Politics: A new beginning

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
. . . free trade is a subsidy to those who can compete.

I understand that you likely didn't mean this the way I'm reading it, but this really made me want to cry.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
You ignored all of the hard points in my post, and just rattled on about why it as right to invade. I think so too -- but that doesn't change anything I said above about the lack of any meaningful honest debate from the administration over cost/benefits and preparing the public for what might happen (or any sign that they understood that this might happen.............Go back and try again, Hank. Or, is this another argument where you declare victory and retreat?

no offense, but I only declare victory when I'm arguing with some of the others. You're an exhibition match.

Prepare the public for what, and how? Prewar go on TV and say "We're afraid some of Saddam's guys will hide out in various cities and stash rockets and attack periodically, and frankly that woould be one bitch of a thing to deal with." you do understand that any "public preparation" goes into Iraq TVs also don't you? whay would you have wanted?

Again , you ignored the substance. Didn't I answer that in my post, to at least some extent? I'll say it again -- its the right troop mix -- higher numbers of MPs and /or Civil Affairs units., engineers, etc., etc. You need them to police the cities, and do all of the crap that the U.S. has tried to do since the occupation began. As I noted, there weren't many of those at the beginning.

So when the country fell quicker than expected we didn't have the "right number" of MP's there already. Do we even have that many MP's in service? they're meant to police our military, not a whole country. Here again, Saddam's guys made some choices that complicate getting Iraq going again, but I don't see how bitching about our not "predicting or preparing" for those choices makes much sense. sorry maybe we just agree to disagree here, again. I won't claim victory.

There also weren't enough combat troops to fill in for them after "the Fall" -- because the 4th ID was still in transit through the Suez after the unfortunate diplomatic debacle in Turkey that kept us from having a real Northern Front -- and thus facilitating The retreat to the North by Hussein and his guerilla fighters -- passg to Syria, etc. That failure did cost us -- although it was obscured initially by the quick success in the South.

anyone who talks of the diplomatic failures sees the initial question of going into Iraq as a grey. If you believe taking Saddam out was right, then I truly don't see how "waiting for France to get on board" is anything other that postponing the inevitable. The UN wasn't going to authorize anything other than continued inspections.
You don't speak of that here, but mention Turkey. turkey was almost bought off to allow troops. It was an equation of $$$$; Don't act like it was anything more. Perhaps Turkey wanted bigger bucks because it knew it might see more unrest internally if it were part of the Iraq attack, but I am comfortable Bush tried that avenue.
I really think what could have been "if only" we had done this or that misses the timing issues that made the attack need to begin when it did, at the latest.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Heck, in at least one case, one of the detainees to be released is said to have killed a U.S. soldier. I'm not sure what more I'd need to justify keeping him locked up for life.

Hello

Dude --

It is neither a crime nor morally wrong for Joe Taliban to kill a U.S. soldier when said U.S. soldier is in Afghanistan (his country) trying to defeat and/or kill him and his compadres. You don't lock people up for life just because they fought against you in a war -- We _may_ be correct in denying Taliban prisoners POW status under the Geneva Conventions due to technicalities of the uniform requirements, etc. (I refer to those as technicalities only because those requirements have little application or meaning in many non-European cultures.) However, even though the war in Afghanistan is still extant -- whether against the same group, or a revised cast of characters -- at some point you should let the former foot-soldiers go -- especially low-level "draftees" -- which some number of these guys are.

S_A_M

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
What whacks me out is that within a dozen posts you guys say stuff like this, essentially the President should have known to ignore this evidence from the CIA; Contradicting the posts a few hours earlier about how he should believe CIA evidence form a source that Sadaam wasn't going forward with Al Queda JV.

That really isn't a position you want to stake out in this debate. It's pretty clear that the White House -- and the Vice President's office in particular -- did not like what it was hearing from the intelligence community, pressured them to change their tune, and then pushed what they got as far as they could, and farther. Most famously, this resulted in the reference in the State of the Union to the uranium from Niger over the CIA's opposition.

I will not re-enter the WMD debate, but let's summarize what has been proven to all who post on this board.

pre-war Bush said:
1 we believe Sadaam has programs to make chemicals/nukes
2 we know he had X tons of weapons, he has a duty to tell us where they are, he hasn't explained it. Sorry, I'm in charge of a country that cannot be attacked by WMD. I can't trust the guy.
3 He has links to OBL

We found proof of #1.

Not so. What, we dug a centrifuge out of scientist's garden?

We haven't found weapons, but that doesn't mean that #2 was incorrect.

Give it up already. As S_A_M said, you're asking for proof of a negative. If the intel was as strong as the President and the Vice President said it was, there should have been no problem in finding the WMD. Particularly if that was the reason for the war. Or were we incompetent in securing the sites, etc?

#3 is true.

Not in any meaningful sense. You can only win this argument by pushing the facts way, way beyond the straight face test. I go back to saying that if we knew what we know now, instead of what the Administration was telling us in the spring, would there have been public support for a war? No way.

Originally posted by bilmore
At that time, the evidence was very strong concerning chemweaps.

Apparently not as strong as we were led to believe.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
Trade and immigration barriers protect relatively unskilled workers in the US and other developed countries from their competition abroad. Furthermore, the conservatives who favor removing immigration and trade barriers have no plan whatsoever to increase taxes on skilled workers to compensated the unskilled workers whose wages are being bid down by third world workers.

Yep. The assumption is that the uncompetitive industries will eventually die, and the unskilled workers affected will mostly get "retrained" and/or find other jobs. It causes considerable hardship in individual cases -- but works well to increase the wealth and productivity of society as a whole. I disagree that such aggregate measures are meaningless.


Also -- why in the hell should unskilled workers harmed by "free trade" be "compensated" by taxes on others? Hell, all consumers pay that "tax" in the form of higher prices for goods that have such trade protection. It is not, in my view, particularly just to say: "S_A_M -- you must pay x% more per year for consumer goods so that Unskilled Workers 1-10 can continue to have jobs." Instead -- Let's give them unemployment insurance for a certain time, education and/or retraining benefits, and continue to try to grow the economy of in those areas so that decent new jobs will appear. Then they can, hopefully, work in jobs that are more likely to stay around.

Government exists in part to maximize the welfare of the society as a whole, not to protect the textile workers in South Carolina.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by bilmore
One quick point on my way out - If I was unclear, I'm sorry - I actually do think we will find chem stocks, and possibly even nuke precursor material - maybe in Iraq, more likely right over the border in Syria - but I won't be terribly surprised if we don't (I'll be surprised, but not terribly - close point, I know), and a complete lack of success once we have covered a substantial portion of the available hiding spots (we ain't even close, yet) will be enough to prove the negative to me. But, like I said, if we don't, it will be a surprise to me, as everything I know about SH, Iraq, the ME, and life in general strongly supports my belief that he had them, or was working on them right before we got there.

That's entirely possible, and wouldn't surprise me. Debka.com kep talking about these vast underground compplexes Hussein had built in the 1980's and 1990s. They may be there. I sure though he had them too.

Originally posted by bilmore
And, from what you say, I guess the new argument really IS but "you said it would be easy!" Lordy. (What other conclusion can I draw from your repeated suggestions that Bush et al kept trying to gloss over the cost of fixing a country? I mean, how stupid of an argument would that be to support? . . . )

Is the substance of what I said, and the questions I asked, so meritless that they aren't even worth addressing? Perhaps I'll retreat to "Bush LIED!!!" That way neither of us will have to stretch.

Actually, Bilmore, there is evidence that a number of people (including some key people in the administration) thought it would be EASY. [Take a gander at the link Ty posted in his most recent post about pre-War planning (mentioning D. Feith) from some web log -- it has a few relevant quotes.] And I think that there is reason to believe that the administration as a whole worked hard to sell it that way.

After all -- when administration is "selling a policy hard' -- as you acknowledge they did with Iraq -- it is hardly unheard of to minimize or gloss over, or even spin, the true long-term costs of such program/policy. See, e.g., the tax cuts, and the new Medicare/prescription drug benefit bill passed last week.

But -- that's not the argument, the "You said it would be easy" part (while it pisses me off -- and did at the time) is just a subtext to the real argument: "You _thought_ it would be easy and so had a fucked up plan in place and are now fucking up something that is vitally important."

You keep asking for specifics about what was wrong -- or thoughts on how to fix it -- I've mentioned some specifics in there on those points, but they've been all but ignored.

Why do you think they fired Garner as the Provisional administrator after, what -- four weeks ?? Why reorganize the whole operation recently to centralize it under the NSC and the White House?? Doesn't say much for the job done by DOD rear echelons for the first weeks and months, does it?

If this is all just partisan carping to be ignored, when and how can one question the conduct of foreign policy?

S_A_M

[Hank Chinaski]

today's NYT had a piece about the TV news coverage of Bush's Iraq trip. Right after it broke, apparently some CNN "journalist" comes on to point out that the trip would upstage Hillary's planned trip. He implied that was the reason for the trip.
The times piece, to its credit, points out that the Bush trip had been planned for months and likely wasn't planned to upstage Hillary.
It sort of reminded me of the sporatic bad-Bush theories that get thrown out here, you know "he set the convention to take advantage of 9/11" stuff like that.
I left the section in the center stall of the 3rd floor men's room, or if you don't work here, its in today's Arts and Leisure. Can't find it in the e-version.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
today's NYT had a piece about the TV news coverage of Bush's Iraq trip. Right after it broke, apparently some CNN "journalist" comes on to point out that the trip would upstage Hillary's planned trip. He implied that was the reason for the trip.
The times piece, to its credit, points out that the Bush trip had been planned for months and likely wasn't planned to upstage Hillary.
It sort of reminded me of the sporatic bad-Bush theories that get thrown out here, you know "he set the convention to take advantage of 9/11" stuff like that.
I left the section in the center stall of the 3rd floor men's room, or if you don't work here, its in today's Arts and Leisure. Can' fin it in the eversion.

Thanks for the offer. The "upstage Hillary" plot is also unlikely because the Clinton trip -- which had also been planned for months -- was originally set for a week earlier -- but was pushed back due to the Medicare votes, etc.

S_A_M

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
today's NYT had a piece about the TV news coverage of Bush's Iraq trip. Right after it broke, apparently some CNN "journalist" comes on to point out that the trip would upstage Hillary's planned trip. He implied that was the reason for the trip.
The times piece, to its credit, points out that the Bush trip had been planned for months and likely wasn't planned to upstage Hillary.
It sort of reminded me of the sporatic bad-Bush theories that get thrown out here, you know "he set the convention to take advantage of 9/11" stuff like that.
I left the section in the center stall of the 3rd floor men's room, or if you don't work here, its in today's Arts and Leisure. Can't find it in the e-version.

Funny, during the hour or so that I spent watching CNN on Thanksgiving nothing negative was said about his trip. Actually it was pretty much just the same story over and over again every minute and a half, accompanied by the same soundbites and pictures of him serving the soldiers food. Then they would act like there was going to be some different story, but they would merely repeat what they just said and showed in excruciating monotony.

Some would ask me why I spent an hour watching this, and honestly I can't even come up with a response. The first couple of times I was fooled into believing that there might be some other story coming on after the report, but I have no excuse beyond minute 7.

[The Larry Davis Experience]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
no offense, but I only declare victory when I'm arguing with some of the others. You're an exhibition match.

Watch out Hank. Apollo Creed died in an exhibition match, and he was once the Champ. Don't get cocky.

Prepare the public for what, and how? Prewar go on TV and say "We're afraid some of Saddam's guys will hide out in various cities and stash rockets and attack periodically, and frankly that woould be one bitch of a thing to deal with." you do understand that any "public preparation" goes into Iraq TVs also don't you? whay would you have wanted?

I realize that none of us have any reference for how much it costs to fix a country after it has been pillaged for decades and then we knock it over in a few months ("uh, I dunno....a zillion dollars?").

But, with that point made, do you disagree that the admin sent signals that indicated that this process would be relatively inexpensive? e.g. the public contradiction of Gen. Shinseki, projections of oil revenues with no reference to the country's debt that they would have to pay off before those revenues could be used for reconstruction, stuff like that? Or have you felt adequately prepared for how much is costing us, the american taxpayers?

Maybe I was poisoned by the "this war will pay for itself" rantings
of Fluffer on this board, but I sure didn't have the feeling that we'd be this deep in the money pit at this point. Maybe that was my naivete, to expect that my government would prepare me for a somewhat negative type of outcome after a victory in the military campaign.

So when the country fell quicker than expected we didn't have the "right number" of MP's there already. Do we even have that many MP's in service? they're meant to police our military, not a whole country. Here again, Saddam's guys made some choices that complicate getting Iraq going again, but I don't see how bitching about our not "predicting or preparing" for those choices makes much sense. sorry maybe we just agree to disagree here, again. I won't claim victory.

The country fell quicker than expected, and then we disbanded the army, sending a bunch of disgruntled (and armed) Iraqis home with no paychecks. More knowledgable people than me have stated that we could have kept the army intact and de-Baathified it, while not allowing it to become the destabilizing force that it appears to have become. You apprently chalk that up to "how could we have planned for this." I choose to analyze the decision.

anyone who talks of the diplomatic failures sees the initial question of going into Iraq as a grey. If you believe taking Saddam out was right, then I truly don't see how "waiting for France to get on board" is anything other that postponing the inevitable.

Was kicking Iraq out of Kuwait "right" back in '91? Because back then we found the time to get other countries (feel free to simplify this to France in your reply) comfortable with our actions enough to foot most of the bill.

Again, my problem is not with taking Saddam out. I feel better that he's not around. My problem is with the manner in which this was done, because you and I are footing the bill. You support the decision and see all of the negative outcomes as mere side effects.

The UN wasn't going to authorize anything other than continued inspections.
You don't speak of that here, but mention Turkey. turkey was almost bought off to allow troops. It was an equation of $$$$; Don't act like it was anything more. Perhaps Turkey wanted bigger bucks because it knew it might see more unrest internally if it were part of the Iraq attack, but I am comfortable Bush tried that avenue.
I really think what could have been "if only" we had done this or that misses the timing issues that made the attack need to begin when it did, at the latest.

What are these timing issues? If no one in the admin was saying that the threat was imminent, why did we have to beat the summer heat? To me the only reason was that Bush wanted to have enough time before the '04 election to get our troops out of there, and invading in the fall would not have allowed for that. I would welcome hearing the other reasons you have, however.

[The Larry Davis Experience]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
It sort of reminded me of the sporatic bad-Bush theories that get thrown out here, you know "he set the convention to take advantage of 9/11" stuff like that.

I was the one who originally posted that little question about the GOP convention, so I kind of enjoy being one of your repeated taglines. It's like I came up with "whatchoo talkin bout Willis" or "where's the beef".

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by notcasesensitive
Funny, during the hour or so that I spent watching CNN on Thanksgiving nothing negative was said about his trip. Actually it was pretty much just the same story over and over again every minute and a half, accompanied by the same soundbites and pictures of him serving the soldiers food. Then they would act like there was going to be some different story, but they would merely repeat what they just said and showed in excruciating monotony.

so you're joining the NYT Times lies crowd?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by The Larry Davis Experience
Again, my problem is not with taking Saddam out. I feel better that he's not around. My problem is with the manner in which this was done, because you and I are footing the bill.

All else equal, are we happier that Saddam is gone? Of course. But all else is not equal. Are we safer now than we were before the invasion? Unclear at best. We now know that Hussein posed little or no threat to us, and what we've done to the country may threaten us in new and different ways for years. And we sucked resources from the war on terrorism to do it. If we are safer, were there better ways to spend the $87+ billion? Probably, yes.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
If you can create net welfare gains, the winners should be able to -- in effect -- buy off the losers. That this does not happen may be because the would-be winners are too focused on staking a claim to all of the gains.

Huh? I'm not sure what you mean by "net welfare gains," but wouldn't this just nullify any efficiencies gained? In other words, if you are suggesting that we redirect the gains don't we simply, at best, maintain the status quo?

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by The Larry Davis Experience
I realize that none of us have any reference for how much it costs to fix a country after it has been pillaged for decades and then we knock it over in a few months ("uh, I dunno....a zillion dollars?").

But, with that point made, do you disagree that the admin sent signals that indicated that this process would be relatively inexpensive? e.g. the public contradiction of Gen. Shinseki, projections of oil revenues with no reference to the country's debt that they would have to pay off before those revenues could be used for reconstruction, stuff like that? Or have you felt adequately prepared for how much is costing us, the american taxpayers?

Maybe I was poisoned by the "this war will pay for itself" rantings
of Fluffer on this board, but I sure didn't have the feeling that we'd be this deep in the money pit at this point. Maybe that was my naivete, to expect that my government would prepare me for a somewhat negative type of outcome after a victory in the military campaign.

What he said -- (and what I tried to say/thought I said). Thanks for the additional specifics, Larry.

Originally posted by The Larry Davis Experience
The country fell quicker than expected, and then we disbanded the army, sending a bunch of disgruntled (and armed) Iraqis home with no paychecks. More knowledgable people than me have stated that we could have kept the army intact and de-Baathified it, while not allowing it to become the destabilizing force that it appears to have become. You apprently chalk that up to "how could we have planned for this." I choose to analyze the decision.

Originally posted by The Larry Davis Experience
Again, my problem is not with taking Saddam out. I feel better that he's not around. My problem is with the manner in which this was done, because you and I are footing the bill. You support the decision and see all of the negative outcomes as mere side effects.

Preach it Brother! Praise Jeeeaaaazuus!

To all those on the other side of the debate on these issues:

It would facilitate further reasoned discussion if you don't spend any more of our time going on about:

(a) how the administration clearly leveled with the American people up front; and

(b) how the administration has handled it all as well as could be expected; so

(c) all criticism is meritless partisan bitching;

until and unless you do us the courtesy of actually addressing the substantive points on those issues that LDE and I have attempted to raise, particularly including the specific questions.

Thank you.

S_A_M