Yes, I wouldn’t have predicted this, either:
One thing I guess I didn’t believe 14 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.
Yes. But I have to say, while it’s a cliche, for this I do at least partially blame George Bush. I expected more competence and strategic thinking in the wake of the removal of Saddam. In fact, the real disaster began with the Democrat take over of Congress in 2006.
I’ve mentioned that I was in Puerto Rico when it happened, getting ready to head to the airport to fly to CA. When I saw the second plane hit the second tower, I knew there was no point in going.
What I’ve never mentioned, I think, was that we had a going-away party a day or so later (we had a place on the beach in Isla Verde with a nice veranda) for one of Patricia’s co-workers. He was about to take a job in Saudi Arabia. He ended up changing his mind in light of recent events, but one of the topics of discussion was the reaction of many of the Puerto Ricans. Many attending had tales of glee. “The Americans had it coming.”
I saw this tweet from Xeni Jardin this morning:
99.999999% of Muslims had nothing to do with 9/11 and reacted with natural human response of horror and sadness. https://t.co/PWlotnGpIV
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) September 11, 2015
This is delusional. There were cheers and ululations in Gaza and the West Bank, and handing out of candy.
We are not at war with Muslims (just as we weren’t at war with the Russian people during the Cold War), but Islam is at war with us (and has been pretty much since its founding). As I said on Twitter this morning, in the Cold War, our national leadership largely understood that we were at war with a totalitarian ideology that wanted to destroy our way of life. We still are, but the president wants to delude himself that we are not. And the most recent flare up of that war started not fourteen years ago, but thirty-six years ago, when Iran went to war with us, and we pretended that they had not. And they’ve been killing us ever since, every chance they get. With the president’s “victory” in ramming through this disastrous “deal” with them yesterday (a defeat for America, as most of Barack Obama’s “Victories” are) this has to be the major foreign-policy issue in the upcoming campaign.
[Early-afternoon update]
Fourteen years ago, Glenn Reynolds “made his bones and invented the blogosphere.”
I started this blog a few weeks later as a result.
I don’t do Twitter. Who’s the bimbo and why should we care if she is delusional? Certainly a lot of stupidity going around.
I wouldn’t call her a “bimbo,” but she is a tech editor at Wired.
Tweeting stuff like that qualifies her as a bimbo in my books.
Enjoyed the first half of your chat with Dr. Space, had to leave though.
I wouldn’t call her a “bimbo,” but she is a tech editor at Wired.
Providing an example of why I no longer subscribe to the magazine.
She’s been there pretty much forever.
Too many of us, Republican and Democrat alike, vastly overestimated what we could and should try to do in Iraq. We smashed Afghanistan as a lesson to those who harbor terrorists, and that was a good thing. We smashed Iraq based mostly on muddled intelligence, and we should have left it at that. Wiser people knew that the place was not ready for a Western democracy.
We Republicans had the presidency and both houses, and we threw it all away because we thought we had to fix the Middle East. We lost all those things as a result, and the Democrats got a decade of wrecking the country, and the Middle East is worse than when we started. If it weren’t for Obama, it wouldn’t be _as_ much worse, but accomplishing nothing at all was about a best-case scenario.
The American people has slowly drifted back to trying the Republicans again since the Democrats have made such an incredible mess of their time in power. But who knows if the Republicans will do better this time? Can we stop trying to be the world’s policeman?
Someone should’ve asked if we were prepared to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan for 50 years to make sure change ‘took’. And if the answer, as it turns out was no, go in, demonstrate that we are either their best friends or worst enemies, and leave.
“demonstrate that we are either their best friends or worst enemies, and leave.”
The problem is that Obama demonstrated that best friends are conditional on who is in the white house and that the sacrifice of our allies will not be reciprocated.
“Can we stop trying to be the world’s policeman?”
The Pax Americana lead to one of the most stable and peaceful times in the history of the world. It is a benign form of dominance that allows everyone to be free to determine their own future, or rather it should ideally. It requires meddling diplomatically, culturally, and militarily.
I don’t get how the Bush years can be viewed as disastrous when the wars didn’t break the bank and didn’t break the military. Militarily, we kicked ass. Politically, the challenge was much greater both abroad but mostly at home. The challenges on the home front had more to do with a party that rooted for defeat and constantly sided with our enemies.
The Democrats and AQ learned the same lesson about Viet Nam. War can be lost politically at home regardless of the facts of the battlefield. For Democrats, just saying we lost the wars was easy. It didn’t even have to reflect events on the ground but rather their wish that the war was lost.
” and the Middle East is worse than when we started.”
The region is and has been a powder keg. Our actions can affect events there but we cannot forget that there are other actors whose actions help shape outcomes.
I think most of your comments are delusional. We accomplished worse than nothing in Iraq at great cost. And because of what we did, we lacked the will to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
“The Pax Americana etc.” We defeated the Soviet Union, and the world needed us to do it – there was no other nation that could match them. After that, there is nothing that the world has needed us to do, but we didn’t know how to stop.
It’s hard for me that there are two major parties in the US, one of which is delusional on domestic policy, the other which is delusional about the military.
Xeni’s math is off. There were 19 directly involved in 911 out of a billion Muslims; that’s 0.000019%. That’s just the ones on the planes, not counting those who financed flight school and airplane tickets. So at best we can say that 99.99992% were not directly involved.
Aw crap, I shouldn’t do math before coffee. Make that 0.0000019% and 99.999992%. But anyhow, Xeni’s 99.999999% means that only one person flew four airplanes.
I need more coffee.
Despite all the criticism of He Who Makes My Leg Tingle, people still don’t get it about him. He’s a traitor pure and simple, the Iran agreement should be final proof of that. I’ve almost come to believe that he was recruited as a sleeper agent by Russia’s FSB or Chinese Ministry of the Interior while he was still a student at Columbia. And the Western Left as a whole are a class of culture traitors. They have no valid positions to argue about anymore, if they ever did. And I’m not talking about gay marriage or abortions rights, those are illusory freedoms granted by the Left’s masters in order to let the sheeple feel they are still free. I’m talking about economic freedom and true freedom of speech, rights that have been under increasing assault all across the Western World for a long time. The two above mentioned rights can be granted by the state without any lessening of government control in other areas. That’s one of the reasons the Left loves them so much. If they threatened a loss of control, the Left would find a reason to oppose them, too.
“I’m talking about economic freedom and true freedom of speech, rights that have been under increasing assault all across the Western World for a long time. The two above mentioned rights can be *granted* by the state without any lessening of government control in other areas.”
If the government can give it to you, the government can take it away. Rights are inherent – you have them the moment you take your first breath.
The highlight of 911 festivities had to be the crane collapsing on the mosque in Mecca, killing 107 and injuring many more. They will probably think twice before hiring Haliburton again.
Not funny. And the crane was owned by Osama bin Laden’s father’s company.