“Too Frenching Stupid”
Needed a break. Took one. All better now.
Sometimes, you just don’t have anything to say. Oh, if there’s a deadline you can’t skirt and a paycheck involved, you can always force something. But a blog? I do this for fun. The day it stops being fun, I’ll close up shop.
So what’d I miss? Here’s today’s Big Story:
After years of delay caused by inadequate intelligence, the U.S. government decided just one day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that it would try to overthrow the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan if a diplomatic push to expel Osama bin Laden from the country failed, the independent panel investigating the attacks reported Tuesday.
The plans were reported in May 2002 by MSNBC.com and NBC News, but the details and precise timing were revealed for the first time in the new report released Tuesday by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
The report alleges that the Clinton and Bush administrations moved slowly against the al-Qaida terror network in the years before the attacks, partly because they lacked detailed intelligence that would have allowed a military strike and partly because they preferred to explore diplomatic alternatives. As a result, bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders were able to elude capture repeatedly.
If the Bushitler crowd hates the President now, how about if he’d attacked Afghanistan without “provocation?” Somehow, in their minds, the 1993 WTC attack, the African embassy bombings, and the suicide strike on the USS Cole weren’t quite provocative enough. Hell, for some of them, not even 9/11 was enough. Afghanistan, they told us
You do seem to hate the French.
Was the last bottle of French wine too sour for your taste or just too pricey?
One of the things I missed at first about all the war in Iraq stuff, is when comparing the arguments side by side, they don’t match up very well.
Saddam was a bad guy. He was murdering, raping, robbing his own people. He invaded two countries. He failed to live up to the cease fire brokered after his removal from Kuwait. He was working on WMD programs, admitted to stockpiles, and had connections to terrorists. (Abu Nidal, and the guy from the Achille Lauro, not to mention Answer al Islam)
Fighting in Iraq would draw terrorist there, and face them against combat troops rather than unarmed civilians here. Removing Saddam would liberate the people of Iraq, possibly install the second Muslim democracy in the Middle East, and start the process of dealing with the real “root cause of terrorism. We owed the Iraqi people after they rose up in 1991 and we did not help them.
That is all reasons for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam. Why not?
Halliburton might make a few bucks. It would increase American influence and power in the region. It would put America in control of a foreign nation (which it does not want, but then it did not want to rebuild Japan and Europe after WW2) It would be a setback for dictators everywhere. People would get hurt and killed. (Forget about all the people Saddam was killing, or the people already hurt and killed in various terrorist attacks.) It would piss off people who already don’t like us and want to, and have tried to, kill us.
You put the two arguments side by side, and one side does not seem that important. Weigh the arguments against each other, and one side far outweighs the other to such a degree, that it is hard to consider it much of an argument.
The fact remains there were a lot of good reasons to remove Saddam and no good reasons not to. It should have been done some time ago. But it didn’t happen, and now it has.
. Fascism is coming. It’s later than you think. Meanwhile, my own skinny, half-Jewish, atheist ass is sitting unmolested in the basement office, shooting off snarky posts highlighting all the Administration’s mistakes
Was the last bottle of French wine too sour for your taste or just too pricey?
French wine has been vastly overrated for decades, at least since Steve Spurrier (no, not the coach) set up the blind taste test between French and American wines, and the French wines lost BADLY.
At that was 1977.
Things have only gotten worse For the French since then.
To: Tomblvd
Comparing wines is a large topic of its own.
To make it short: French wines have the benefit of reputation on their side and some are indeed priced way over the top. So you can be legimitately angry about them on this point, if you want.
However, to say they have got worse over time … Well, I don’t know which ones you tasted recently.
One blind testing of some French wines versus some US wines in 1977 isn’t overly impressive. The quality of wine varies by year and producer. Also for that reason blind testing of wines happens by the dozen. If a producer is consistently rated among the top wines – through good and bad harvest years, you should buy.
Do the Democrats really want to go there? I really don’t see how a messy politically charged witch hunt is going to hurt Bush more than the Democrats.
We all know the list: WTC I, USS Cole, Khobar Towers, African embassies, etc…all al-Queda related attacks that happened before 9/11 and before Bush set foot in the White House. It also turns out that the hijackers were in country and under cover before January 2001…so how does blame fall to Bush for failing to prevent attacks in eight months that Clinton failed to detect and act against in eight years?
The more media play that this gets, the more facts will come out and the worse the Democrats are going to look. The completely one-sided, self serving, and sour grapes rantings of Richard Clarke aren’t going to help either. The whole thesis of his book falls apart if you do ten minutes of research into his background and work.
Liberals who want to politicise 9/11 are giving Kerry just enough rope to hang himself with. He’s already claimed to have been “the first to sound the warning” about terrorism (what did he know and when did he know it?), and he did precisely squat about it. He’s also putting his spineless voting record against the fact that there have been no attacks since 9/11 and Bush’s response to it. Putting your biggest weakness against your opponents biggest strength is a surefire loser every time.
Kerry is already in Dukakis territory. Mark my words, he’s going to end up in a fighter plane or doing something equally pompus and phony before this is all over. His campaign is going to be known as “River Styx” ten years from now…marking the Democrat’s crossing from the mortal world into Hades. I can’t wait to see the carnage unfold!
Old European – why do you bother reading these blogs? French wine? Are you that superficial?
You equate bad wine with hating the French.
It’s not their products that are hateful, it’s their actions starting (for me) with the mayor of Lyon giving up Jewish orphans to the Nazis and it goes downhill from there.
The French are toast to me. Nothing they could do or say could make me look at them other than with disgust.
–To the best of my recollection, I have not spent any time in a concentration camp, deportation center, ill-lit police warehouse, or taken out and shot.–
Now, Stephen, you are married…….
Don’t count your chickens just yet.
OE, that “shitty little country’s” history precedes it.
Nothing they do moves the surprise meter anymore.
They are not allies, and, IMHO, have moved into enemy territory. Which is not surprising anymore.
9/11 sharpened the lines, brought the divisions out in the open. Which is a major difference between us.
Man stands up: Hi, I’m Stephen, and I like to use straw men.
Rest of blogsphere: Hi, Stephen.
Stephen,
*Clap clap clap clap clap.*
Excellent argument.
Meanwhile, we have an election campaign where the Good Guys tell you that George W. Bush is aiming to establish an illegal hegemony in the Middle East, is stuffing the wallets of his Halliburton cronies in the process, is trying to establish a theocracy here at home, went AWOL, and secretly gave the go-ahead for every bad thing Israel has done the last three years. The candidate himself has called the Bush Administration a bunch of “crooks and liars.”
You forgot to mention that he and his administration made many misleading and some flatly untrue statements to justify a war that has cost hundreds of americans their lives and billions of dollars. And if there is a coherent, let alone persuasive, argument that it was necessary to make either of us safer in our basement offices, I have yet to hear it.
Also conspicuously absent: the covenient underestimation of the cost of the Medicare proposal, the chronic overestimation of the number of jobs his magic tax cuts would create, the ballooning of the federal deficit, the opposition to and stonewalling of the 9-11 commission, support for what would surely be the most regrettable language added to the Constitution since the “3/5 compromise”, and now, use of his vice-president, chief of staff, and national security advisor, among others, as taxpayer-compensated book critics.
Any one of the foregoing + an absurd flight suit and “Mission Accomplished” banner + a perplexing inability to correctly pronounce the word “nuclear” depsite degrees from both Harvard and Yale= all the reason in the world to vote Democratic in ’04.
THere we are again, with JNS proving S.Green’s point. Bush wants to fight terrorism and prevent the proliferation of WMD by rogue states, and in the process he liberates more people than ever at any time since 1945. JNS hates this and says that it was the wrong thing to do because of the Medicare budget and how Bush pronounces the word, ‘Nuclear’.
And people say the American antiwar movement can’t be taken seriously.
Still waiting for a coherent argument . . . .
JNS,
See if you can understand this. There were many arguments in favor of the Iraq Campaign but here is the biggest connection with the War on Terror.
1. Terrorism grows out of the dysfunctional political culture of the Arab world.
2. To prevent future terror attacks, culminating in nuclear attacks when the terrorists gain access to nukes through a government which wishes to wage war on the Us while maintianing deniability, this political culture but be reformed.
3. Iraq is the best place to start this reform because of the social and cultural development of its people. Thus we overthrow tyranny in Iraq and establish the Iraqis as having a consensual government. Specialists in the Arab culture have long thought the Iraqis the most promising people in the region for such a development.
4. This example, plus some pushing from the US (including military force if necessary but also including covert action and propaganda) spreads to neighboring countries, which establish consensual governments either by reform or revolution over their own tyrannies.
5. Consensual governments lead to more peaceful states that do not support terrorism and are more stable in reality than a bunch of tyrannical thugs and theocrats.
For a better understanding of what is going on and what the Bush Administration is doing I suggest reading David Pryce-Jones book “The Closed Circle” and Bernard Lewis’ two latest books “What Went Wrong” and “The Crisis of Islam”.
We ought to have done what we are now trying back in 1991 but the Bush 41 administration refused to out of excessive respect for multilateralism, the limitations of the UN resolution to just liberating Kuwait, the opinions of many countries which did not like the idea of a ruler being overthrown for being an enemy of the US (cuts too close to the bone), stability in the Middle East, and most of the other nonsensical arguments used against the Iraq Campaign. Consequently we had to do the fighting all over again in less favorable conditions after 12 years of futilly trying to hold Saddam to his responsibilities under the armistice agreement of 1991 and the UN resolutions. If you like the UN shouldn’t you want to see mandatory UNSC resolutions enforced? If we had freed Iraq in 1991 we might have shortcircuited Al Qaeda and be far advanced on the road to responsible, consensual government in the Middle East now. Now is the time to finish the job.
Fair enough. It’s an argument, albeit not one that is very persuasive to me. Perhaps more importantly, it is certainly not the one that was publicly advanced by the Bush administration as its primary reason for going into Iraq.
It is difficult for me to understand the connection between a group of primarily Saudi radicals whose group was based in Afghanistan and the admittedly despotic and brutal government of Iraq. For some reason, Bush seems to have really, really wanted there to be a connection, but that does not mean that there was one. I cannot quarrel with the notion that Saddam was a brutal thug and that the Iraqis he persecuted are probably better off without him. But I think it is quite a stretch to say that he posed a serious threat to America, and that we were therefore justified in asking hundreds of Americans to sacrifice their lives to deal with him.
And this notion that once democracy is established in Iraq, other totalitarian regimes in the Middle East will fall like dominos as its spreads inexorably throughout the region…where have I heard that theory before?