That is absolute horsesh*t.

The war against terrorism is a war of ideas, and the administration has repeatedly said that this would be a hard and long slog. *I* would have like to hear more detail, esp. more on the philosophical battle, but there was no sugarcoating.

And you talk like the administration can somehow prove miraculously to all people, beyond all ability to question, what is going on in the ME. Why are you holding the Republicans up to this impossible standard? When did any Democrat prove his claims, like a science experiment, and end opposition to them that way?

Likewise, you imply that somehow, without some magic intervention, Americans have no information whatsoever to use in assessing the situation: no personal contacts, no reading of reports, no reading between the lines of the reports, nothing. (That’s us, helpless.) But you believe that government (or should I say Government) has the power to give an Answer that all will agree on.

The things you ask for are beyond the power of any government.

Ugh, should have been, “When things seem to not go well,”. Preview is my friend.

Sorry, your opening in that paragraph doesn’t go with the conclusion. As a member of a democracy, it is ultimately your responsibility to make judgement calls about such things. To the extent that you can’t (and we all can’t on some piece of the puzzle or another), then you fall back on your judgement of the character and capabilities of the person said democracy put in charge to represent it.

You cannot delegate that fallback judgement to others, or talk about perception, or other such things that affect how other people make their judgement when making your own. To the extent that the perception is off with the reality, then the question becomes what we, as citizens, can do to change that.

Yeah? And when people twist what the administration said, over and over, after the fact, to make them apparently claim things they did not, then the administration loses credibility. I get it. For those of us who were listening to what was said, instead of what others said about what was said, the administration hasn’t lost any credibility. (Not on that front. Some are upset about the administration not fighting back enough to keep the credibility, but I for one don’t see what they good do in the face of such an obvious attempt to distort their message.)

Bush has yet to mislead about *one single thing*. He is the most honest president we have had in my lifetime. The administration was going to “lose credibility” *no matter what they did*. They only question was what they would accomplish before they did it. *All* administrations lose credibility, and Republican ones faster than warranted (see MSM).

Since Bush said in Sept/Oct. 2001 that what he was starting would not be finished during his administration, and probably not even the one afterwards, only the ignorant or willfully blind could miss the implications (or, I guess, the willfully ignorant or blindly partisan–see Kerry’s 2004 complaint that he didn’t get the war he voted for). The *only* reason that perception has not suffered more in Afghanistan is because it gives certain parties room to point and say, “here, here is the way it should work,” while they pretend they want us to “do something in Darfur”–as long as that something looks good without committing anything of substance If never in Iraq, we would still be in Afghanistan, we’d be getting hit harder there, and the same usual suspects would be dredging up “quagmire” talk. (Actually, they’d never have dropped it. They started it before we even hit Iraq, and only dropped it when they got a better target.)

Rumsfeld baiting is a decoy. Selective Cheney quoting (instead look at his actual words, over time) is a decoy. Afghan winter is a decoy. Saddam being some secular guy that would never find any common cause with terroists–yep, decoy. *Serious* people that signed up as supporters of hitting terrorists where ever they lived signed up for the whole thing. All the hows are just tactical wrangling, unless someone wants to claim that limiting our hit to Afghanistan is a strategy. That’s not quite as bad as hitting “a camel in the butt with a missle” as a face saving way of pretending to sign up, but 20 years from now, it might as well be for all the good it does.

Like Lincoln (and Grant and Sherman), you need someone that understands the “terrible arithmetic”. We cannot fight Islamic Jihad solely on our terms, at our pace. Therefore, we cannot dictate our losses. We can only pick the battles that seem to give us the most gain for what we can bring to the fight at that time. Sometimes we can only pick the really awful ones that pale only in comparison to the civilian carnage that could result if we don’t fight.

We fight a war with the lily-livered, smug, self-righteous, twerps in the public that you have, not the ones we wish we had. When things go well, I find more fault with the twerps than the administration. You seem to blame the administration for not convincing the twerps to be something that they are not.

As for WMD, that horse has been beat near half to death. I agree that we’d be in a lot better shape diplomatically if certain people hadn’t put so much effort into pretending that Bush lied about WMD.

1. Weaker form of Cut n Run?

I didn’t say anywhere that we should cut and run. I personally think it would probably be a disaster if we left Iraq now, a disaster that would probably include the genocide of many Sunni and for which the US would be blamed, further inflaming the Sunni Madmen like Bin Laden.

2. It’s a form of, “should have done it my way, and it would have worked out better”

Argh! How about a form of assessing the situation now and trying to learn from what’s happened and how that has affected the American people and their support for the President. I don’t know that not invading Iraq would have meant winning in Afghanistan.

The biggest problem, I think, may be credibility (which often has nothing to do with facts). The administration didn’t say “We’re going to invade Iraq, it may be a bad mess, it will cost lots, it will take a lot of people and time and in the end we may have to leave with a Civil War brewing.” Instead, they apparently believed that it would be quick, painless and done by now. This, in the face of many ME experts warning that the occupation, not the invasion would be the problem. Now, four years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead soldiers later, the administrations credibility is blown. Those who advised Bush and planned the invasion apparently did so in some reality where positive think = positive outcome. None of the publicly available information about our strategy assumed the worst, not even close.

The American people tend to “trust but verify” when it comes to the government. What the hell can they verify from this administrations war in Afghanistan and Iraq, when compared to what they were told ahead of time?

Precious little.

Little enough that they are not likely to trust this administration with yet another front in the GWoT. That, more than anything that the MSM has pushed, is our problem today. I agree that the MSM doesn’t show Bush in a favorable light. They slant the news to sell their ads and in a way that meets their view of reality. However, this has been mode of operation with every President that has been in office… how many times did we hear about Blue Dresses with Clinton?

At the end of the day though, Bush and his team have lost their credibility with the American people. The connection between AQ and Iraq, we now know was not true (or at least not nearly as concrete as we were led to believe)… and instead of saying “Hey we made an error”, they continued for years to push it until its simply become ludicrous. The same for the insurgency. When Cheney is on tape as saying that the insurgency is “pretty much over”, while experts were saying that it would continue for years… the administration loses credibility. When were told that Saddam has Nukes that he can get off the ground in short order, but these are never produced, never confirmed and now… never talked about… the administration loses credibility.

I’m not making judgment calls about what IS or ISN’T true. Saddam may have had Nukes that he was planning on giving to AQ for use in the US, I don’t know. However, the American people have not been given any way to verify this… they were told over and over… then a couple weak circumstantial connections provided the only ‘proof’. Americans will not trust that which they can never verify, thats not patriotism, that nationalism and the domain of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Democracy isn’t that easy, but its much better in the end.

If someone supported going into Afghanistan without a firm understanding that this was the first in a long line of steps–and that we can’t afford to “finish” one step before starting the next–then the problem is in a weak understanding of how wide-ranging conflicts are fought.

I knew what we were getting into from the beginning. I didn’t know specifically where we would run into trouble or where troops would die, but I knew that this kind of effort inevitably involves setbacks. (I really expected the Iraq invasion–not the occupation, the invasion–to lead to somewhere around 2,000 to 3,000 serious casualties (death or amputation or other life-long injuries). So when I support the particular conflicts, it is part of this bigger whole.

If people bothered to listen to Bush, and bothered to educate themselves minimally on the military, they’d know these things as well. If you supported something else going into Afghanistan, then you needed to understand that the USA wasn’t implementing your plan then, and support or not support accordingly.

dclydew,

I don’t want to tar and feather you, but that last particular post is merely a weaker form of cut and run. It’s a form of, “should have done it my way, and it would have worked out better”–and it’s on shaky ground, even with hindsight. There was no more support for tangling with Iran in 2001 than there is now, and a weaker strategic position then as well. Logistics matter in Iran.

As for WMD, that horse has been beat near half to death. I agree that we’d be in a lot better shape diplomatically if certain people hadn’t put so much effort into pretending that Bush lied about WMD.

Sigh. This is so tiresome.

In other words, you think that the war against terrorist jihadis who hate the US can be won by military means alone.

This is certainly what you imply by your “finishing the job” comment.

Why not start from your premise? Why not argue your premise instead of assuming it?

However, instead of finishing the job, there was the big cry for Iraq and its WMD’s. There was the preaching of the Gospel according to Rumsfeld, about a short war with lots of flowers and oil money to pay for it all. And many (notably less than before) seemed pretty supportive of Bush. Any talk of insurgency was laughed off or decried as unpatriotic (hell, even by some who frequented blog forums…) Yet, here we are, years later with no stability, no WMD’s, no Oil money to pay for it all and we still haven’t succeeded in Afghanistan, nor have we caught or killed Bin Laden (that we know of).

Now, Bush finally gets around to pointing a finger at Iran, a real wolf, a country that’s actively perusing Nuclear tech, a country that was used as a key travel point for 9/11 hijackers, a nation that has pulled underhanded stabs at America for most of my lifetime. And the American people hear only “Wolf!!”. We haven’t cleaned up our mess in Afghanistan, we haven’t cleaned up our mess in Iraq… the information we got from our government, be it through faulty intel, or rose-tinted sunglasses, or lies, or stupidity, or whatever excuse there may be… was incorrect in some very real sense. Is it any wonder that those loud, proud Americans that backed the justifiable invasion of a rouge state and the invasion of an immediate percieved threat, now keeps silent?

War should always be the final and last resort. War costs lots of not easily renewed resources; money, weapons, armor, vehicles, bullets and most importantly the lives of our soldiers. War should be an option only when we’re sure that the investment is necessary and unavoidable and then implemented with a plan that makes the investment worthwhile. Currently, our investments in Afghanistan and Iraq are deep in the red (both metaphorically and literally). We’ve spent far more than we expected to, lost far more good Americans than we expected to, have yet to see real evidence that any of this is working and, honestly, we still haven’t avenged the deaths of 3000 of our fellow citizens… their murderer is still at large.

Despite what some may think, most of us in this country aren’t bloodthirsty Rambos. Distaste for war seems a feature of Democracy and of a strong free market. Most Americans would prefer not to be at War, if it can be avoided. Is it not understandable that their taste for war has faltered in the face of poor leadership? Be Bush right or wrong about any or all of the past 6 years… he appears as a poor leader and no one wants to follow a poor leader into a war, when he hasn’t finished the first or second one he started.

So there it is… we face a real enemy and the government that leads us has lost its credibility, its potency and people no longer feel comfortable playing the Light Brigade.

I would rather see Saddam still in power and a united United States willing to stand against Iran, than the mess we now find ourselves in.

He was a madman, but Ahmadinejad is a madman who can hurt us.

Seems to me that nobody in their right mind would deny that Iran has fighting a proxy war with us since 1979.