Letters to the Editor
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Martin Gifford
You haven't been replying to the truth of what people have posted. You've twisted your replies to suit your ongoing critique. You are "waxing poetic" about the Reagan years in that you are complimenting the men who 'had and made a plan and "succeeded" in implementing that plan. It makes no difference that you claim to disagree with the outcome of their plan. Should we also follow Hitler's example of how to implement a plan?
You've failed to acknowledge that this "plan" was carried out illegally. Billions of tax dollars have been used for bribery and other nefarious purposes. One example: nine billion gone missing in Iraq. That's a trifle of the trillions gone missing because of the Iraq "plan". If had nine stolen billion dollars and was willing to use it for bribery or buying off the adversaries or whatever else would help me get my way, I maybe could make my plans a "success".
Along with the stealing there is also the threatening everyone and anyone who descents. Buy off the media and big business to "catapult the propaganda", use Signing Statements to avoid following any and all laws that are or have been passed by congress -- all of this done in order to invade a country without the approval of most of the people in the US, not to mention the world. That is not "Success" under any line of reasoning. That is not making or implementing a plan. That is trampling the constitution of the United States and taking anything you want and not be held accountable for it.
You've said that you have convinced yourself that you are doing your Glenn Greenwald imitation of x does not = y, but you aren't. You are using an illegal disaster as an example of "success" and holding it up as a bludgeon to us, and falsely claiming that "progressives" don't have any plan. That assumption all alone, regardless of everything else you are positing, shows your complete ignorance or dishonesty about what is happening in the United States.
You seem to think you have made some sort of case but you haven't. You're using what may well be the most corrupt people in the history of America and the "most unpopular war in American history" as an example of making and implementing a plan. Somehow, I don't see how that washes, as you say, in the 'Greenwald x does not necessarily = y logic' category.
Just because you've said you don't agree with what their plan has engendered doesn't release you from being incorrect for holding it up as an example of how to make and implement a plan.
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Seriously?
We need to deal with what is in front of us. And if that means we aren't going to be able to hold the idiots who got us into this mess in the first place accountable, so be it.
Since the idiocy continues, the first step must be to deal with the idiots. ( "holding the idiots accountable prevents us from dealing with the mess" would need to be demonstrated, not accepted as true.)
Our national punishment for letting them into office and then refusing to throw them out will be to know they got away with it.
Out national punishment so far already makes that look silly. Punish those responsible, and you make it less likely to happen again.
But spending time and energy on who was right and who was wrong when we are still in the middle of the situation makes it less likely that we will see a somewhat acceptable outcome. Assigning blame is not part of crisis management, it's for the post mortem.
Those who got it wrong might have thought badly, followed blindly, or or acted for personal gain. None is a qualification for fixing the problem. The opinions of such folks should be given very low weight.
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I am the exception to that rule
"Anyone who thinks he knows what is going on just doesn't understand the situation." That, in a very few words, is you to a T.
-- Frankly, my dear, ...
I know the situation and I understand what is going on.
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You've missed Glenn's original point, Martin.
“Simple plans to deal with complex problems invariably result in nothing but absolute and costly failure.” I agree. But I’d almost say that simple plans are better than no plans because simple plans fail and that hurts and that SHOULD wake up those who can make better plans.
And what if those who composed and implemented the plans which failed have no incentive to either learn from that failure OR to listen to those who propose more comprehensive alternatives?
I believe Glenn and many of us here already discussed this issue at length in a prior thread.
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Reasononline loves the war machine ...
Nick Gillespie, Editor, reason.tv and reason online:
After almost 4,000 U.S. deaths, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and trillions of dollars poured into the desert sands, Americans have gone from "shock and awe" to something approaching "Aw, shucks." ...
I was never in favor of invading Iraq, which I thought was a bait and switch from the 9/11 attacks engineered by a Bush administration whose "War on Terror" had run out of steam given its inability to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. When U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein (a man who makes me want to believe in hell, just so he can get what he deserves for all eternity), the Americans hubristically pulled a page from the playbook of Shelley's overreaching Ozymandias, and replaced one "colossal wreck" of a regime with another. It's incredibly dispiriting how arrogant and stupid the U.S. forces were when it came to losing the peace, but really, more of us should have seen it coming.
The question I worry about is what American foreign policy will look like five years hence. I'm not a pacifist, and I don't think that military intervention is always a bad thing (ideally, it should be used like Astroglide: sparingly and after a lot of foreplay). But I don't think we've learned very much as a country from the Iraq mess ...
David Weigel, Associate Editor:
Do you remember the pro-war protestors? I was one of them. Five years ago a pack of conservatives at my college planned a "crash" of the final anti-war rally before the start of the war. When the forces of non-intervention set up on the library steps and started speaking, we walked right in front of them, blasting the Saddam Hussein love ballad from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut on a ROTC student's boom box.
I have excuses for all of this. I was 21. My expertise in American interventionism came from watching Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo reports on CNN. I had friends in the Army. I wanted to "free the Iraqi people." The takeaway is that, like millions of people, I was naive and uninformed about the doings in Mesopotamia and I did my little part to enable a catastrophe.
Michael Young, Contributing Editor, reason; Opinion Page Editor, Lebanon Daily Star:
The assumption that our thoughts should have changed on Iraq is presumptuous. Certainly, the Bush administration's abysmal postwar strategy until the surge last year invites a critical reassessment of what could have been done for the better. But what does not, and should not, is the bottom line of the war: the fact that the United States managed to remove one of the world's worst mass murderers from power, so that today 55 percent of Iraqis believe that their lives are good, according to a recent poll—including 62 percent of Shiites and 73 percent of Kurds. ....
So, sorry, but invading Iraq was the right thing to do, even if it could have been done a million times better by a more competent group of people. When I think of Iraq, somehow I have no profound problem slamming George W. Bush's faults while welcoming what he did to the Baath regime—the barbaric, genocidal, thankfully bygone Baath regime.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/125577.html
I recommend reading the entire article. I will comment in another post sometime, but the above tells us a lot about the pro-war nature of Reason magazine.
The idea apparently is that it is American Man's burden to "fix the culture" of the people around the world. They seem to believe that they somehow have the moral right or even the moral imperative to force others to live as they would live. This disease often comes with the exercise of great power.