Don’t They Know There’s a War On?

Just one thing: cut the self-pity crap about being attacked for being wrong on the war. Most people are happy you have finally seen reality. I don’t know what your arguments were for the war, but I am only cranky at the people who based their support on their “mature” understanding of “reality”, and not liking the foolish, patsy antiwar pussy arguments against it. Thank God Saddam posed absolutely no threat to anyone: just imagine the disaster if he had a decent army with WMDs.

Hell people we got lots and lots of air power we ain’t using cause Bushco doesn’t want bad….umm worse headlines in election season.
Bushco does have a plan. They no intention of losing that oil, down to the last living Iraqi child.

Check out Tacitus, who has connections in DC. The word is out, Fallujah Delenda Est November 3, Sadr destroyed, Iran bombed. Allawi and Negroponte unleash the Death Squads.

Should Bush get re-elected your fear will be replaced by a shame beyond the ability to bear.

It’s amusing how you want to talk about issues again, now the Bush AWOL thing has blown up in your face.

I am coming to the depressing notion that the Instapundits of the world simply do not or cannot care about the real interests of the U.S. They are so caught in a partisan worldview that they can only think “Republicans up, Democrats down.” Usually, when you’re affluent and white and all that, this blind partisanship doesn’t end up hurting you in any perceptible way, so there’s no reason to drop it.

After 9/11, and with Saudi millions available to buy up all the plutonium on the black market, this partisanship is becoming awfully close to suicidal. And yet, there’s no indication that ANYTHING plausibly imaginable would make (say) Glenn Reynolds abjure Bush and support Kerry. NYC could be vaporized tomorrow, and it would somehow be the Democrats’ fault, on Instapundit and Little Green Footballs.

I don’t particularly like John Kerry; I am scornful of the Democratic Party; but I have a Kerry sticker on my car (in Mississippi, no less … curse you, Electoral College!), and I’m going to vote Kerry in November, purely on moral grounds.

(Sorry for the vent. That is all. Thanks, Belle1)

I’ll admit some puzzlement as to what your post is trying to accomplish, Belle. Doesn’t CBS running with a forgery, misrepresenting the account of their own document examiners, and then stonewalling count as a big story? As to why people are blogging about it, it’s a great “bloggable” story: a great deal can be found out about it from behind a desk. Also, many see it as confirming previously held beliefs about the shoddiness and bias of the mainstream press, so that helps too.

Iraq, by contrast, is not easily bloggable. We can’t know as much. You are 100% convinced that Iraq is a horrendous (irreperable?) disaster. Chris Allbrittron thinks so, and he knows more than us. But other folks don’t think so, and they also know more than us. At the level of debate available to uninformed web commentators, there seem to be three options on the table: 1) leveling pockets of insurgency while waiting to see if the new Iraqi government can get decent security up and running, 2) keeping the lid on while waiting to see if the new Iraqi government can get decent security up and running, or 3) getting the hell out. You call for a national conversation. As far as I can tell both US presidential candidates are advocating door #2, as is almost everyone else.

So what’s the debate you want? You can talk door # 1 or # 3 with their advocates on the right and left, I suppose. But is it in fact a conversation you want? It seems more likely you seek a confession, similar to your own, from other advocates of invasion that everything is a big clusterfuck [and perhaps adding as corollary: Bush must go!]. You’re not likely to get that, for obvious reasons.

Like it or not, the CBS blunder is a story.

You can compile lists of all the bad news in Iraq and see that it’s a mess.

You can also make lists of good news, and note that some progress is being made, however difficult.

It’s the numbskulls who obsess on either list and bang their little tin drum for “abandon all hope” or “everything is just peachy in Iraq” (are there any of those left?) who are the truly useless ones. Well, useless to the people of Iraq. Neither of the two obsessive camps are going to come up with any solutions.

I want to second WeSaferThemHealthier here. Those who supported this war, and now see what a disaster it has become, have an obligation, if they are intellectually serious, to explain why they were so wrong and how their thinking has changed. Pre-emptively calling yourself names to neutralize others’ doing so is transparent and frivolous. Particularly, if you, as most war supporters, were dismissive, sarcastic, or venemous to those of us who, as you now admit, were right all along. Apologies may well be in order. Parading bad judgement as a badge of honor is a trifle odd, you must admit.

And, no, I don’t buy “it’s all execution”. I’ve yet to see a credible detailed account of how this war *could* have worked out well, barring miracles, given the facts on the ground at the time.

John Q., doesn’t your point tend to cut against Belle’s? If CT contributors write about the topics that most interest them, why should other bloggers not be similarly free to choose their topics in the same way?

As for Belle’s point about the lack of a national debate on Iraq, I would suggest that it stems in part from the lack of articulated positions, and hence identifiable differences, on this issue from the major presidential candidates. Neither Bush nor Kerry has much to offer in the way of a thought-out policy, so the debate devolves into muddled variations on muddling through.

Just a bit of repetition: jdw is 100% correct – they really do believe this shit. (In general, that is. I make no specific claims about Reynolds because I don’t read him.) I mean, people have told me straight up that they think the documents found to date back up the Swift Vet liar’s group, or that the insurgency in Iraq is not a growing problem. And then they attack me for being deluded.

In my limited experience, it is not productive to converse in these situations.

“Well, yeah. They’ve been pretty assiduous about sticking to the designated timeline for most of 2004. And there has been a bevy of Administration officials basically stating outright what’s going to happen this fall in-country prior to elections. Are you really not seeing any of this? It’s somewhat astonishing that an informed person would that that the President “continues to talk about Iraq as if it is May of 2003.” comments, which can run 300+ on some of Bird dogs posts

Tacitus also mentions at least one current major offensive, North of Baghdad I think. All in comments. I just hear bombings of Iraqi cities, and don’t use a map enough to see if they connect into a campaign.

Tacitus has returned from Redstate.org and is very busy in the comment sections, cleaning out the ill-mannered and trollish that have accumulated during his abscence. He will ban people for provocative assertions made without facts or links. One of the reason I read Tacitus.org is the extended conversations in the comment sections from some very informed people about military matters and foreign affairs. Tacitus, in a thread of 300 comments, will be 20-40 of them. Quite unusual blogger.

Tacitus is partisan, and is currently of course in Bush defense/Kerry attack mode. But some of the best comment threads on the web, because Tac works on them.

I myself plead guilty to slight hyperbole, and of course my assumptions in that graph should not attributed to Tac.

The whole “fake memos that were accurate” issue wasn’t even commented about on CT until Sept 15, so my guess is that the stupid bloggers out there like Glenn, Charles, Patterico, etc are just trying to get some attention. I think that the emphasis should be put on the other CBS issue, the JEW SPY IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION story that 60 minutes also broke, and Newsweek ran with for two weeks in a row (one two page article, then a Periscope article, which was twice as large as their 3 sentence and 1 photo Beslan coverage). How is that investigation going, anyway?

We heard over and over and over about the Plame affair, but the Sandy Berger incident, well, stealing and destroying documents that were classified Top Secret- Codename doesn’t merit attention from the press or CBS.

The pictures of Abu Ghraib were all over the news for weeks: here again Newsweek included a large photo of prisoner humiliation in an article about Chalabi, along with a large sidebar that had photos of those JEWS Perle, Feith, and Wolfowitz, suggesting that they ordered torture. What failed to be covered was the attacks on the prison in April that resulted in dozens of Iraqi fatalities, and the actions of our soldiers that saved many prisoner’s lives.

Sudan and Syria gassing civilians in Darfur is another problem, but I think that the UN Security Council will make some sort of resolution and then everything will be all right. No, seriously, there are bad things happening all over the world, in Russia, Sudan, Nepal, Kashmir, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Burma, and the fact that the US is not engaged in these places does not make their situation any better.

I would suggest that y’all check out some Iraqi bloggers, or read Allawi’s comments responding to Kofi Annan’s opinions about the war in Iraq. I don’t think that anybody said that changing Iraq would be easy. Pre-war predictions of hundreds of thousands of casualties, millions of refugees and all-out civil war haven’t happened at that magnituude.

Consider North Korea and South Korea. American troops have been stuck in SK for 50 years. I think it has been worth it.

baa, I don’t think it will do to say “some people say Iraq is going well, some people say it’s going poorly” and call it a draw. There are some ground-level facts we can work from:

At a briefing earlier this month, a high-ranking US officer in charge of the zone’s perimeter said he had insufficient soldiers to prevent intruders penetrating the compound’s defences.
The US major said it was possible weapons or explosives had already been stashed in the zone, and warned people to move in pairs for their own safety. The Green Zone, in Baghdad’s centre, is one of the most fortified US installations in Iraq. Until now, militants have not been able to penetrate it.

If you accept the major’s premise, then I think it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Iraq is a total clusterfuck. And since we are about to choose whether the people responsible for that clusterfuck will get to continue to direct the country for four more years, it seems like a relevant fact to bring up.

In other words–why shouldn’t other advocates of invasion admit it’s a clusterfuck, if it is one? The facts don’t seem that hard to evaluate.

I’d like to know: What other contributors to CT have at any point in time been in favuor of the invasion of Iraq?

‘I’m very sorry to say this, but we are f%$#ed.’

Dear Belle, you are wrong, and furthermore your wrongness indicates that you personally are spineless, a coward, not in favour of resistance to jihadis and morally worthless. Not being rude but you are. This is because:

1) The war in Iraq is splendid because the more people the US military kill in Iraq, the fewer they will have to kill in the US – oh, did I mention this has a catchy ‘flypaper’ metaphor attached to it? (Mark Steyn, Gregg Easterbrook, some washed-up Canadian who came up with the metaphor, every chickenhawk in the blogosphere);

2)The war in Iraq is insufficiently splendid, but only because we have yet to attack Syria and/or Iran, who are of course the only reason for the insurgency’s success (Mark ‘consistency is a virtue only to the sane’ Steyn, Charles Krauthammer);

3)The war in Iraq is splendid, and for anyone who thinks, for example, that Tony Blair has anything to apologise for, I have a really storming joke about Trotsky and Stalin to prove that ‘Marxist humour really isn’t an oxymoron- also, I will prove that said war is splendid by making up silly rhymes in response to Guardian articles; second childhood, isn’t it fun? (Norman Geras).

4)The war in Iraq is insufficiently splendid, but only because we have yet to definitively impose non-Sharia law on the Iraqi population, which would presumably have to be done by the British and American armed forces, and would be an incredibly smart move aimed at decreasing violent Shi’ite attacks on our troops (Ophelia Benson, and if she has the brass neck to complain about inaccurate summaries she can stop telling blatant lies on her own website, and can also tell her catamite Jerry to stop deleting any poster who calls her on said lies);

5)The war in Iraq is splendid, gosh let’s change the subject, and now let me explain that we didn’t declare war on terror, terror declared war on us, as is proved by the Beslan atrocity, and no I’m not going to mention Russian atrocities in Chechnya- these, by definition, are non-terrifying, non-terrorist atrocities (David Aaronovitch);

6)The war in Iraq is splendid, because we are bringing freedom to Iraqi Arabs, who are child-abusing cowardly terroristic sicko adherents of the Religion Of PeaceTM (LGF in public, and one wonders who else in private);

7)The war in Iraq is splendid, but a war on North Korea would be even more splendid, and should be declared forthwith (Johann ‘Of military age’ Hari).

8)The ‘war’ in Iraq was not a war at all, as witness the tiny number of US and UK casualties, but was still splendid (Christopher Hitchens, various Slate articles in April and May 2003, reprinted in ‘A long short war/Regime Change’);

9)The war in Iraq is splendid, despite the high number of US, UK and indeed Iraqi casualties- about whom, having quoted some poetry, I shall now maintain a dignified silence, showing that I, unlike those who pontificate about dead GIs, fully understand the nature of these brave sacrifices (Christopher Hitchens, in Slate a couple of days ago).

I could go on, but my contempt for these people rises by the day.

The simple response from conservatives would be that it’s the liberals’ fault that the Iraq liberation did not work, because domestic oppositon weakened the country’s resolve, just like it was said of the Vietnam War. This does not make any sense, of course, but it since it’s almost unfalsifiable, it works for them.

Is the view of the majority of Iraqis that their liberation was not, in fact, a failure, of any consequence to the left? Or has the left abandoned the last pretence of caring about the actual people who stand to suffer most from the left’s continued support of genocidal dictators?

Parenthetically, I regard myself as a leftist. War is a ruthless enterprise; mistakes never go unpunished.

Just a friendly reminder, for all the baying warmongers, ex-baying warmongers (remorse-stricken or maybe just realising that, hey, shouting for the mass death of foreign strangers is just, like sooo 2003), propaganda-fronting “journalists” of BBC, CNN et al., generals, politicians and ordinary schlubs who either didn’t bother to fact check their nation’s grave decision to invade, bomb, torture, maim, occupy and rape a nation that never attacked it — or perhaps secretly revelled in being powerful, untouchable and bloodied with revenge —

There is blood on your hands.

james wrote, I supported the war in Iraq. The support was based solely on Iraq’s repeated attempts to shoot down US war planes in violation of the cease fire treaty from the 1991 war.

Have you ever heard of the concept of “cost benefit analysis”? Just because Iraq tried to shoot our planes down doesn’t mean that we should have invaded.

Based on the history of the occupation of Germany and the Philippines, I expected about 5 years of post war violence.

How would the situation in post-war Germany (a European nation essentially inhabited by a single ethnic group speaking a single language, with no recent history of colonial occupation) be at all relevant to that in Iraq?

And the mention of the Philippines is particularly amusing—how many Philippinos died in that American occupation? And what was the rationale for the occupation?