Time for LIEberman to Face Reality
"If we do not act," the senator said in April 1991, "if we neglect our duty to humanity, we would, as Dwight Eisenhower once said in speaking about a failure to confront evil in the world, `outrage our own conscience. In the eyes of those who suffer injustice, we would become partners with their oppressors.'"
I say that we have not become partners with Saddam Hussain, we have become what we accused Saddam Hussain of being. Though our assertions about him were false, the truth is that the United States has become the country that has the most WMD's in the world, and instead of drawing down that capacity, this administration is looking to expand it. We are now the torturers, we are now the ones that use unspeakably horrible chemical weapons on civilians. We are living in an era of increasing limits on our civil rights, and increasing power plays by the most fanatic religious elements in our society.
STALEMATE
... when Walter Cronkite addressed his CBS audience at the end of his Feb. 27, 1968, broadcast. An anti-war movement was gaining strength and volume at home, and the North Vietnamese had swept into the streets of Saigon with the shocking Tet offensive. Mr. Cronkite himself was just home from a trip to Vietnam.
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” Mr. Cronkite said. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
The question we've been hearing from the Iraq war apologists is: Would you rather have Saddam Hussain in power?
My answer is this: The Iraqi people are not better off than before the war. They have traded occasional outrages for daily outrages. They have traded Saddams torture chambers for American and Shiite torture chambers. They have traded intermittant electricity with even more intermittant electricity, and their schools and hospitals have been bombed, they cannot even walk on their streets without fearing death.
We are not doing as good a job as Saddam Hussain in supplying security, electricity, food, water, schooling, or medical services.
We are not doing as good a job as Saddam Hussain in the delicate tightrope walk that mideast politics have always been.
And, if you think that "fighting them over there, so we do not have to fight them over here" is a viable exercise, please consider that the Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting each other for some 500 years or more, and they hate each other no less for it. Unlike the average american joe who cannot remember what happened 6 months ago, these people hold grudges forever. They haven't even begun to vent their fury against us. And, every day we give them more reason to hate us.
This is our plan???
posted by SB Gypsy | 8:59 AM
8 Comments:
While G.W. Bush definitely is not sharpest tool in the box, and post-war planning has left much to be desired, I'm not convinced we're being fair to Lieberman. Let's look at things from the American side.
The Americans eliminated a midterm weapons threat with Hussein, exhibited a willingness to spend blood and money to defend themselves after 9-11 (Hussein was as good as an example to be made as any), created a terror sponge where all the crazies go to die at the hands of the American military in Iraq instead of suiciding themselves in American shopping malls, and the Americans have sent a clear message to terror sponsors like Syria and Iran's who's next if another attack occurs on their soil.
As a result, I'm not sure if it is America's interests to pull the plug on Iraq. It seems criminal to let the nascent Iraqi security forces face the jihadists alone.
Unfortunately part of our problem now is that there is no trusted voice to call out from a supposedly "objective" position: there is no Uncle Walter or Edward R. Murrow. The media spent the first GWB term kissing the president's butt. It's only now that it seems safe that the are growing a spine.
Hey Jason,
Welcome, but I have to disagree.
Bringing in Saddam Hussain has not eliminated a threat. Hussain had no nukes. That has been proven. It is also obvious that Iraq is a much more dangerous place since we decided to go in there and break things up. The Iraqi "insurgents" have now learned to make second generation (and very professionally deadly) IED's, and the attacks on US soldiers and Iraqi citizens is increasing, not letting up.
We haven't spent "blood and money to defend ourselves", we've wasted blood and money starting what the neo-cons hope is a forever war. The fact that no nation can afford a war in the mode that we've been fighting, never mind a forever war, is beside the point to them.
Hussein was as good as an example to be made as any
Hussain was probably the worst block to pull out of the foundation of the middle east. He had a secular govt, and he had iron control over his area. Yes, he was a terrible dictator, and an evil man. 9/11 was no reason to turn into him. Now instead of Saddam torturing Iraqi citizens, US soldiers and Shiite religious wingnuts are torturing Iraqi citizens. Instead of Saddam threatening his neighbors and his citizens with chemical and conventional weapons, US soldiers and Shiite religious wingnuts are using chemical and conventional weapons on Iraqi citizens and their neighboring countries.
created a terror sponge where all the crazies go to die at the hands of the American military in Iraq instead of suiciding themselves in American shopping malls
I don't remember any shopping malls being blown up by crazy Iraqis, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Tell me why we should be horribly killing and maiming a large percentage of their populace. And who is going to blame them when they DO come here to do that very thing?? And notice I said "when".
It seems criminal to let the nascent Iraqi security forces face the jihadists alone.
I realized before the last election that we are only making things worse over there, and experience has validated my early intuition. Of the security forces that we train, a large percentage of them accept the training, take the guns and ammo that we give them, and disappear into the insurgency. That's a big problem, and one of the reasons that their numbers never seem to get bigger. It only gets worse, and worse, and worse. And our soldiers continue to come home in body bags, and in med-evac planes. And they've just cut funds that help pay for veterans' hospitals - the bastards!
Hey Woodstock,
The media is a huge problem in this country, but the internet is a mitigating factor. The problem with the internet is that the ones who use it tend to be the ones who are already aware of the wool that's being pulled over our eyes.
Mr Bowden, that is a delusional world view you are clinging to there. It does reflect a great deal of "mainstream" American thinking, of course, at least among our ruling elites, but that kind of "crackpot realism" as the great sociologist C. Wright Mills called it has got us into a world of hurt in the past. And at least in Mills's lifetime (he died the day JFK did) the nuttiness was tempered with a certain amount of pragmatic wisdom, much of the time. Now that there is no _real_ rival comparable to the USSR in those days to fear, this conventional wisdom draws us into worse and worse outrages. How quickly our Mayberry Machiavellis forget (and trust the American people to forget!) that the _same_ leaders who today cry out what a terrible, terrible man Saddam Hussein has been and how _awful_ the threat he allegedly posed was, were the same geniuses who in the 1980s supported him, _ensured_ he would have chemical WMD to use on the Kurds for instance, because they valued his uses as someone who battered away at the Iranians. Back then it was leftists who pointed out, to a deafening silence on the part of the mainstream media, what vile tortures Hussein used to get and keep power, and how threatening his arsenal _was then_. But the Gulf War of 1991 ended that military threat, the sanctions regime and enforced disarmament guaranteed he would be no threat to others. As a secular Arab dictator there was far more hostility between him and fundamentalist Muslims of all stripes than between those loose cannon and our own ruling elites who helped create the foundations of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and this division was not changed one bit by the locking-down of Iraq under the sanctions. Indeed the only al Qaeda or other fundamentalist Muslim activity in Iraq that has a shred of credibility was precisely in territory Hussein did _not_ control. There is no mystery to this.
You list a catalouge of completely absurd assertions that don't gain any validity just because they are repeated back and forth by intellectually irresponsible people. There was no "midterm weapons threat," not after 1991 (and as I say before then, people like Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and that whole crew took credit for it as part of _our_ side). Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 so the notion attacking them was a "defense" is an outright lie. There is no "terror sponge," only a rising incidence of terror globally, for before our attack Iraqis were not involved in global terror at all and the spreading terror incidents globally are fed by people who aren't Iraqis outraged by what we are doing there. The only thing being absorbed by this "sponge" is innocent Iraqi and largely innocent American lives, with the occasional token coalition supporter thrown in to spread the outrage.
This notion of yours that terrorism is some kind of proxy war other _states_ conduct is particularly nutty. Of course it isn't just your notion, it is a commonplace of American policymaking, but it is still nuts. In general states don't sponsor terrorism because terrorists are loose cannon. You never know when they are going to decide your government has crossed some line and turn their skills and contacts against you, and even if they don't their enthusiasm can be hard to control and draw your vulnerable state into embarrasing confrontations you'd rather avoid. The great exception to this rule has been none other than our own US of A; our government has often sponsored terrorists to attack those our leaders decide they don't like overseas. We often get away with it because the terrorists we have sponsored have generally understood we can't be brought down, and back in the Cold War days they were generally focused on defeating our Soviet-bloc and other leftist enemies too. But since the collapse of the USSR we've seen a _lot_ of "blowback" as this risk was called by our spy types; the Taliban and al Qaeda among them, as indeed is the entire network of reactionary Islamic fundamentalism the Saudis cultivated with our blessing and support. Even we are getting burned now; lesser states have generally shied away from this dangerous activity and many of the cases where we've cried out against other people "harboring terrorists" have been very doubtful indeed. But dandy excuses to blast away at them with bombing and other attacks. Oh, and sponsoring terrorists. In short, one reason American crackpot realists think foreigners harbor terrorists is that _we_ do--classic projection.
I think the people who schemed to launch this war have been accomplishing their objectives--at the expense of the American people stuck fighting it and paying for it and taking the inevitable consequences. One goal of PNAC and other crackpot realists have had has been to keep this whacked-out militant mentality going in a world it is less and less suited to; your thinking is a prime example.
Welcome, Mark, and I couldn;t agree with you more.
I'd like to add: WE taught Osama Bin Lauden how to take down a superpower (USSR). We armed him, we supported him, we egged him on.
Now, unless our incompetent leadership suddenly gets some smarts(fat chance), he's going to take US down.
We are about to experience the mother of all resessions, and if we manage to pull out of it before I die, I will die happy and very very surprised.
Foxwell, gypsy --
Leaving Iraq has a cost. If we let someone like Al-Zarqawi take over, the result isn't going to be pretty. They'll butcher their opponents en masse, spread terror like a cancer throughout the world, and pursue a WMD program aimed at us and the "Zionist Entity."
Some might not take radical Islam seriously, but the events in Russia, India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Israel, Spain, France, the UK, and the United States in contemporary history suggest otherwise. As Afghanistan under the Taliban, Syria, and Iran illustrate, some states will and do support terror groups.
Your side needs to demonstrate how leaving Iraq to the jihadists is better than staying there and fighting the jihadists. The other material about how we used Hussein as a bulwark against an Iranian superstate, or how we used Islamists against the Soviet Union, is irrelevant to arguments why we should let the jihadists take over Iraq.
Hussein was a midterm weapons threat. Hussein used WMD on his neighbors previously, and would have resumed his program the minute Anglo-American pressure relented. President Clinton certainly believed so; that's why we had operation Desert Fox in 1998. Bush f---ed him over, and now there is a strong incentive for terror supporters in the region not to send violence our way. If another attack occurs against us, they'll be next, no questions asked.
If one is familiar with Hussein's regime, what we're doing in our operations against the jihadists is certainly not the same thing. There have been around 30,000 civilian dead so far, but we don't target civilians and jihadists are doing so everyday. The comparisons are gratuitous.
There have been no terror attacks on American soil since 2001. Whether or not our presence in Iraq serves as a terror sponge, the *evidence* certainly points that way.
btw, tell Tom Servo and Crow I said hi! ;)
Leaving Iraq has a cost. If we let someone like Al-Zarqawi take over, the result isn't going to be pretty. They'll butcher their opponents en masse, spread terror like a cancer throughout the world, and pursue a WMD program aimed at us and the "Zionist Entity."
Hi Jason, and yes Iraq is going to pay the price of our interference. We don't have the option of "Letting" this person or that person take over. Iraq is already fighting their own civil war, with no permission asked and none given. If you have been following the news, they are already butchering and torturing their opponents.
A good place to follow what's happening over there is at Informed Comment, a blog run by a Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He posts what our "news" services refuse to print.
Terror is already spreading like a cancer thru the world, and we have only fostered it, by our actions now in starting that war, and by our money and actions in the past when we have directly sponsored terror and terrorists for our own political ends.
Saddam was not a threat, unless you happen to have been a poor Iraqi woman. I do take fundamentalism seriously, of any flavor. But, your assertion that we have any say, at this late date, about whether fundamentalists take over Iraq or not, well, that fight has already been won. Sharia law is already in their constitution.
You say there is a strong incentive for terror supporters in the region not to send violence our way. I say, with every house search, with every checkpoint killing, and with every day that we keep our soldiers in Iraq, we are giving them a strong incentive to come here and kill civilians. Americans are, by the official word of the Iraqi government, fair game right now. 80% of the Iraqi people want us to leave yesterday.
There have been no attacks on our soil since 2001. Honey, they are still fighting and killing each other over things that happened over 500 years ago. Can you get your mind around that??? Few westerners can. What's 4 years to them. I completely expect them to get back to us when the war is over inside Iraq, and to be still coming after us in your grandchildren's lifetime. You cannot stuff the evil back into Pandora's box. Bushco opened it, and he can't close it, and he hasn't a clue as to what he's done.
We'll be paying the price for generations.
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