Hail the liberators!Follow

Isn't that a traditional Iraqi form of greeting? They're just trying to be polite, is all.

Ok... So it took toppling a nation's leadership and moving said nation to the bring of democracy to get the same sort of action that Clinton brought us in Somalia while accomplishing... nothing...

Sure. I'll take "world conflicts" for a thousand...

Clinton killed 600 American's and crippled 10,000?

Odd, I don't recall that. I mean, surely you're not engaging in ludicrous partisan hackery by shouting "The other guy was just as bad!"

Let's see, not only did Bush let 3,000 civilians die on his watch, he's let 600 servicepeople die and 10,000 be wounded to the point of being permentntly disabled.

Mission Accomplished!

Do you think Kerry knows he is a sacrifical lamb?

with buddies like that...


Are you refering to their shared alma mater or do you see closer ties? Beyond being multi-millionaire politicians?

edit: really ugly grammer thingy

Edited, Wed Mar 31 22:15:32 2004 by Vassa

They know each other socially. It would be hard for them not to. They were both Bonesmen at Yale at the same time so you'd imagine they know at least some of each other's deep dark secrets.

I have no idea if they swap wives or eat dinner together though. They've both been to the Bohemian Grove together though!

Hey! Good plan. I'll have to remember that one... ;)

Of course, you'll have to accept that it's all the Dems fault since after all: "It happened on their watch"...


Seriously though. I was talking about the whole: "Parading bodies through the street bit". Although I still argue that if you are to compare body count to accomplishment, we're waaaay ahead of the curve in Iraq when comparing it to Somalia (we were just there to get some food to some starving folks, right? ;) ).


On the more pessimistic side, I tend to agree with you in terms of the future of Iraq. While nothing's set in stone, the reality is that if you've got a bunch of people in a nation that really really really want to kill eachother, sometimes you just have to let them until a clear winner comes out. Harsh? Yeah. But the alternative would lead us into a Vietnamesque situation.


Also. While you'll *never* hear anyone on any side of the polical parties actually say this, the "win" for us was getting rid of the progressive government under the Bath party. Honestly, a fundamental Shiite or Sunni government isn't nearly as much of a "threat" to us as the quite Western Iraq was under Saddam. That's kinda hard to swallow because we're supposedly for "pushing western ideals", but the combination of a very western approach to education and infrastructure, while still being a product of the middle east was really why Iraq was such a threat. Barring the miracle of all sides spontaneously adopting a friendly "live and let live" policy in Iraq, we are, sadly, better off with just another middle east muslim-fundamentalist-run nation.


Fundamentalist nations in the middle east typically don't build their own bombs and weapons. They buy them. It's vastly easier to track weapons purchases then to see what a nation is building all on it's own. But that's just one way of looking at the problem.

And predictions for what the Kurds will do while the Sunni and Shiite are fighting it out for control of Iraq?

Well Rush that certainly was some insightful commentary on American politics today. Thank you for joining us.

Declare an independent Kurdistan and get bombed by the Turks I imagine.

Kerry is going to win for some very simple reasons. 1) He's not George Bush, 2) He's not on video anally raping voters grandparents.

That's really all it takes to win the election this time around.

No one cares about who Kerry is, they care about who he isn't.

Darn it! George has 50% of those qualifications. Soooo close...




Heh. This is abundantly clear from the campaign so far. Probably a good tack to be honest. I've been saying for weeks now that the Dem campaign is composed of nothing but pointing the finger at things they don't like (what they're against) rather then pointing the finger at things they would do differently.

Again though. That is probably the best approach. Let's face it. In the politics of post 9/11 US, there's pretty much no approach that you can take that wont **** someone off. You're either a warmonger, or someone who's "soft on terrorism". It's vastly easier to gather the pissed off onto your side by selectively finger pointing at the "other guy", then pick a position which will only generate a group of people pissed off at you. I think it's an annoying way to campaign, but I really can't blame Kerry for doing it.



Stok. What part of my post do you disagree with? I was being pretty straight. What made Iraq dangerous was not whether or not they had WMD at that moment. It was not whether Saddam tortured and killed his own citizens. All of that is window dressing. The real danger was that Iraq was progressive in many ways, but still had a large population that held onto the rather exclusionary social politics of most of the middle east.

Why do you think there was a big deal about WMD in Iraq? It wasn't about what he had. It really wasn't. Despite all the rhetoric. Despite what you may have heard. It was still *about* WMD (and many other things). The danger in Iraq was that Iraq had its own system of pretty good universities that taught subjects like Math, and Physics, and Chemistry, and Engineering (as opposed to "supplication to Alla 101). This meant that Iraq could build its own infrastructure to build things like Chemical weapons, without having to hire folks from outside the country. It could also build the manufacturing plants to build the tools needed to build things like nuclear bombs. All without outside aid.

That's why such seemingly scant evidence was "blown out of proportion". If a country like Iran purchased some raw Uranium, we might be concerned (ok, we would be). But we'd know that they have no way to purify it into weapons grade materials, let alone construct anything but a very crude bomb out of it (crude and refined being a *huge* difference when you're talking about potentially fisionable material, since that's the differnce between a small explosion with some radition and a nuclear blast). They would have to also purchase the materials for housing the weapon, and hire experts to put it together, and any of a number of stages that we know they can't do themselve. Same logic applies for Jordan, Syria, and even Eqypt. That makes it much easier to spot and stop.

Iraq, on the other hand, was a black box. We knew they'd had plenty of time to bring up a whole generation of scientists purely within Iraq who could build weapons like that. We knew they had the ability to build all of the materials in country. The only thing they lacked was raw fissionable material. And that's just for nuclear weapons. Every single thing they'd need to build chemical or biological weapons, they could construct themselves, with no possible way for anyone outside the country to know what they were doing. Heck. They'd been building chemical weapons for almost 20 years. Not "buying". Building. All on their own. With no outside assistance.

Iraq really was more dangerous then any of the more fundamental islamic nations in the area, exactly because it was more western. Instead of rejecting western ways and knowledge, it embraced them. That would have been nice if they hadn't had someone like Saddam running the country. With a government that held onto the ideas of oppressing anyone inside their country that wasn't like them, and hating anyone outside their country that wasn't like them (exclusionary social politics at its finest), this was a huge problem.

We honestly would be safer today if radical Shiites from Iran took over Iraq tomorrow then we would have been with the Bath party still in charge. But no one would ever say that since that appears to fly in the face of our "goals" in the middle east. Sure. We'd like to establish a democratic, westernized government in Iraq. Heck. There's even a slim chance it might work. But we'll settle with another Iran or Syria if that's the choice we're given.

You should sent this as an email to the relatives of the contractors - I'm sure it will make them feel better.

Obviously you do feel better now so it seems to work.