Despite the assertions of some here that I’m a knee-jerk supporter of all things liberal, people without blinders on are aware that I’ve expressed frustration and anger with Democratic party leaders any number of times.
But I have to say, I was tremendously amused to learn that the Democrats are intending to present the war funding bill to Bush–a bill he is certain to veto because, God forbid, it sets a timetable for our troops coming home (because in Bushworld extending their tours and leaving them in indefinite danger is “supporting” the troops whereas bringing them home isn’t)–on the fourth anniversary of Bush standing in front of that dámņëd “Mission Accomplished” sign. Think of it as Operation MAMA–Mission Accomplished, My Úš.
PAD
• 
Has anybody read any of Peter Lances books?
or is he another “shooter in the grassy knoll” type?
http://www.peterlance.com
The Bush Administration did EVERYTHING possible to attach Saddam with 9/11. Even if they were not explicit, they jammed them together like PB&J.
If you asked for an explicit connection, you got responses framed so that the public would make the connections (without actually hearing any proof).
For example, Condi Rice regularly attached these phrases together in interviews:
“Saddam is a threat.”
“Saddam has WMDs.”
“Saddam wants nuclear weapons.”
“Saddam harbors terrorists.”
“Saddam has ties to Al Qaida.”
“Terrorists attacked us on 9/11.”
“Terrorists could blow up a U.S. city with a nuke.”
If the interviewer asked what connections Saddam had to Al Qaida, her reponse would be (some variation of): “We can’t wait for a mushroom cloud!”
Anyone giving Condi Rice, et al, the benefit of the doubt would make the connection that Saddam would give nukes to terrorists to use in our cities.
AT NO TIME did the Bush Administration CORRECT the misperception (if misperception it was) that all these statements added up that way. If people were wrong, and by people I mean the MEDIA, the Bush Admin certainly did not offer any kind of clarification.
And keep in mind, the media who pushed this the most were outlets who have been shown to take marching orders straight from Karl Rove. So there’s no question this misinformation was purely intentional.
It’s absurd when one party bìŧçhëš about the others’ riders attached to bills. What percentage of bills are “clean” anyway? A fraction of one-percent, if that much.
I’m not saying it’s right. I’d love a law that says every bill must be clean.
But if the GOP wanted clean bills, they had 12 years to establish that new tradition.
Micha wrote: “The reference to WWII is typical. It is unfortunate that to many people carelessly compare every conflict to WWII, instead of learning the relevant lessons and adapting them to each unique conflict, while also learning other lessons from other conflicts.”
“Learning the relevant lessons” is exactly what I am talking about.
If you are, in fact, knowledgeable about World War II, and you do not see the inherent danger of appeasement in the face of an aggressor, then you missed one of the key takeaways from that conflict.
And your Cold War example is flawed. There were several instances during the Cold War – most notably The Cuban Missile Crisis — when World War III was nearly triggered. In other words, containment is still a very dangerous proposition, and historically has failed far more often than it has succeeded. It, like a hot war, is still a form of Russian roulette – and while it is an option, it still might end up killing you.
The fact is, North Korea is more dangerous today than at any other time in the past 54 years, in my opinion. You seem to think that because they have not directly attacked South Korea for five decades, they have become a toothless tiger, with no stomach for war. I disagree. They still want a united peninsula more than ever, but only under their rules and their form of government.
In my personal opinion, if we do anything militarily against North Korea, Seoul is toast, along with its 10 million inhabitants (22 million, if you take into account its entire metro area). This is how it is now, and this is how it was 10 years ago.
So, keep your fingers crossed that the North collapses from within before its leadership has a bad day and opts to attack. Because right now, that’s about all we can do.
The idea was pounded into peoples brains by the Bush Admin throughout 2002 and into 2003. It’s really hard to argue that. You’ll find very little in the mainstream or popular public discourse about it prior to that point.
I suspect this ABC news report was not the only one of its kind but it would take more work than I’m ready to put into it to prove it one way or another. My point was simply that this was not something new and if people had the perception taht Alqaeda and Saddam had links they may well have gotten it from ABC news–“where more Americans get their news than from any other source”.
Incidentally, another possible source of this idea is from those right wing rabble rousers at PBS with their interview of former CIA head (under the Bush-lackey lickspittles of the Clinton administration) R. James Woolsey where he says, among other things, “I think things will continue to come out tying Iraq — possibly Iran — but tying Iraq to terrorism directly against the United States in the 1990s and possibly September 11, 2001.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/woolsey.html
I do remembr one pop culture reference to Saddam and WMD though–at the beginning of Armegeddon, when the meteors are crashing into NYC, one of the Wayans brothers screams “We’re being bombed by Saddam Hussein!”
I suspect this ABC news report was not the only one of its kind but it would take more work than I’m ready to put into it to prove it one way or another. My point was simply that this was not something new and if people had the perception taht Alqaeda and Saddam had links they may well have gotten it from ABC news–“where more Americans get their news than from any other source”.
It may not have been, but I spent about an hour bouncing around on Google and came up with almost nothing but stories from 2002 and beyond. Most of the pre-2002 stuff was the same two or three stories being discussed on hundreds of blogs. Hundreds and hundreds of blogs. You have no idea the size of the aspirin I need right now.
Some people may have remembered that story and thought that. No question there. But the majority of people likely didn’t. Like I said before, most people didn’t even seem to know who the hëll Osama Bin Laden was or what Al Qaeda was until after the press explained it for weeks on end after 9/11. It took OBL sticking his head up and sending out his “I did it videos for most people to even know what he looked like. Ok, slight exaggeration there.
But still, a few people did think that Saddam and OBL might make a pact back then. Lots of people look at their enemies and their allies under the the enemy of my enemy is my friend prism of thought. But that was looked into and was being disputed, quite strongly, within the intelligence community when Bush and crew took their show on the road.
Saying that the few, minor stories from 1999 – 2001 fueled the mass craze that Iraq and Al Qaeda were all buddy-buddy with each other and that OBL and Saddam were joined at the hip in there 9/11 complicity or WMD manufacturing is like saying that the light spring rains in 2003 are what really weakened the levees in N.O. and Katrina wasn’t really that responsible for their bursting.
Do your homework on someone before you try and use them as a debating point. R. James Woolsey was gunning for Iraq for quite some time before that interview. As a matter of fact, he and several friends of his got together and sent a letter to Clinton to do something about Saddam back in 1998. Maybe you’ve heard of the guy’s friends? Donald Rumsfeld? Paul Wolfowitz? John Bolton? Richard L. Armitage? William J. Bennett? Francis Fûkûÿámá? Richard Perle? Any of them ring a bell? They all got together and formed this little glee club called Project For The New American Century and advocated using any pretext that an incident in the Middle East might offer to take Saddam out and set up shop in Iraq.
You can see Woolsey’s John Hancock with those guys here:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
Other then that, Woolsey was also the Delegate at Large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), Geneva, 1983-1986 under Ronald Reagan (and he left the CIA under Clinton’s Administration in 1995.) He’s been in to many conservative groups and in government service in general way too long to try and make him out to be a lib for this argument based on his three years of service under Bill Clinton. That’s a bit like calling Colin Powell a raging conservative neo-con because he served under Bush.
Oh, he’s also now a member of the FDD with just a bunch of screaming libs.
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/biographies/biographies.htm
I do remembr one pop culture reference to Saddam and WMD though–at the beginning of Armegeddon, when the meteors are crashing into NYC, one of the Wayans brothers screams “We’re being bombed by Saddam Hussein!”
Backs one of my points up quite well. It was a joke in a Hollywood movie that was meant to point out how what a joke everyone viewed Saddam as at the time.
Bill Mulligan, I don’t mean to play “pile on the Republican” here but I have to agree with Jerry Chandler: you’re making a mountain out of what doesn’t even rise to the level of a molehill with this ABC News report and the PBS interview with Woolsey. The idea that Al Qaeda was in any way linked with Iraq wasn’t at the forefront of the public consciousness until Bush put it there. And moreover, by the time Bush started talking about it, it was already well-known that the evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection was too thin to be worth anything. But that didn’t stop Bush from using it to help his agenda.
As I’ve already pointed out, the entire ABC News piece hinged on an alleged meeting between Saddam’s then-intelligence chief and bin Laden, wherein Iraq reportedly extended a welcome mat to the head of Al Qaeda. That’s it. That’s the ONLY fact upon which they hinged the assertion that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a long history. That’s an awfully big leap of logic, to say the least.
Posted by: R. Maheras at April 29, 2007 12:25 AM
“Learning the relevant lessons” is exactly what I am talking about.
If you are, in fact, knowledgeable about World War II, and you do not see the inherent danger of appeasement in the face of an aggressor, then you missed one of the key takeaways from that conflict.
I followed the link you provided. The Web page provided a very simplistic bit of history, written at a grade-school level. If you truly want to read a good history of World Wars I & II, I recommend the following books (if you haven’t already read them): A Short History of World War I and A Short History of World War II, both written by James L. Stokesbury. He does a great job of providing an historical context for both wars.
The “appeasement” argument is a shopworn cliche, I’m afraid. Iraq was not Germany. Neither is South Korea. At the time Germany was secretly building up its military against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, its neighbors were still licking their wounds from World War I. None of those countries were in particularly good shape to stop Germany’s advances, and one school of thought holds that Neville Chamberlain’s isolationism may have ironically bought England some much needed time to prepare its military for the coming German onslaught.
Iraq and N. Korea are not comparable to Nazi Germany. Neither country could go on a rampage against its neighbors and get very far. Hëll, Iraq was in crappy shape after Gulf War I, as demonstrated by how easily the Iraqi army folded during the 2003 U.S. invasion. And they had no WMDs.
As for N. Korea, yeah, they may have a handful of nukes. But they also have a return address and as batshit crazy as I believe their government to be, I also believe they have a survival instinct. Can you imagine what would happen if N. Korea deployed a nuke against S. Korea? The U.S. would probably wipe the North out of existence! N. Korea has been trying to get our attention with a nuclear threat because they feel it will bring us to the bargaining table. A skilled diplomat like George H.W. Bush could probably find a way to get them to calm down without sacrificing U.S. long-term security interests.
Posted by: R. Maheras at April 29, 2007 12:25 AM
And your Cold War example is flawed. There were several instances during the Cold War – most notably The Cuban Missile Crisis — when World War III was nearly triggered.
Are you suggesting that we should’ve gone to war against the Soviets, then? Because that would’ve resulted in a global thermonuclear conflict! I prefer the dangers of containment to that scenario, thank you very much.
“Im certainly not going to argue grammer with you PAD. You most obviously have a better handle on it then me. or is that myself?”
Actually it’s “I.” “…have a better handle on it than I.”
People frequently get confused on the me/I pronoun, but it’s easily avoidable. All you have to do is add the rest of the unspoken sentence and your ear will fill you in. In this instance, imagine adding the word “do.” Is it “have a better handle on it than I do” or “have a better handle on it than me do”? Pretty obvious, or at least it should be.
Same general approach with combos. If you don’t know whether to say, “John and I are going bowling” or “John and me are going bowling,” make it singular. Is it “I am going bowling” or “Me am going bowling?” Obviously it’s only the latter if you’re Superbaby.
See the things you learn hanging out here?
PAD
While Peter already delineated the difference between imply and infer… here’s a little trick that makes it even easier:
Just remember that the speaker “implies.” The listener “infers.”
I just didn’t want to feel left out. 🙂
Do your homework on someone before you try and use them as a debating point. R. James Woolsey was gunning for Iraq for quite some time before that interview. As a matter of fact, he and several friends of his got together and sent a letter to Clinton to do something about Saddam back in 1998. Maybe you’ve heard of the guy’s friends? Donald Rumsfeld? Paul Wolfowitz? John Bolton? Richard L. Armitage? William J. Bennett? Francis Fûkûÿámá? Richard Perle? Any of them ring a bell? They all got together and formed this little glee club called Project For The New American Century and advocated using any pretext that an incident in the Middle East might offer to take Saddam out and set up shop in Iraq.
Oh I know what a right winger Woolsey is. The point I am trying (and obviously failing) to make is that there were people in government and in the media making explicit connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda before 9/11.
The fact that Woolsey was so gung ho on this idea supports my point–if this was the view of the head of the CIA don’t you think this info was probably getting out there?
I’m not arguing that the Bush people did not imply things that led others to infer things. But any argument as to why people believe as they do ought to at least acknowledge the ABC news story if they are being honest. Were there other stories? Maybe, let’s keep in mind that not everything automatically got plunked on the internet 9 or 10 years ago.
Here’s another–principle vs principal. Easy to remember: “The PRINCIPAL is your pal.”
I also, to this day, have to use the following to calculate sine, cosine and tangent: Saddle Our Horses, Canter Away Happily, Toward Other Adventures. The math teacher who taught me that warned us that once learned we would never be able to forget it and he was right.
Posted by: Bill Mulligan at April 29, 2007 09:57 AM
The point I am trying (and obviously failing) to make is that there were people in government and in the media making explicit connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda before 9/11.
Bill… I get that. I really do. But as I’ve pointed out… it’s irrelevant.
First, regardless of how many or how few reports there were about this (and I suspect there were fewer than you believe), this was NOT at the forefront of the public consciousness until Bush put it there.
Second, this was not conventional wisdom in the intelligence community by 2002. I think you and I would agree that Bush should’ve been basing decision made in 2002 on recent intelligence, not stuff that was believed to be true three years prior. Well, by 2002 it was pretty well-established that nothing ever came of the meeting between the Iraqi official and bin Laden. Hëll, by that time bin Laden had declared Saddam an enemy!
Third, I don’t give a rat’s ášš whether Bush was being dishonest with us… or dishonest with himself. Either way he told the U.S. that he had strong evidence that Iraq was a threat when in fact the OPPOSITE was true.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16521324/
WASHINGTON – U.S. President George W. Bush’s new Iraq policy will include “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government to meet to ease sectarian violence and stabilize the country, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
…
The U.S. officials insisted that they intended to hold the Iraqis to a realistic timetable for action but did not say what the specific penalties for failure would be, the newspaper reported.
…
Administration officials said that by more clearly defining the goals and by planning to make them public some time after Bush’s address they hope to encourage a sense of accountability on the part of the Iraqis, the newspaper reported.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html
The people of Iraq want to live in peace, and now it’s time for their government to act. Iraq’s leaders know that our commitment is not open-ended.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,242314,00.html
Besides an order to increase up to 20,000 troops in the country, FOX News confirmed Monday that the plan also will include establishing a set of benchmarks that the government there will be expected to reach in an effort to stabilize the country in the face of heightening sectarian tensions.
I point up these quotes because they’re rather important in the “Reality VS Bushality” debate for this week. Condi just shot another hole into her credibility on This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
She just said that:
1) The Democrats imposing deadlines isn’t the same as benchmarks in Iraq because the Iraqis rather then us are the ones who set up the benchmarks for their progress.
and
2) We can’t set up deadlines based on these benchmarks because there shouldn’t be some sort of artificial consequences for failing to meet the goals of the benchmarks. We can’t hold Iraq to the benchmarks that “they” set for themselves because it would be wrong.
Yup. Just another day at the Bush Ministry of Truth.
Oh, I loved her new definition of Iraq being an Imminent Threat. See, now, that doesn’t have anything to do how powerful Iraq was or what Iraq was capable of. Noooooooo. Saying that Iraq was an imminent threat was referring to the U.S.’s strength at the time. Imminent threat means looking at whether you’re more able to deal with a threat today, or if you’ll be in a better or worse position to deal with that threat tomorrow.
Oh, so Iraq was an imminent threat in 2002 and 2003 because either the U.S. could suddenly have gotten weaker or because Iraq could, maybe, one day might get strong enough and capable enough to be a challenge to the U.S.? Ðámņ. We’ll be invading Borneo next week if that’s how they look at it.
Oh I know what a right winger Woolsey is. The point I am trying (and obviously failing) to make is that there were people in government and in the media making explicit connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda before 9/11.
Yeah, you kind sidetracked your point by adding the bit about Clinton into it in the citation of Woolsey. That made the point come across, at least to me, as you saying that Woolsey was an example of a prominent Lib or Democrat.
The fact that Woolsey was so gung ho on this idea supports my point–if this was the view of the head of the CIA don’t you think this info was probably getting out there?
Kind of… Woolsey, while he still likely had a few inside contacts that would skirt federal law by telling him the odd fact that he was no longer legally allowed to know, was essentially out of the loop as of 1995. His information was four years out of date by that point. That’s a lifetime in Intelligence terms. people out of the loop can still speak on their field of expertise, but they lose the credibility debate when held up against people still in the loop saying, as the White House was being told in 2001 -2003, that those older ideas have been shown to not hold water.
Woolsey also drops a few credibility points by being a member of Project for the New American Century. When you’re a part of a group that holds the position that it’s ok to use any major event in Middle East as a pretext to enter into conflict with Iraq in order to bring about regime change… I think I’m taking your talking points on Iraq with a huge grain of salt.
I’m not arguing that the Bush people did not imply things that led others to infer things. But any argument as to why people believe as they do ought to at least acknowledge the ABC news story if they are being honest.
No, it should be included in the overall discussion. But, again, it was such a minor event in the public conversation of the time. Barely anyone caught it and for most that did it seemingly went in one ear and out the other. Adding those voices who were a part of the pre-2002/2003 chorus to those who were part of the post-2002/2003 chorus is a wee bit like peeing in the ocean. No matter how inflated your ego is over your own… uh… prowess, you’re not likely to cause any noticeable change in the sea’s overall volume.
No, it should be included in the overall discussion. But, again, it was such a minor event in the public conversation of the time. Barely anyone caught it and for most that did it seemingly went in one ear and out the other.
But it seems to me that a lot of people are saying that an explicit claim of Iraq/Al Qaeda links on the highest rated evening news simply passed by without anyone noticing…but the slightest implication of same by a Bush official on a sunday news chat somehow made a majority of the country come to that conclusion.
Geez, Bill Mulligan, are you shrouding me or something?
Seriously, I just can’t reconcile your position with the fact that by 2002 intelligence agencies had learned of nothing — nothing — to even suggest that this 1998 meeting led to anything worthy of note. Bush conveniently left that part out when he began pounding the Drums of War.
Perhaps my posts appeared to be of the rhetorical, dead-end, “gotcha” type. So I’ll try to phrase it in the form of a question, like Alex Trebek always asks contestants to do, so that I may elicit a response:
Why shouldn’t what was known in 2002 supersede anything ABC News reported in 1998?
Also, given that the ABC News report cited what seems to me to be thin evidence — one meeting about which little is known — and given that that’s EXACTLY the reason why the evidence didn’t hold much water in 2002, why should it have held any more weight in 1998, when it was first reported?
Y’know, I just realized why this argument is going ’round in circles (I attribute my slowness to this cold that has been plaguing me since last week). We’re arguing about the wrong thing.
Did Bush the Younger manufacture all talk about a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq out of whole cloth? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Doesn’t actually matter. Because it Bush who decided that the evidence merited an invasion of Iraq, and it was Bush who made that case to a U.S. public that was NOT clamoring for such an invasion until he played on their fears and misled them.
The question is not whether there were people who believed in an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, but whether the evidence of that justified an invasion. Given that intelligence agencies in 2002 had no evidence — NONE — to suggest that anything came out of that 1998 meeting, the answer is a big fat resounding “NO!”
Did Bush manufacture the story about a 1998 meeting between an Iraqi official and OBL? No. But he also didn’t bother to mention in his speeches that we had no evidence of anything coming out of that meeting. The former fact cannot be judged without the context provided by the latter.
So the answer is: Bush was not the only one who spoke about a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq and he was nevertheless dishonest with us. The two are not mutually exclusive.
But it seems to me that a lot of people are saying that an explicit claim of Iraq/Al Qaeda links on the highest rated evening news simply passed by without anyone noticing… but the slightest implication of same by a Bush official on a sunday news chat somehow made a majority of the country come to that conclusion.
Ok, are you doing a Roddy Piper or Bobby Heenan on me. You gotta be trying to tweak me here.
You’ve gotta know that the highest rated news show in the country is still only watched by a fraction of the population. Add to that the fact that it was a short blip on the program. I’m a news and politics junkie and I only vaguely remember it. I also vaguely remember some dispute over the facts involved in it afterwards. Then it went away.
… but the slightest implication of same by a Bush official on a sunday news chat…
Uhhhhhh, no. First, it wasn’t a Sunday news show or just a Bush official. It was every Sunday chat show that they were on, it was pushed every time they were on and it was every major official in the Bush Administration right on up to the VP himself. It was pushed on the weeknight shows, on every cable appearance, on every talk radio appearance and in every newspaper interview that was made. Bush played the idea up in his speeches as well.
When the Bush Administration people weren’t talking up themselves, they could count on Rush, Hannity, Beck, Savage, Liddy and others to bang that drum all day long on talk radio. If you didn’t do talk radio, you would get an earful from pro-Bush pundits on CNN, CNN Headline News and MSNBC playing the war drums. And of course, they could count on Fox News pushing the idea as hard as possible and smearing anybody or any organization as lying, unpatriotic or anti-American propagandist groups if they pointed out any flaws in the theory. In print, you had editorial pages full of the same people writing week after week on the subject and pushing it to the moon. If you logged onto your net service’s homepage, you had big headline banners touting the idea and you then could log on to pundit pages or blogs and see the idea all over the debates there.
Trying to compare the impact of a few one off, rather short news pieces to in 1999 or 2000 to the almost nonstop cacophony of voices pounding away on the issue in 2002 and 2003 and all the things that the growing information age brought to the table just doesn’t stand up.
Yes, do include the idea that some people were pushing that idea and that some of the public at large may even have believed the idea as far back as ’98 or ’99. But it was nothing like what happened when Bush, Cheney and Rummy decided that this was going to be the talking point de’ jour that they made it. The difference in the level of awareness of the idea in 1999 to the level of awareness in 2002/2003 is night and day.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I didn’t arue with you because, as you point out, we weren’t quite on the same page on what we thought we were arguing about. Or something. 🙂
Anyway, I’d never shroud you. But one of the disadvantages (?) of getting to know someone and be their friend is that you are more likely to just let stuff go without comment. Unless you say something really stupid. So don’t get cocky. 🙂
Heh-heh-heh. Bill Mulligan said “cocky.”
Say the “f-word” again!
… we weren’t quite on the same page on what we thought we were arguing about.
I’ll go there as well. I’m not saying that you’re wrong in the idea that the theory of their connection was floated prior to 2001. I’m not saying that you’re wrong in saying that some people knew of the idea and believed in it.
The only two points that I’m really arguing are the levels of impact on the general public’s awareness of the idea and the fact that by 2002 the Intel people themselves were telling Bush and crew that these ideas weren’t really all that and a bag of chips as some thought several years prior.
Far more people were made aware of this theory in 2002 then ever before and the argument could be made that Bush and crew are far more guilty of pushing a discredited intelligence theory and fostering it on the public then the people who ran with the idea in the mid to late 1990’s.
Now, where do we stand on these two points?
Sounds about right to me from what I know…but what I don’t know is just how discredited the ABC News report was. I’ve heard that there is no solid evidence to support it, no smoking gun, but is it now accepted fact that the report was 100% wrong or just that we don’t know what, if any, significance and import to give it?
Getting back to an earlier point, why would it be so hard to imagine people legitimatelythinking Saddam was behind 9/11? I don’t think he was quite the joke you made him out to be. It was (and as far as I know, still is) accepted wisdomthat he had planned for the assasination of a former president. The Sudanese pharmeceutical factory was bombed on the premise that it was being used by both AlQaeda and Iraq for WMDs. And it isn’t like 9/11 required a level of genius that was beyond Iraqi capabilities. I recall callers to the various radio shows that day demanding we nuke Iraq at the earliest convienence. Unless my memory of that day is way off an awful lot of people did not regard him as quite the joke you think they did.
I’ll admit that my talk radio knowledge for that day is a bit weak. As I said in another thread, I was in my second week of police academy when 9/11 happened. We saw the TV footage, but didn’t turn on the local radio stations. Even when I got home that day, I flipped the TV on to CNN and MSNBC.
By the time I started turning on talk radio again a day or two later, our local talk radio channel was running just local stuff and national news and then it turned into some Clear Channel thing all day rather then then normal line up. Also by then the first signs of this being OBL were starting to come out.
I have no idea what the talk radio callers were saying in your area, but what I did get in this area was a mix of “who did it” and “did you hear that some Osumo Ben Lidden guy was behind it” and very little, if any, mentions of Saddam.
… awful lot of people did not regard him as quite the joke you think they did.
All I have to say is:
Hot Shots
The Naked Gun
South Park
The Tonight Show
The X-Files (Rember the one with Michael McKean?)
Armageddon (Even if we saw that bit in a different light.)
Late Night
The “I Survived Desert Storm & All I Got Was This Lousey T-Shirt” with Saddam’s picture on it wearing the t-shirt.
Tons of Parody songs
I know that there’s more, but the brain ain’t working with me right now.
On a goofy note about Snarkiness…
A friend just showed me something that proves geeks do have a really great sense of humor.
Go to Google.
Click on Maps
Click on Get Directions
Enter New York into the first blank and London into the second.
Start reading the directions. Don’t skim, actually read them. Trust me, you’ll know when you’ve hit the spot I’m talking about.
Well, I laughed. Does that mean I’m a geek?
You can get a description of how to get to anywhere in Europe as far as Moscow (but not Cyprus), from anywhere in the US and Canada as far as Alaska, but I don’t know about Hawaii and Iceland. You can’t get descriptions for driving to Australia, but you can inside Australia. You can’t get any description for Mexico South, America, North Africa, Japan, India and China.
A description starting or ending in Moscow reads like WWII.
So…. Does that mean you got to the funny bit of New York to London or not?
Yes.
Bill Myers wrote: “I followed the link you provided. The Web page provided a very simplistic bit of history, written at a grade-school level. If you truly want to read a good history of World Wars I & II, I recommend the following books (if you haven’t already read them): A Short History of World War I and A Short History of World War II, both written by James L. Stokesbury.“
The site’s synopsis is simple, but accurate. It doesn’t make much sense to refer someone to anything much more comprehensive in response to a blog thread that will be passé in a week, in my opinion. Thanks for the book suggestions, but I’ve been reading about WW II since the mid-1960s.
Bill Myers wrote: The “appeasement” argument is a shopworn cliche, I’m afraid.”
No, the appeasement/containment argument is a recurring mistake that has happened many times throughout history, and its dangers is something anyone who is dealing with a potential military crisis should consider.
Bill Myers wrote: “Iraq was not Germany. Neither is South Korea. At the time Germany was secretly building up its military against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, its neighbors were still licking their wounds from World War I.”
Germany was “secretly” building its military? France and England weren’t stupid. They were well aware of Germany’s the buildup and defiance of the treaty.
Why do you think France went nuts building the extremely expensive Maginot line – a historic failed edifice that is a perfect example of the danger of assuming containment will always deter a foe.
And you’re right… France and England had no stomach for a confrontation with the growing German threat. They wanted to “negotiate” the problem away, and Hitler, like any cold, calculating predator, sensed their weakness and took advantage of it.
This calculated intransigence is something North Korea excels at. After the cease-fire in 1953, they stalled us for years until their military was large enough and dug in enough to hold Seoul hostage. Once that happened, there was no way we could attack the North militarily without millions in Seoul being killed, and they knew it. When that happened, it was only a matter of time before they upped the ante with long-range missiles, nukes, or both.
You say North Korea is not like Germany because it can’t “go on a rampage against its neighbors and get very far.” The only place North Korea wants to go is south, and it has built the world’s fourth largest army in the world to achieve its goal. Just because its sights aren’t set on ruling the world does not mean it is not a threat.
You also say that because they have a survival instinct, they won’t attack because we’d wipe them out of existence. Wrong. The 22 million people in the Seoul metropolitan area are hostages whose blood would be on our hands if we tried.
We had our chance to end this problem in the 1950s, and we decided to just kick the can down the road, hoping the regime would collapse. Well, it hasn’t. Our wishful thinking all these years is now coming back to haunt us.
Iraq under Saddam was not a world threat per se, but it certainly was a regional threat. Factor in the fact that the region in question is one that has huge strategic importance to not just the U.S. economy, but the economies of many of our allies and trading partners, and it’s a whole different ball game.
Bill Myers wrote: “Are you suggesting that we should’ve gone to war against the Soviets, then? Because that would’ve resulted in a global thermonuclear conflict! I prefer the dangers of containment to that scenario, thank you very much.”
No, we actually had little choice by 1962 to do anything else than continue the policy of containment. All I was pointing out is that containment can easily hurt a country just as badly (or worse) than a “war avoided” might have.
I know that there’s more, but the brain ain’t working with me right now.
Come now, I could probably name 1000 movies, cartoons, songs, comics, jokes etc about Hitler, many written at the very time he was in serious danger of winning the war. Mocking the enemy doesn’t mean you don’t fear him. TEAM AMERICA WORLD POLICE doesn’t mean we think the threat of North Korea is a joke.
I mean, what enemy have we ever NOT made fun of?
Im going to throw this out there, if its old news I’ll apologize now. Seems Hilary was convinced we needed to take Saddam out. Though i will note she doesn’t make a 9/11-Saddam connection but believed there was a Al-Qaeda-Saddam link.
http://clinton.senate.gov/speeches/iraq_101002.html
Also from the listen hillary site.
http://www.listenhillary.org/article.php?id=762
Speaking to the left wing, anti-war organization, Code Pink, on March 7, 2003, as can be found on YouTube, Sen. Clinton tried to justify her pro-war vote: “There is a very easy way to prevent anyone from being put into harm’s way, that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm. And I have absolutely no belief that he will. I have to say that this is something I’ve followed for more than a decade. If he were serious about disarming, he would have been much more forthcoming. … I ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information, intelligence that I had available, talking with people whose opinions I trusted, trying to discount the political or other factors that I didn’t believe should be in any way part of this decision.”
Fair enough.
It’s a fair cop. 🙂
Groan…
I don’t know what’s worse, the joke, or that I didn’t get to it first. 😛
-Rex Hondo-
Appeasement and containment are not the same thing.
The metaphor of the Russian Roulette is very good. There are people who will tell you that you should ‘remove the threat’, others wil try to close their eyes and pretend it doesn’t exist. These people can get you shot. But most of the time it’s more about knowing how to play the game and try to make the rules be in your favor as much as possible. Because, guess what, there are always going to be threats (unless you live in Europe or Canada), and you’ll always have to figure the best strategy for a given situation. and abstraction like ‘peace good’ or ‘appeasement bad’ are going to work. You have to play the game.
(this is also relevant for the discussion about a society where everyone has guns.)
Containment was the right strategy for dealing with the Societ Union. What was the alternative? For the allies to keep marching east past germany after WWII? Use tactical nuclear weapons? Containment was the right strategy to deal with Iraq in 2003. It wasn’t a significant threat on anybody except Iran, which was a good thing. It is hard for me to tell if this was the right strategy to deal with North Korea since I’m not sure what the alternatives were, and am not familiar with that war. I do know that it is no simple decision, and should not be decided on based just on the fear that who knows, someday the North Koreans will decide to make another bid for the south. You don’t start a bloody war just because something might happen. You prepare for the possibility, and then weigh the odds.
In the case of pre WWII Germany you have several benchmarks indicating a worsening situation in a relatively short time:
Rise of Hitler, with a known expansionist strategy.
Violations of restrictions on army size and armament.
Remilitarization of the Rhineland
Involvement in the Spanish Civil War
Austria
Chechosolvakia
and then finslly Poland when the war started.
So you have a set of decisions during a relatively short period to not pressure Hitler diplomatically or pose a real military threat on him, especially when two other countries were already taken over. You also have lack of preparation for war, or bad preparation (in the case of France), which meant that Hitler was less deterred to go to war and the countries he invaded were easily defeated. It also seems clear that Hitler was interested in war.
In North Korea the situation seems to be different.
In Iraq the situation was different. Saddam has already made two expansionist bid, and was beaten both times. He knew that his opponents were stronger than him, capable of acting against him, and wililng to do so if necessary (back in 1990 he though the US wil refrain from acting). He also knew that the US had a lot of legitimacy for the use of military force. His abillity to threaten his enemies was also limited, so the likelyhood of an Iraqi threat manifesting any time soon was quite unlikely. It was possible. Armies had to prepare for it. But it was unlikely.
Here is an idea for an alternative history novel. What would have happened if countries stood up to Hitler early on? Would the threat of or the use of military force resulted in him giving up on Chechosolovakia and austria but remaining in power in Germany for decades? (see Spain).
“I mean, what enemy have we ever NOT made fun of?”
I do think 9/11 caused a shift in attitude in the US toward its enemies. Up until them, even if they were taken seriously they were perceived as distant caricature like figures. After 9/11 they weren’t so distant.
Bush got a lot of milage from this American shift in perception.
See the things you learn hanging out here?
PAD
Thank you for the education 🙂
Posted by Bill Myers at April 29, 2007 08:54 AM
While Peter already delineated the difference between imply and infer… here’s a little trick that makes it even easier:
Just remember that the speaker “implies.” The listener “infers.”
I just didn’t want to feel left out. 🙂
Thank you for the education also 🙂
Micha makes an excellent point. Too often, people want to come up with a one size fits all solution to global problems. Appeasement clearly was not the solution for dealing with Hitler. Likewise, a policy of containment (not the same thing as appeasement) would also have failed. Direct military confrontation was the only way to prevent Germany’s expansionist policies. On the other hand, everyone knew that a direct military confrontation with the Soviets would have been a global disaster, so were were forced to engeage in a decades-long policy of containment.
Same thing with Iraq. Contrary to GOP talking points, no one in the US was advocating a policy of “appeasement” with Saddam, but, we had done a very effective job of containing him for a decade. And of course, in hindsight, we can see what a disaster a military solution was in Iraq.
Now, we can argue what kind of public servant George Tenet has been, but he has been in a position to know and he has just confirmed what many of us have know all along: Bush was planning on invading Iraq from day one of his administration and was just looking for an excuse. So, the invasion was never about 9/11, never about “taking it to the terrorists” or any of the dozen or so other justifications given over the past few years. We went to Iraq for no other reason than Bush and his handlers wanted to.
As for North Korea, we’ve also spent the past 54 years pursuing a policy of containment, primarily because any military action would inevitably lead to a confrontation with China. So what is the solution to Kim’s growing aggression? A military solution is still off the table. We don’t have the resources to even do a good job in Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously. As Londo Molari would say, only the heir to the kingdom of idiots* would start a third war, especially given that China is still there. That leaves negotiations. Now, contrary to the fantasies in Bushworld, negotiation is not a sign of weakness, especially if we take a strong stance and back it up with an international and regional coalition that has a vested interest in keeping the Korean peninsula nuke-free. We have to take a firm stance and make sure that they abide by the agreement to allow international inspectors in.
Maybe a second military confrontation with NK is inevitable, but given what we have on our plate already, pushing that date back another decade or two is in our best interests.
*Go ahead and say it.
I was stationed there for a year. We were on alert the whole time. The North can, on a whim, attack tomorrow, and the number of U.S. casualties inflicted in the first week would make four years in Iraq look like a minor skirmish.
The only reason NK would invade the south is if it were suicidal.
Like I said, apples and oranges (regarding comparisons between Korea and Iraq).
R. Maheras: “The site’s synopsis is simple, but accurate. It doesn’t make much sense to refer someone to anything much more comprehensive in response to a blog thread that will be passé in a week, in my opinion. Thanks for the book suggestions, but I’ve been reading about WW II since the mid-1960s.”
I don’t believe one can ever have too much knowledge. Perhaps you feel otherwise. Regardless, I apologize if the suggestion that those books are a good read is offensive to you.
R. Maheras: “No, the appeasement/containment argument is a recurring mistake that has happened many times throughout history, and its dangers is something anyone who is dealing with a potential military crisis should consider.”
Yes, but it is not the only potential danger one must consider. Another danger is fighting a war on too many fronts. Germany learned that lesson the hard way when it violated its non-aggression pact with the Soviets, which was a costly mistake.
Rather than agree to a cease-fire, we certainly could have invaded N. Korea. Of course, as has been pointed out already, we would have risked a direct confrontation with China. Even if China sat by and let us take N. Korea (not likely), the military force needed to take and hold N. Korea would have left us with fewer military resources to act as a deterrent against the Soviets. See what I mean about fighting a war on too many fronts?
Iraq is another good example of the folly of over-extending one’s military. Between our commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re spread too thin. The Iranians and N. Koreans both know it, which is in part why both nations are now pursuing nuclear programs. It’s not like we can invade them as well at this point.
Besides, our responses to N. Korea and Iraq don’t meet the definition of “appeasement.” In both cases we prevented these nations from conquering one of their neighbors.
And neither N. Korea nor Iraq represent a threat on a par with that posed by Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany had allies who went to war with that nation, whereas N. Korea’s main ally — China — is trying to get the N. Koreans to calm down. And the Iraqi army pretty much fell to pieces each time we fought them. Some world-beater they turned out to be!
Correction: Nazi Germany had allies that fought alongside her in World War II. If her allies had fought with her they’d have been piss-poor allies. 😉
A very minor point in the scheme of things, but…
I know ABC News’ motto of “More Americans get their news from…” But, at least in the late ’90s, they must’ve been adding the ratings of 20/20 and Primetime Live (or, “Primetime… _LIVE!_”, as Sam Donaldson used to call it) into the equation. NBC Nightly News was the highest rated evening news program for the last several years (or more) of Tom Brokaw’s tenure. (I miss Tom.) So, the ABC News report in question was on the _second_ highest-rated nightly news show. 🙂
Getting back to an earlier point, why would it be so hard to imagine people legitimatelythinking Saddam was behind 9/11? I don’t think he was quite the joke you made him out to be. It was (and as far as I know, still is) accepted wisdomthat he had planned for the assasination of a former president.
One thing I can say for sure, outside of the US almost no one was buying this stuff about Saddam as the mastermind behind 9/11 or having WMDs, from day one. As a Brazilian, I remember pretty well how the local media was portraying it. Everyone tended to believe the UN, and from our outside perspective, it looked like Saddam-as-urgent-threat was totally a fabrication of the Bush Administration and/or the American media.
Local commentators that initially supported the Iraq War here did so because they thought it would be a good thing if Bush managed to create a democratic ally in the Middle East and also because Saddam, even though he was pretty harmless by 2002, was still the monster who had commited many atrocities in the past. But no one tended to believe he was still a threat or had WMDs.
On the side issue of North Korea:
Based on past reports (what little gets out), it seems to me that assuming that the NK leadership will not act erratically, irrationally, or against the interests of the people is a big risk. A friend of mine once said that Kim Jong-Il is just a white cat away from being a Bond villain.
In this game it is always a gamble no matter what you do. If you assume that your enemies — whose ideologies, cultures and motivations are usually very different than yours — are going to act rationaly and not start a war, you take a chance. If you assume that they are going to attack you, you go into war with all the risks involved. This was the gamble both the US and the USSR took for 50 years. The best you can do is assess the risk while preparing for the worst.
The good news is this:
a) Since the North Koreans already have nuclear weapons, there’s really no option to attack them except as a last resort.
b) It would seem that for all the craziness of the North Korean government their past behavior does not seem to indicate any intention to risk their own rule (they couldn’t care about the people) in order to recapture the south at this stage.
c) It would seem that the South Koreans and the Americans are prepared to deal with a North Korean conventional invasion (or at least I hope so), and are as prepared as you can be for a nuclear attack.
Welcome to the Cold War.
This might be an old point (If so, I apologize) but, has anybody read Hillary Clintons speech to the Senate Floor from 2002 Heres a link:
http://clinton.senate.gov/speeches/iraq_101002.html
Seems she thought Saddam was a threat. She doesnt make a 9/11 connection but does believe that Al-Qaeda and Saddam were talking.
Also Ive included a link to a speech she made at a Code-Pink rally in 2003.
http://www.listenhillary.org/article.php?id=762
She was convinced before Bush took office that Saddam needed to be taken down.
If Saddam had nuclear weapons, then the concern that he would give it to Al-Quaida, regardless of their prior connections, would have been credible. If he had other kinds of WMD, there would have been a similar but lesser concern. So it all goes back to the question of WMDs. Without WMDs Saddam was a minor threat, although nobody would have regretted seeing him go.
It’s practically a photo of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden shaking hands.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
Happy Mission Accomplished Day, everyone!!! So glad major combat operations are over!!! Now, if only they’d get the memo in Iraq.