Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Mark Denney: "They used what they thought were necessary means to gain intelligence from captives in this war and ignored sound advice from seasoned professionals from beginning to end in how to execute this war, how to deal with the aftermath, and how to gain information from captives."
I am glad you are seeing this...
Mark Denney: "I think everyone feared saddam having and using chemical weapons."
Really? I don't think so at all. There was no tangible intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein was up to anything nefarious or that he had accelerated military activities. Every single thing in Colin Powell's speech to the UN has been debunked. Every. Single. Thing.
Sure, if somebody tells you your enemy might have chemical weapons that will melt your face off, and you're stuck in a desert full of people who might want to kill you, you're going to be full of all sorts of fears -- fear of guns, chemicals, bombs, camels, spicy foods....
Mark Denney: "Trust me, no one WANTS to wear chem gear and do anything except sit still. That alone to me is evidence that information existed that he had them and he did nothing to change that."
Whoa, that's quite a leap there in the 2nd sentence above. WHAT is evidence that information existed? That people had fear?
Mark Denney: "But, as a human being, I am glad we decided to act and take out saddam."
That is a weird statement: "As a human being." All this time I thought I was writing to a panda!
No, really, what does it mean, "as a human being"? Does being a human being make you happy to see a man's sons killed, sliced up, and then lathered with facial makeup, photographed, and their photographs air-dropped onto cities to demoralize people? Does being a human being make you happy to see a man put into a show trial in a kangaroo court, convicted, and then led up the stairs to be hung from the neck, and then repeatedly stabbed afterward?
Does being a human being make it worthwhile to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people just so that one man can be punished?
Hundreds of thousands of people...
What was your human reaction to the little boy who lost both arms and both legs due to an errant U.S. bomb?
What was your human reaction to the pregnant woman shot multiple times by U.S. soldiers who didn't realize the car approaching them was trying to get to a hospital as she went into labor?
What was your human reaction to the teenagers gleefully thrown off a bridge by U.S. soldiers, breaking their legs and then drowning?
Or the human reaction to an innocent taxi driver, rounded up, taken to an interrogation room, and beaten so many times in the legs (mostly to get him to stop crying) that the coagulation in his arteries caused his heart to fail?
What is the human reaction to wave after wave of suicide bombings in public markets as a result of the chaos unleashed due to shoddy post-war planning?
What is the human reaction to Abu Ghraib prisoners forced to wallow naked in their excrement, pretend to jack each other off, and stand in "stress positions" for hours at a time, sleep-deprived, with electrodes connected to their hands or genitalia?
You must have a lot of human reactions. Let's hear them. I mean, sure, it's good that Saddam Hussein is out of power. He was always a mobster-like cretin.
But this is a bigger picture than just "Saddam Hussein was BAD and taking him out was GOOD." We are worlds beyond that now.
We're looking at the displacement of 5 or 10 million people or more, the likely deaths of 500,000 to a million others, the complete gutting of the entire U.S. economy, over 5,000 U.S. personnel dead and probably 50,000 or more seriously, seriously disfigured.
Mark Denney: "I am extremely dissapointed with how we did it but I think we took action when no one else would and I think Bush deserves some credit for that. Not much else but, he tried..."
Bush has already been given credit, from millions of Americans who have lavished praise on him after the war, and who voted for him in 2004. That's about all the credit he deserves. After that, what did Bush do that was worth credit? He failed to live up to American ideals. Instead of owning up to the problems of the Iraq war, he consistently side-stepped them. He never took responsibility for the U.S. torture policy that came all the from the top -- even as he claimed "we do not torture."
I don't even think Bush deserves credit, for anything. Going to war? That doesn't take courage on his part. He didn't have to put himself in danger. He just had to convince himself it was a good thing to do, facts and circumstances be damned. And that's the problem -- it is well-documented that Bush never actually read intelligence reports and briefings that were delivered to him on important, key matters. He let the people around him do that, and then he asked for their interpretations. Bush was disengaged from all the details. He didn't care enough to learn about the very people he was sending young soldiers in to attack. What credit does he really deserve?
Mark Denney: "In writing all that I also personally get the same feeling I did during the rodney king incident. Did those police go too far, yes I think they did. But, for me, you take a swing at a cop after driving 100 miles an hour down the highway on PCP and taking a taser and still not dropping to the ground....you get what you get."
Uh.... Sorry, this is a mind-boggling comparison.
Mark Denney: "I think that Bush is a very sad person who, much like Reagan, surrounded himself with people who were extremely empowered and thought they were acting in the interests of the country."
How do you know those people thought they were acting in the interests of the country? How do you know they weren't acting in their own self-interests? Or in the interests of just certain segments of the country? You don't. You can't read their minds or their souls. The only thing we have to go on are the reports of what they did, what they said, and what the results are. The result is failure.
Mark Denney: "I think he looks back and personally doesn't understand how it all went so bad with such good intentions."
If he doesn't understand, then he's an asshole for not learning the facts better. Not some poor victim of circumstance who meant well. When people's lives hang in the balance, ignorance or a failure to do homework is not an excuse. And Bush never bothered to do his homework. He never bothered to listen to people who challenged him. The whole administration is famous for shunning people in their own ranks who told them things they didn't want to hear. How can you have sympathy for him?
Mark Denney: "He's a fall guy and a putz who has to live with the knowledge that smarter men made him the patsy for a failed war."
Why do you keep calling him a fall guy? HE IS THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.
Mark Denney: "That's why I think people like Rumsfeld deserve more of the blame."
Let me repeat that. GEORGE W. BUSH IS THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.
This "Rumsfeld deserves more blame" stuff is inane. And insane. Truly.
I just don't see why you want to let Bush off the hook that way. You still haven't explained it in any way that makes sense. I think it's an emotional thing for you -- some sort of connetion to Bush, to the idea that he meant well. I think that's wrong. I think Bush has a disdain for other people, an indifference. People wanted to turn him into a father figure, but he's not.
Mark Denney: "Does Bush bear blame too - absolutely. But at the end of the day I think it was Rumsfeld who did everything he could to enforce his agenda and that's what we're living with today. Bush allowed him to do that and, I agree, he deserves blame for that."
No -- wrong, wrong, wrong. Bush was in CONTROL of Rumsfeld's agenda. That's the part you keep ignoring. Bush was the one who told Rumsfeld what to do. To the extent that he chose not to do so, to defer to greater experience or knowledge, he is STILL responsible. Because it was Bush's job to study the situation and know the full ins and outs of what was going on. What is it about chain of command that you don't understand? The guy at the top is responsible for what the plans the people below him carry out. This is how it works.
Mark Denney: "But I believe the person who drove this agenda deserves more blame, whether he's the top dog or not."
There's that word again, "Believe." You believe it why? Why doesn't it matter who's top dog? And how can you be so sure it was just Rumsfeld driving the agenda? What, you don't think Bush was on board, that he wasn't gunning for Saddam Hussein himself, looking to kick ass? Bush drove the agenda. Rumsfeld went along. All Bush had to do was say to Rumsfeld, "Naw, let's do something else," and Rumsfeld would have had to. Bush had that power and didn't use it. Yet you want to excuse him. Why? No, really -- why?
Mark Denney: "And all I can say is what made me rethink it was reading and listening to a guy named Thomas PM Barnett."
Expand your sources. Keep reading. If I come across that book I will look into it. I've read quite a bit of other material and the picture generally keeps getting worse the more I know. I don't think there is much that mitigates a situation in which hundreds of thousands of people have died. I think once people are senselessly dying, questions of "who is more responsible," or "who had good intentions" become pretty trivial.
Mark Denney: "And sorry I called you obtuse and rabid. Again, it's just too easy to be snarky in these posting. My apologies."
No problem, and I am sorry for being so hardcore in terms of my communication. I am not rabid but I am passionate about this. I do not mean to insult you personally, but I *do* mean to lay into your arguments and reasoning. The little rationalizations that live in all of our heads are the seeds of bad things. You seem like a decent person in general. I don't fault you if you have a gut-level affection for Bush, or something, since after all -- it's gut-level.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
