Letters to the Editor
prunes
Published Letters: 784
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@gen. apathy
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I suspected it, and wanted the UN to confirm it, but I didn't know it.
But we could go too far in the other direction, and ignore legitimate threats for the fear of being wrong.
Up until Iraq, didn't you always assume that the government had trained experts who could accurately assess such things? Regular citizens are completely unqualified (as to the engineering and physics) and underinformed (as to actual availability of materials and so forth) to have any sort of opinion on the matter.
The intelligence and advisory system evolved over decades was completely subverted by the Executive. How many reports of groupthink in the Whitehouse have we heard, former staffers blasting the environment that squelched dissenters?
It was simply unthinkable to me (and I assume others) at the time that the President could go on national TV and make up a nuclear threat out of thin air.
So we allowed the plan to be railroaded through and started the first pre-emptive war in American history.
It seems like there is not too much danger of failing "in the opposite direction" if the option of pre-emptive war is eliminated. A case for war should require the preponderance of evidence in favor of it, never the supposition of some unknowable imminent existential threat, which destroys all capacity for accurate risk management.
Regular intelligence was what got in the neocons' way, it's also the remedy.
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I hate these types of comments...
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...where the only purpose seems to be to work off some frustrated emotions to the detriment of the conversation:
Well the idea that we are the root the branch and the leaf of all evil is just the flipside of imagining we are the font of freedom. You slogan hurling morons truly deserve one another. There's your expertise.
Half a point in there that dissolves into apoplectic gibberish. You feel better now, honey? Get all the angries out?
Next time, maybe think about what you want to say in case someone might want to listen, huh? Yelling "you stupid bastards" on the internet just doesn't work as well as in real life. People just skip it.
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@pluege
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]if you think you're a so-called "liberal-hawk" you're just confused.
Likewise, imo, there are no Christian hawks and particularly no Christian torture proponents.
Not that there aren't people who couldn't be classified that way, but in doing so, we move from definitive principles to demographic groupings, losing any descriptive power beyond designation.
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shooter on Groundhog's Day
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I guess Glenn is just going to have to condemn and marginalize himself as a member of the discredited and immoral Foreign Policy Community. Heh.
Of course the situation in Iraq is identical to what it was a year ago and even much morely identicaler to what it was at the start of the war.
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@gen. apathy
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If he had been, would the war have been legitimate? I still don't know. But if those big ifs were true, and you were a war proponent making that argument, I'm not sure what I would say right now to argue your point.
Prior to the war, we had much intelligence indicating that the "imminent threat" was bunk. This was not widely reported at the time.
Voters like you and I simply can't be well-informed enough to judge the likelihood of imminent existential threat if we aren't trained in nuclear physics, weapon systems, Middle Eastern econopolitics, etc. We hire schooled professionals with our taxes to judge these things for us.
During the lead-up to invasion, the professional intelligence system was overruled by the neocons. Even IF Hussein had been engaged in WMD production to any serious degree, the evidence for this was never presented to the standards of the pre-Iraq war intelligence community.
The spectre of existential threat annihilates probabalistic reasoning like Pascal's wager does. When you include terms of zero, one, or infinity in probabilistic calculations, all possibilities are overwhelmed by the existential term, leading to the "One Percent Doctrine."
Existential threats can be imagined in infinite manifold forms, all equally deadly and utterly urgent. Pre-emptive war is practically a necessary outcome of this thinking. By allowing pro-war arguments that were not backed by solid intelligence, the entire logic of military strategy was undermined.
I tend to think this was possible due to the good reputation of our intelligence and military prior to this screw-up.
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@Anonymous
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I will critique other posters. Because I have nothing at all to say. I am a liberal. I would rather be hated than ignored.
Has anyone ever seen such a self-descriptive comment?
FWIW, Anonymous, you can scroll through this thread and read several substantial comments by yours truly. If you'd like to discuss the content of any of them, feel free to. Or you can continue to act like a jackass.
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@shooter242
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Either way Bush was going to suffer, and decided that the welfare of the country was worth more than his legacy. Unlike some other Presidents I could name.
Oh, my ass.
You know how many Milsovic fans there still are? These guys claim everything he did was for the good of his people (translate: Volk) and that out of his great love for them, he was willing to take the fall for what the consider to be trumped-up war crimes charges. The war was the fault of those cursed Muslim dogs who had been living there for hundreds of years. If they hadn't forced the Serbs into it, there would have been no need for such slaughter and (literal) rape.
You can find as many of these invariably racist clowns as you like online, wandering from forum to forum, carrying the undying flame of memorial for their leader, who loved them.