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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (183292)	3/10/2006 2:49:12 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Every war has casualties. We lost large numbers of men in the pacific theater during ww2. The japanese were a brutal enemy. Men came back maimed and not until 1943 did we gain the edge. Should we have quit? Now i am not comparing the two at all and as you know i have big problems with iraq, but to accuse folks who support the war as uncaring vis a vis our casualties is kind of obscene. Does bush not care about our soldiers? Did LBJ not care? Did FDR not have doubts about how that war was going? Folks should argue efficacy of policy without accusing their opponents in that way or on grounds of patriotism for that matter---something the rightwingers like to do.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (183292)	3/10/2006 5:11:58 PM
From: paret	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Cuban official lectured on free speech …………………………………………………………………………………….. Anti-Castro Sign at Ballgame Causes Stir Mar 10 2006 By ANDREW SELSKY Associated Press Writer SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico 6f09d0b8badf@news.ap.org While Cuba played the Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic, a spectator in the stands raised a sign saying: "Down with Fidel," sparking an international incident that escalated Friday with the velocity of a major league fastball. The image of the man holding the sign behind home plate was beamed live Thursday night to millions of TV viewers _ including those in Cuba. The top Cuban official at the game at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan rushed to confront the man. Puerto Rican police quickly intervened and took the Cuban official _ Angel Iglesias, vice president of Cuba's National Institute of Sports _ to a nearby police station, where they lectured him about free speech. "We explained to him that here the constitutional right to free expression exists and that it is not a crime," police Col. Adalberto Mercado was quoted as saying in El Nuevo Dia, a San Juan daily. The brouhaha gathered steam Friday when Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma, called the sign-waving "a cowardly incident." Cuba's Revolutionary Sports Movement exhorted Cubans to demonstrate in Havana late Friday, saying U.S. and Puerto Rican authorities were involved in "the cynical counterrevolutionary provocations." An anti-Castro Web site, therealcuba.com, identified the protester only as Enrique, and carried his own account of the incident. Enrique said that during the warmup before the game, he flashed another sign denouncing Castro _ this one saying "Baseball players yes, Tyrants no" _ to the Cuban leader's son, Tony Castro, who is the Cuban team doctor. "He looked down and kept walking and I shouted, 'Eso es para tu papa ('That is for your dad').' ... I know he heard that," Enrique said, according to the account in the Web site. Mercado said the spectator, and a second one who also waved signs, had tickets for the section behind home plate, but had moved out of their seats so their signs would appear on TV. Cuban state TV was showing the ESPN signal, and the signs were briefly visible on television in Cuba. Police later told the pair to return to their seats, Mercado said, adding that Iglesias was never under arrest. "The Cubans were upset with the incident that happened last night, and they want to make sure it doesn't happen again," said John Blundell, spokesman for Major League Baseball, which helped establish the tournament. "We are doing everything that we can to ensure the safety of fans and the delegations." Cuba downed the Netherlands 11-2. Cuba has also beat Panama in the first round of competition and was playing Puerto Rico Friday night. __ Associated Press writer Anita Snow in Havana, Cuba contributed to this report.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (183292)	3/11/2006 11:30:22 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: 1. "Define "winning".. Is it merely military, or socio-political and economic victory that you think can never be achieved?" I wrote, "in a war we can't win." It would be more logical for you to define winning instead of asking me to prove a negative? I will say, however, that I can't think of a single broad objective articulated by the Bush team that can be accomplished by our military using the tool of "war" in Iraq Who do you fight and how do your fight them? How do you identify your enemy? What benchmarks do you use to measure if you've won or if you've just driven them underground for a week or two? How many times do you "win" the battle for Fallujah? If you have to claim as "victory" the capture of, or killing of, small numbers of "insurgents" in a land where millions of people approve of killing your soldiers, how big are your "victories?" Face the facts. The Iraqi people understand that this isn't a war of "good versus evil." They understand that this is a war of Sunni vs Shiite vs Kurd vs sectarians vs tribes vs nationalists vs separatists vs educated vs ignorant with a little Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran thrown into the mix. The Iraqi people understand that you can't create an effective, trusted army or police force made up of men who are free of the influence of such politics and religion. The Iraqi factions understand that a "democracy" dominated by their enemies will create an intolerable Iraq for them. And one thing is very clear; the Iraqi people, at best, barely tolerate the presence of our soldiers. This war will not be "won" by us. After we've left it will be "won" by some faction in Iraq, or maybe by the division of Iraq into enclaves of sects and religions, and it will probably be a bloody "win." That's the reality. It's already apparent. The Iraqi insurgents have almost completely driven our soldiers out of the everyday lives of Iraqis. Sure they make some patrols and knock on some doors but for the most part they're now off the streets and trying to avoid making targets of themselves. The real "influence" we exert in Iraq is through the hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars we dangle as "rewards and incentives" to move the Iraqis in the directions the Bush people want them to move. Unfortunately, most of those directions have turned out to be dead ends. We don't hear much about how we've created a better world for Iraqi women now, do we? "2. What kind of war IS winnable?" Lots of kinds of war are "winnable." Where the mission is to take or hold territory or destroy of neutralize an identifiable force then it can be won or lost. We "won" the war against Saddam's army. When the mission became defeating the insurgents and preventing Iraq from descending into chaos, however, we learned that there were powerful forces in Iraq that were beyond the power of our military. If you'd paid attention, that's what many experts and our best thinkers were telling us long before we took out the Saddam government. "3. What is your threshold for going to war should we see a number of countries become Islamo-Fascist as their current regimes are undermined and overthrown, and what would be your appropriate reaction?" So what? If those people have the will and the support to undermine and overthrow, let them "win." Once the current regimes are "undermined and overthrown" the underminers and overthrowers will come out in the light. If they directly or indirectly attack us then we will have a mission we can accomplish; i.e. we can make them sorry they ever moved against us. Because of the strength of our military it's not nations that threaten us, it's those who are hidden from sight. We CAN dissuade those who are in sight from harming us. The overthrow of the Taliban was a good lesson and a good message to send. Conversely, the course of our involvement in post overthrow Afghanistan and Iraq are also instructive. Although we can punish and destroy those who attack us, we cannot reliably manipulate the evolution of societies and we should certainly understand that forces beyond our control will determine what arises out of the vacuum we've created. In other words, the best cure for populations that think they want to be ruled by Islamo-Fascists may be rule by Islamo-Fascists. Maybe then, like the Eastern European nations and Communism, they will embrace democracy, or maybe not. Maybe it will turn out that they accept such rule. It's their country. Ed