Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Glenn's sentiments are mine, ignoring the morons in comments who think that I worship George Bush, despite the many times I've expressed wishes for other choices.

It's like smoking cigarettes. Most smokers can tell that something has gone wrong. They certainly don't "worship" Phillip Morris. They also wish for other choices --- maybe cigars would have been better. Even so, they are extremely defensive if you criticize their habit. Naturally, part of the party line is that they aren't defensive at all, they're just stating facts.

It seems that the world is brimming with cigarette derangement syndrome.

Posted by at April 2, 2007 07:04 PM

What was that?

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at April 2, 2007 07:29 PM

Bush is growing increasingly irrelevant.

Radical Islam shall not be defeated by January 2009 so even on that front the question is who shall lead our nation next.

Posted by Bill White at April 2, 2007 07:55 PM

You see, Rand, you can't just say that you agree with policy A and disagree with policy B on the merits. You first have to find out whose policies they are. Then, depending on your political orientation, either 1) both policies are OK or 2) both policies result from lies and evil conspiracies and the elected official responsible for them is as bad as Hitler.

This makes perfect sense.

Posted by Jonathan at April 2, 2007 08:01 PM

A good troll can increase your hit rate. Everyone wants a shot at them. OTOH, you seem to be bothered by them to the point of often refering to them in your posts. Since I like this blog, I would suggest it's time for password implementation. Then you can at least admit the trolls you like and remove the ones you don't.

Posted by K at April 3, 2007 12:47 AM

Jonathan: "You see, Rand, you can't just say that you agree with policy A and disagree with policy B on the merits. You first have to find out whose policies they are."

What makes you think he doesn't? If someone talked about Ahmadinejad the way Rand talks about Bush, expressing qualified disappointments while castigating the real opposition, would you or Rand buy their protestations to just be "judging policy on the merits"? If a Persian doppelganger named Randar Simberxes came here and started throwing around accusations of "Ahmadinejad derangement," would you compliment him on his "reasoned" and "issue-based" approach to Iranian politics?

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 3, 2007 01:04 AM

> Radical Islam shall not be defeated by January
> 2009 so even on that front the question is who
> shall lead our nation next.

Not too long back Jonah Goldberg cautiously floated the idea that maybe a Democrat should win the next presidential election, reasoning that the Democrats have been such awful back-seat drivers that maybe they should be forced to take the wheel so they can realize how treacherous the road really is.

It's certainly true that up 'til now liberals have looked on the war on terror like it was a George Bush vanity project. At least having Bush out of the picture will remove that aspect of it.

Posted by Mike Combs at April 3, 2007 06:13 AM

"What makes you think he doesn't? If someone talked about Ahmadinejad the way Rand talks about Bush, expressing qualified disappointments while castigating the real opposition, would you or Rand buy their protestations to just be "judging policy on the merits"? If a Persian doppelganger named Randar Simberxes came here and started throwing around accusations of "Ahmadinejad derangement," would you compliment him on his "reasoned" and "issue-based" approach to Iranian politics?"

Here we see the ugly vomit of moral equivilence, the last refuge of the troll.

President Achtung in Iran has called for the extermination of Israel and its citizens. When you call for genocide, all bets are off, you don't get the ordinary treatment. Common sense lets normal people understand that.

Bush Derangement Syndrome has apparently stripped you of any microscopic amount of common sense you once possessed. It is nonsense like this that is exactly why almost no one on this board gives you any serious consideration.

Posted by Mike Puckett at April 3, 2007 07:06 AM

BS wrote:
If someone talked about Ahmadinejad the way Rand talks about Bush, expressing qualified disappointments while castigating the real opposition, would you or Rand buy their protestations to just be "judging policy on the merits"? If a Persian doppelganger named Randar Simberxes came here and started throwing around accusations of "Ahmadinejad derangement," would you compliment him on his "reasoned" and "issue-based" approach to Iranian politics?

If someone talked about you and Ahmadinejad. . ..

If someone talked about Mother Theresa and Ahmadinejad. ..

etc.

Your logic is flawed.

Ahmadinejad advocates fascist oppression and genocide. Bush advocates tolerant democracy and freedom. There is no moral or intellectual parallel between them. Juxtaposing names in a sentence does not change this fact. The reality is that Bush advocates positions A, B and C, while Ahmadinejad advocates positions D, E and F which differ radically from A, B and C. Further, the fact that Rand disagrees with some of Bush's policies and some of Ahmadinejad's policies does not imply that Bush is morally equivalent to Ahmadinejad, since Ahmadinejad's worst policies are so much worse than Bush's worst policies that comparing them is like comparing spitting in the subway to murder.

Posted by Jonathan at April 3, 2007 07:21 AM

www.thewarofthewords.net

quotes extensively from Glenn Reynolds

Posted by anonymous at April 3, 2007 08:15 AM

You see, Rand, you can't just say that you agree with policy A and disagree with policy B on the merits.

That's absolutely correct: Rand is not content to merely disagree with the Clintons; he has also concluded that they are criminals.

Fortunately, this style of downplaying Bush's disastrous presidential record is unlikely to work next year at the polls. Frankly, it's just mealy-mouthed talk that you could apply to just about anybody. "I've never been in love with Joseph McCarthy, but useful criticism has been clouded by McCarthy Derangement Syndrome." Or, "Sure, Nixon has made some mistakes in the Watergate kerfuffle, but the leftist wackos think that it makes him worse than Hitler."

The truth is that Bush started the war in Iraq, he got all of the resources that he ever requested for the war in Iraq, but he has lost the war in Iraq. He lost it at the beginning because his entire conception of Iraq as a nation or as a war never made sense. Since he can't face defeat, he's reinforcing it. That really is a terrible record; it goes way beyond not feeling affection for the man.

Posted by at April 3, 2007 08:43 AM

Mike Combs: "It's certainly true that up 'til
now liberals have looked on the war on terror
like it was a George Bush vanity project."

The so-called "war on terror", no... the "war on
Iraq" (_not_ the same thing), on the other
hand... it sure struck me that W was (as is the
habit of leaders intending to form a pretext for
aggression) issuing "demands" and "ultimatums"
intended to be unacceptable to the other party
("give us your President and his sons", not that
I shed any tears for Qusan and Uday or whatever
their names were), and dealing with the UN in
what looked like breathtakingly bad faith...

UN was trying to settle things down with
proposals to avoid the conflict; Bush: "no that
would take too long, I've got a war to start!".

It's like W had _already decided_ to go to war,
had already marked it off on his calendar, and
the one and only "choice" he intended to offer
the UN was whether they would sign on and make
it a "UN war" rather than "just a US war" (and
that was mainly because he had the notion that
"getting the UN on board would appease US public
opinion"...)

So, yes, to me (at the time) there _was_ a
definite scent of "George Bush vanity project"
about the way he went about starting of the Iraq
war...

-dw

Posted by dave w at April 3, 2007 09:03 AM

Oh Oh, I see that anonymous is back from the wilderness. Rand, did you relent and let him back in?

-unnamed poster child-
"He lost it at the beginning because his entire conception of Iraq as a nation or as a war never made sense."

I would have to agree - an A Priori assumption that was fatally flawed, as even Bill Buckley concedes.

Bush remains a likeable guy though; much preferable on a dinner date to Kerry for example.

To make Iraq a nation will require a brigade of brain surgeons and psychiatrists to rewire the Sunni-Shia-Kurd mutual hate machines embedded in the Iraqi psyche. Japan and Germany didn't seem to need this.

One can still hope for the best with the surge if the sectarian metrics keep falling as they are right now.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at April 3, 2007 09:40 AM

There are lots of anonymouses. This one seems more literate than the one that idiotically kept chirping "chickenhawk, chickenhawk."

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 3, 2007 09:43 AM

One can still hope for the best with the surge if the sectarian metrics keep falling as they are right now.

No, the surge is already the fifth round of hoping for the best, and it is only a small variation of "staying the course". The only reasonable way to hope for the best is to accept defeat in Iraq and fight the war on terrorism elsewhere. And not by bombing Iran, because however much you may hate Ahmadinejad, Iraq is a shotgun marriage between the US and Iran. Bush has given a wedding ring to a lizard.

Posted by at April 3, 2007 10:18 AM

"You see, Rand, you can't just say that you agree with policy A and disagree with policy B on the merits."

That's absolutely correct: Rand is not content to merely disagree with the Clintons; he has also concluded that they are criminals.

They aren't criminals?

-$100k bribe via commodities account
-Falsified Rose Law Firm billing records
-Whitewater fraud
-Abusive prosecution of Billy Dale
-Stolen FBI files
-IRS audits of political opponents
-Perjury
-Subornation of perjury (Monica Lewinsky)
-Witness intimidation (Kathleen Wiley, Linda Tripp, Elizabeth Ward Gracen et al)

Fortunately, this style of downplaying Bush's disastrous presidential record is unlikely to work next year at the polls. Frankly, it's just...

Non sequitur. Clintons are crooks. Your response is to state your opinion that Bush is a poor president. So?

[...]

The truth is that Bush started the war in Iraq, he got all of the resources that he ever requested for the war in Iraq, but he has lost the war in Iraq...

You assert that it's truth. Looks more like opinion to me. Why should we accept it?

Posted by Jonathan at April 3, 2007 11:16 AM

Why is it reasonable to think that we will be strengthened if we "accept defeat in Iraq" (or anywhere, for that matter)? If we leave Iraq and avoid Iran, where will we fight our enemies -- Afghanistan? What if our enemies want to fight us somewhere else?

We invaded Afghanistan because it was a haven for Al Qaeda. If we give up on Iraq and Iran, why do you not expect them to become the main havens for AQ and other enemies of ours? Iran is already run by our enemies, and they will become stronger if we bolt from Iraq. And if Iraq is in such sorry condition as you think, its elected government will fall shortly after we leave, and the people who replace it will not be our friends. Why is that a good outcome for us?

Has an invading army ever defeated an insurgency by withdrawing from the country the insurgency was trying to take over?

Posted by Jonathan at April 3, 2007 11:31 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/theater/03billw.html

Anonymous Is Prominent in Audience of This Play

Posted by anonymous at April 3, 2007 02:11 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/theater/03billw.html

Anonymous Is Prominent in Audience of This Play

Posted by anonymous at April 3, 2007 02:11 PM

The only reasonable way to hope for the best is to accept defeat in Iraq and fight the war on terrorism elsewhere.

Posted by at April 3, 2007 10:18 AM

Ridiculous.

First off you make the mistake of bying into the "war on terrorism" thing...and after that all your theories fall. There is no such thing as a war on terrorism. Terror is a tactic not a organizational theory...it never has been and never will.

I will humor you and the discussion and go on with some other comments, but there is no "war or terror".

Moving on.

Simply running away and giving up in Iraq is dumb on so many levels. It would be a "plan" if the armed forces were in choas, if morale in the armed forces were low or other problems were showing,...but the only people who are losing stomach for the fight...

are the people farthest away from the fight...

the chicken doves.

I guess you are one of them.

We never should have gone to Iraq in a "war" on Arab extremism and in a war against those who would destroy the concept of the nation state and remake it in a political mode.

iraq was the wrong place with the wrong war, fought badly by idiots in the administration who seem to have as good a grasp on politics and policies as you do.

But leaving without success is the wrong concept in the wrong place at the wrong time advocated by people who have no real personal stake in the fight.

Have a nice day.

Robert

Posted by at April 3, 2007 03:55 PM

The person calling for genocide should get what he wants. Starting with him.

Posted by Fletcher Christian at April 3, 2007 05:08 PM

Why is it reasonable to think that we will be strengthened if we "accept defeat in Iraq" (or anywhere, for that matter)?

Whenever defeat is manifest, it does indeed make you stronger to accept it and fight elsewhere. The world is much bigger than Iraq; even the Arab world is much bigger than Iraq. Wise military leaders live by the principle, "do not reinforce failure". History is also full of rash military leaders who lost everything because they refused to lose anything.

If we give up on Iraq and Iran, why do you not expect them to become the main havens for AQ and other enemies of ours?

Iraq is a haven for terrorism because the US destabilized it and because US troops are available for target practice. What Bush is doing there is not only a colossal overinvestment, it makes things worse.

And if Iraq is in such sorry condition as you think, its elected government will fall shortly after we leave, and the people who replace it will not be our friends.

The people in Iraq's elected government already aren't our friends. One of the men who bombed the American Embassy in Kuwait was found in the Iraqi parliament. Iraq's leaders are enemies who Bush calls friends in order to pretend that he hasn't lost. Calling a spade a spade would be an improvement.

Why is that a good outcome for us?

There is no good outcome for the US in Iraq any more, there are only bad outcomes and worse outcomes.

Bush admitted that things have gotten worse the whole time. He began by declaring that he had won the war in Iraq. For a while it was a matter of getting used to victory. Then for a long time he said that he was merely winning. Now he doesn't even say that he is winning, only that we can't afford to lose. The end of this progression is clear: He will say that it wasn't his fault that we lost.

Posted by at April 3, 2007 07:44 PM

Also, an answer to this question:

Has an invading army ever defeated an insurgency by withdrawing from the country the insurgency was trying to take over?

No, but there are armies that saved themselves by making peace with insurgencies that they couldn't and didn't need to defeat. Example #1: The British army vs the American colonies. Napoleon destroyed himself with a policy of never surrendering no matter what. The British were smarter than that.

Posted by at April 3, 2007 07:48 PM

Mike: "Here we see the ugly vomit of moral equivilence"

I agree it's ugly that Bush is equivalent to Ahmadinejad, but whose fault is that?

Mike: "President Achtung in Iran has called for the extermination of Israel and its citizens."

Yeah, he's a blustery idiot trying to magnify his importance by extorting attention. Moderate Iranians routinely protest against him in public, calling him a dictator and calling for his death, and the religious police don't even stop them.

Mike: "When you call for genocide, all bets are off, you don't get the ordinary treatment."

But if he had called for a "preemptive" war to "liberate" Israel and "enforce UN resolutions" against it, then I guess he would be A-OK.

Mike: "Bush Derangement Syndrome has apparently stripped you of any microscopic amount of common sense you once possessed."

I'm not the one who voted for him.

Mike: "It is nonsense like this that is exactly why almost no one on this board gives you any serious consideration."

Nor would you have given me any serious consideration if I predicted current events at the time of the Iraq invasion. That's my point.

Jonathan: "Ahmadinejad advocates fascist oppression and genocide."

Neither of which are within his capability. The mullahs have permitted him no greater power than his predecessors, and in some cases even less.

Jonathan: "Bush advocates tolerant democracy and freedom."

While having people dragged off in the night and tortured. Yes, we've already established that he's a sociopathic liar and Orwellian hypocrite.

Jonathan: "There is no moral or intellectual parallel between them."

On the contrary, they're both extraordinarily stupid and vicious, both serve radical right-wing constituencies, and neither gives a damn what the people think or international law requires. Then again, Bush actually did attack and conquer another country, resulting (to date) in roughly half a million deaths, and has had hundreds of people tortured, while Busherxes just keeps running his mouth and losing support in Iran.

But since Bush used the magic word "freedom" in campaign speeches while having people strung up, beaten, water-boarded, and strangled to extract confessions, he is apparently not an evil psychopath, whereas his Iranian doppelganger is equivalent to Hitler for making a threatening speech. That's a nice first attempt at reality, but you're a long way from the Majors.

Jonathan: "The reality is that Bush advocates positions A, B and C, while Ahmadinejad advocates positions D, E and F which differ radically from A, B and C."

Usually people understand the difference between words and actions by the time they start shaving. Or are you taking this approach because it's all you've got?

"since Ahmadinejad's worst policies are so much worse than Bush's worst policies that comparing them is like comparing spitting in the subway to murder."

Only a Bush supporter would think torture and murder are "spitting in the subway." You're extolling mild discussion about a lawless regime dripping in American and Iraqi blood, and yet deciding the Antichrist has arrived because an Iranian conservative leader made a speech. This kind of Fox News "new reality" borders on psychosis.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 4, 2007 03:53 AM

I agree it's ugly that Bush is equivalent to Ahmadinejad, but whose fault is that?

How not to be taken seriously by people who don't live in a lunatic asylum.

Posted by McGehee at April 4, 2007 05:36 AM

McGehee beat me to it. B.S., after showing signs of sanity and logic, shows how he got his reputation around here. The difference between an incompetent leader and a genocidal leader can only be missed by those without a functional brain. At least B.S. put that ridiculous statement first in his comment so we knew to ignore and skip the rest of his lunacy.

Posted by Stewart at April 4, 2007 06:43 AM

"Mike: "Bush Derangement Syndrome has apparently stripped you of any microscopic amount of common sense you once possessed."

I'm not the one who voted for him."

No, you voted for worse twice. Thank you for underscoring my point.

Posted by Mike Puckett at April 4, 2007 06:54 AM

Brian,

If you were in Iran now posting equal such idiocy, you would either be in a dungeon or dead. You are neither here.

Tell me again how the Bush administration and President Achtung are the same.

Again, you defend the indefensible. A minor amount of torture conducted by all apparent evidence against the wishes of the chief exectuive verses the mass denial of human rights that is President Achtung's regieme.

You migh as well claim equivilant a cat playing with a mouse and Adloph Hitler because huge orders of magnitude make no difference to you.

You are the worst of both worlds, an extreme lefty that cannot see the world in shades of grey.

Again, you wonder why serious people on this board think you an idiot.

Posted by Mike Puckett at April 4, 2007 07:00 AM

"No, you voted for worse twice."

I wasn't around during the elections of Caesar or Hitler.

"Thank you for underscoring my point."

You have it backwards. I pointed out your under-score.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 4, 2007 07:05 AM

"I wasn't around during the elections of Caesar or Hitler"

And you so regret missing your chance to vote for both of your role models.

"You have it backwards. I pointed out your under-score"

9 out of 10 bloggers in this thread disagree. You buy into consensus on AGW, you can't cherry pick here.

Posted by Mike Puckett at April 4, 2007 07:48 AM

"If you were in Iran now posting equal such idiocy, you would either be in a dungeon or dead."

I would be dead in Iran because I'm an atheist. Secondly, crowds of Iranians have repeatedly and publicly demonstrated against Ahmadinejad, calling not for his impeachment, but his DEATH, and the Ayatollah's people have not cracked down on them.

"You are neither here."

Because going after its domestic critics would have been impractical for the regime even under the lawless One Party State, so they had to be content with a "chilling effect" by sending FBI agents to harass groups that opposed them. Maybe they were expecting some of their more radical auxiliaries to catch their drift and kill a few people without being told, but if so they vastly overestimated the attention span of the average Fox News viewer.

"Tell me again how the Bush administration and President Achtung are the same."

Torture, militarism, imperialism, abuse of religion and nationalism in politics, pandering to bigotry and public fear, complete indifference to and flouting of public will and international law, and dedicated antagonism to human rights, civil liberties, and democracy. In fact, they're so similar I think I'm going to start generically referring to Ahmadinejad as "Busherxes."

"Again, you defend the indefensible."

I didn't vote for a torturer.

"A minor amount of torture"

Even if we limit the discussion to Abu Ghraib, which you seem to be assuming for some reason, being held incommunicado for over a year, stripped and sexually humiliated, sodomized with flashlights, beaten, attacked with dogs, told your families will be murdered, and in at least one verified case, kicked to death while tied to the floor (the soldier was demoted), is not "minor."

Imagine your entire head covered in a black sack, as it's been for months; you haven't known day from night other than by the heat and freezing cold since you were brought here; you don't know if you're going to live or die, what's happened to your family or if they know you're still alive, or whether today you'll have a bullet in the back of your head as some of the guards insist; your hands tied behind you, your body naked, hearing the sound of laughter as boots crash into your stomach, as foreign accents brokenly talk about how they're going to rape your wife and daughters and throw their bodies in a ditch. Now repeat this experience hundreds of times, with dozens of variations on the cruelty, and tell me how you'd probably feel listening to yourself talk as you have here.

Torture is never legal, negotiable, excusable, or "minor." Those who rationalized it (e.g., Gonzales), ordered it (Rumsfeld), allowed and continued it (Bush), and committed it are traitors and belong in prison for the rest of their lives. That is, in a CLEAN prison, where their HUMAN RIGHTS will be respected, unlike what they've done to hundreds of people including innocents. Moreover, a lot worse things than those found at Abu Ghraib were commited at Gitmo and various, less well-known torture sites in the regime's overseas gulag archipelago. Use of suffocation with soaked rags, water-boarding, and chaining in intensely painful positions that restrict breathing for weeks on end have been verified to the satisfaction of the Red Cross, who has also reported repeated attempts to hide seriously injured prisoners from them.

"conducted by all apparent evidence against the wishes of the chief exectuive"

Considering it occurred at multiple facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous other places around the world, was carried out in conjunction with CIA personnel, was followed by a vigorous Justice Department attempt to rationalize it as legal, and according to the ICRC has continued to this day, your claim is a ludicrous and damnable insult.

"verses the mass denial of human rights that is President Achtung's regieme"

Yes, because he can get away with it. Bush and Busherxes both go exactly as far as they can get away with going, and no further--Bush will torture people overseas, but doesn't dare the provocation of doing it on our own shores; and Busherxes will bluster and threaten while knowing he would never be allowed to commit Iran to its own destruction.

"because huge orders of magnitude make no difference to you."

The orders of magnitude are in the other direction, but you can't seem to care because one is Your Guy and the other isn't.

"Again, you wonder why serious people on this board think you an idiot."

I don't wonder why idiots think anything they do. It's achingly clear. And there is no rationalization, excuse, or foreign straw man that Bush's 2004 voters can conjure that could make voting for a torturer other than the complete abdication of morality, decency, and American citizenship that it was.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 4, 2007 08:57 AM

"I didn't vote for a torturer."

Neither did I. I see no evidence that Bush personaly directed any torture or sanctioned it. So far, you have produced zero evidence to back your assertion.

"I don't wonder why idiots think anything they do."

So you do not self-question or seek self feedback. That is abundantly clear to everyone else too. This could help explain your psychosis.

Posted by Mike Puckett at April 4, 2007 09:08 AM

From the above steaming piles of ad hominems I tease the following assertions:

-The war is lost to us.

-Bush systematically abuses civil liberties.

If these assertions are invalid the entire anti-war, anti-Bush case of BS and anonymous collapses. Yet BS and anonymous do not provide evidence for their assertions. All they do is repeat them with ever-increasing vehemence.

Why should anyone accept your assertions? Surely they are empirically testable and subject to rebuttal. Surely reasonable people can disagree about them. Yet your responses to reasonable counter-arguments here consist of insults and more unsupported assertions. If the war really is unwinnable you should be able to explain why. If Bush is systematically having prisoners tortured and abusing civil liberties you should be able to provide evidence. I've heard people openly accusing Bush of everything under the sun, yet somehow no one disappears in the night, and the only civil-rights violations I hear about are marginal cases that are subject to dispute. The only thing you've proved is your animosity toward Bush.

Posted by Jonathan at April 4, 2007 11:05 AM

Mike: "I see no evidence that Bush personaly directed any torture or sanctioned it."

ONCE AGAIN: Considering it occurred at multiple facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous other places around the world; was carried out in conjunction with CIA personnel; was followed by a vigorous Justice Department attempt to rationalize it as legal; involved neither the firing nor prosecution of any White House, CIA, Pentagon, or DOJ official for ordering, allowing, or attempting to justify it; and according to the ICRC has continued to this day, your claim is a ludicrous and damnable insult to this country.

Mike: "This could help explain your psychosis."

Denial can be a psychosis, and the above claim about "no evidence" clearly qualifies. The Bush regime's response to accusations of torture has been and remains talking about how evil and dangerous their prisoners are, which has nothing to do with whether or not they torture and doesn't change the law.

Then, still without denying anything, they make some boilerplate remark about the credibility of the prisoners, even though the accusations are verified by innocent victims released and cleared by them of any suspicion, and found to be credible by the ICRC. Every time new horrors emerge, they say the same factually irrelevant non-denials, feebly trying to ratchet up the terror and insist they can do whatever they want as long as they use the magic word "9/11." Under those circumstances, the apologists (and denialists) for this regime have a lot to answer for.

Jonathan: "The war is lost to us."

There is no war. The "mission" in Iraq, if there ever was one, has degenerated into maintaining a US presence for its own sake, and at the very least until Bush can "gracefully retire" from politics without being confronted by reality.

Furthermore, the people responsible for 9/11 are nearly all dead or captured, and our operations in Afghanistan largely consist of security sweeps. Any sane, rational leader would have implemented something similar to the Marshall Plan for the Afghans, with both obvious and subtle differences, but of course Bush didn't. All they've done is dish out a few pipeline contracts, build a handful of roads the military finds useful, and then let most of the country just wallow in the same squalor and danger in which they found it.

In any case, I believe we still have a strong chance of succeeding (i.e., building a stable country) once an actual president is back in charge in Washington, and rational priorities take over from the psychotic chaos of the past few years. An Afghan Marshall Plan, fully funded and endorsed by the international community, would be the beginning of both Afghanistan's recovery and our own.

There might even come a time when, to the enormous chagrin and resentment of war fantasists everywhere, an American president states unequivocally that the "War on Terror" has been successfully concluded. Of course no such thing ever existed to begin with, but the announcement would mean we've dealt with those problems that actually do exist and could finally move on. Surely the worst nightmare of some around here.

Jonathan: "Bush systematically abuses civil liberties."

Far more important is his systematic abuse of human rights.

"Yet BS and anonymous do not provide evidence for their assertions."

Since I'm assuming none of us has been in a coma for the past six years, that means we've all witnessed the same events unfolding, and the likelihood of having remained completely insulated the whole time is small. Moreover, if certain people frequent the liberal sites as often as their precious slurs against them imply, they should no doubt have encountered most of the evidence that's out there, including that which I've read and have relied upon.

They've seen the reports, although probably not bothering to read them through, and simply ignored them; read the firsthand accounts of the innocent victims, and ignored them too; read maybe the first few pages of the ICRC findings, and then promptly decided not to think about them lest they begin to understand what they've done and (heaven forbid) experience guilt.

I've been through this so many times with so many conservatives that their reactions seem like something from a manual: Ideologically unacceptable statement elicits absurd Python-esque denial; persistence elicits demand for evidence; provision of evidence is ignored; persistence elicits vague, glib dismissals of evidence indicating they never read it; further persistance elicits demands for more evidence; provision of more evidence is ignored; repeat earlier cycle for new evidence; frequent attempts to change subject; frequent employment of convenient fallacies and attempts to use "others are worse" as a defense while still conceding nothing; and finally, after a short time has passed, all evidence earlier provided is forgotten and proof of facts already demonstrated is demanded; repeat cycle.

I'll be glad to dig back in and find the documentation for specific facts you want to read more about, but saying "prove it" after I've just summarized six years of history is clearly nothing more than baiting. So, what would you like to know more about?

Jonathan: "Why should anyone accept your assertions?"

Because they're not my assertions. They've been widely reported for years, and investigated thoroughly by numerous organizations of undisputed credibility, so your question leads to one of my own: If you aren't aware of any of this, despite that coverage, have you been deliberately limiting yourself to ideological sources that wouldn't report such things? I can say off the top of my head that in-depth articles about it have appeared several times in the New Yorker, Newsweek, and Wall Street Journal, several PBS programs have examined it, panel shows have discussed it, the ICRC's report findings were covered in most national newspapers, etc etc. How is it you never saw any of that?

"If the war really is unwinnable you should be able to explain why."

Well, first off I'm curious why you consider "winability" a more important debate than legality and morality, which have always been my primary arguments on the issue. Secondly, I have frequently explained why the scenario is set up to fail, but perhaps you think otherwise because the explanations are usually made in terms of analyzing the claims of supporters. I see no connection whatsoever between their assumptions, claims, and predictions and the facts as they actually turned out, nor do I see any basis in those facts for believing anything constructive or even sustainable can be achieved by the US presence. That alone is *obviously* sufficient to argue for withdrawal, since you don't send people to die for inertia, but the most persuasive argument is also the simplest and most basic: The Iraqi people overwhelmingly want us out of their country. Let Bush finally, at long last give some remote credence to his own "democracy" rhetoric and ask Iraqi leaders to call the question in a UN-monitored plebiscite.

"I've heard people openly accusing Bush of everything under the sun"

The thing is, the truth isn't that hard to find out or recognize. For example, an Attorney General of the United States is not going to split hairs on the definition of torture unless torture is occurring, and certainly isn't going to go out of his way to insist that prisoners aren't covered by the national and international laws against torture just for the hell of it. That is just one small tidbit in a long timeline of outrages, but it's a typical one.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 4, 2007 03:46 PM

Jonathan,

Just want to let you know I respect your attempt at a rationale debate. I'm not surprised that your effort was not reciprocated, but it is nice that every now and then, someone takes a crack at trying to pull out facts rather than rhetoric.

Posted by Leland at April 5, 2007 08:10 AM

Thanks, Leland.

Posted by Jonathan at April 5, 2007 08:53 PM

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