Its not a civil war...

[Cleon]

Speaking of failures of ideas, what's with the continuing failure of war opponents to come up with a better anallogy for Iraq than the new Vietnam?

Really? Sounds like a strawman.

I thought the claim was that the anti-war people WERE the best minds in America - isn't that the standard critique, that the smart people opposed it and only the dumb rubes supported it?

Ooh, definitely a strawman.

Then why the hell can't they explain this supposed giant failure on its own terms?

Why can't you admit that it's a giant failure? Three years, constant violence, no end in sight.

If it's really so obvious that we're doomed to defeat, why is it necessary to keep stretching back to more than a generation ago in order to try to prove it?

Another strawman!

It's like a rhetorical pacifier: the word "Vietnam" doesn't actually PROVE anything in a debate (just like a pacifier doesn't provide milk), but it provides a kind of reassurance to those who utter it, and damned if you'll give THAT up.

Kinda like phrases like "liberation of Iraq?" Or "liberation of Afghanistan?" (My current favorite, considering the poor schlub who might be executed for being Christian.)

 

[rikzilla]

I love the logic that says 'well, if you don't like our plan, why don't you try the other guys' plan?' All it shows is that the Republican plan is a failure, always has been a failure, and will continue to be a failure and now they're trying to shift blame and instead stand up and try to fix their failure. It's a nice way of evading the question, nothing more.

On the one hand I have a guy who says he has a plan. He told me up front it would be hard, bloody, and messy. He never once said it would be easy. Not once. He has chosen a hard road and he's walking it resolutely. He's stumbled and fallen and veered off the trail from time to time...but he's gutting it out.

On the other hand I have a chorus of people who have proposed no plan whatsoever. A group of people who sit in bleachers and jeer at the one guy willing to do the work.

Well, that being my choice I guess I'll stick with the dumb looking guy with the big ears. Apparently I had alot of company last election day.

Also, this doesn't excuse the shoddiness of the plan. Bush had from 9/12/2001 until 3/2003 in order to come up with an Iraqi Invasion plan. If he couldn't get the best minds in America to come up with a decent after-war plan, then that's his failure and has nothing to do with the Democrats. If you want to blame anything, go ahead and blame the people who got us into this new Vietnam in the first place.

Funny how you can spin a two-term Republican President as a failure and hold Democrats blameless. Democrats lost 2 elections through sheer incompetence and lack of ideas. Had they better ideas when ideas were needed we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. And still...STILL...after all this time...they have proposed no good ideas on how to deal with the WOT.
Pathetic!

-z

 

[Ziggurat]

Why can't you admit that it's a giant failure?

A question along the same lines as "when did you stop beating your wife". I cannot answer why I do not admit it's a giant failure if I don't think that it is a giant failure. But even if Iraq actually IS like Vietnam, if its failure is really so clear, then it should still be explainable on its own terms, and my question is still legitimate. My question and your question are therefore not equivalent: mine is not actually predicated on my opponent being completely wrong, but yours is. I realize that asking you to understand this difference might be a bit much, but I'm giving it a shot anyways.

 

[CapelDodger]

Speaking of failures of ideas, what's with the continuing failure of war opponents to come up with a better anallogy for Iraq than the new Vietnam?

I've brought up the Moros of the Philipinnes as another analogy. Anologies with other US wars are hard to spot, apart perhaps from the Indian Wars and that's stretching it. The Iraq War, victory and subsequent occupation experience is hardly analogous to the wars against Japan and Germany. The Mexican War, and various forays into Canada, were about territorial expansion, which the Iraq War isn't. The only available analogies are with foreign overt interventions by the US.

I thought the claim was that the anti-war people WERE the best minds in America - isn't that the standard critique, that the smart people opposed it and only the dumb rubes supported it? Then why the hell can't they explain this supposed giant failure on its own terms?

A lot of anti-war people in the US are down-home isolationists who don't like the idea of foreign entanglements. That's what their forefathers were escaping from to create God's Own Country under Wide Skies free from the corruptions and deadly histories of European elites. Whose claim is it that "anti-war people" are the best minds in the US?

 

[rikzilla]

I've brought up the Moros of the Philipinnes as another analogy. Anologies with other US wars are hard to spot, apart perhaps from the Indian Wars and that's stretching it. The Iraq War, victory and subsequent occupation experience is hardly analogous to the wars against Japan and Germany. The Mexican War, and various forays into Canada, were about territorial expansion, which the Iraq War isn't. The only available analogies are with foreign overt interventions by the US.

Well put. Also since Vietnam is the mother of the modern televised anti-war movement and not buried too deeply in the past, it's a natural favorite.

A lot of anti-war people in the US are down-home isolationists who don't like the idea of foreign entanglements. That's what their forefathers were escaping from to create God's Own Country under Wide Skies free from the corruptions and deadly histories of European elites. Whose claim is it that "anti-war people" are the best minds in the US?

I agree. I'm not sure I've actually heard anyone in authority on the left make such a claim. But I have heard many, many, many on the left deriding GWB's intelligence. So I think there's a clear connotation there that; "he's stupid and we're much more intelligent"; coming from the left's most commonly heard rhetoric.

-z

 

[Ziggurat]

I've brought up the Moros of the Philipinnes as another analogy.

And it's a much more interesting one than Vietnam. But it doesn't get nearly as much attention, because the conclusions to be drawn from it (it doesn't quite point to inevitable defeat or inevitable victory) don't fit squarely on a pro- or anti-war one-liner.

 

[headscratcher4]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301157.html

More crazed lefties asserting that there is a Civil War in Iraq.

"This whole debate about civil war is surreal. What is the insurgency if not a war supported by one (minority) part of Iraqi society fighting to prevent the birth of the new Iraqi state supported by another (majority) part of Iraqi society?

By definition that is civil war, and there's nothing new about it. As I noted here in November 2004: "People keep warning about the danger of civil war. This is absurd. There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side" -- the Sunni insurgency -- "is fighting it." "

-- from a crzed lefty who supports President W.

 

[Ziggurat]

More crazed lefties asserting that there is a Civil War in Iraq.

No, headscratcher. It's just somebody insisting on a definition for the term "civil war" that I still can't buy into, nothing more. The question of whether or not Iraq has turned into a civil war is devolving into a semantic debate about what that term means, and there simply isn't agreement on that. So no surprise that people don't agree on whether it's a civil war, since we can't agree on what the term means. But in the big picture, that kind of semantic debate gets boring and irrelevant pretty quickly.

 

[headscratcher4]

Actually you are right...it is a semantic debate and a pretty useless one at that.

The bottom line, and the real distinction, is that I believe that this President not only took us into a bad war, based on bad intelligence, bad planning and a dangerous vision coupled with knowingly or unknowingly misleading the America people about what he was up to, and that that it has been badly managed and bungled since that time.

You, clearly, have a different view and even score points when defending it.

Whether or not it is a "civil war" changes nothing about what I perceive to be a growing policy and potential military disaster -- save that an incerasingly skeptical American public was not told that we'd be in the middle of a civil war...and somehow that makes them more concerned and less willing to buy the dreck the President, Cheney and Rumsfeld are pushing.

However, the semantic argument goes both ways, doesn't it? I mean if things are going better than we think and the media let's us see, than it shouldn't matter if it is a civil war or not, as Iraq is on the mend and heading for a new "rebirth of freedom" (essentially, this is Charles K's argument). On the other hand, if it isn't a "civil war" but the country is not returning to any stable, re-buildable state for the foreseeable future, draining lives and huge amounts of cash from the American people with no foreseeable end in sight, that can't be a good thing either.

So, k=ok, you win. It isn't a civil war. It is just a bad situation made worse by American political leaders who see themselves and Churchill but lack the vision, sense of history or ability to listen and change.

 

[headscratcher4]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060324...gzcmSys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--

Hopefully, they got AlQeda's number 2 in Iraq -- again -- in thecapture of insurgents that leads the story of almost 30 killed in new blasts in Bahgdad.

 

[Ziggurat]

Actually you are right...it is a semantic debate and a pretty useless one at that.

The bottom line, and the real distinction, is that I believe that this President not only took us into a bad war, based on bad intelligence, bad planning and a dangerous vision coupled with knowingly or unknowingly misleading the America people about what he was up to, and that that it has been badly managed and bungled since that time.

You, clearly, have a different view and even score points when defending it.

Yup, that's about the size of it. And we won't know definitively which of us was right, and to what extent, until probably years from now.

 

[a_unique_person]

We know right now.

 

[Ziggurat]

We know right now.

What you me "we", lefty?

 

[rikzilla]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301157.html

More crazed lefties asserting that there is a Civil War in Iraq.

"This whole debate about civil war is surreal. What is the insurgency if not a war supported by one (minority) part of Iraqi society fighting to prevent the birth of the new Iraqi state supported by another (majority) part of Iraqi society?

By definition that is civil war, and there's nothing new about it. As I noted here in November 2004: "People keep warning about the danger of civil war. This is absurd. There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side" -- the Sunni insurgency -- "is fighting it." "

-- from a crzed lefty who supports President W.

Which only bolsters my opinion that this insurgency hasn't changed anything but it's target. Repackaging it in the terrifying and hopeless new clothes of "civil war" is less than useless. This thing has been going on since the occupation began. Suddenly calling it a new name that carries terrible connotations is simply useless and unhelpful. This is why I have such an issue with the attempt to re-label it. It smacks of terrorist propaganda being credulously embraced by those in the west who have always had an axe to grind with this administration.

-z

 

[a_unique_person]

The war is nothing like what Bush et al envisioned, he already claimed it was over years ago. That's a fact.

 

[rikzilla]

We know right now.

Yep I'm sure you do...just like Pat Robertson knows that Jesus loves him.

-z

 

[rikzilla]

The war is nothing like what Bush et al envisioned, he already claimed it was over years ago. That's a fact.

Then providing to us a link to this "fact" should be pretty easy....

-z

 

[DavidJames]

Which only bolsters my opinion that this insurgency hasn't changed anything but it's target. Repackaging it in the terrifying and hopeless new clothes of "civil war" is less than useless. This thing has been going on since the occupation began. Suddenly calling it a new name that carries terrible connotations is simply useless and unhelpful. This is why I have such an issue with the attempt to re-label it. It smacks of terrorist propaganda being credulously embraced by those in the west who have always had an axe to grind with this administration.

-z

An editorial that says there is a civil war and has been, is bolstering your opinion that calling it a civil war now is "repackaging it".

An editorial that says there is a civil war bolsters your opinion that there isn't one.

An editorial that says there is a civil war and has been, is "suddenly calling it a new name".

An editorial that says there is a civil war and has been is an "attempt to re-label it"

I think to the rational person the editorial says what is going on is a civil war.

 

[Ziggurat]

The war is nothing like what Bush et al envisioned, he already claimed it was over years ago. That's a fact.

No, AUP. That's STILL just your opinion. Did Bush get everything right? No, he didn't. Nobody did. That tends to happen: as Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." But does it look nothing like what he envisioned? You may think so, but that doesn't make it a fact. And pretending that your opinions are facts doesn't impress me.

 

[a_unique_person]

No, AUP. That's STILL just your opinion. Did Bush get everything right? No, he didn't. Nobody did. That tends to happen: as Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." But does it look nothing like what he envisioned? You may think so, but that doesn't make it a fact. And pretending that your opinions are facts doesn't impress me.

Sure, you can debate correct name for the shambles that is happening right now, it's not what Dubya expected, but exactly what Powell expected. That is, a mess that is not going to be easily resolved. Dubya has already said, he can't solve, it's going to be for the next poor bastard who gets the job after him to fix up.