry/McCain ticket. I think that Kerry would show a lot of class in reaching across party lines to choose a highly decorated veteran who has extensive experience in government. I think this ticket could go a long way towards healing some of the partisan wounds that have been torn open over the past decade.
     
  3. basso

    basso Member
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    not Kerry, but Kerrey, and i'd prefer McCain at the top of the ticket.
     
  4. FranchiseBlade

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    I do like Kerry. I loved it in the hearings when Clarke was testifying and Kerry gave that speech slamming FOX news and people started applauding. That was hilarious.
     
  5. basso

    basso Member
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    so you only like him to the extent he slams the right. what about his comments on clarke's anti-iraq position, highlighted above?
     
  6. Major

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    what about his comments on clarke's anti-iraq position, highlighted above?

    He makes the assumption that we can create an "Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite". I think most people would agree that would be great. The problem is that many people don't think we can simply impose democracy on a country that has no history of really, really desiring it. Many people believe that "rule by the people" is a concept that has to be started from the ground up by a national desire for it. Iraqi's didn't want Hussein, but they weren't clamoring for a democracy either (unlike, for example, the old Iron Curtain countries that rose up to fight for it).
     
  7. basso

    basso Member
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    Japan, after WW2?
     
  8. B-Bob

    B-Bob "94-year-old self-described dreamer"
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    What a nice springboard for comraderie and civil debate.

    Please see the plea, a thread authored by RM95.
     
  9. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    You mean his comments today about the horrible mistakes being made in Iraq?

    He is steamrolling Condi and the administration today.

    Still like him?

    Anyway, as to his main point.....sure, if the utopian vision of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq comes true, of course it would help with the war on terror.....that of course is premised on the fact that the Bush admiinistration can achieve such a goal.

    Thus far, they're doing a worse job rebuilding Iraq than even in Afghanistan...in short, it's been a failure.

    I'll post Kerrey's quotes on Iraq when they are transcribed.
     
    #9 SamFisher, Apr 8, 2004
    Last edited: Apr 8, 2004
  10. ROXTXIA

    ROXTXIA Member

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    We also tried reeeeal hard to bring democracy to Vietnam and that just turned out great.

    It's a noble endeavor but just won't fly.
     
  11. Major

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    Japan, after WW2?

    I would argue that is more the exception than the rule, and took place in a very different world. That was an environment where we literally destroyed the country in virtually every aspect - they had no choice but to do as we wanted. It was the result of losing a war. They accepted defeat and everything that came with it. You didn't have resistance or leadership issues, etc.

    In this case, we're trying to do it as a partnership - but that requires them to want democracy as much as we do. While they certainly want something besides Hussein, I'm not they care too much whether its a democracy or a friendlier dictator.
     
  12. basso

    basso Member
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    i heard him, and i think he's wrong. if anything, we need to be even more ruthless, get positively medieval on they ass.
     
  13. basso

    basso Member
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    a little too early to throw in the towel isn't it?
     
  14. basso

    basso Member
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    our major mistake in iraq, IMHO, the country doesn't feel defeated. hopefully, Operation Vigilant Resolve will go some way towards rectifying that error.
     
  15. Rocketman95

    Rocketman95 Hangout Boy

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    I agree. Whether or not one believes we should've attacked Iraq, it's been done. Now, we have to make sure that we give the resources to ensuring that we do all it takes to make sure that it, along with the 500 deaths aren't for naught.
     
  16. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    See I actually think that is the biggest problem, that they (and the rest of the arab world) feels inferior, humilliated, and defeated. They get whooped by us, Israel, their culture has become irrelevant when it used to be dominant (a thousand years ago). Accordingly, they have a lot of anger, combine that with poverty and jihad and you've got a bunch of pissed off guys with nothing to lose.

    The difference with Japan is that the Japanese, after the war (or so I read a few months ago in "Embracing Defeat", a fantastic book about the rebuilding of Japan) directed their anger not at the US but at their military class for getting them into WWII in the first place and launching a war of aggression that brought the US in. The military class in Japan was essentially the descendants of the samurai/shogun class that repressed the averge japanese peasant for centuries.

    The Iraqis and Arabs don't have that situation. While they can direct anger at Hussein & the Baathists, they were largely minding their own business when we decided to come in and start blowing things up. The US and the West have been expanding into/dominating arab affairs for about a century, so they really don't feel the degree of inward guilt/etc that the Japanese did.
     
  17. basso

    basso Member
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    perhaps after Fallujah we will stop granting excuses to the middle east for the depravity into which so much of its culture has sunk.

    --
    The Mirror of Fallujah
    No more passes and excuses for the Middle East
    Victor Davis Hanson

    What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for hours.

    Yet I fear that we have not seen anything new. Flip through the newspaper and the stories are as depressing as they are monotonous: bombs in Spain; fiery clerics promising death in England, even as explosive devices are uncovered in France. In-between accounts of bombings in Iraq, we get the normal murdering in Israel, and daily assassination in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, and Chechnya. Murder, dismemberment, torture—these all seem to be the acceptable tools of Islamic fundamentalism and condoned as part of justifiable Middle East rage. Sheik Yassin is called a poor crippled “holy man” who ordered the deaths of hundreds, as revered in the Arab World for his mass murder as Jerry Falwell is condemned in the West for his occasional slipshod slur about Muslims.

    Yet the hourly killing is perhaps not merely the wages of autocracy, but part of a larger grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display. The Taliban strung up infidels from construction cranes and watched, like Romans of old, gory stoning and decapitations in soccer stadiums built with UN largess. In the last two years, Palestinian mobs have torn apart Israeli soldiers, lynched their own, wired children with suicide bombing vests, and machine-gunned down women and children—between sickening scenes of smearing themselves with the blood of “martyrs.” Very few Arab intellectuals or holy men have condemned such viciousness.

    Daniel Pearl had his head cut off on tape; an American diplomat was riddled with bullets in Jordan. Or should we turn to Lebanon and gaze at the work of Hezbollah—its posters of decapitated Israeli soldiers proudly on display? Some will interject that the Saudis are not to be forgotten—whose religious police recently allowed trapped school girls to be incinerated rather than have them leave the flaming building unescorted, engage in public amputations, and behead adulteresses. But Mr. Assad erased from memory the entire town of Hama. And why pick on Saddam Hussein, when earlier Mr. Nasser, heartthrob to the Arab masses, gassed Yemenis? The Middle-East coffee houses cry about the creation of Israel and the refugees on the West Bank only to snicker that almost 1,000,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.

    And then there is the rhetoric. Where else in the world do mainstream newspapers talk of Jews as the children of pigs and apes? And how many wacky Christian or Hindu fundamentalists advocate about the mass murder of Jews or promise death to the infidel? Does a Western leader begin his peroration with “O evil infidel” or does Mr. Sharon talk of “virgins” and “blood-stained martyrs?”

    Conspiracy theory in the West is the domain of Montana survivalists and Chomsky-like wackos; in the Arab world it is the staple of the state-run media. This tired strophe and antistrophe of threats and retractions, and braggadocio and obsequiousness grates on the world at large. So Hamas threatens to bring the war to the United States, and then back peddles and says not really. So the Palestinians warn American diplomats that they are not welcome on the soil of the West Bank—as if any wish to return when last there they were murdered trying to extend scholarships to Palestinian students.

    I am sorry, but these toxic fumes of the Dark-Ages permeate everywhere. It won’t do any more simply to repeat quite logical exegeses. Without consensual government, the poor Arab Middle East is caught in the throes of rampant unemployment, illiteracy, statism, and corruption. Thus in frustration it vents through its state-run media invective against Jews and Americans to assuage the shame and pain. Whatever.

    But at some point the world is asking: “Is Mr. Assad or Hussein, the Saudi Royal Family, or a Khadafy really an aberration—all rogues who hijacked Arab countries—or are they the logical expression of a tribal patriarchal society whose frequent tolerance of barbarism is in fact reflected in its leadership? Are the citizens of Fallujah the victims of Saddam, or did folk like this find their natural identity expressed in Saddam? Postcolonial theory and victimology argue that European colonialism, Zionism, and petrodollars wrecked the Middle East. But to believe that one must see India in shambles, Latin America under blanket autocracy, and an array of suicide bombers pouring out of Mexico or Nigeria. South Korea was a moonscape of war when oil began gushing out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia; why is it now exporting cars while the latter are exporting death? Apartheid was far worse than the Shah’s modernization program; yet why did South Africa renounce nuclear weapons while the Mullahs cheated on every UN protocol they could?

    No, there is something peculiar to the Middle East that worries the world. The Arab world for years has promulgated a quite successful media image as perennial victims—proud folks, suffering under a series of foreign burdens, while nobly maintaining their grace and hospitality. Middle-Eastern Studies programs in the United States and Europe published an array of mostly dishonest accounts of Western culpability, sometimes Marxist, sometimes anti-Semitic that were found to be useful intellectual architecture for the edifice of panArabism, as if Palestinians or Iraqis shared the same oppressions, the same hopes, and the same ideals as downtrodden American people of color—part of a universal “other” deserving victim status and its attendant blanket moral exculpation. But the curtain has been lifted since 9-11 and the picture we see hourly now is not pretty.

    Imagine an Olympics in Cairo? Or an international beauty pageant in Riyadh? Perhaps an interfaith world religious congress would like to meet in Teheran? Surely we could have the World Cup in Beirut? Is there a chance to have a World Bank conference in Ramallah or Tripoli? Maybe Damascus could host a conference of the world’s neurosurgeons?

    And then there is the asymmetry of it all. Walk in hushed tones by a mosque in Iraq, yet storm and desecrate the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank with impunity. Blow up and assassinate Westerners with unconcern; yet scream that Muslims are being questioned about immigration status in New York. Damn the West as you try to immigrate there; try to give the Middle East a fair shake while you prefer never to visit such a place. Threaten with death and fatwa any speaker or writer who “impugns” Islam, demand from Western intellectuals condemnation of any Christians who speak blasphemously of the Koran.

    I have purchased Israeli agricultural implements, computer parts, and read books translated from the Hebrew; so far, nothing in the contemporary Arab world has been of much value in offering help to the people of the world in science, agriculture, or medicine. When there is news of 200 murdered in Madrid or Islamic mass-murdering of Christians in the Sudan, or suicide bombing in Israel, we no longer look for moderate mullahs and clerics to come forward in London or New York to condemn it. They rarely do. And if we might hear a word of reproof, it is always qualified by the ubiquitous “but”—followed by a litany of qualifiers about Western colonialism, Zionism, racism, and hegemony that have the effects of making the condemnation either meaningless or in fact a sort of approval.

    Yet it is not just the violence, the boring threats, the constant televised hatred, the temper-tantrums of fake intellectuals on televisions, the hypocrisy of anti-Western Arabs haranguing America and Europe from London or Boston, or even the pathetic shouting and fist-shaking of the ubiquitous Arab street. Rather the global village is beginning to see that the violence of the Middle East is not aberrant, but logical. Its misery is not a result of exploitation or colonialism, but self-induced. Its fundamentalism is not akin to that of reactionary Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity, but of an altogether different and much fouler brand.

    The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures. Quite simply, any society in which citizens owe their allegiance to the tribe rather than the nation, do not believe in democracy enough to institute it, shun female intellectual contributions, allow polygamy, insist on patriarchy, institutionalize religious persecution, ignore family planning, expect endemic corruption, tolerate honor killings, see no need to vote, and define knowledge as mastery of the Koran is deeply pathological.

    When one adds to this depressing calculus that for all the protestations of Arab nationalism, Islamic purity and superiority, and whining about a decadent West, the entire region is infected with a burning desire for things Western—from cell phones and computers to videos and dialysis, you have all the ingredients for utter disaster and chaos. How after all in polite conversation can you explain to an Arab intellectual that the GDP of Jordan or Morocco has something to do with an array of men in the early afternoon stuffed into coffee shops spinning conspiracy tales, drinking coffee, and playing board games while Japanese, Germans, Chinese, and American women and men are into their sixth hour on the job? Or how do you explain that while Taiwanese are studying logarithms, Pakistanis are chanting from the Koran in Dark-Age madrassas? And how do you politely point out that while the New York Times and Guardian chastise their own elected officials, the Arab news in Damascus or Cairo is free only to do the same to us?

    I support the bold efforts of the United States to make a start in cleaning up this mess, in hopes that a Fallujah might one day exorcize its demons. But in the meantime, we should have no illusions about the enormity of our task, where every positive effort will be met with violence, fury, hypocrisy, and ingratitude.

    If we are to try to bring some good to the Middle East, then we must first have the intellectual courage to confess that for the most part the pathologies embedded there are not merely the work of corrupt leaders but often the very people who put them in place and allowed them to continue their ruin.

    So the question remains did Saddam create Fallujah or Fallujah Saddam?
     
  18. basso

    basso Member
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    btw, i found kerrey's comments about bipartisanship in the WSJ article somewhat ironic given his adversarial posture during his questioning of Dr. Rice.
     
  19. ron413

    ron413 Member

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    Dr. Rice did a great job this morning.
     
  20. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    I though Kerrey was hypercritical of both sides.

    EDIT: his remarks on Iraq and the war on terror today, these seem to echo Clarkes sentiments on the war in Iraq (and Hosni Mubarak's, and the Army War College, and Robert Baer, and Rand Beers, and Wayne Downing, Wesley Clark, Barry McCaffrey, etc etc etc etcand any number of names big in counterterror) :

     
    #20 SamFisher, Apr 8, 2004
    Last edited: Apr 8, 2004

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