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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (45948)	4/17/2004 11:19:45 AM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

>listen Carl that is my influence you follow I regard your posts as footnote, they lack originality and they lack consistency> Got to defend Carl here. He is one of the most original thinkers on this board and elsewhere. -Arun

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (45948)	4/17/2004 8:07:10 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Hi IQBAL LATIF; Re: "Carl I think intellectual honesty means consistency of posts ..." You've provided no specific examples of this. Re: "... you have been most inconsistent during the fall of Baghdad you just disappeared ..." I can assure you that I've been corporeal continuously for many decades. I don't always post on SI, but who does. Re: "... your theories on war were like ‘toilet paper’ strategies ..." I'd love to answer what you're accusing me of, but you're not making any actual accusations. You're just throwing up trash. Re: "... you remember that 500,000 casualty figure of UN ..." I don't remember any such casualty figure. Re: "... now with your 10,000 books on Vietnam ..." For some reason, I have very few books on Vietnam. I use it as an analogy because most people are too historically illiterate to use other examples of occupations that descended into guerilla wars. There is also a very strong human tendency to believe that "we are special or different". So many Americans reject historical data on, for example, how the French civilians responded to the Prussian invasion of 1870, because they say "but we're not Prussians". That leaves very little compare with, other than Vietnam. I could bring up the subject of the Phillipines, but it was too long ago and obscure for most Americans to have any knowledge of. This failure of understanding due to a failure of being aware of the historical parallels was seen in polling from a year ago. The support for going into Iraq was highest among the youth, much lower among those old enough to remember Vietnam. As we run out of troops and a draft slowly creeps into reality, the youth will reverse on this. Like I said before the war, it's too soon after Vietnam for the US to have another failing guerilla war with a 50,000+ US fatality cost. Because of the high cost, I doubted that Bush would go in. And now, with our increased resistance to absorbing casualties (which may be correlated with our reduced family size), we will pass the point where we decide to leave Iraq far sooner than we left Vietnam. We've barely been in Iraq for a year and already politicians are talking about pulling US troops out. I don't think that that level of resistance began during the Vietnam War until 2 or 3 years after it began in 1963. Re: "... you go back each and every of my post and throw the results on my face that how wrong I have been ..." I've not gone back to each and every one of your posts, that was just a sampling from about 4 weeks. Why don't you show how you were not completely, totally and utterly wrong about Iraq by looking through those posts I replied to and finding something that you said that was true? It's not like I misquoted you. I quoted you quite exactly. You were very specific on Iraq. Re: "... listen Carl that is my influence ..." I'm not sure what you mean by this. But if I thought you were completely unimportant, I wouldn't post to you. Re: "... now I feel proud that a great strategist like you follow me so closely what I write in five minutes takes you hours to ponder about ..." Uh, go back and look at the time stamps on my post. I wrote them all within one hour, but thanks for the compliment on my being a great strategist. Re: "... that is the difference, yes Fallujah is last stand of the extremist moor ... we can be wrong by few months but the change is on the scene that is the whole discussion about." I'm not sure what an "extremist moor" is, but if you're saying that Falloujah is their "last stand" you're completely wrong. I tell you what. My big complaint about you is that you expressed your opinions to a US audience about the US war against Iraq when you knew nothing about the US, war, or Iraq. Most Americans also know nothing about these things, and since as far as they're concerned there is little difference between a Pakistani and an Iraqi, some of them were undoubtedly convinced by your ignorant arguments. Now a year has gone by and you've been proved completely wrong in everything you said. Do you want to admit this now? Or would you like me to remind you of it again come March 2005? That's another 12 months, for a total of 24 months after you wrote that the resistance was collapsed, LOL. How many is a "few"? Re: "On a lighter side just don’t mix my role I am small time poster on SI smallest corner ..." I am in exactly the same position. If I could change the world by making great speeches I'd do it, but this is all I can do at the present time. Re: "... on these matter of strategies even your highest paid Generals have made certain error of judgment so please don’t hold me so high ..." Well this is sort of an admission of error I guess. There were highly paid generals who predicted what Iraq would be like (that is, no WMDs, an easy victory, and then a failing occupation), but their opinions were gutted by two ways. First, the Bush administration fired some of them, like Shinseki. The rest did what military officers are supposed to do: they tried to implement a policy that they had privately argued against without making any public comment. Second, the Bush administration modified some of their plans so as to eliminate the problem. The best example of this is that it was the original plan to bring the troop strength in Iraq down to 30,000 by the end of summer 2003. This was the plan because it was widely thought that if large numbers of US troops remained in Iraq for more than a year, the inevitable result would be that the Iraqis would first become inconvenienced, then slowly become irate, and then eventually become our enemy. This has come to pass. Bush's best plan would have been to set up quick elections, no matter how corrupt or bad they would be, for a constitutional convention, and immediately begin pulling out of Iraq. I believe he didn't do this because despite the lip service that the administration's plan gave to the predictions that a long and large US presence would lead to a guerilla war, the neocon thinkers really didn't believe this. Instead, all they could talk about was how well the German and Japanese occupations had gone. -- Carl