I am just very uncomfortable with the president thinking and talking in these terms. World War III is not something to even joke about much less talk seriously about as President. The fact that he THINKS in these terms is a very disconcerting It seems like he is SEEKING it out Rocket River
On top of what mc mark said there are many military families who will feel they need to believe in what is happening right now whether it is just or not. They have loved ones in the line of fire and if they or their loved ones get too deeply caught up the horrendousness of their betrayal my this administration they could lose their edge and that could cost them their life. So I don’t blame them for in the heat of war trying to hold onto the belief that what they are doing is just. It is the media and the citizens who need to stand on the front lines at home and make sure that the miliary has been used properly and not merely sent to die to satisfy the political ambitions of a few members of one party. Sadly there are more than a few who claim to be “supporting the troops” but who are in fact only trying to suppress the inquiries and to cover up for those who’ve needlessly sent the troops, on false pretenses, to fight an illegal war that has cost 2,500 of them their lives and many more than that serious physical and psychological injury. The people who are really supporting and defending the troops are those who are pushing to find out what really happened and to hold accountable those who have so horribly misused the military.
This is getting to be less and less true. http://www.militarycity.com/polls/2005_main.php Bush's support amongst active military is down to 54% - and that was in December. Based on how polls have tracked since then, its almost certain that less than 50% of military members now look at Bush favorably. Unfortunately, this poll only started 3 years ago - I would like to see how Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, etc fared in comparison.
I love how they utilize the ridiculous way Vietnam vets were treated as a way to justify this war WE don't want to have these vets treated like the Vietnam vets so We must support them . . .well . . supporting them and supporting the war are two different things Rocket River most americans seem to miss that though
The man's obviously a Great Omnicient Decider. Pro-Bushies will probably cite that economies spike after wars. With all that rubble and dead bodies, there's a lot of jobs to fill.
Is Terrorism World War III? by Philip Ball Back to Previous Page The third World War has already started. It is not George Bush’s rhetorical “war on terror,” but terrorism itself. In other words, terrorism is the new war. Journalistic cliché? Apparently not. A recent analysis of the casualty statistics of global terrorism shows they follow the pattern previously observed for conventional conflicts ranging from small local skirmishes to the Second World War. In at least two continuing conflicts not generally regarded as terrorist in nature - in Iraq and Colombia - the statistics are converging on the form seen for global terrorism, perhaps indicating that governments need to deal with wars differently. According to Neil Johnson, a physicist at Oxford University and one of the team that studied the figures, the findings raise the possibility that both conflicts “are a part of one big ongoing global war - a mother of all wars.” If that is so, London is embroiled in it, too. The casualty figures for the July 7 bombings “absolutely fall in line” with what the analysis of terrorism statistics predict, says Johnson. But how can a single, simple (if gruesome) statistic such as the number of people killed in attacks tell us anything meaningful about events and conflicts conducted in completely different places for what seem to be totally different reasons? Isn’t this like expecting to understand a country’s culture by counting its population? That depends on what you are looking for. When he first studied the statistics of “deadly quarrels” eighty years ago, the British physicist Lewis Fry Richardson wanted to understand why wars happen. Richardson, a Quaker who served as an ambulance driver in the First World War, hoped that such insight could promote world peace. He decided first to find out how wars were distributed according to their size. In the 1920s, Richardson plotted the fatality statistics for 82 wars fought since 1820 on a graph showing the size of the conflicts on one axis and the number of conflicts of that size on the other. He found that the data fitted onto a smooth curve which, when the numbers were plotted as logarithms, became a straight line. This sort of mathematical relationship is known as a power law. The line slopes “downwards” because there are progressively fewer conflicts of ever-greater size: little wars are common, big ones rare. The power law continued to hold as the data embraced conflicts such as the Second World War and Vietnam. Richardson’s discovery of power-law statistics of conflicts has been followed subsequently by the recognition that power laws govern all sorts of “social” statistics, from the sizes of towns to the fluctuations of economic markets and the network structure of the World Wide Web. Power-law statistics of event sizes are also found for natural phenomena that occur close to points of instability, such as earthquakes and avalanches. This suggests that social systems prone to power-law statistics, such as economic markets and international relations, also operate on the brink of instability. Earlier this year, computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young at the University of New Mexico showed that the fatalities from acts of terrorism since 1968 also follow a power law. “We were very surprised,” Clauset says. “It made us think that there may be some deep, underlying connection between terrorism and wars.” But they found that not all terrorism is the same. There are two different power laws - one that fits the figures for terrorist attacks in industrialized (G8) nations; and another for attacks in the rest of the world. The slope of the straight-line plot was steeper in the latter case, indicating that attacks in industrialized nations are more rare but more severe when they do occur. The attacks of September 11 indicate precisely that, as do the London bombings. Johnson has teamed up with economist Mike Spagat at Royal Holloway College in London, a specialist in the Colombian conflict, and researchers in Bogotá, Colombia, to apply the same kind of analysis to this continuing struggle between the government and several left- and right-wing insurgent groups. The conflict has been going on since the 1980s, and at face value it resembles neither a terrorist-style confrontation nor a conventional war. But the researchers found that the fatality statistics for individual attacks since 1989 also follow a power law. More strikingly still, the slope of the power law has been decreasing steadily over time and appears to be converging on precisely the value that Clauset and Young found for global (non-G8) terrorism. The Colombian “war” may have started out as something unique, but it seems now to have mutated into a conflict with the fingerprint of terrorism. And the team found the same trend for the statistics in Iraq since the coalition invasion in March 2003. Here, the slope of the power law initially had much the same value as that seen by Richardson for conventional wars. But it has crept up steadily since 2003, and now it, too, is equal to that for global terrorism. Johnson argues that, while the conventional approach of political analysts is to look for micro-explanations of the course of a conflict in terms of the motivations of the groups concerned, that statistical analysis suggests that the outcomes are much more to do with “the mechanics of how people now do war.” “It’s like looking at different markets,” [Johnson] says. “We now know that a lot of the fluctuations are universal, irrespective of whether you’re looking at trading in New York or Shanghai.” With that in mind, he and his colleagues have developed a simple mathematical model of how insurgent forces are organized into small groups that are continually coalescing and fragmenting. Assuming that the destructive capacity of a group depends on its size and resources, this model predicts the value of the power-law slope found for global terrorism. The team’s conclusion supports the assertion of Mary Kaldor, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, that “the ongoing war in Iraq is a new type of war.” Kaldor says that US military action in Iraq has been predicated on the assumption that they are fighting an “old war.” “This is immensely dangerous,” Kaldor says. That, it seems, must also be the message for any global “war on terror” - it is not one that can be won by military might, but by new strategies. In “new wars,” says Kaldor, military forces should be deployed for law enforcement, and “forces are needed that combine soldiers, police and civilians with the capacity to undertake humanitarian and legal activities.” But if, as Johnson’s work suggests, these conflicts have indeed turned into a form of terrorism, they will not be over soon. According to Clauset, the power-law statistics of terrorism show that it “is an endemic feature of the modern world and is likely not something that can be completely eradicated. Instead, it should be considered in a similar way to other endemic problems, such as crime and natural disasters.” This article originally appeared in The Guardian of August 4, 2005 and is reprinted under fair use standards.
I know he's president and all...but something tells me that that article Hayes just slapped up as a defense attempt and George Bush himself probably aren't quite on the same wavelength.
Bush and Reagan are both buoyed by quasi-victories (Iran Hostages freed, Berlin Wall falls) at the beginning of their terms. Reagan also builds up the military, and talks tough to Russia. Bush is a WWII vet with a good war story, also has Desert Storm and the end of the Cold War. Draft-dodging, Haiti, Don't Ask Don't Tell, partial military cutbacks (though fiscally responsible, and a sensible post-Cold War action), Somalia, Chinese fundraising allegations (along with accusations of "selling them weapons technology") probably hurt Clinton's military approval. On a side note, even though I would support the idea of internal polls of military's of Presidential support as a means of gauging morale, I have an odd queasiness about publicly polling active military about their boss/commander, particularly in any kind of a war-time environment.
Japanese bomb carrying balloons were used against the United States, with most of them falling on the Western seaboard. They were not an effective weapon, but that could constitute fighting in North America.
WEll with Dubya, it is just not ignorance of W W II. Seymour Hirsch interview: ******** And there goes a scoop about bad blood, I said to myself. But on Iran, it was something different for Hersh. He was talking to a contact. "I brought up Iran. 'It's really bad,' he said. 'You ought to get into it. You can go to Vienna and find out how far away (from nuclear weapons production) they are.' Then he told me they were having trouble walking back the nuclear option with Bush. People don't want to speak out--they want the **** on my head." As Hersh said in his New Yorker report, nuclear planners routinely go through options--"we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," he quotes one of them as saying--but once the planners try to argue against all this, they are shouted down. According to another intelligence officer quoted by Hersh, "The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The option came from you'." In other words, once the planners routinely put options on the table, the options become possibilities to be considered rather than technical reports. "That whole Johns Hopkins speech," Hersh goes on, referring to the address in which Bush attacked Hersh's own article, "he talked about the wonderful progress in Iraq. This is hallucinatory--and there are people on a high level in the Pentagon and they can't get the President to give this up. Because it's crazy. .... It's all put neatly by one of Hersh's sources in the Pentagon: "The problem is that the Iranians realise that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the US http://counterpunch.org/fisk05052006.html
I don't defend, baby. I attack. The article was a response to those who voiced the opinion that its absurd to rhteorically link WWIII and terrorism. Yeah I thought it was interesting too. As long as states are the main purveyors of power in the world, there is a place for 'old wars.' I think the part you've keyed in on refers to the 'ongoing' operations in Iraq, not the intervention itself. With that in mind, it certainly would have been good to have the legal/civil affairs force augmented from the beginning of the intervention in Iraq - or as Deckard has often suggested, not disbanding the Iraqi army in the beginning and using them for the legal/civil force would have helped a lot.
I don't get why the pro-bushies get off on death and murder and get stiff off war. I wish we could just send them off to fight with the terrorists somewhere else and leave the rest of us out of it.
Who 'gets off on death and murder?' That a pretty ridiculous accusation to level against even the most ardent Bush supporter.
[OT] Here's another gem from the leader of the free world... _______ Question: President Bush what is your best moment in office? Answer: "I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound perch in my lake" link
