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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (108149)	7/26/2003 12:38:49 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, we'll clearly have to agree to disagree. About what? That I assumed that Hersh's facts were correct for the limited purpose of discussing them with you? If that is a point of disagreement, then you are more, ah, flexible, than I ever imagined. That you didn't mention Iran as part of Hersh's piece, which clearly it isn't? Here is what you said. Read it for yourself: Message 19137705 Read Seymour Hersh's piece in this week's New Yorker. It's online. He argues that the CIA argues that after 9-11 Syria and Iraq and Iran scaled down their commitments to ME terrorist groups. That was a window of opportunity which the Bush folk missed. Hey, I even gave you a gratis pass on Iraq. :0 That Hersh is being yawned at by the public and policy makers? I suppose that's a matter of interpretation, but I certainly see little commentary about his generally preposterous recent stuff in any mainstream medium except the ultraliberal New Yorker. The problem is that you refuse to accept any other viewpoint except an extremely liberal one. That is certainly your prerogative, as it is mine to punch holes into it. And its easier than breathing.

To: JohnM who wrote (108149)	7/26/2003 1:16:42 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

SOLDIERS SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER ________________________ Fri Jul 25, 8:02 PM ET By Richard Reeves story.news.yahoo.com <<...I'm with the kid in Fallujah, the Army private in the Third Infantry Division, who said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ought to resign. Rummy and his crowd led and misled those soldiers out there to occupy a country we can defeat but not control. Rumsfeld, who should never have been given an army to play with, is either nuts or incompetent. I tend toward the former. He and President Bush overreached in sending 16 of the Army's 33 combat-ready divisions to win an easy war and now have to leave them out there to occupy the desert -- something they are not well-trained to do -- until we withdraw or find someone to take our place. Now there's a problem. We mocked and bullied most of our allies in the run-up to war -- we didn't need the wusses of Old Europe and old everyplace else -- and now we are begging the people we ignored, the United Nations and our own North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to come bail us out. We can't really win this game. In that way we are repeating the mistakes we made in Vietnam all those years ago. This is quite a different war in quite a different place, but there is this similarity: The Vietnamese and the Iraqis have been there forever and will be there forever, but we will leave sooner or later. So our soldiers want to go home -- and some now feel they have been betrayed by their superiors right up to the commander in chief. This is what our young guardians are saying: A private: "We liberated Iraq. Now the people here don't want us here, and guess what? We don't want to be here either. So why are we still here?" A corporal: "I'm not sure people in Washington really know what it's like here. We'll keep doing our jobs as well as anyone can, but we shouldn't have to still be here in the first place." The problem the military has now is that some of these soldiers and marines, too, have been freely sharing their thoughts with the American people, exercising their freedom of speech -- most notably on camera with ABC News. If I were an ABC correspondent I would have used them on the air, too; the press is not part of the military...>>