Letters to the Editor
shooter242
Published Letters: 1590
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re: Shooter's talking points
[Read the article: The rigid pro-war ideology of the foreign policy community]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm still having trouble with that stuff. Sorry for the confusion.
Not to worry. That is why one has to be scrupulous about using the preview feature. Formatting text with little symbols is a real pain, but like spelling it's a measure of how much basic education one has. After all we are, only what we write, in cyberspace. I took me about two weeks to just get used to the idea of the symbols and another two weeks to use them easily. But I still preview for mistakes. Keep plugging.
Al Quaida is good at blowing themselves and bystanders up, that is all they are good for. To achieve the type of control necessary to create a stable and industrialized society necessary to create nukes, WMDs and the missiles to deliver them usually require the type of institutions and government not suicidal enough to actually use them.
Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Sudan are the result of bomb throwers campaigns. The Taliban took over a nation. You presume too much about Al Qaeda. As for enough control to produce WMD's requiring non-suicidal government, I think Iran negates that idea. This is a country on the way to a bomb that during the Iran-Iraq war sent waves of children to death in minefields clearing them for the regular troops. Ahmadinejad captained one of those outfits. One absolutely cannot use western concepts of humanity to evaluate "holy warriors."
My point exactly. But Iraq doesn't need us there to turn against the extremists. If anything our presence is putting off the inevitable at great loss of life all around.
Dawggone, this is where formatting is important. I can't tell if you wrote this or not. I hope it's not.
Like, Hamas or Hezbollah, their aims are strictly regional.
All politics is local? The caliphate was real and it was huge. An entire forest is potentially in every acorn.
Second, I don't know what cultural alternatives the US could ever offer so long as its efforts are blunted by a military occupation. It's hard to drop leaflets offering goodwill when they are constantly followed by bombs of death.
Excuse me. We are not bombing civilians. We are not shooting civilians. We are in fact trying to build Iraq back up.
There's that run away phrase again, and it belies the true theme of those who want to stay until "victory": fear of looking weak. What amazes me is how one can fear looking weak when they don't seem to understand what "strength" is? I don't know if you noticed this, but our continued failure in Iraq is sending the best message possible that we can be beaten.
Sorry Dawg, but "run away" is what we do best. We have either lost or drawn nearly every armed conflict since WW2 by reason of political nervousness. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1, etc, etc. Leaving now would chalk up another loss for us. We might as well concede that we can't win any war, anywhere, and go isolationist. That's something I could live with.
No rational mind would think we would ever be living under Sharia law.
I'm sure people in Sweden never thought they would either, but what happens when they become the minority? And they WILL be the minority within a generation.
There is the little issue of nuclear retaliation. Iran? Even if they got a nuke they would not be so stupid as to use it. And if they saw our withdraw as an opportunity to invade Iraq, well good luck with that, they Revolutionary Guard is far less capable of occupying Iraq then we are. I doubt anyone would want to trade places with us right now.
You're making a very large assumption about Iran and a nuke. Would they nuke Israel? Absolutely. Collateral damage? It is Allah's will. As for taking over Iraq they would be in, in a heart beat. With the Shiite militia leading the way. Iran wants Iraq's oil more than we do, not to mention arming up for the Sunni's. Regional? Only temporarily.
I would hardly call our lack of terrorizing other countries with our military "no diplomatic leverage." If anything the power to scare countries into doing our bidding through threat of invasion is probably the weakest and most dangerous diplomatic currency any nation can employ. The point of Glenn's article.
Oh please. Do you tell your poker buddies what you have in your hand before you start betting? Does Glenn provide a list to the opposition of what he won't do during a trial? Totalitarian countries don't go to war, their leaderships do. And as Saddam demonstrated to one and all, sanctions don't work on leaderships. Bribery didn't work well on Kim of Korea, but the looming presence of China worked wonders. Sorry Dawg, one doesn't have to go to war, but one has to have that threat to be credible after the conferences are over.