Posts by Alex Coleman
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David, I think people are entitled to know who exactly is being accused of allying themselves with AQ, if that is who is meant by
the enemies of Bush and Blair.Maybe such people do exist but I have not heard of them. All I can see is some people on the left saying things like:
I think Islamists have some justification for their anger (but that does not excuse their 'indiscriminate slaughter' strategy at all).
Anyone who thinks that I only oppose torture, strategic incompetence, death squads, detention without trial, and disregard for the rule of law, because of my dislike for Bush has it 100% backwards.
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I think if Osama does rail against the 'liberals' it's in a wider sense. The 'Western Liberal Values' that Osama has the most objection to are the biggies. Rule of law, freedoms of speech and religion, full citizenship rights for females, democracy.
The fact that he's also teed off about our dirty movies and naughty sex kind of misses the point IMO.
As rodgerd says, if AQ's primary grievance is our lefty decadance, they attacked the wrong country.
The whole 'he attacked us primarily because of the lefty libs' argument only makes sense if you believe that had the US been governed by a Southern Baptist/Opus Dei coalition he would have no problem with them placing their armies in the middle east. To think of it is to reject it as an argument.
Another piece of evidence against this silly trope is that jihadist websites use footage of westerrn occupations and dead Muslim children etc in their propaganda, (and have done for years) rather than the gay porn that D'Souza seems to think has got them all het up.
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Your talents are being wasted here. I understand Bob Clarkson would give a lot for sound poltical suggestions such as these.
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I think Iraq could become an 'Islamic threat". Sure, it wasn't before the US led invasion, but that was only because "Islamists" had a solid base elsewhere; Pakistan, Afghanistan. Iran too, but they would never admit to it after the 'for us or against us' threat from Bush.
I think the fact that Saddam was feeding Islamists into shredders and what not had something to do with their low profile in Iraq before the war. I don't think it's any sort of secret that Islamists have a solid base in the Islamic Republic of Iran. They're a different sort of Islamist from the ones that had a base in Afghanistan and Pakistan though.
Would you agree that in the light of Pakistan (AQ, Nuclear secret sales, etc) the 'for us or agin us' stuff is not really that scary? Given that Bush is moving troops from Afghanistan to Iraq, despite a resurgent Taliban, is Bush for AQ or agin them? It's very confusing.
You also might want to do some research into just how helpful Iran was being untill Bush's childish, ahistorical and needlessly inflammatory 'axis of evil' speech. It's interesting though tragic, and the missed oppurtunities have been costly both in terms of blood and treasure.
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Neil,
I will be surprised if Maliki attacks Sadr. Everything he has done up until now has indicated that he is Sadr's man. I suspect that if there is a push against Shia militia's it will be against SCIRI, who have been on the back foot against Sadr for a while now.Lot's of interesting stuff in this WaPo story...
U.S. officials are skeptical of Qanbar not only because of the way he was named, but because they know little about him. Moreover, they have questioned the degree to which Maliki's government is reliant on sectarian figures, particularly Sadr. Maliki essentially is asking American officials to take Qanbar on trust at a time when they have little left....
...Within the Pentagon, not everyone agrees that attacking Sadr City is advisable.Crucial to the decision will be the incoming U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus. He has not commented on the tactics he plans to pursue, but for the last two years he has overseen the development of the military's new counterinsurgency field manual, which appears to argue against a large-scale invasion of a neighborhood such as Sadr City, particularly in the early part of the new Baghdad security campaign.
The manual's first chapter, which Petraeus is known to have aggressively rewritten, advises commanders that though largescale offensives against insurgents may be necessary, they should be limited.
"Killing every insurgent is normally impossible," the manual says. "Attempting to do so can be counterproductive in some cases; it risks generating popular resentment, creating martyrs that motivate new recruits, and producing cycles of revenge."
An influential plan for Baghdad security drawn up by retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and military analyst Frederick Kagan strongly advised against moving into Sadr City. The plan, which was highly influential within the White House and is considered to mirror Petraeus' thinking, argued that an attack on Sadr City would unite now-splintered Shiite factions against U.S. forces.
"We have an opportunity now to keep the Shiite parties separate and to avoid a full-scale military conflict with them," Kagan said. "If we go into Sadr City, that will not be the case. We will find ourselves in a full-scale, very bloody operation, which probably will look something like Fallouja."
Combine this with Malikis previous statements that he will be initially focussing on Sunni terrorists before negotiating with Shiite groups to lay down their arms, and it looks to me like a plan for handing de facto power to Sadr. It's sectarian cleansing a-go-go with the hapless Americans stuck between allowing it to happen and having Sadr sending 60 000 men on the street (including who knows how many defections from the Iraqi army).
I hope I'm very wrong.
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Weston, never apologise. Firstly this is the internet and it's simply not done, and secondly you were providing good linky info.
It's certainly a complicated situation and I have no idea what the solution in Iraq will be, it's not going to be a military one unless the question is "how do we eliminate the Sunni?"
It's always good to balance Max Boot with someone else.
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However, I also feel some responsibility for the fact that Hussein and his sick motherf@#ker sons are not terrorizing Iraqis anymore. No more gang raping women in front of their families, no more feeding people feet first into industrial plastic shredding machines in front of their families. No more putting people in baths of concentrated acid in front of their families.
No more mass graves. No more persecution of the Kurds. No more Halabjahs. No more invasions of Iraq’s' neighbors. No more likelihood of Saddam reconstituting his WMD programs. No more active cooperation with and funding of a multitude of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations.James, while there is much wrong with your post, I thought I would highlight the above piece to serve as an example.
Most of what you wrote above is of course true, but it is dishonest to use examples of particular people and events that are no longer alive or happening as a case that tyranny and abuse are no longer prevalent in Iraq.
Hussein and his sons are no longer terrorisng Iraq, yet Iraq is still being terrorised.
People are no longer being fed into shredders, or bathed in acid. Instead around 50 corpses of tortured murder victims are turning up on the streets of Bahgdad every couple of days. The government's interior ministry and police are still in the torture business.
There are no more mass graves, but corpses are left on the roadside or thrown in the river, with the families of the victims left none the wiser, knowing only for certain that their son has not yet returned.
The Kurds were not being persecuted in the lead up to the war, but I take your point. Now the Sunni are being persecuted and cleansed into ghettos.
What little support Saddam was providing to international terrorists has been replaced by turning Iraq into a vast geurrilla training zone and propaganda rallying cry for Wahhibist terrorists who are using it as example number one of the wests supposed hatred for Islam.
You say that the war in Iraq is like the curates egg, that you are proud of it in parts and are angry about it in parts. This is of course an intellectually responsible position to take in any real life situation, as reality is never without it's faults. However the parts you are proud of seem to be about intentions, and hopes that have not yet come to pass, while the bits you are angry about are the parts that are existing now, and the way the war has unfolded. At some point it becomes necessary to evaluate whether the hopes and intentions are enough to justify the reality. For me that time has long past, (I initially supported the war) your mileage may vary, but I can remember a time when conservatives used to mock the left as being utopian.
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I guess if you believed that the west was best back when we all paid attention to priests, and that secularism is a religion, and that that religion cannot have a moral basis, then I guess you would see an existential threat to the west from political Islam. You'd also be in need of some education IMO.
Josh Marshall and Steve Clemons are worried that "the surge" was not the important part of Bush's speech. They've heard rumours of presidential directives.
Rice is refusing to say whether or not the White House believes it has the authority to launch attacks inside Iran/Syria.
I can't help but remember Seymour Hersh's stories about Dick Cheney and tac nukes.
We may be about to find out who the Iraqi army is loyal to.
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Iraq and Vietnam seem similar in respect to the fact that in both cases the goal was to support democracy. The flaw in both attempts was that instead of establishing the government that the locals wanted, the US tried to establish a goverment that the US thought they should have.
I saw a biography of Ho Chi Min a few months back and was astounded at how little I knew about him. Undoubtably a hard arse, but the so was George Washington, whom he greatly admired. Apparently he only went communist when he realised that the post WWII talk about self determination from the west was always going to play second fiddle to France being allowed to hold on to her colonies.
Vietnam was ideological, Iraq is religious. Vietnam was not an insurgency by a death cult, Iraq is. Communism never had the reach to destabilise capitalism and it's politics, Islam has the means and demographic in Europe and Asia to install fanatic ultra-fascist regimes everywhere.
Perhaps you missed the 20th Century but ideology was found to produce just as much crazy fanaticism as religion does. There was also this thing called the Soviet Union that had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at western cities and a massive army and navy. Communists, unlike today, actually controlled a large portion of the globe, whereas Islamist extremists are in charge nowhere really, and most predominantly Muslim countries are clients of the west.
As for them out breeding us in the west, you seem to think that either Islam is a biological phenomenum, like a race, or that their ideas are so obviously more attreactive than ours that Muslims who have been in the west for long enough to become the majority will still find Sharia law attractive. I think that's pretty strange myself. Doesn't seem like you are a much of a fan of western values
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The ERO is not fallible.
That is the basic axiom that drives all ERO programming.
When presented with a situation that is dissonant with that axiom the ERO restructures reality so as to concur with the axiom.This is the purpose of the "to the best of recollection" patch
The infallible (axiomatic) ERO does not recall event X therefore X cannot be true.
"I am guilty" is not a grammatically possible sentence for a properly functioning ERO unit.