Text 15412, 110 rader
Skriven 2007-06-13 17:11:05 av Josh Hill (1825.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: unions
==================
On Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:26:25 GMT, Kurt Ullman <kurtullman@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>In article <fba073dtj8bdamc0510srgmf5cu5skpdnh@4ax.com>,
> Josh Hill <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 
>> >> Which makes Bush's mistake all the more shocking. He lived through the
>> >> Vientam years. He had Colin Powell, the author of the Powell Doctrine,
>> >> as his Secretary of State. But he turned one of the greatest
>> >> advantages of democracies -- the reluctance of their citizens to
>> >> become cannon fodder unless there's a damn good reason -- into a
>> >> liability. Now we're painted into a corner, and the best we can hope
>> >> to do is leave our footprints where the furniture is likely to sit.
>> >
>> >          You missed the point so valiantly (g). Little from Iraq 
>> >(outside of the intransigence of GWB himself) has dispelled the idea 
>> >from BHD that we are likely to turn tail and run when bloodied. Your 
>> >post did nothing to dispel that either.
>> 
>> Because we are!
>> 
>   Okay. So your point is that Bush should have known the American 
>people would turn tail and run when our noses were bloodied a little bit 
>and his major policy failure was to take into account that we are all 
>wussied? 

The American people won't fight if they don't think it's worth it, no.
And sure, Bush should have known that, because everybody else did. But
I didn't say it was his major policy failure. It's just one of so many
that I can't for the life of me figure out how he does it. As the
world's most conservative cartoonist put it the other day, George of
the Bungle:

http://www.gocomics.com/glennmccoy/

You know it's bad when even Glenn McCoy does an about-face.

>> My point is that, rather than repairing that impression, Bush
>> reinforced it. Everyone knows by now that one of a few conditions are
>> necessary if the American public is to continue backing a war: it has
>> to address a significant threat,  or it has to be small, or it has to
>> be successful. And just about everyone knows that the advantages of
>> our highly mechanized, advanced military are largely nullified when
>> we're fighting a limited war house-to-house in friendly territory, or
>> fighting insurgents or terrorists who blend into the local population.
>
>    So, then we should have not even tried but rather waited around 
>until the Soviet Union or someone else was nice enough to engage us in a 
>manner we were, under your assessment, better able to undertake?

No, we should have played to our strengths: overwhelming force,
destruction of strategic targets. Quick victory, catch Saddam, /get
out/ -- or if you can't get out, leave an occupying force that is
sufficiently large by historical standards, as Gen. Shinseki
recommended, only to be publicly humiliated for his troubles by the
White House. That way you prevent the broken window syndrome, the
escalating cycle of lawlessness.

That's exactly what Bush's father did, except that he left Saddam in
place. He took a lot of flack for it in the following years. But the
words he wrote in his book about avoiding a bloodbath in Baghdad sound
eerily prescient. One of the questions I think we should be asking
ourselves (when we're done with important things like flaming, of
course) is why the responsible voices have such a tough time being
heard these days. That's not a Republican or Democratic thing,
although I obviously prefer one party. But the level of discourse has
fallen so low, the swing voters know so little about what's actually
going on, that elections have turned into glorified soap commercials.

>> We won the goddamn war. It was a cakewalk for us. But rather than
>> listening to the generals who told the truth, e.g., Shinseki, Bush
>> fired them and replaced them with generals who told him what he'd want
>> to hear. Rather than going in quickly and then handing things over, as
>> his father had, he dismantled the government and army, turned down the
>> /request/ of the UN to take over, delayed elections. And so forth.
>         No problems here. Although your faith in the UN after about any 
>African dust-up over the last 50 years, Kosovo, Iran, Iraq, anything 
>remotely involving Israel, the list is endless, is rather touching.. .if 
>not exactly reasoned.  

Within very broad limits, would it have mattered what the UN did with
it after we were out? We'd achieved our secondary objective, which was
to get rid of Saddam (our primary one, of course, turned out to be a
shibboleth). Our tertiary one, turning Iraq into the United States of
the Cradle of Civilization, probably wasn't realistic.

>> If, at the moment of victory, we'd handed things over and gotten out,
>> we not only would have had every dictator in the world shaking in his
>> jackboots, we would have immediately put the lie to the people who
>> claimed we were trying to start an empire or steal Iraq's oil.
>> Instead, Bush painted a big fat target on our tail that said "Kick
>> here."

>        No, because the UN would have gotten out when any real shooting 
>started.

Smart! Because if we know anything about that part of the world, it's
that once they start blowing one another up there's no stopping it
until they've reduced themselves to rubble and some strongman marches
in. Look at what Fatah and Hamas are doing in the Gaza strip: all the
Israelis had to do to win the war there was to leave.

-- 
Josh

"Paranoia results from a proper perception
of the food chain." - Boots
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
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