Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I believe the question was about the Middle East.

You continue to have an absurd definition of "ignore" and a huge blind spot about the period between January 20, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001.

That's an accomplishment? Even with the whole not-having-plan-for-what's-next and the sparking-a-regional-civil-war and the who-knows-how-things-are-gonna-turnout-but-that-civil-war-could-easily-restart-soon?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Not a positive achievement. He was a bad guy but not as bad a guy (from U.S. perspective) as they might get when the troops are all gone.

Not to mention a costly and unnecessary war.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Fugee has spoken!!

Also, per Hank's earlier reasoning, getting rid of Saddam was the main cause of the Arab Spring, which again, per Hank's fortune telling, is going to lead to unsavory new regimes in Egypt and Libya. So that's all W's fault too. So triple, quadruple, however many time over, not an acheivement.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

It's amazing that any US President can actually control events in Egypt and Libya, while unilaterally setting the US foreign aid budget.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Is "hiding" a biblical name for Pakistan?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

well during W's term we thought we could still trust Pakistan, and we sort of could as it did give us cooperation for those years. Now we are finding out it is in league with al queda and Taliban. We'll see if Obama keeps blowing up people there, cuts funding, and moving to India's side and perhaps confiscates the nukes before the shariaites take over officially. We will see if he steps up.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

translation: I really do not have any understanding of politics, or global relationships. Not as clueless as Ty or Adder, but still I'm in over my head.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

You seriously think going after Sadaam was a good thing? I supported W going after the Taliban after 9-11 but you have to do more than insult me to convince me going into Iraq was anything other than a major clusterfuck.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I don't have the knowledge. Let's look at what people with knowledge and evidence said: http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich thinking that he had gotten the UK a pretty good arrangement. In retrospect, that looks wrong. Not sure why you keep defending the Bush era foreign policy by saying it looked right at the time. That's a defense?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

hmmm, Chamberlain's opposition said he was wrong.

Just a thought.
 

Maybe you need to consider what's actually happening in the world instead of what different politicians say.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I don't uusually respond to the same post twice, but I'd rather have "looks right at the time" as opposed to "we all know we're fucked from the start, and Israel is going to have to nuke somebody soon."

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I don't think the Snopes article means what you think it means.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

It would be interesting to hear you actually lay out a Middle Eastern policy. Presumably it would involve some kind of mind control to prevent Arabs from reacting to, e.g., Israel's policy of de facto annexing land beyond the 1967 borders.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

ummm. when a Dem was in power the Dems said that stuff about how the BJ king should go. I understood it quite clearly.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I would urge Israel to give up Gaza as a show of good faith. then the Palis can show they are capable of building a government based upon something other than Nazi goals and also, they will be able to start providing to relieve their people's hardship. Once the "Gaza experiment" is in full flower, the west bank should be an easy next step.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

The Israelis have done all sorts of things to undermine the capability of the Palestinian government, both in Gaza and the West Bank. It's hard to escape the thought that it serves the ends of recent Israeli governments for moderate Palestinians to fail. But in a world where nothing is ever Israel's fault, this can be safely ignored.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

ummm. You missed the part of the Snopes article where Snopes said the quotes were truncated and not in context and that some people were not in favor of a military action in Iraq.

So obviously it doesn't mean what you thought it meant when you used it as support for W's sending military into Iraq as a good thing.

And even if they weren't truncated and not in context, I didn't see any of those people saying we should spend billions (trillions?) of dollars sending troops into Iraq. It's one thing to say Saddam is a bad guy and quite another to say we should start another military action.

Even though it didn't result in the capture of OBL and also got us stuck in a hellhole for years, I still (rightly or wrongly) put Afghanistan in W's plus column as a response to 9-11.

I think Saddam was a personal family thing for W, which I can understand but was still a bad thing.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

When they all said he had WMD they were saying W was right. To any fair-thinking person at least.


Really? The man started a war because of avenging his daddy? You're smarter than that.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

accuse me again of being so blindly pro-Israeli that em gives the Palis no chance at all, but this time do it looking in a mirror. Now, does that look any different than me saying you hate Jews?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

At best they were saying (at least with the information they had at the time) that W could have been right about believing Saddam had WMD. I thought I recalled reading that W's people had information indicating this wasn't the case but don't want to take the time to go hunting for it.

Where W went wrong was in what he did with that information (assuming for this purpose he had the same information the Ds had about WMDs). Believing that Saddam had WMD doesn't mean we have to send in the troops. Keeping international pressure on Saddam would have been better than charging in and starting a war we could ill afford and could result in someone even worse than Saddam ending up in power in Iraq. So I blame W more for the action than the information -- though if I'm right in my recollection that his people (the evil Cheney perhaps) had info that there weren't WMDs then I ding W for that as well.

And yes, I think avenging his Daddy was definitely in W's mind and could have been the tipping point. He's a Texan after all. Didn't you watch last week's Big Bang Theory? :D

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

If we thought Iraq had WMDs we were right in going in. And the gov. there will be better than it was.
Have you ever ever ran a business or are you about as qualified as Ty to mouth off here?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Is there any basis for this belief other than blind faith?

The weird thing about your (and various pundits) half-assed posturing about Libya and Egypt is that the fundamental decision to stop propping up dictators in the region, recognizing that while we might not like the short term results of democracy/popular government it nonetheless is the only long term chance for peace and stability in the region, was W's decision. And on that level, he was absolutely right.

Having gone down that road in Iraq (in my view with the worst possible of all tactics, but whatever), I'm not sure how you can expect us to do anything different than we did in the face of the Arab Spring. How do we say to the people in Tahrir Square, "sorry, Iraq gets democracy, but you guys need to stay under Mubarrak's thumb?"

The answer, of course, is that even if we had the means to enforce that (which we didn't, especially after the Egyptian military refused to use force), we couldn't possibly say that. And no American president in 2011 would have made a different decision on the question of the people vs. Mubarrak.

Granted, some might have made much worse decisions and sent in American troop in Libya and I guess reasonable minds can disagree. Sort of. I think it's pretty clear that would have been a recipe for disaster along the lines of Iraq in 2005-2006. And not just in Libya, but whatever.

Which, Hank, leaves you in a precarious position. You think invading Iraq when, no matter what the situation with WMD was, we didn't have to was great because for the moment you are confident about what comes next. For everyone's sake, I hope your confidence isn't revealed to the hubris too quickly, but I fear it will be.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Really? So you justify all actions based on what you think, regardless of whether your thoughts have any correspondence to the real world?

Is this a universal Chinaski rule?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I said a bunch of things about Israel, not about you. It is true that the things I said about Israel don't ever seem to figure into your posts, a world in which the views that many Egyptians have about Israel seem to be entirely the fault of Barack Obama (who is not building settlements in the West Bank). That's why I suggested it would be interesting to hear you state your views more completely. I don't believe you have nothing critical to say about Israel. I believe that you want to take Israel's side, and see that as meaning that when Israel is the topic, you attack Israel's enemies. Which means that you never quite get around to saying whatever you might say that's critical of Israel.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Well, I missed the Big Bang Theory, one of the few things worh watching on TV.

But I do think there were all sorts of biases, ranging from avenging Daddy to satisfying a very militaristic base to shoring up polls starting to come down from Afghanistan highs to some of his administration buying in to the silly neo-con theories of the time that led Bush to either recklessly disregard or entirely ignore the evidence.

It's important to remember that Bush's support going into Iraq was not what it was in Afghanistan, certainly not on the international stage and also not in congress. A majority of Dems voted against it but there was overwhelming Republican support. If the Rs had any institutional propensity to listen, either to their allies or to the guys acrosss the aisle, they might not have rushed in.

So what was on the big bang?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

The whole notion of "WMD" as a salient category seems to have been meant to make Saddam sound dangerous. It combines nuclear weapons, which are really dangerous and which he was building when the Israelis bombed Osirak but which he was not building more recently, and chemical weapons, which he definitely used against Iran in their war but which have little use against civilians.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

So why haven't we invaded North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, South Africa and France?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I think it was much simpler than that, although all that is probably part of it. I think W, personally, saw it as an opportunity to remove a long-standing thorn in our side and bring final resolution to a matter that, in his view, had dragged on far too long.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Don't forget Israel!

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Anyone else find the who idea of "pro-" Israel sort of funky? I mean, how many of us are "pro-Canada" or "pro-England" or "pro-any-other-country"?

As long as other countries avoid starting wars, treat their people with some respect, and buy our shit, they are A-OK in my book.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Ty is pro-South Korea and mightily confused on India and Pakistan - he needs to pick one, not invade both.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I do recommend the National Folk Museum, if you ever find yourself with time to kill in Seoul.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Insults are all Hank has got. At least, ever since he lost Curveball.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Half the Dems in Congress, including Obama, said W was wrong.

Hell, even the French knew he was wrong.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

We thought he had WMDs for years and didn't go in. If the new government is full of religious zealots sympathetic to terrorist organizations, it will not be better than it was. And without staying there endlessly, I don't know how that can be prevented. What does running a business have to do with evaluating a political decision? That right -- nothing! If this is what you turn to rather than offering something more than "The Dems thought he had WMD too," there isn't much point in continuing this.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Howard, Raj and Leonard pulled a Halloween prank on Sheldon and he spent the rest of the episode trying to get back at them.

BBT is one of the few shows I can watch multiple times and laugh again each time. I have the first 3 seasons on DVD and pull them out when I need a laugh.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

other than Sidd we've all agreed to 1)ignoring GGG and 2) treating each other with respect.

You've violated point 2.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I'm sorry, what part of was treating me with respect? :eek: