It’s starting to become a pattern – and it can only be good when the sane, reasonable ideas that have been suggested by many of us start getting implemented, no matter who does the implementing. But I just hope, come November, everyone remembers who was right in the first place (no, I’m not just talking about not invading Iraq) and who really has the judgment to Keep America Safe and Powerful.
ITEM ONE:
Obama’s said since before the invasion of Iraq that AFGHANISTAN is the central front in the war on terror, and Iraq has been a disastrous distraction. (Common wisdom by now.) For at least a year now, he’s said that as President he would put at least two more brigades into Afghanistan to quell the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda there – something he could do since he will be withdrawing many more troops than that from Iraq.
McCain has said throughout the campaign that Iraq, not Afghanistan is the central front in the war on terror, and that we should rely mainly on NATO troops in the latter. UNTIL THIS TUESDAY, when he suddenly decided – without crediting his opponent – that we do need to send two brigades to Afghanistan. Although with McCain, it’s hard to know where those troops would come from, as he would like to stay in Iraq indefinitely. (much more documentation here).
It may be that McCain heard the Joint Chiefs’ July 2 call for more troops in Afghanistan but it’s hard to know how a President McCain would provide those troops, unless he intends to bring back the draft.
ITEM TWO:
After ridiculing Obama’s willingness to sit down and negotiate with enemies like Iran, even calling it “appeasement” and comparing Barack to Neville Chamberlain in a completely inappropriate speech to the Israeli Knesset, Bush’s administration is now… going to talk to IRAN!
I know who I’m going to vote for, even if I’m peeved with his FISA flip-flop – the candidate with the judgment to keep our country Safe and Powerful! ¡Sí, se puede!
vern , vern . vern . are you telling us that obama is better at keeping us safe than mccain.. i dont trust obama . he is weak on defense .give me a military man who has some knowledge of what is going on . obama wants to cut n run . and what is going to happen as soon as we get out of there ..
Vern:
The three surge brigades are coming out of Iraq, so they’ll already be available to Afghanistan regardless.
But it’s a good thing we’re winning the War in Iraq (no thanks to Defeatocrats like Barack), so Obama can make the inevitable flip-flop while maintain that he’s only “refining” what he’s always said all along.
great one,
You’ve already got a “military man” in office that theoretically has knowledge of “what is going on”. This “military man” has managed to make a mess of everything he’s touched. It isn’t a military man that we need…it’s someone who isn’t hellbent on forcing his “democraticizing” agenda on countries that have no interest in democracy.
Jubal,
Those three surge brigades should not be redeployed to Afghanistan. They should come home.
Winning in Iraq. What exactly is that going to look like, Jubal?
Vern. “Obama’s lead?” You have just lost what credibility you had.
Perhaps you missed Condi’s comments yesterday.
Anon. You stated: You’ve already got a “military man” in office.
That’s interesting. It wasn’t too long ago that your side questioned president Bush’s military service. Which side of the argument are you taking today? Is this another flip-flop?
Larry,
Nice attempt at spin, but it wasn’t Bush’s actual military service that was questioned. He was “in” the military. It’s the deferential treatment he received while in service that is questioned.
Flip-flop? Nope.
Winning in Iraq. What exactly is that going to look like, Jubal?
Perfecto. Rather than admit we are winning in Iraq, lefty Vern retreats into an intellectually dishonest denial that victory even exists. I’ll take that as an admission of error.
Obama’s and the Left’s opposition to the surge, and their predictions that it would fail, were completely wrong. Obama is already in the process of flip-flopping on withdrawal — he’s just doing it in slow motion in hopes know one will notice, and if they do he’ll simply claim he’s saying what he’s been saying all along.
So much for Obama’s vaunted judgment.
Hey anon,
Millions of these people who “are not interested” in democracy risked life and limb to vote, and did so with passion.
The seeds of the 9/11 attacks and its predecessors through the 80’s and 90’s can be found in the brutal repression and manipulation of the people by the oligarchs, monarchs, dictators, and theocracies in the region. They are not found its actual democracies.
And while we are currently suffering through an oil crisis (partially supply shortages and partially speculative), do we believe, should Saddam have not been toppled, that Europe and the other oil consumers would have resisted reducing or dropping sanctions so they could freely dip into the huge Iraqi reserves? And should that have happened, can we now see that a re-invigorated Saddam would have again attempted nuclear weapons to keep up with his enemies, the Iranians? And the Iranians, who may have ramped down their nuclear program when Iraq became a non-threat, would have been in an arms race with Saddam and Co., making them more lethal than might be at present.
We’ll probably only know with 10 or 20 years hindsight whether the invasion, toppling, and democratic attempt in Iraqi was effective.
BTW, here’s what the Obama campaign site said about the Surge before they popped it down the memory hole earlier this week:
“The problem – the Surge: The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq’s political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq’s civil war. At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006. Moreover, Iraq’s political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.”
I guess that’s an example of change we can believe in.
the left dose not want to win iraq . could you see them telling the people of the u.s.a { WE WHERE WRONG WE ARE NOW WINNING } when you got bozos like harry reid saying we lost the war it dose not help .. if we win in iraq the dems lose .
Hey oldcabman,
Actually, a lot of Shiites voted in Iraq. Very few Sunnis did. Please refrain from trying to portray what has happened in Iraq as some sort of democratic juggernaut that is going to transform the region and all those old Shiite/Sunni conflicts. It ain’t.
Those three surge brigades should not be redeployed to Afghanistan. They should come home.
Brilliant. Obama’s and the Left’s ostensible purpose in immediately withdrawing from Iraq is to concentrate our resources on the “real” front in the War of Terrorism, Afghanistan.
Yet, when forces are actually withdrawn from Iraq, you don’t want to use them that way.
Oldcabmman:
Lefties like anon will never admit to being wrong. They will nitpick every at pimples on the complexion of success.
Matt –
I don’t think Vern’s question was rhetorical… and you didn’t answer it.
SMS
Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan Barack Obama told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri,forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.
Jubal,
If we’ve achieved success in Iraq, then let’s get out.
To all the Neo Cons or more like Chicken Hawks posting today; Your political leaders (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, etc.), conservative think tanks, lobbyists (OIL), Military Industrial Complex (Haliburton, Blackwater) and friends at Fox news made the case to invade Iraq on the following premise:
1) Saddam had WMD’s and would make them available to Terrorist’s.
Don’t suffer from amnesia, that is the message they marketed.
These so called experts, all of them got it wrong. From “100,000 troops will be enough”, uranium tubes, mobile chemical trucks, the meeting of an iraqi bathist with an al queda operative, to the expectations of being “liberators”, spreading democracy, abu ghraib, guantanamo bay, waterboarding, NSA wiretapping, Valerie Plame outing, Rumsfield’s “the war will pay for itself”, etc…
I could go on and on. The point is, they were all WRONG! How could anyone defend the Right’s position? Why let them continue to make policy?I’m completely baffled at the stubborness.
Meanwhile, the culprits have yet to serve justice… Pathetic!
post 19 is right out of the move on .org playbook. your boys scary kerry . rotten clinton . clueless harry reid . all saw the same thing bush did . everyone knows he had WMDS. to sit back and monday qb the whole thing is a little unfair . where mistakes made of course, but with a 9 % rating in the congress the same thing can be said there also .
Hey all,
In response to “When Right is Wrong”, that unknown person who, bravely, anonymously rages against all the “Chickenhawks” who support our fight against terrorists in Iraq:
Yes, mostly Shiites voted in Iraq last time, but Sunni leaders are pledging to urge their people to vote in the next round. They are building a coalition government which will probably end up being a loose federation of the three major groups. It will not be Jeffersonian Democracy, surely, but it will also not be a megalomaniac and his psychopathic sons in a death race against their arch-enemies (the Iranians, not the US.) It is also no longer a country which brutally represses a significant percentage of its population (the Shiites, Marsh Arabs, and Kurds.) In other words, it will end up being a “success.”
We know that it has and will continue to cost dearly. We won’t know for years (or perhaps will only be able to speculate, in a historic, academic way) whether it has “paid for itself”, because we can only guess as to what would have happened if we had not invaded.
As to Afghanistan and the “wild” part of Pakistan that is currently the best refuge of Osama and the others like him: It has no strategic value to us. It is not at the center of the Middle East, nor does it contain the world’s second largest known oil reserves, nor is it militarily capable of attacking either Kuwaiti or Saudi Arabian territory. The Russians learned the hard way that Afghanistan is a military nightmare, we are not finding it to be any better.
Mr. Obama’s is right in saying that the war in Afghanistan needs to be managed better (McCain and most everyone else also agrees, that’s now Dave Petraeus’ focus), and that it has lacked the focus of military resources. The lack of resources is due to the fact that we have been using those resources to draw Al-Quaeda and other Islamists into Iraq and to effectively beat them there.
Anyway, why should the actual “fight-to-win” in Afghanistan be done solely with American power, when many in Western Europe have accepted the righteousness of the war there? Why not seek a (broader, improved) coalition? Mr. Obama seemingly wants to lead the US, only, to a place that we shouldn’t be going, or at least not without the rest of the world alongside.
Our invasion and occupation of Iraq was a secondary topic of this post. The main point was that events of late have forced both the Bush administration and McCain to adopt common-sense positions which Obama (and others) had long advocated, and which they had ridiculed until recently. So, to piss off Bushies and McCainites, I characterized this pattern as their “following Obama’s lead.” That is certainly one way to look at it! And the pattern has continued in the two days since I wrote this post, so I’m writing a sequel.
Of the five “pro-war” commenters here, “oldcabman” is the most serious and thoughtful, so I’ll respond to him last. Nobody takes “great one” seriously; he exists in the blogosphere as a sort of object lesson, and some (not I) suspect he is a left-wing spoof… (cont.)
…Matt “Jubal” Cunningham has his own special well-known brand of dishonesty, on full display in this thread. He ignores (as SMS is starting to notice) perfectly serious (and devastating) comments and questions like my #5 and anon’s #18, only pouncing and cherrypicking when he thinks he’s found a sentence he can distort into a contradiction.
As in #14. First, Anon reacts to Jubal’s cruel fantasy of redeploying our exhausted surge troops to Afghanistan with the obvious retort that these poor young men and women deserve to come home. Then, sneers Jubal, “Brilliant! Obama’s and the Left’s ostensible purpose in immediately [16 months = immediately?] withdrawing from Iraq is to concentrate our resources on … Afghanistan. Yet, when they’re actually withdrawn, you don’t want to use them that way.”
NO, our troops need to come home from Iraq because they don’t belong there, they have done a great job and WON, and deserve to come home and heal and be celebrated. And we need SOME of them to go to the real fight in Afghanistan. It’s so easy for this armchair warrior—-our troops are just like toy soldiers and it’s nothing but simple math for him.
In #11, he is sure he’s caught Barack in some sort of flip-flop by quoting him being critical of the Surge, admitting that it reduced violence but was not taken advantage of by Iraqis for political progress. There’s nothing there that’s untrue, is there? Nothing that Obama or most of us here would disagree with then or now. If he’s taken it down off his site now, which I gather is what happened, it’s because it’s no longer as relevant as it was now that the “Surge” is supposedly over. (Although we actually still have thousands more troops out there than we did at the beginning of the “Surge.”) This whole business of Barack flipflopping on Iraq is Fox-news BS anyway—he’s been very consistent on his 16-month STRATEGY, and “refining” is “refining.”
Juice-brother Larry. (#3) I’ve lost “whatever credibility I had” because of some spin Condi put on Bush’s flipflop? Vern losing credibility because of something Condi Rice said — have you any idea how comical that sounds? Once again I have to guess … this would be about Condi claiming they’re not “negotiating with” but “talking to” Iran? That’s called Spin, Brother Larry, Spin. Semantics. What the administration is doing in Iran is exactly what they ridiculed Obama for saying that he would do, nothing less or more.
Then along comes Juice-brother Thomas, (#17) with yet another anecdote of Obama allegedly saying something foolish. I WOULD like to trust you when you write about Santa Ana, and to think that you could be a decent mayor. But forgive us for our skepticism here, you’ve had such a bad track record when it comes to your Obama stories. So far they all come from rightwing chain mails and they’ve all been regularly debunked here. Don’t make me look for the embarrassing links.
So I don’t even know for sure if Obama did say they need Arabic translators in Afghanistan, and if he did say that I don’t know if he was misspeaking or meant to say it. Of course they speak many languages in Afghanistan, and Arabic is not among the top four. (I know this because I lived for five years in an area of HB we called “Little Kabul” because of all the Afghan refugees — believe it or not!)
But I’m thinking that he could have said that and meant it, and been entirely correct. Remember, the religious pricks who attacked us on 9/11 were Arabic speakers operating from Afghanistan … and now the same folks are hiding out in mountainous Western Pakistan, right next to Afghanistan. I would tend to trust Obama, who knows a hell of a lot more about the area than John “can’t tell Sunnis from Shia” McCain.
On to my allies. #19 “When Right is Wrong.” Nice rant, all accurate. Must drive righties crazy that the group most outspoken and 100% correct about this misadventure from the start was MoveOn.org, the people who make obnoxious puns on Petraeus and Betrayus. Oh wait. That was Rush Limbaugh first. Never mind.
Anon #3 (who also did yeoman service on #4, 8, 13, and 18), even though I agree with most of what you say I wouldn’t have refered to President Bush as a “military man.” I think I know what you mean: He presents himself as a military man, he likes to prance around on aircraft carriers in a military drag, he calls himself “a war President” ad nauseam, most of these righties probably think he’s a “military man,” and he just plain loves hisself some war as long as he doesn’t have to be in it himself. But we both know he is the chickenhawk par excellence, not even able to comply with the cushy service he was given to keep out of Vietnam. And you gave an opening to Brother Larry (#7) to accuse us of contradictions.
And in the same comment you grant Bush the benefit of being a foolish cockeyed-optimist “democratizer.” (Giving an opening to protests from #10 oldcabman.) Come on, you don’t believe this war had anything to do with fostering democracy, do you really? Let’s continue to talk about what this war was really for, on my next post.
You were right on at #18, with the comment “If we’ve achieved success, let’s get out.” These war-lovers are really a prisoner of the success of their surge—–comment #18 is what all reasonable Americans are saying! Jubal will NEVER respond to that. They do NOT want to leave Iraq, no matter what!
Oldcabman, #10 and 21; a couple things first:
Anyway, why should the actual “fight-to-win” in Afghanistan be done solely with American power, when many in Western Europe have accepted the righteousness of the war there? Why not seek a (broader, improved) coalition? Mr. Obama seemingly wants to lead the US, only, to a place that we shouldn’t be going, or at least not without the rest of the world alongside.
Where do you get that impression? We pretty much left Afghanistan up to NATO and brought almost all our troops to Iraq. Obama doesn’t want to get rid of NATO but rejoin that coalition we already have there. Things are not going well with such halfhearted participation from us, but nobody’s talking about going it alone there.
The lack of resources is due to the fact that we have been using those resources to draw Al-Quaeda and other Islamists into Iraq and to effectively beat them there.
See that’s the flypaper theory again, so offensive to actual Iraqis who don’t want their country made into a battleground between us and the Jihadists. But in actuality, only something like 3% of the people we’ve been fighting in Iraq are from outside of Iraq.
The seeds of the 9/11 attacks and its predecessors through the 80’s and 90’s can be found in the brutal repression and manipulation of the people by the oligarchs, monarchs, dictators, and theocracies in the region. They are not found its actual democracies.
Well… if we don’t count Iran as a democracy, which it is in only the most limited sense, that leaves Israel as the only democracy in the region (we’re talking 80’s & 90’s) … but it’s kind of hard to say that Israel and its policies had NOTHING to do with the “seeds of the 9/11 attacks.” Wherever you stand on the settlements and the occupied territories, Israel’s policies and the US’s unwavering support for all of their policies was actually the largest motiving factor in the attacks. Not to excuse the attacks at all, but just saying… Apart from that your point about the oligarchs etc. is also correct.
I know these three points are peripheral to your main concerns, and that you have spent a lot of time agonizing over the question of if this war will turn out to have been “worth it,” just as I have spent years trying to figure out what it was all for. I’m pretty comfortable looking at the death toll on our side, the tens of thousands of grievously wounded troops, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, the vast displacement, the three trillion dollars when all the loans for this are paid off, the damage to our military and our reputation, and the lost years going after our terrorist enemies, … and I’m pretty sure that even if I’m able to look back at this fifty years from now, I’ll still say it was not worth it. Not close.
There are brave Iraqis, as you mention, who do want democracy. The same ones who want us out of there. I think some of the best Iraqis we should be supporting, if we only could, are the oil workers attempting to unionize, stuck in a vice between a repressive US-backed government that would like to privatize Iraq’s oil and pay them starvation wages, and religious fanatics of various stripes who consider them to be sellouts to the Great Satan.
Like I said, I don’t believe our administration cares or ever cared about fostering democracy, any more than they really believed Saddam was a threat to us with WMD’s and terrorist ties. Those were just their top two PRETEXTS. But this comment’s gone on long enough, we can discuss what this war may or may not have been for on the next post…