Hawkmoon, you keep carrying neocon water, but the bucket if full of holes.
Buddy... I carry my own water when it comes my foreign policy views. If the neocons happen to agree, then that just alright with me..
But note that none of them, that I know of, have proposed establishing a national oil trust fund for the purpose of creating national unity.
First Iraq was about WMD and links to terrorism, and now it's about making Iraq into a democratic example for the rest of the region.
Everything has to be a single issue for you, doesn't it? There can never be more than one reason to taking, or not taking, any particular course of action, right? No capability of multi-faceted policy making, right?
I can provide you a long list of reasons why Saddam needed to be overthrown, just as we can do when many authoritarian/totalitarian regimes throughout the world today.
But none of it would have mattered without the legal context of enforcing a BINDING UNSC resolution and cease fire accord.
That was what made Saddam different. WE HAD THE LEGAL RIGHT AND OBLIGATION UNDER 17 UNSC MANDATES to take the actions we undertook.
We did what the UNSC, blocked by France and Russia, was supposed to do. We enforced the cease-fire, put teeth behind the inspection process, and re-established the credibility of the UNSC binding resolution process.
Think about how our former friends in the region view this-- what are the dictatorships we seek to ultimately overthrow from the democratic garden of Iraq?
Just because we're trying to bring democratic reforms to the region does not necessarily mean that that these monarchs and rulers are facing self-destruction.
What they are facing is to see their political power diminished and governmental accountability instituted through parliamentary reform. This is what was required in the UK, and it's likely the best transition method for most of the regimes in the region.
What did the freedom-loving people of Algeria do? Elect an Islamic government.
What if, out of some strange political twist (too many parties and no absolute majority), a neo-nazi party managed to be elected in the US, based upon a platform of abolishing the constitution and instituting repressive state security laws. Wouldn't it be the obligation of the US military leadership to preserve that constitution?
After all, US soldiers and officers swear an oath to the constitution, not to whoever manages to get elected. And I suspect that's the same logic that the Algerian military took when the Islamists won in that election.
We "liberated" Iraq and the plunged it into the worse chaos they've ever known.
Who are you trying to brainwash?? 300,000 Iraqis are murdered over the course of less than 10 years, right after a 8 year war that involved the use of chemical weapons, and you have the gall to claim that this is the worse chaos they've ever known?
Amazingly, I bet you actually believe this BS.. Stop watching CNN or Al-Jazeera.. Use your brain instead.
The saddest irony is that the State Dept. actually had spent three years drawing up detailed occupation and reconstruction plans--security, basic services, de-baathization, conversion of the military. What happened to those plans? Rummy and Dicky and the gang ignored them. Why? Because they did not include a leadership role for Chalabi.
So you believe those plans have not been implemented solely because Chalabi had not been included?
From the article:
"This is an important point," he said, "because of this issue of What did we believe? ... The common line is, nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us that everything was going to be swell." Chalabi, the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often been blamed for making rosy predictions about the ease of governing postwar Iraq. "So we predicted that everything was going to be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell." Here Feith paused for a few seconds, raised his hands with both palms up, and put on a "Can you believe it?" expression. "I mean—one would really have to be a simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not that dumb, that how can people write things like that?" He sounded amazed rather than angry."
Douglas Feith just referred to you as a simpleton... And despite his being a neocon, I would have to say that he probably has a point.
Now, as for not following some kind of post-war planning outline, they are certainly more vulnerable.
And most especially, not requiring the detention, vetting, and reconstitution of the Iraqi army.
The article was very good overall, but I didn't see anything in there about how this post-war plan was ignored merely because it had no place for Chalabi... Geezus!!!
And finally, regardless of any mistakes, or miscalculations on the part of US leadership in the pre and post war planning process, NONE of this criticism detracts from the argument that Saddam's regime was a danger to the region, to US interests, and potentially (by way of providing support and WMDs to terrorist organizations) to the US homeland itself.
And one more concept you should become familiar with h0db.. No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
And sometimes it's a matter of "I have found the enemy, and he is us"...
Another analogy I can provide you with is an anecdote I once read.. A german general was being debriefed (as I recall) after his capture and asked about his opinions of American tactics and combat capability.. His response (and I paraphrase) was:
"The reason the US Army does so well during war is because war is chaos, and they practice chaos on a daily basis."
This is just the way it is h0db. The military is a huge bureaucracy with almost every point of view being advanced at one time or another. Unfortunately, the ones that might have made an actual difference (or were implicited correct) sometimes just don't get implemented.
Hawk |
