2 Comments Add your own

• 1. Samal  |  March 19th, 2008 at 3:58 am

  Jon, you have strong opinions and state them well. I try to have my comments address factual issues, but there are some logical fallacies in your post that I need to address as well.

  To begin, you seem to believe that if one takes the advice of one person over another then they have ignored the first person and that is not the case. It simply means that the a choice was made with all the information available not just that one persons. Now perhaps our allies were ignored, but considering most intelligent agencies as well as most nations believed Saddam posed a danger then there has to be other reasons for the decisions. Following the invasion it became clear that many of our allies had financial interests in maintaining Iraq with Saddam in power. Including in some cases illegal bribes and activities surrounding the Oil for Food Scandal, some of which are or have been being prosecuted.

  In the real world nations do things in their own national interest, and there is nothing wrong with that. Somehow over the past couple decades some people have been convinced that this is a bad thing only when it comes to the USA.

  Was the President wrong in his belief as to how we would be greeted and did he really have no plan? Well lets see what New York Times Iraq reporter John Burns told Tim Russert when asked why we weren’t greeted that way:
  

  “The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it. It lasted very briefly, it was exhausted quickly by the looting.” Burns added: “I think that the instincts that led to much that went wrong were good American instincts: the desire not to have too heavy of a footprint, the desire to empower Iraqis.”

  Why didn’t we plan right and could we really have avoided the degradation that occurred?
  

  “I think that the policy makers in Washington, and to be on honest with you the journalists also, to speak for myself, completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush’s phrase, ‘ to stand up’ for themselves, to take authority, to take risks.” Burns also rejected the notion that different U.S. strategies would have prevented the current chaos: “My guess is that history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done, except to impose its own repressive state with half a million troops, which might have had to last ten years or more, nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring.”
  http://newsbusters.org/node/10626

  Let me add here that recent documents recovered from al Qaeda indicate that they hoped to conduct immense attacks in the US after they began losing in Iraq with the hope that we would have to withdraw all of our troops to deal with the tragedy. Perhaps that contingency was included in the options chosen that weren’t, “ignored,” as you put it. That hindsight and all….it can really be twisted to fit your personal leanings can’t it? But as you say, you have no military experience.

  Your comment about the cost of the war is a fallacy as it is not; A) We invade and have the costs involved with that decision; or B) We don’t invade and therefore have no costs. The actual formula would be; A) We invade and have the costs; or B) We don’t invade that therefore have the costs involved with that choice.

  Should we then assume that by not waging the war, Uncle Sam would be a trillion dollars to the better? That would be a questionable assumption, a product of a sort of “static analysis” that assumes if you change one critical factor, all the rest stay pretty much the same. Professional futurists, like the ones at the Big Oil companies, know better than that. They give clients a range of scenarios based on different values for different variables. And that is also what three economists at the University of Chicago’s business school did in 2006. They looked at the costs of not going to war with Iraq back in 2003. Their study instead examined the costs of containing Iraq. …

  Factoring in all those contingencies, the authors find that a containment policy would cost anywhere from $350 billion to $700 billon.
  http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2007/11/14/is-the-iraq-war-costlier-than-doing-nothing.html

  Nearly as costly with no way to know the number of lives lost had we chosen to back down, it could actually be more lost then the nearly 4000 to date.

  Mission accomplished! Do you really stand on that one? Did you hear or read the President’s USS Lincoln address? “Mission Accomplished,” was not in that speech, but he did say:
  

  We have difficult work to do in Iraq. …The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

  But perhaps you meant his address in Qatar later the next month where he actually used those two words:
  

  America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.

  He added:
  

  Not only does the war on terror go on, but we’ve got a lot of work to do in Iraq. And we’re going to stay the course until the job gets done. We will stand with them as they build a stable democracy and a peaceful future.

  Not quite what you meant is it?
  (both quotes from Whitehouse.gov)

  While you state there is no simple solution you then offer the simple solution of, “conclude our Iraq involvement in an expedient fashion.” Don’t you think we should conclude our involvement in Japan first, after all we have been there 63 years. We have a strategic interest in Iraq, whether any of us like it or not. That region is the epicenter of world tyranny and terror at this time and our presence for years would be no different then our presence in Japan (Oh, and before you try to disconnect Iraq from Terror, read the full text of that report last week that reviewed the 600,000 documents found in Iraq. * see below). Or 55 years in Korea — well, we are still at war officially and the South Koreans know this and don’t want us to leave. Or 63 years in Germany, the German people actually protested that thought due to the costs to their economy, both in lost income as well as their loss of security.

  So while you are well spoken and have strong opinions, an objective reader would do well to question the basis of those opinions.

  * The 59 page pentagon report released this month stated:
  

  Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam’s security organizations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a “de facto” link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime. — pdf file
  http://a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf

• 2. Samal  |  March 26th, 2008 at 3:08 am

  So here is a quiz. Who said?

  We’ll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.

  McCain? Bush? Cheney?

  No, this one was Barack Obama’s military advisor, McPeak, the gentleman who this weekend called Bill Clinton Joe McCarthy.

  Now, just for comparison here are the full quotes, first John McCain:

  “Make it 100 [years] … We’ve been in South Korea . . . we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’s fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.”

  Now here is McPeak:
  

  Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

  Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We’ll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.

  I’ll tell you one thing we should not hope for (is) a democratic Iraq. When I hear the president talking about democracy, the last thing we should want is an election in Iraq. We’re not very popular. So I don’t think we’ll see any open elections in Iraq for a long time.

  Hopefully over time they can be brought along like Japan and Germany — Japan and Germany were relatively easy, I think, and South Korea. The Orgonian 3/27/03

  Politico recently reported that the DNC plans on attacking the thought of a 100 year war, FacttCheck.org calls this a “rank falsehood” and a “serious distortion”. Politifact calls Obama’s rhetoric on this “false”

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