Asymmetrical Information

I tried following the links and only find one source that claimed she made the statement to someone else. I could not find a source that actually claimed they heard her make the statement. It may be true, but i saw nothing to confirm it.

The old intelligence rule is to always seek a second source to confirm such statements.And I did not find it.

Spencer,

You ought to listen to talk radio every so often.

There has been an audio recording of Cindy Sheehan saying exactly what Megan McArdle talked about running for the last two days.

Actually, the link that Jane gives itself links to that audio and video recording -- you can hear her words yourself.

spencer, the very second word of the VC post (after the title) is a link to a video hosted by Indymedia. A woman (apparently Cindy Sheehan, but I've never seen a photo of her) is interviewed during the video, 6 minutes into the video, she says: "... Iraq was not involved in 9/11, Iraq was not a terrorist state, but now that we have decimated the country, the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in..."

This isn't a he-says that she-said situation. Either, a) Ms. Sheehan made that statement, b) that isn't Ms. Sheehan, c) the video was altered/faked.

I tried linking to the video and the link was broken

Try again-- I've got it downloading right now. The video is 66MB or so, in quicktime format.

Why should they care at all? The chances of this getting a reasonable (as in just mentioning it) amount of MSM attention is about zero.

Sam is right on. And I think that the section of the video beginning at 5:36 until 6:25 should be widely played.

She says "People who never thought of being car bombers or suicide bombers are now doing it because they want the United States of America.. out of thier country."

So this is why car bombers slaughtering thousands of Iraqis!

There is this enormous disconnect between regular ol' everyday Democrats you meet in the store and the high profile lefties. The former will gladly tell you how they dislike Bush and feel the war was wrong, we-were-lied-to, itsallaboutoil, etc. But none of this insane, paranoid Bush-is-the-worst-terrorist, the insurgents are freedom-fighters crap. My worry is the unwillingness of the latter to denounce the former, and the seepage of the nutcase violence into the rank-and-file. The bumper sticker in front of me in the parking lot says "Support Bush" -- with a noose on it. I know this person; she's a strong government union person with a dash of feminism. She seems a nice enough person. But we have to stop calling this kind of rhetoric "over-the-top," or "passionate," or whatever. Public statements advocating the killing of public officials is just plain dangerous to the republic.

I worry. If someone's manufactured the bumper sticker, then presumably some segment of customers finds it funny. I keep waiting for large numbers of Democrats to suddenly turn and say "that's enough! This party is about seeking justice for the little guy and this other stuff is just right out."

If I don't hear that long before the election, I'm not going to believe it's real in the summer of 2008.

Jane,

What is your definition of "freedom?" If an occupying army swept through the United States, destroyed the infrastructure, deposed our elected officials, enacted martial law, privatized government controlled natural resources, and utilities with the stipulation that foreign corporations could spirit out 100% of the profits (Bremer's Order #39), installed 25,000 heavily armed mercenaries (contractors) who answer to NOBODY, and tried to whip together a constitution between three distinct tribes that have been feuding for centuries, (which is looking more and more like an Islamic theocracy) all while establishing over a dozen PERMANENT millitary bases, I don't know if you would describe it as "freedom," but I certainly wouldn't automatically disparage anybody who had a problem with it, and felt strongly enough to fight for what THEY believed in.

But hey, that may be the difference between you and me.

Cobra, I'd like to think that if Canada or Mexico ever occupies America, I won't fight back by blowing up you and your family.

mckinneytexas writes:

>>>"Cobra, I'd like to think that if Canada or Mexico ever occupies America, I won't fight back by blowing up you and your family.'

What makes you so sure of that? What happened during our own Revolution between insurgent colonists and loyalists? What happened during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War?
If you perceive me as a collaborator with the enemy, you're going to embrace me?

I highly doubt it.

--Cobra

Hey, Cobra and mckinneytexas, a better analogy would be: 'I'd like to think that, if Russia or Germany ever occupies Canada, I (as a U.S. citizen) won't fight back by blowing up Canadian citizens in Canada.'

And Cobra, you really think those carbomber-murderers perceive CHILDREN as collaborators? And that that justifies carbombing them?

Sheesh.

What happened during our Revolution? Nothing like what our enemies are doing in Iraq. Of course, cars and carbombs had not been invented in 1776, but bombs were well-known (the Guy Fawkes plot was over a century before) and the Minutemen did not even try to put any explosives in the basements of (e.g.) British barracks. They would have been ashamed to do anything so contemptible. And I'm pretty sure that redcoats could go out for a pint at the local tavern in any occupied city without having to worry that some patriot in civilian clothes would shoot or knife them or poison the beer. In short, American revolutionaries, very much unlike Iraq thugs, generally followed the principles of the Geneva Convention, even if it wasn't written yet.

I am astonished, by the way, that Cobra can write a supposed analogy that refers to deposing "our elected officials". Does Cobra think that we deposed anyone in Iraq who had been elected in anything resembling in any way an actual free election? Nor have we destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure, as Cobra clearly implies. Saddam had done an excellent job of that himself before the war, and his buddies and their newfound buddies are continuing the destruction of (e.g.) pipelines, while the U.S. and patriotic Iraqis try to rebuild the country. I could go on, but these two statements are enough to disqualify Cobra as a commenter.

Cobra -

If an occupying army swept through the United States ... deposed our elected officials ... and tried to whip together a constitution between three distinct tribes that have been feuding for centuries that [was] starting to look more and more like an Islamic theocracy ...

If all that really happened --American tribes feuding for centuries and whatnot-- then I would conclude that I was foolish to doubt your understanding of the correct use of hypothetical arguments.

But even then, I'd think you were kind of a fool for missing the difference between our elected officials and Saddam. I'd rather have Ted Kennedy or Strom Thurmond as president than someone who would commit genocide against his own people. But as you put it: hey, that may be the difference between you and me.

Strom Thurmond is dead, so electing him would be one way to achieve a government that 'governs best by governing least'.

The Iraqi insurgents are going to have to kill an awful lot of civilians before they even come close to the number the US directly targeted and incinerated in the Second World War. The sad fact is that we humans are pretty brutal and people in combat use the methods they can.

As for this woman her importance to the anti-war crowd is more as a symbol than anything else. But this shows that she seems to have fallen in love with her role and I suspect she will crash and burn before long if she continues to say things like this.

The damage to the pro-war side has been done. Americans are becoming more and more vocal in their opposition to the war.

The statement that "people in combat use the methods they can" is demonstrably false. Some do, most don't, and the former can and should be blamed.

Once again, the American revolutionaries did not in fact lurk behind corners in civilian clothes to catch redcoats by surprise and kill them. And Americans in Iraq do not (e.g.) dynamite mosques or hospitals, even when 'insurgents' hide in them in gross violation of the Geneva Convention. Nor do our troops line up prisoners and shoot them, even when they are fighting out of uniform, again in gross violation of the G.C.

If the Allies sank very low in World War II, that is in great part because the Axis led the way in targeting civilians. In fact, Germany, Italy, and Japan were all knowingly butchering civilians with bombers and bayonets before the war ever started, in Spain, Ethiopia, and China, respectively.

If you want to achieve some kind of moral equivalence, you're going to have to do much better than that.

P.S. The "damage to the pro-war side" has been accomplished for the most part by lies, misrepresentations, and gross exaggerations on the part of opponents.

I should have qualified it further. Sorry.

People in combat use the methods they can as limited by their moral views and circumstances in which they find themselves.

This is not an issue of moral equivalence. Rather it is simply an explanation that things are not always black or white. When the US thought it in its interests it behaved worse than any modern terrorist. And that's what the insurgents are doing. They believe it is in their interest to kill civilians because the expected gain is much greater than the cost.

Look at the reaction to Robertson's comment. Although most bloggers quickly rejected it many, who remain convinced that the US is trying to promote democracy in the world, had no problem supporting the view that a leader who has been to the polls about 4 times and got a % of votes each time Reagan could only dream of should be killed because his policies were ones they dislike. People always find ways to rationalize their moral behavior.

The "damage to the pro-war side" has been accomplished for the most part by lies, misrepresentations, and gross exaggerations on the part of opponents

Yes. It's because the prowar side actually believes that that they don't understand what is going on. Having gottten every aspect of the Iraq war wrong, from WMDs to whow we would be received, they now turn to blame those that don't agree with them.

It's only going to get worse. Bush has reached the 30s in some polls and if this continues he will reach the 20s soon. Dean's position was considered radical a year ago and today it is too prowar.

Cobra,

If the incoming army deposed a government that had killed hundreds of thousands of their own citizens, started two disastrous wars, stole all of the revenues from natural resources to give to his cronies, and was running a totalitarian torture / police state I believe I would be relieved the occupying army had driven the tyrant out of power.

Your ignorance of the pre invasion situation in Iraq and your lack of empathy for the Iraqi civilians who had to live under Saddam's tyranny is a pathetic thing to see.

GT,

The only way to make sure Iraq did not have WMD was to have complete freedom to inspect every geographic region and every building including Saddam's palaces. Saddam had interfered with inspectors in the past, he was interfering with the inspectors on the ground, and he was acting like he still had WMD.

At that point the only reasonable thing to do was to invade, depose Saddam, and do the inspections.

TJIT,

Yes, I know you believe that. You are, like me, entitled to your opinions.

But we are not entitled to our own facts. Saddam was not interfering with the inspectors in any way that materially limited their ability to gather information. They were quite free to go around and inspect. And inspect they did and found nothing.

A reasonable approach, IMO, would have been, once we realized the WMDs were not being found, to inspect some more and more aggresively if needed and not endanger American lives unless there was simply no other way.

And when Saddam did not permit the inspections to be made more aggressively, then what? If war had been ruled out in advance, no inspections would have been made.

The pro-war side did not get "every aspect" of the war wrong. Bush gave half a dozen reasons for invading Iraq, and only the WMDs turned out to be mistaken, which is why anti-war propagandists keep pretending that that was the only, or the principal, reason for invading.

At the same time, the anti-war side got a lot more wrong, but those of course were all honest mistakes and not lies at all. What bugs me is that they won't even admit they were mistakes. Remember the "brutal Afghan winter" and the "mighty Afghan warrior"? It was supposed to take hundreds of thousands of troops to invade Afghanistan, and even then many told us that such an attempt would likely fail, as the Russian experience proved. Not even close to true. We were told by Chomsky, among others, that 2,000,000 Afghans would likely starve, that Bush knew it, and that he didn't care. Utterly false. Some of the same people now sneering about the absence of WMDs warned us that if we invaded Iraq our troops would die by the thousands because Saddam would gas them. We were told that capturing Baghdad would take a siege of many months with thousands of U.S. deaths. We were told that invading Iraq would lead to massive refugee flows into neighboring countries, epidemics of more than one dreadful disease, and immediate civil war. People are still predicting the last, and I suppose it may come, but it's way overdue. The Bush administration has a Hell of a lot better record for predictions than the antiwar crowd does, but somehow he's a proven liar and they're all still right even when they're wrong.

Nah, you got practically all the important stuff wrong. They say you can't fool all the people all the time and that's what we are seeing today.

All the talk of the many reasons given for the war is quite silly, and no one other than hard core Bush supporters believes that anymore. Americans did not sign up for this war just so they could get rid of a bad dictator, there are plenty of those around in the world, or to promote democracy in the ME. Americans supported this war because they were told there were WMDs and because they were fooled to think there was some link with 9/11.

I suspect Americans would have forgiven being misled on this if at least they could see a clear benefit from the war. And it's not like the pro-war side hasn't tried, coming up with you-gotta-be-kidding-me rationales like the flypaper theory. But, sadly, reality has a way of setting in. The quagmire has become quite clear to most which is why Bush is now in Nioxon after Watergate territory.

This doesn't mean all is lost. Things can still change if Bush manages to find a way to defeat the insurgents and make sure Iraq doesn't end up cozying up to Teheran. As things stand today the greatest winner in all of this is Iran, which saw a strategic threat turned into an ally.

It is simply false to say that Iraq is now an ally of Iran. There are some straws in the wind suggesting that that could happen, but it hasn't come close to happening yet. If this prediction turns out false, like the many others I've already listed, I expect that the people predicting it or pretending (like GT) that it has already happened will not even admit to being mistaken, but will just make more bold guesses about things that could go wrong.

GT is acting like a common troll, ignoring any arguments that would be difficult to answer and confidently asserting things that are at best highly arguable. What about my assertion that Bush's record is a Hell of a lot better than his opponents'?

If "no one" (another dishonest exaggeration) now believes in any of the multiple reasons for going to war, perhaps it is because so many like GT and most of the media continue to assert falsely that the war was 'all about WMDs' or that 'Saddam had no connections with terrorism' or 'Bush said the threat was imminent!' when he specifically said that it was not, and so on and on and on. It is not Bush or his supporters that is trying to "fool all of the people all of the time".

Dr. Weevil writes:

>>>"Once again, the American revolutionaries did not in fact lurk behind corners in civilian clothes to catch redcoats by surprise and kill them."

This is a false statement. Perhaps you should re-aquaint yourself with General Francis Marion, better known as "The Swamp Fox." If you don't know who he was, let me invalidate your last statement with his story.

>>>"Francis Marion, “Swamp Fox”
Never to be caught, never to be followed
The British soldier trembles when Marion’s name is told.
Marion’s Brigade ( Troop of 150 men)...
...Not bothered by his lack of men and supplies, Marion brilliantly used a weapon unknown to the British: the swamps, waterways and marshes of the South Carolina low country. Employing guerilla tactics to harass the enemy, Marion and his men would strike without warning and then disappear into the swamps...
Tarleton, previously feared by southerners for his brutal and bloody attacks, was exasperated when his communications were interrupted, his supply lines were cut off, and his hold on the south slipped away. Powerless to stop the constant unconventional attacks...
The Redcoats could not capture Francis Marion. He and his men were never defeated. Tarleton called him the "swamp fox." As Cornwallis moved north, his troops were demoralized and weakened. By the time he reached the Virginia village of Yorktown, England's second-in-command had made a series of blunders..."

http://www.emayzine.com/lectures/Francis%20Marion.htm

Ol' Swamp Fox wasn't just into guerilla warfare...he threw down with fear,intimidation, and torture.

>>>"Encompassing the antics of Robin Hood and the TERROR tactics of the American War of Independence, which saw Francis Marion 'the swamp fox' burn homes, and tar and feather enemies..."

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/S/sh01/legions2.html

Now, Dr. Weevil, I fully acknowledge that the MAJORITY of battles in the American Revolution were convention, regimented fife and drum firing line type events. Swamp Fox had some different ideas for the American Insurgency and unapologetically utilized assymetrical warfare
tactics that were effective for the resources and manpower he had at his disposal against a SUPERIOR occupying force.

Dr. Weevil writes:

>>>I am astonished, by the way, that Cobra can write a supposed analogy that refers to deposing "our elected officials". Does Cobra think that we deposed anyone in Iraq who had been elected in anything resembling in any way an actual free election? Nor have we destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure, as Cobra clearly implies. Saddam had done an excellent job of that himself before the war, and his buddies and their newfound buddies are continuing the destruction of (e.g.) pipelines, while the U.S. and patriotic Iraqis try to rebuild the country. I could go on, but these two statements are enough to disqualify Cobra as a commenter."

Disqualify me? LOL! Let's examine the roots of the phrase: "Shock and Awe"

>>>"Why did the U.S. bother to bomb markets and shopping malls? The logic of targeting civilian infrastructure appears in the book from which the Bush Administration drew its bombing strategy in 2003. Military researchers at the National Defense University wrote Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance in 1996. The text suggested applying U.S. military "resources to controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of the adversary to resist."
http://www.spectrezine.org/war/wagenen.htm

Direct text from "Shock and Awe"--

>>>"The goals of achieving Rapid Dominance using Shock and Awe must be compared with overwhelming force. "Rapid" implies the ability to "own" the dimension of time-moving more quickly than an opponent, operating within his decision cycle, and resolving conflict favorably in a short period of time. "Dominance" means the ability to control a situation totally.

Rapid Dominance must be all-encompassing. It will require the means to anticipate and to counter all opposing moves. It will involve the capability to deny an opponent things of critical value, and to convey the unmistakable message that unconditional compliance is the only available recourse. It will imply more than the direct application of force. It will mean the ability to control the environment and to master all levels of an opponent's activities to affect will, perception, and understanding. This could include means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure as well as the denial of military responses. Deception, misinformation, and disinformation are key components in this assault on the will and understanding of the opponent."

http://www.gulfinvestigations.net/document623.html

Couple that strategy with quotes from OUR OWN MILITARY (not little ol' Cobra) from Gulf War I.

>>>"Washington Post, June 23, 1991. Front-page article by Barton Gellman. For the full article, see www.endiraqsanctions.org/WashPostWarDamage23Jun91.html. (See also www.endiraqsanctions.org/NYTimesAhtisaari21Mar91.html.) Excerpts (emphasis added):

...
The worst civilian suffering, senior [American] officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed --- at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks.
...
Now nearly four months after the war's end, Iraq's electrical generation has reached only 20 to 25 percent of its prewar capacity of 9,000 to 9,500 megawatts. Pentagon analysts calculate that the country has roughly the generating capacity it had in 1920 --- before reliance on refrigeration and sewage treatment became widespread.
...
Pentagon officials declined two written requests for a review of the 28 electrical targets and explanations of their specific military relevance.

"People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,'" said the planning officer. "Well, what were we trying to do with [United Nations-approved economic] sanctions --- help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions."

Col. John Warden III, deputy director of strategy, doctrine and plans for the Air Force, agreed that one purpose of destroying Iraq's electrical grid was that "you have imposed a long-term problem on the leadership that it has to deal with sometime."

"Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity," he said. "He needs help. If there are political objectives that the U.N. coalition has, it can say, 'Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.' It gives us long-term leverage."

Now granted, there weren't as MANY civilian infrastructure targetted in 2003 as in
1991, but for you to sit here and SUGGEST that the United States Military NEVER targetted Iraq's civilian infrastructure is utterly hilarious.
Secondly, Viceroy Paul Bremer up and FIRED thousands of Iraqi civil servants (teachers, electical workers, etc. as well as the Iraqi Army) under his Chalabi-lobbied "deba'athification" program. The very people to help RUN the non-bombed infrastructure targets in 2003 weren't around. Bremer was more interested in PRIVITIZING Iraq, via the infamous "Bremer Order #39". Look that one up, Weevil, before making blanket assertions about the qualifications of commentors.

John Desyck writes:

>>>"If all that really happened --American tribes feuding for centuries and whatnot-- then I would conclude that I was foolish to doubt your understanding of the correct use of hypothetical arguments."

Well, let's stay on the American Insurgency and the resulting Constitutional congress. America at the time was populated by three tribes of people:
WHITE COLONISTS, BLACK SLAVES, and NATIVE AMERICANS. The white tribe subjugated blacks into slavery. The white tribe earmarked Native Americans for genocide. There were quibbles about their fates at the Constitutional congress, (albeit, not with representation from EITHER non-white tribespeople) and this compromise was made.

"Clause 3: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

Now, unless you believe that the white Founding Fathers believed that blacks and Indians were "equal" to themselves, this is a splendid example of American tribalism in action after an insurgency. This inequality between American racial tribes lasted for 190 years on paper, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
190 years= 1.9 Centuries.

--Cobra

TJIT writes:

>>>Your ignorance of the pre invasion situation in Iraq and your lack of empathy for the Iraqi civilians who had to live under Saddam's tyranny is a pathetic thing to see."

Saddam was our ALLY in 1988, when he gassed the Kurds. Bush I failed to support the Shia when they rose up against Saddam after Gulf War I. What's your excuse for that?
Right now there is the genocidal slaughter of black Christians in the Sudan, some estimates being placed at 300,000 dead. I have NOT to this day heard ONE Bush supporter, conservative or warhawk support a US Military intervention to save them. NOT ONE. Don't give me this, "I don't care about civillians" nonsense. This is about the Project for the New American Century.

--Cobra

What Cobra begins by calling a false statement is in fact true. Guerrilla warfare is not terrorism. The fact that he can't tell the difference between hiding in swamps while wearing uniforms (guerrilla warfare, protected by the Geneva Convention) and pretending to be a civilian so you can get close enough to someone to kill him (terrorism if you kill a civilian, not protected by the G.C. whether you kill a soldier or civilian) utterly vitiates his argument. So far from "invalidating" my argument, he hasn't even understood it. If the 'insurgents' in Iraq hid out in caves and gullies to avoid U.S. troops, they would not be in violation of the G.C. It is the fact that they do not wear uniforms, that they do not have a fixed chain of command, and that they do not carry weapons openly, that makes them war criminals and (when targeting civilians, as they so often do) terrorists. The vast majority of American and allied casualties in Iraq have come not from any incompetence on our part but because the enemy are a bunch of war criminals and terrorists who do not even try to obey the laws of war. That gives them a huge advantage: I might not be able to beat Mike Tyson, but I could do some serious damage if you allowed me to bring a couple of razor blades and a revolver into the ring while forcing him to follow Queensberry rules.

Changing the subject from one war to another is a dishonest "Bait and Switch" tactic. And Cobra still hasn't explained how we "deposed elected officials" in Iraq.

Cobra grants that "there weren't as MANY civilian infrastructure targetted in 2003 as in
1991": were there any? No evidence is offered. And he accuses me of "SUGGEST[ing] that the United States Military NEVER targetted Iraq's civilian infrastructure". I did not use the word "never". That is Cobra's dishonest addition, so he can talk about Gulf War I as if it were Gulf War II.

I could go on, but why bother?

Cindy Sheehan has plainly snapped. That the material backing for continuing her madness has apparently been traced to MoveOn.org and others of comparable ilk merely gilds the prosecution's lily.

And I almost wish this forum had kill-file featrues for dense, hijacking trolls -- Cobra would be a permanent entry and GT would be removed every 10-20 days, to see if his mode of argumentation had improved. I mean really, you two, this is just ridiculous.

Apparently Cobra hasn't heard that the U.S. Air Force has been ferrying Rwandan peacekeeping troops to Darfur. We are in fact doing something about the genocide there. Not nearly enough, but U.S., British, and Australian ground forces have their hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment. I would think that France, Sweden, Brazil, Russia, China, and a dozen other countries would be first in line to do something about Darfur, since their armies are not doing anything important, but apparently none of them can be bothered.

The U.S. was never a friend, and never really an ally, of Saddam. For a brief period when it looked like Khomeini's Iran might conquer Iraq and roll on into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. reluctantly helped Saddam as (barely) the lesser of two evils. If you think about the alternatives, it was probably the right thing to do, however disgusting. We supported Stalin, too, but only when the alternative was Hitler.

All in all, the usual leftie talking points, part half-truths, part out and out falsehoods, part irrelevant truths.

To me, the bottom line of Cindy's expressed concern regarding the "freedom fighters" is, new people are deciding to be terrorists every day. Does the current "war on terror" kill more terrorists than it causes to decide to become terrorists? Or the other way around?

By all means, kill as many terrorists as you can. As long as you can show me that your method of killing them is not causing so many more people to decide to become terrorists that we've got more terrorists than we started with before the "war on terror" began.

It's tough to tell whether, long term, we'll killing more terrorists than are being created in response to our menthods, or the reverse.

In the short term, obviously, there are more people blowing themselves and innocents up today than there were before we invaded Iraq. Maybe that will change. I certainly hope so.

And Cobra still hasn't explained how we "deposed elected officials" in Iraq.

No, we didn't depose elected officials; we deposed officials we installed and then supported for years, back when Saddam was our best defense against Islamic fundamentalism and communism.

we deposed officials we installed and then supported for years

Ok, no. That's just flat-out wrong.

The Baathists came to power on their own. They then cozied up to, and were heavily supported by, the Soviet Union. Our client states in the region were, at that time, Iran and Israel; the Soviets had Iraq and Syria. After Hussein rose to the top of the Baath party, he began trying to separate Iraq from its dependence on a single foreign sponsor. It was at this point that Iraq became closely tied to France, which was also trying to go its own way independent of both the Soviets and the USA. The United States began making overtures towards Hussein after we lost Iran to the mullahs. However, we were never a significant supporter of theirs. That's why we faced little other than French and Soviet equipment during our wars with them.

For some good information on arms transfers to Iraq, I recommend checking out the SIPRI project (run by the Swedish government -- no toadies of Bush):

http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/REG_IMP_IRQ_70-04.pdf

Saddam was our ALLY in 1988, when he gassed the Kurds

So genocide isn't genocide if an ally of America does it? What a fascinatingly jingoistic point of view.

Jane, so what? The Iraq war is still a disaster, Bush lied to get us into it, and his friends are profiting from it handsomely. No matter what you say about Cindy Sheehan, those facts won't go away.

'purple' is at best one for three:

1. Whether the Iraq war is a "disaster" is (a) arguable, and (b) too early to tell for sure, no matter what your definition of disaster.

2. The statement that Bush lied to get us into the war is itself a lie. It is really tiresome to have to point out over and over and over that Bill Freakin' Clinton thought Saddam still had WMDs, as did the UN, the French, the Russians, and just about everyone else in the world. It has yet to be proven that he didn't. The fact that virtually none have been found does not prove that he had disposed of them all before the war. (We know he had some at some point, because he used them on the Kurds.) Whether he destroyed them without keeping any evidence that he had done so (as Bush-haters all assume), or did a very thorough job of hiding them (Iraq is very well-supplied with uninhabited desert areas), or shipped them all to Syria, or some combination of the three, is not known. To say that Bush knew for a fact that Saddam had no WMDs is a lie.

3. So is the statement that his friends are "profiting handsomely" from it. No evidence needed: just assert as fact what you would like to believe is true. Just another leftie lie -- not to mention cliche.

It is simply false to say that Iraq is now an ally of Iran.

Yes. You appear to be one of those willing to be fooled all the time.

The good news is that a majority of Americans now seem to have caught on what is really happening. It's a start.

GT seems to be one of those willing to repeat bald-faced lies in the hopes that he can fool all of the people at least long enough to win the next election. Whether Iraq is now an ally of Iran is a simple question of fact, and GT is obviously and entirely wrong now.

I'm still waiting for his reply to my other objections, but I don't expect that to be any more honest than this one.

GT,

For some reason you think that the weapon inspectors had the job of inspecting locations to FIND the weapons. It wasn't. Their job was to VERIFY the weapons existence or non-existence based on info the Iraqis gave them. They did not find any evidence, written or oral, that any of the WMD's known to have been possessed by Iraq had in fact been destroyed.

And Saddam was interfering with this process. Is it any wonder that Clinton and Tenet and Bush all thought that Iraq still had WMD's?

Attacking my character, and calling people who disagree with you "trolls" does not make you correct, or even an effective debator.

Take your STATEMENTS:

">>>"Once again, the American revolutionaries did not in fact lurk behind corners in civilian clothes to catch redcoats by surprise and kill them."

That's EXACTLY what Francis Marion did with his brigade. I provided EVIDENCE to support it.

>>>"In short, American revolutionaries, very much unlike Iraq thugs, generally followed the principles of the Geneva Convention, even if it wasn't written yet."

Francis Marion burned houses and tarred and feathered people. Is tarring and feathering enemies okay under the Geneva Convention?

>>>"Nor have we destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure, as Cobra clearly implies."

Sure we did. I gave you direct quotes from PENTAGON OFFICIALS admitting as much. You don't have to believe a thing I say in here, Weevil, but I source my commentary.

>>>The U.S. was never a friend, and never really an ally, of Saddam. For a brief period when it looked like Khomeini's Iran might conquer Iraq and roll on into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. reluctantly helped Saddam as (barely) the lesser of two evils. If you think about the alternatives, it was probably the right thing to do, however disgusting. We supported Stalin, too, but only when the alternative was Hitler."

"Reluctantly helped?" Here's the "help" we provided.

>>>The war against Iran was going badly by 1982. Iran's "human wave attacks" threatened to overrun Saddam's armies. Washington decided to give Iraq a helping hand. After Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S. intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal-American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq. Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam's Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for "video surveillance applications"; chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. According to former officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/09.18A.neswk.us.iraq.htm

That's more than, "reluctantly helped", Weevil.

And I know you don't want to discuss the PROFITS American Energy companies made with Iraq through the Oil-for-food program, right? Including Dick Cheney?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact

You can attack me all you like. I'm a big guy. You can't do anything to me I can't handle. The troops mired on the ground in Iraq are a different story, and unlike some other posters here, I don't view their untimely deaths and grave injuries as neccessary or justified.

Dr. Weevil writes:

>>>We are in fact doing something about the genocide there. Not nearly enough, but U.S., British, and Australian ground forces have their hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment."

Of course it's not nearly enough. Dead black Christians in Sudan aren't important enough in the neo-con agenda.

--Cobra

Please learn to read, GT. You even quote the words I wrote that prove you wrong: "in civilian clothes". That is the difference between a legitimate guerrilla warrior like Marion, whose troops hide in swamps but carry weapons openly and wear uniforms, and a terrorist or war criminal who wears civilian clothes to sneak up on our troops and kill them. How many times do I have to spell it out for you before you will understand that lurking in swamps or deserts or caves or forests is not a war crime, but wearing civilian clothes while killing soldiers is? You have offered no evidence that Marion's troops ever pretended to be civilians.

Of course "burning barns and tarring and feathering enemies" is not okay under the Geneva Convention. I never said they were, and I carefully used the word "generally" when talking about American Revolutionaries fighting methods. In general, they fought honorably, with occasional exceptions such as the ones noted. Iraqi 'insurgents' don't just burn barns and tar and feather people now and then, they slaughter men, women, and children in large numbers every day of the week, they never wear uniforms, and they in fact make a point of violating the G.C. not just occasionally but damned near all the time. Yet somehow according to you they are no worse than our Founding Fathers. You have to be very prejudiced or very ignorant to think that.

What else? You don't seem to know the meaning of the word "reluctantly". You quote the very words that show that the only reason the U.S. briefly helped Saddam was fear of what an Iranian victory would do to the Middle East and the world, but can't seem to understand them. The point of "reluctantly" is not the amount of help, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the question, it is the attitude with which it is offered. Did the U.S. help Saddam because they liked him or approved of him or thought he was a good man doing good things, or because they thought he was slightly the lesser of two evils in one particular historical situation? That is the question. The latter is obviously correct, and you still insist on the former.

You've also done another Bait and Switch. As evidence that Bush's cronies are making money off the war, you point to an article alleging that Cheney made money from the Oil-for-Food program. Do you think your readers are all morons? The war ended sanctions and Oil-for-Food, so if Bush wanted his buddies to make more money, he would (by your own argument) have NOT gone to war. Again, you are utterly dishonest in your arguments.

Not to mention hypocritical. You don't seem to care that no other nation except the U.S., Rwanda, and (I think) Nigeria is doing anything at all for Darfur, which suggests that you don't give a damn about dead Africans either, unless they can be used as a stick to beat Bush with. Also, the Darfurites are not Christians, they are Muslims, which means you don't even know the first thing about the situation there. The Sudanese are oppressing Christians in the south, and Muslims in the west, and Darfur is in the west. Try to keep up.

Sorry, the previous was addressed to Cobra, not GT.

Before the first shot was fired in this war I said:
1.We will end up in a protracted guerrilla that will tie up the US military for years.

2. It will end up with Iraq being split into 3 countries.
--- Shiite south allied with Iran that will put a Shiite army along the border with Sunni Saudia Arabia.
--- A sunni west allided with Syria
--- A Kurd north that will support Kurdish indepence forces in Turkey -- and you wonder why
Turkey would not let us ship troops thru turkey.
--- In other words we will strengthen two of our enemies in the area and screw two of our allies.

The reason this will happen is that this administration is trying to fight this war on the cheap. They have sent the military into a war without providing them the resources they need to win the war. This is the only time in history that the US army is weaker two years into the war then at the start of the war. The inability of the army to secure the borders is just like going into battle without protecting your flank and any commander doing that should be relieved of his command.
Bush has done more damage to the military then any American since Robert E. Lee. By damage I am excluding post-war reductions in force. So it excludes The Clintor reduction in force, what should have happened after the cold war.

Bush is fighting this war on the cheap because if he were honest about the true costs he would have to give up his tax cuts -- notice he fired Larry Linsey for telling the truth about the costs.

It is very simple, the tax cuts are more important to Bush then winning the war.

Nothing I said over two years ago have been proven incorrect and I have seen no reason to
change my expectations.

I oppose this war because Bush is doing massive damage to US interest and curtailing our ability to conduct a rational foreign policy -- influence other countries to act in our interest.

We are not safer because of this war and this should be obvious to anyone because we our wasting our limited resources fighting the wrong enemy. And they are limited because Bush is not willing to spend the necessary money.

I could care less of some emotional woman calls the insurgents "freedom fighers" because it does not matter.

What I care about is US power, and Bush is pissing that away and the people giving him
unquestioned support are doing much more damage to the US then a few anti-war demonstraters.

If you pro-war types would spend your time trying to force Bush into giving the military the resources it needs to win this war I could take you are lot more seriously.

If Bush had been honest two years ago we could have easily recruited the necessary forces to expand the army and win this war. But because he was dishonest with himself and the American people we are now in the mess he is responsible for. Moreover, almost everyone that knew anything about the region told him this would happen -- but he elected to ignore this good advice even from his father. He claimed some greater force told him what to do.

Maybe someone should ask Bush why God gave him such bad advice.

Maybe 'spencer' should offer some kind of evidence that (a) Bush claims to get advice straight from God, and (b) that he himself in fact predicted all these things.

Weevil,

Jane permitting, we can do this all day if you like. I have no problem standing up to right winged warmongers like you. Never have. So let's begin with this statement:

>>>Yet somehow according to you they are no worse than our Founding Fathers. You have to be very prejudiced or very ignorant to think that."

You're correct. I DON'T worship the Founding Fathers. I don't worship slave owners and racists, or are you going to DENY that there were slave owners and racists among the Founding Fathers? Go ahead and claim they weren't. Also, it depends on perspective. Let's look at what King George III had to say about American Insurgents.

>>>'"I cannot conclude without mentioning how sensibly I feel the dismemberment of America from this empire, and that I should be miserable indeed if I did not feel that no blame on that account can be laid at my door, and I did not also know that knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom."
King George III, Letter to Shelburne, 1782

Gee, I guess he didn't worship the Founding Fathers, either. Matter of fact, if I was alive back then and was a slave (a distinct possibility since I'm an African American) there's a damn good chance I would've fought with the Redcoats. And here is why:

>>>"For black people, what mattered most was freedom. As the Revolutionary War spread through every region, those in bondage sided with whichever army promised them personal liberty. The British actively recruited slaves belonging to Patriot masters and, consequently, more blacks fought for the Crown. An estimated 100,000 African Americans escaped, died or were killed during the American Revolution..."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr4.html

And what would stop me from fighting for America back then?

>>>"Had George Washington been less ambivalent, more blacks might have participated on the Patriot side than with the Loyalists. When he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, Washington barred the further recruitment of black soldiers, despite the fact that they had fought side by side with their white counterparts at the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr4.html

That's right. That's G-Washington, the Big Daddy of Founding Founders, and the leader of the Continental Army you hold in such high esteem. And you want ME to think more highly of that slave-owning racist than some displaced Sunni civil servant, who lost everything (either through bombardment, false imprisonment or Bremer edict), trying to defend his way of life against the most technically advanced millitary the world has ever seen? I support our troops, and I want this war to be resolved with the least amount of casualties for everybody involved, but you'll never see me bow down to the graven images of dead slave owners.

Dr. Weevil writes:

>>>As evidence that Bush's cronies are making money off the war, you point to an article alleging that Cheney made money from the Oil-for-Food program. Do you think your readers are all morons? The war ended sanctions and Oil-for-Food, so if Bush wanted his buddies to make more money, he would (by your own argument) have NOT gone to war. Again, you are utterly dishonest in your arguments."

Hello? Are you kidding me? You don't need an Oil-for-Food program if YOU CONTROL THE OIL. Let's review YET AGAIN, the policies of Viceroy Paul Bremer in regards to Iraq and corporations.

>>>"Before the US proconsul Paul Bremer left Baghdad, he enacted 100 orders as chief of the occupation authority in Iraq. Perhaps the most infamous was Order 39 which decreed that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised, that foreign companies could have complete control of Iraqi banks, factories and mines, and that these companies could transfer all of their profits out of Iraq. The “reconstruction” of the country amounts in effect to wholesale privatisation of the economy and is little short of economic colonisation."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1731547,00.html

I'm sure you'll defend this blatant, naked corporate takeover paid for with the blood of our troops and thousands of dead Iraqis, because hey...Americans did it, and you've managed in the course of this thread to defend alomst everything this nation has done in its history. As far as Bush's buddies in the Oil Industry profiting from this war? Do you REALLY need me to post what their potential earnings will be?

OK, I will, just to pound the stake in further.

>>>Table 2 below uses the four variables to estimate potential profits for the oil companies in Iraq. In order to understand the magnitude of these profits, it is useful to know that the worldwide profits of the world’s five largest oil companies in 2002 were $35 billion. Our estimate of the “most probable” annual profits in Iraq are $95 billion, three times this sum! Total company profits in Iraq, over time, would be an enormously large sum – ranging from a low of about $600 billion to a high of about $9 trillion."
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2004/0128oilprofit.htm

You see, MSM won't talk about this, and Lord KNOWS the right winged media won't. It's right before your eyes people.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr4.html

Weevil writes:

>>>You don't seem to care that no other nation except the U.S., Rwanda, and (I think) Nigeria is doing anything at all for Darfur, which suggests that you don't give a damn about dead Africans either, unless they can be used as a stick to beat Bush with."

I don't control the armed forces of the United States. If I did, I would command a millitary intervention take place for obvious humanitarian reasons. The latest argument by right wingers for intervention in Iraq is that the Iraqi people "deserve to be free," is it not? Don't the black Sudanese (whether Muslim in Dafur, or Christian in the South) deserve that same freedom? Or are the Khartoum Oil profits not as enticing?

--Cobra

Thanks, Weevil. A noble effort, but you are playing whack-a-mole with Cobra and GT. You bring up a point, he responds by either a) answering a related but different question or b) making an unsupported and usually paranoid comment about controlling the oil or various guilt-by-associations. He then brings up five more subjects. It's a familiar tactic among those who "just know" what's really happening behind the scenes, disregarding those bits of info that don't fit the template. It's always a giveaway when you're arguing with someone who thinks that "everyone knows" or "everyone but hard-core Bush supporters knows" something. It's the adult equivalent of the highschool "All the cool kids think..."

purple -- "the war is a disaster" No, it's a resounding success, as those actually present outside the Bagdhad hotels consistently report. "Bush lied." No, he was at worst mistaken about WMD -- we were greeted happily by most Iraqis, for example. And even on the WMD, we have still not eliminated the possibility that they are in Syria or at the bottom of the Gulf of Aqaba. "Bush's friends are getting rich." No. I think he could have managed to slip them a few million some other way than fighting wars costing billions if that were his aim. And had an easy re-election to boot. So the three facts that won't go away -- just went away.

Why do we bother, Dr. W? When I was a liberal I didn't listen to anyone else either, so sure was I that my opponents were hiding dark secrets.

I am really getting tired of Cobra's misrepresentations and outright lies, so I'll keep this short:

1. Don't call other people "warmonger" in the same comment in which you demand that the U.S. start one more war, on Sudan. It's hypocritical.

2. Bait and Switch arguments are dishonest, and you have now used them three times. We were talking about how the Founding Fathers made war, and now you want to switch to the subject of slavery, which has precisely nothing to do with the question of whether the American revolutionaries were war criminals. Why did you try to change the subject? For the same reason you did the first two Bait and Switches, because you were losing the argument, but don't have the decency to admit it.

3. Do not pretend that I expect you to "worship" George Washington or "bow down to the graven images of dead slave owners". All I'm asking you to do is admit that Washington and company did not act anything like the Iraqi resistance, and that is a simple fact. If someone compared Bill Clinton to Mussolini, I would strenuously object to the vicious slander. Does that mean I worship Bill Clinton? Far from it. I despise the man, but I at least know the difference between a bad man who was a lousy president and an out-and-out Fascist dictator. And I know the difference between a Swamp Fox, fighting a guerrilla war and occasionally burning a barn or tarring and feathering someone, and the Iraqi "resistance", which, you seem to have forgottten, routinely and as a matter of policy murders barbers so men will be forced to wear beards, fires mortars into crowded marketplaces, blows up gas stations crowded with civilians, blows up the funerals of the people they killed the day before, assassinates elected politicians, and videotapes themselves sawing off the heads of civilians.

4. Do not try to make George III into some kind of hero. Not for the first time, your own quotations prove you wrong: "the British actively recruited slaves belonging to Patriot masters". Note the word "Patriot": any slaves who belonged to Tories were out of luck. You have offered no evidence that George III and the Tories would have abolished slavery if they had won. Washington's record on slavery was lousy, but the other side's was only marginally better, if at all.

5. Paul Bremer's privatization plan was, as I recall, never implemented. Do you have any evidence that any Bush supporters have in fact acquired shares of Iraqi companies?

6. The plan was not so obviously stupid or evil a plan as you pretend. It would have made the Iraqi economy much more like the U.S. economy, which works tolerably well. We have no national airlines, or national auto companies, or national utilities, and foreign companies are allowed to buy shares in American companies or even buy the entire company. They often do, and some of the largest companies in the U.S. are foreign-owned. Is that a problem? If not, why should it be a problem in Iraq? Bremer wasn't proposing to give the companies away, or steal them, but to offer them for sale to the highest bidder: an entirely different process.

More bad arguments incoming in 5, 4, 3, . . . .

While this thread seems to have moved onto a general discussion of the Iraq war, I wanted to respond to Jane's original post.

That post irritated me for the same reason that all the right-wing attacks on the "unpatriotic" left do.

How should we judge what a segment of the population thinks? Well, we could use polls - but no one has ever found a poll that I know of where any Americans actually routed against our soldiers. So we'll skip polls.

But we do live in a representative democracy so a second obvious choice is to find political leaders who voice support for the insurgents. Again, though we draw a blank.

A weaker option than the first two might be to seek out people we think are "opinion leaders" who represent the thoughts of a segment of the population. Here at last we can strike gold - any famous person can be quoted and used to prove liverals believe almost anything.

Cindy Sheehan is a symbol of the cost of the war; she is not a representative of the thinking of liberals.

The accusation of treason (even when we skirt around it) against those who disagree with the war is one of the least helpful tactics in these debates (comparable I think to arguments that the war was for oil). Please let it go.

Tom G.

The vast majority of American and allied casualties in Iraq have come not from any incompetence on our part but because the enemy are a bunch of war criminals and terrorists who do not even try to obey the laws of war.

Laws of war... now that's funny. As if there were some impartial referee on the sidelines imposing these laws. The only law in war is to win. The winners determine who is a war criminal and who is a hero. And write the laws for the next war.

Dr. Weevil,

Oh no. We're never going to be on the same page when you assert your opinions as irrefutable fact without the slightest source citing to support them.

You distort my comments every bit as much as you claim I do yours. You're trying to frame the debate to parameters of YOUR choosing, and you're upset with the fact that I don't choose to OBEY them.
Where do you get this notion that you're in control?

Your comments here are a perfect reflection of the administration's attitude, which is why we're in the mess we have right now.

You tell me I'm "bait and switching" when I refute your statements with sourced historical facts, quotations, statistics.

You just don't do this with me, of course. You hold in contempt anybody who questions you.

And the funny thing about it is...You KEEP making these statements that just AREN'T TRUE, and when someone challenges you on them with facts, he or she is branded as a "troll."

I'm just curious why this is?

--Cobra

More disgusting misrepresentations.

I have never claimed to be "in control" of this argument or expected anyone to agree with me for any reason except having (I hope) convincing arguments and replies to counterarguments.

I have argued respectfully with many people on many websites, and the only opponents I hold in contempt are those who do not argue honestly. If you're one of them, I can't help it. Anyone can read your arguments and mine and judge for themselves whether you have used "bait and switch" tactics or quoted sources that do not prove what you say they prove. I have certainly specified plenty of examples above.

Here's one more: I've only called one person a troll on this thread, and that was GT. (Actually, I said that GT was "acting like a common troll", which leaves open the possibility that the behavior was a momentary lapse.) I gave a long list of predictions that the anti-war people made that turned out every bit as mistaken as Bush's assertion that Iraq had WMDs, and GT couldn't even be bothered to acknowledge the argument, much less counter it. Ignoring your opponent's strongest arguments while tossing up further irrelevant arguments of your own is what trolls do. Should I have pretended that GT was arguing when he was just trolling?

Please, let's continue to talk about Cindy Sheehan's utterances. So we can avoid a genuine conversation with the people who had careful, prudential doubts about this war (which have largely been borne out in practice) and so we can avoid any accounting of error in the actual, specific conduct of the war. Distractions R Us, on both sides of the "debate".

Is it just me, or have a number of people gone out of their way to avoid the fact that racist, anti-Jewish David Duke and now the bizarro-world anti-everything National Vanguard have come to the support of Mrs. Sheehan and her ideas?

Is it just me, or are some people going out of their way to avoid confronting the fact that some of their ideas about the war are exactly the same as those of certified, hate-filled right-wing nutcases who see "Jewish Conspiracies" under their beds?

Is it just me, or what?

It's the adult equivalent of the highschool "All the cool kids think..."

I wouldn't go so far as to use the word "adult" with respect to your target(s). Any self-respecting lexicographer would sooner slit his or her own throat with a rusty spoon than stretch the definition that far.

Please, let's continue to talk about Cindy Sheehan's utterances. So we can avoid a genuine conversation with the people who had careful, prudential doubts about this war (which have largely been borne out in practice

Oh, please. We're still a full order of magnitude below the level of American and Iraqi casualties that the anti-war bozos predicted. And there's still no sign of that full-scale Iraqi civil war that was supposed to happen, or the mass uprisings throughout the Arab world, or the upsurge in terrorist attacks against the United States. I'm not actually sure what "careful" and "prudent" predictions you're claiming have come true, actually.

For the anti-war lunatic fringe, it's not enough to say the war is wrong or has gone badly; no, Bush is an evil idiot who started this conflict for gits and shiggles, while the terrorists (alias "insurgents" or "activists") are elevated to the same level as Paul Revere. We all know what people do when all they've got is a hammer.

The scary thing is, Cindy Sheehan is still more sympathetic than most of her compatriots on the wacko left...

Occassionally, it is instructive to attempt to wade through some of Cobra's sourcing. Here is a snippet:

"Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal-American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq."

This is paranoid inference-on-inference 'truth' at its worst, completely in line with the Michael Moore school of veractity.

None of it is true, in fact, and when analyzed substantively it isn't even factual. "Official documents suggest that Amercia may . . .". Which "official" "suggested" (in what way?) that (who in?) "America" "may" (did he or not--Is there some huge inventory of American tanks in the Egyptian Army that we don't know about?)"secretly" ship tanks (how does that remain secret?) to Egypt?

My apolgies for the crappy sentence structure. Syntax is the first casualty of deconstructing guacamole in short form.

The beauty of being part of the angry left is that accusations and paranoid speculation are their reality. It is impossible to be wrong.

Cobra is so far into his own world, and so consistently and comically wrong , I can't figure out if he is really the snake he says he is or if he is Jane in disguise, acting as an agent provacateur, just to see what kind of buzz she can generate.

The beauty of being part of the angry left is that accusations and paranoid speculation are their reality. It is impossible to be wrong.

I love conspiracy theories (right or left), because they can never be disproven. Normal theories can be proven or disproven by the evidence. Conspiracy theories, on the other are proven by the lack of evidence, to wit:

"I know for a fact that (insert group here) caused 9/11 to happen!"
"How do you know this?"
(smugly) "I just know."
"But there's no evidence to support this theory."
(raging crazily) "You naive little tool! Of course there's no evidence! The bastards are too clever for that!"

And so on. On one side, you have the nutcase right-wingers who think Baghdad is going to turn into Main Street USA any day now, and on the other you have folks like Cobra, who is loathe to admit that anything good is happening in Iraq lest he give comfort to Chimpy McHitler. If I have to choose, I'll take the optimists over the pessimists.

Cobra, I have trouble with your characterization of Article 39 as:

>>Perhaps the most infamous was Order 39 which decreed that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised, that foreign companies could have complete control of Iraqi banks, factories and mines, and that these companies could transfer all of their profits out of Iraq. The “reconstruction” of the country amounts in effect to wholesale privatisation of the economy and is little short of economic colonisation.">Section 6

Areas of Foreign Investment

1) Foreign investment may take place with respect to all economic sectors in Iraq, except
that foreign direct and indirect ownership of the natural resources sector involving
primary extraction and initial processing remains prohibited. In addition, this Order
does not apply to banks and insurance companies.

Ellipsis
"Is it just me, or have a number of people gone out of their way to avoid the fact that racist, anti-Jewish David Duke and now the bizarro-world anti-everything National Vanguard have come to the support of Mrs. Sheehan and her ideas?"

Thing is, she hasn't endorsed those persons and their movements the way they have endorsed her. Looks from here like they just want to cash in on her free publicity. Not that it doesn't make for a comical spectacle, watching the twisty-lefties and the evilest-righties making common cause, but so far it looks from here to be a one-way courtship. That is, saddling Cindy and the Sheehanis with Duke's naziism is a classic "ad hominimem" guilt- by- asshole- association argument, and really unnecessary, since her silly ideas are QUITE foolish enough on their own merits.

Cobra, In addition, if the major oil companies are to see the type of earnings growth that your source quotes - 35 billion to 95 billion to 600 billion-900 trillion, and up, shouldn't these stocks be absolutely on fire? Shouldn't this look like the tech bubble of the 1990's? The stocks have definitely run, as Exxon, for example is up about 22% per year, but there are plenty of other stocks in other sectors that have been hotter.

If the numbers in the Global Policy "study" were correct, we would assume that Wall Street would be predicting huge increases in earnings. Instead, most stocks are showing slightly up to slightly down in consensus earnings estimates. For example, Exxon-Mobile is estimated to make about $5 per share this year, and slightly less next year. Open source:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/analyst/earnest.asp?Symbol=xom

It just doesn't add up.

Maybe this is why - from Global Policy's website:

>>"The United States is the most powerful nation in the world and it often acts unilaterally, but is it an Empire? Though some insist that “empire” means only direct rule over large-scale conquered territory, the United States today looks decidedly imperial. The term empire has entered common usage, not only among critics but also among advocates of muscular US policy and global superiority. Economist Niall Ferguson has written about the British Empire as a lesson-book for contemporary US power. Influential Washington neo-conservatives are using the E-word freely, insisting that the United States is the world’s most benevolent nation and that it should use its imperial power robustly to expand “freedom” across the globe. This section considers not only the utility of the Empire concept but also the way in which the United States (empire or not) deploys its economic, political and military power globally, limiting the force of international law, shrinking the capacity of international organizations, and reducing the possibility of multilateral action and democratic self-governance in an increasingly interdependent world."

The insurgents in Iraq most definitely are freedom fighters. They are fighting for the freedom to run the county just as they did in the past. I respect them for their courage. Still, we are going to have to kill them.

"Cindy Sheehan is a symbol of the cost of the war; she is not a representative of the thinking of liberals." Good, then where are the liberal leaders denouncing her? Or even ignoring her, the way most conservatives ignore David Duke and Pat Robertson?

Replying to my rhetorical question, Father Mocker writes:

Thing is, she hasn't endorsed those persons and their movements the way they have endorsed her.

While that is literally correct, it includes a false premise...and that is, that she disagrees with them or disapproves of them. There is no evidence of that. I wager that if David Duke were to come out in support of something that "Al" Sharpson said, Sharpton would move quickly to distance himself from Duke. The same is true for many other public figures in all points of the political surface. That Mrs. Sheehan has remained silent about Duke et al while commenting freely on Michael Moore's website and other left-wing places about Bush, the war, Israel and other topics is revealing. But wait, there's more...

Looks from here like they just want to cash in on her free publicity.

...one of the memorable quotes from Mrs. Sheehan concerns how to end terrorism: If you get America out of Iraq and the Israelis out of Palestine, you'll stop terrorism! or something very close to that. Unhappily, she appears to be using the same definition of "Palestine" as the late Yassir Arafat did; which means she's calling for ridding the Middle East of Jews.

Then there's the quote about how her son really "died for Israel", and so forth. Oddly enough, the Main Stream Media hasn't called attention to these rather blatant examples of "Jewish Conspiracy Theory" thinking. But David Duke and others who hate Jewish people did notice, and very likely this is at least one of the reasons for their support of her.

Not that it doesn't make for a comical spectacle, watching the twisty-lefties and the evilest-righties making common cause, but so far it looks from here to be a one-way courtship. That is, saddling Cindy and the Sheehanis with Duke's naziism is a classic "ad hominimem" guilt- by- asshole- association argument, and really unnecessary, since her silly ideas are QUITE foolish enough on their own merits.

I hope that by pointing out her own habits of thought regarding Jewish people and conspiracy theories that I have rendered this last paragraph obsolete?

McKinneyTexas citing one of Cobra's sources:
"Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal-American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq."
Well that clinches it, eh? We know it's true, because it's secret, and we know it's secret, because we read it on an internet site. What more do we need?

Me, earlier and stupider: "ad hominimem"
That's "ad hominem," damn it.

Randy sez: "The insurgents in Iraq most definitely are freedom fighters."

Who will be made more free if they prevail?

"They are fighting for the freedom to run the county just as they did in the past."

They didn't run the country in the past; and half of them ain't even FROM that country.

"I respect them for their courage."

They hide behind women and children and they blow up civilians. Their "courage" is not apparent to me.

" Still, we are going to have to kill them."

Works for me.

Ellipsis quotes & replies:
" 'Thing is, she hasn't endorsed those persons and their movements the way they have endorsed her.'
While that is literally correct, it includes a false premise...and that is, that she disagrees with them or disapproves of them. There is no evidence of that."

Granted. But if she had anything nice to say about him, I think it would have shown up by this time. I think that my premise is as solid as it needs to be.

"That Mrs. Sheehan has remained silent about Duke et al while commenting freely on Michael Moore's website and other left-wing places about Bush, the war, Israel and other topics is revealing."

Silence is revealing? I don't buy it. Until somebody puts a microphone in her face and asks her what she thinks of David Duke, and she either answers or evades that question, then silence is just silence.

" But wait, there's more..."

I'm sure there is, but I am NOT going to be baited into defending Saint Cindy. Good day.

Father Mocker,

Re; "Who will be made more free if they prevail?

They will.

Re; "They didn't run the country in the past; and half of them ain't even FROM that country."

Those who cross "borders" to fight in Iraq are fighting for the idea of an Islamic world that must be rid of infidels. It is a holy cause and to them, Iraq IS part of their "country". Remember that Saddam added the script to the Iraqi flag. Why do you think he did that? Indeed, our success depends on finding a way to reconcile our concept of individual freedom, with Islam, in which one is free to serve Allah.

Re; "They hide behind women and children and they blow up civilians. Their "courage" is not apparent to me."

What do you expect them to do? Throwing themselves headlong against our troops would be just plain stupid. They are fighting to win against overwhelming odds using the best tactics available to them, and there is courage in that. From a military perspective, there is no point in demonizing or disrespecting them (though there may be some propoganda value). We simply have to understand them, because like I said, we are going to have to kill them. The way they would order the world is unacceptable to us.

Father Mocker wrote:

Ellipsis quotes & replies:
" 'Thing is, she hasn't endorsed those persons and their movements the way they have endorsed her.'
While that is literally correct, it includes a false premise...and that is, that she disagrees with them or disapproves of them. There is no evidence of that."

Father Mocker:
Granted. But if she had anything nice to say about him, I think it would have shown up by this time.

How would that happen? I mean, we have recordings of her stating that the way to end terrorism is for the US to get out of Iraq and to "get the Israelis out of Palestine" (and not Palestine, Texas, either) as well as claims that her son "died for Israel". Neither of these comments have appeared in the Main Stream Media except seemingly by accident. Given the way the MSM is playing this poor woman's situation as some kind of professional wrassling match against Bush, is it reasonable to expect that they'd actually focus on the meaning of what she's been saying?

Father Mocker:
I think that my premise is as solid as it needs to be.

Well, ok, then can you explain how "get the Israelis out of Palestine" means anything other than "Jews Out Of The Middle East", then? Or could you explain why David Duke is supporting her, and the MSM is keeping that fact as quiet as possible?

I wrote:
"That Mrs. Sheehan has remained silent about Duke et al while commenting freely on Michael Moore's website and other left-wing places about Bush, the war, Israel and other topics is revealing."

Silence is revealing? I don't buy it. Until somebody puts a microphone in her face and asks her what she thinks of David Duke, and she either answers or evades that question, then silence is just silence.

And what are the odds that anyone in the MSM will actually do that, please? Based on the evidence from the real world, I'd say it is "zero". So given that no one is going to ask her that question, we must consider other ways to deduce the information. Again, given that she has no qualms about voicing all manner of disapproval of various people from Bush on down, given that she's not shy about speaking her mind in public, on Michael Moore's website and other places, it becomes stranger and stranger that she cannot bring herself to tell David Duke and the others of that ilk to go away and stop supporting her, doesn't it?

I wrote:
" But wait, there's more..."

Father Mocker:
I'm sure there is, but I am NOT going to be baited into defending Saint Cindy. Good day.

I'm not asking anyone to defend Mrs. Sheehan who doesn't want to do so. I'm defending my own premise by stating three facts that are clearly true:

1. Mrs. Sheehan has made some statements that reek of "Jewish Conspiracy Theory" thinking,

2. Racists such as David Duke and the National Vanguard have flocked to support her,

3. She's not rejecting these foul racists in any way...

Therefore:

Mrs. Cindy Sheehan in particular, and the anti war left in general, is willing to accept support from the anti-Jewish, racist far Right. She and others on the left increasingly use the same tropes as the anti-Jewish, racist far Right when discussing events in the Middle East.

And nobody wants to talk about that, probably because it upsets all manner of preconceptions, self images and other apple carts.

However, no matter how hard people want to ignore these inconvenient facts they remain facts, just like the Molotov-Ribbontrop pact...

Ellipsis: " . Neither of these comments have appeared in the Main Stream Media except seemingly by accident. Given the way the MSM is playing this poor woman's situation as some kind of professional wrassling match against Bush, is it reasonable to expect that they'd actually focus on the meaning of what she's been saying?"

Ellipsis, look around you. Where are we? We're on a BLOG, right? So we're not all that dependent on the MSM for our news, are we? Was it the MSM that brought it to our attention that David Duke was sucking up to Saint Cindy's crusade? No. Will it be the MSM that clues us in when and if she reciprocates his attentions? No.

E "1. Mrs. Sheehan has made some statements that reek of "Jewish Conspiracy Theory" thinking,"

She has. She's an evil phony, in my estimation. That doesn't automatically make her good buddies with all other evil phonies, or even with all other antisemitic evil phonies.

E "2. Racists such as David Duke and the National Vanguard have flocked to support her,"

Yeah, and THEY issue press releases about it; THEY find microphones. THEY flock to support HER. She has not yet audibly reciprocated, and it's been almost a week.

E "3. She's not rejecting these foul racists in any way..."

She's also, (how can I put this?), apparently not real bright. It's *quite* possible that she's not put any real mental wattage into the question of what company she's keeping, or more correctly, what company is trying to keep her. She may not have even noticed their advances and/or her "handlers" (whatever they call themselves) may not be letting them get at her. We don't know, so we ought not act as if we did.

E "Mrs. Cindy Sheehan in particular, and the anti war left in general, is willing to accept support from the anti-Jewish, racist far Right. She and others on the left increasingly use the same tropes as the anti-Jewish, racist far Right when discussing events in the Middle East."

That could change real quickly, were she ever to meet these [bad fellows] in person.

E "And nobody wants to talk about that, probably because it upsets all manner of preconceptions, self images and other apple carts."

Okay, we'll deal in those. Ste. Cindy is a HIPPY. Hippies Don't Like Nazis. Even if there's a big overlap in their ideologies, Hippies and Nazis do not get along. It's a personal issue, not an ideological one.
Now I get that you're anxious to paint Saint Cindy as a Jew-hater, and on the strength of her own dizzy comments, you seem to have a pretty good case. But it does *not* bolster your case to claim that she's good buddies with D.D. et al, UNTIL and unless she actually says so. Until that time, it's just a buncha skeevy innuendo. Stop it.

Randy--we agree, the bad guys need to be killed. We don't agree that:

"They are fighting to win against overwhelming odds using the best tactics available to them, and there is courage in that."

Sorry, even by their own standards, they are cowards, as when they hide among women and children, using them as shields. Likewise, when they car- and suicide-bomb non-combatants. Sending a brain-washed loser out to cancel his own ticket is not bravery, it is the worst kind of manipulation.

Roadside bombs directed at our troops, while a legitimate tactic (no different than mining a field or using claymores), does not require much courage other than in handling the explosives.

Finally, you are too kind in your pitch for 'understanding' the terrorist mentality. Knowing the enemy because it aids in the war effort makes sense. Beyond that, because we have no common ground whatsoever, their bizarre notion of how the world ought to be simply needs to recognized for what it is and, since it is their causus belli, destroyed.

Re; "Who will be made more free if they prevail?
Randy sez:
"They will."

"They"?, as in the Ba'athist-Jihadi "freedom fighters," or "they"?, as in the ordinary people of Iraq? Way I see it, the kind of "freedom" that those scumbags are offering is not the kind that anybody, especially including Iraqi Arabs, wants any part of.

Re; "They didn't run the country in the past; and half of them ain't even FROM that country."
Randy sez:
"Those who cross "borders" to fight in Iraq are fighting for the idea of an Islamic world that must be rid of infidels. It is a holy cause and to them, Iraq IS part of their "country"."

Those who cross borders From one despotic hell-hole to fight in Iraq are, according to you, fighting for "freedom," except now by "freedom" you mean a holy Islamic caliphate, eh? So really they're fighting for the privilege of prostrating themselves before a more familiar type of tyrant.

" Remember that Saddam added the script to the Iraqi flag. Why do you think he did that? Indeed, our success depends on finding a way to reconcile our concept of individual freedom, with Islam, in which one is free to serve Allah."

Did you just say "our success" depends on that? So whadda you? You here on behalf of the Jihadi-American community, or what?

Re; "They hide behind women and children and they blow up civilians. Their "courage" is not apparent to me."

"What do you expect them to do?"

I expect them to behave like nihilist idiots, right up until the moment that they get killed doing so.

" Throwing themselves headlong against our troops would be just plain stupid."

Yeah, well that's pretty close to what they're doing. Then when it's break time, back they go to hiding behind the civilians.

" They are fighting to win against overwhelming odds using the best tactics available to them, and there is courage in that."

They are fighting against the liberty of their Arab neighbors and they are hiding behind women and children in between setting off bombs in an Arab city, and there is no courage in that. They are the lowest of the low, and their enablers and excuse-makers are the second-lowest of the low. Feel free to take that personally.

This guilt by association thing is getting disgusting. Just because people have a common cause, it doesn't mean that they are allies or that they want the same thing for the same reason. I have seen no evidence that Cindy Sheehan wants David Duke's help. If simply having a common goal makes one associates, then you could argue, for example that the GOP and the KKK are allies because they both tend to oppose affirmative action.

Once again, the American revolutionaries did not in fact lurk behind corners in civilian clothes to catch redcoats by surprise and kill them.

Actually, they did. The militias (as opposed to the Continental Army) fought in civilian clothing and used guerilla type tactics.

Me, earlier and stupider: "ad hominimem"
That's "ad hominem," damn it.

Were you, perhaps, trying to convey a subliminable message?

Willie B. Goode wrote:
This guilt by association thing is getting disgusting.

"Guilt by association" does not seem to apply in this case. Mrs. Sheehan has said some of the same things that David Duke routinely says.

Just because people have a common cause, it doesn't mean that they are allies or that they want the same thing for the same reason.

That rather depends upon what the common cause is, and how similar their perspectives are, doesn't it? If they use the same terms, such as "he died for Israel" or "get Israelis out of Palestine", isn't it more likely that there is some agreement?

I have seen no evidence that Cindy Sheehan wants David Duke's help.

Agreed. But there also is no evidence that she rejects his support. Consider back when David Duke secured the Louisana Republican nomination for Governor; what did the then-head of the Republican party say openly? Didn't that person openly urge all voters in Lousiana to cast their ballot for the Democrat, rather than for then-Republican Duke?

Why can't Mrs. Sheehan say something similar?
Why can't the moveon.org and Michael Moore group crowding around her say anything?

If simply having a common goal makes one associates, then you could argue, for example that the GOP and the KKK are allies because they both tend to oppose affirmative action.

Opposing affirmative action is a poor analogy to "get Israelis out of Palestine", isn't it?

A more apt analogy would be "get black people out of North America", wouldn't it? Suppose that both the GOP and the KKK publicly asserted that goal? There would be more than just a common goal, right?

"Get the Israelis out of Palestine" is pretty clear, as is "my boy died for Israel"...and both are quite a bit farther down an ugly road than opposing affirmative action is, or opposing the war in Iraq is for that matter.

One more time for Carla:

Guerrilla tactics (hiding behind trees, running away when outnumbered, attacking at night) are NOT a violation of the Geneva Convention. The G.C. does not even demand that soldiers wear uniforms, just "insignia recognizable from a distance" so that they can be clearly and easily distinguished from civilians. The Crips and the Bloods have figured out how to use color-coding to make it clear who is on which side, and the Iraqi insurgents could easily do so, but prefer to be war criminals.

I am of course aware that many American revolutionaries could not afford full uniforms, but they did generally wear some sort of insignia and also carried flags and such into battle. Are you saying that redcoats were unable to tell the difference between an American soldiers (alone or in groups) and civilians (e.g. men out hunting with muskets) by looking at them to see what they were wearing? If you are saying that, you had better offer some evidence, because I do not believe it is true. The two men I know of caught working behind enemy lines in the Revolutionary War while out of uniform* -- Nathan Hale for the Americans and Major Andre for the British -- were both hanged when they were caught, and quite properly, even though neither of them was trying to kill anyone: they were spies, not war criminals or terrorists. Again, the idea that the Iraqi thugs are doing nothing that George Washington hadn't done before is untrue. I wonder why so many people insist on it.

*Actually, Major Andre was wearing an American uniform as a disguise. I also found on some website that he was captured by three Americans disguised in British uniforms. If so -- I hadn't heard that before -- they would have been hanged if caught by the British, and quite rightly. Nathan Hale was disguised as a schoolmaster for his expedition behind British lines.

Ivan tips off: "Were you, perhaps, trying to convey a subliminable message?"

Shhh! It's all part of my secret strategery.

Ellipsis persists:
""Guilt by association" does not seem to apply in this case. Mrs. Sheehan has said some of the same things that David Duke routinely says."

Duke is famous for saying those things; Sheehan is not. Moreover, Sheehan is apparently embarassed about saying those things, and has since tried to pretend to not have said them. But Hitchens has stayed on her case, and she's still busted. If she ever gets around to having a confab w/ D.Duke, she'll be busted again. Until then, it's still just loose talk. Why is that a problem for you?

". But there also is no evidence that she rejects his support."

Okay then, when Fred Phelps shows up at this circus, are you going to start calling her a gay-bashing homophobe too? After all, there's no evidence of her rejecting his support either.

Father Mocker wrote:

Ellipsis: " . Neither of these comments have appeared in the Main Stream Media except seemingly by accident. Given the way the MSM is playing this poor woman's situation as some kind of professional wrassling match against Bush, is it reasonable to expect that they'd actually focus on the meaning of what she's been saying?"

Father Mocker wrote:
Ellipsis, look around you. Where are we?

Well, I'm sitting at a kitchen table...

We're on a BLOG, right? So we're not all that dependent on the MSM for our news, are we? Was it the MSM that brought it to our attention that David Duke was sucking up to Saint Cindy's crusade? No. Will it be the MSM that clues us in when and if she reciprocates his attentions? No.

This appears to be an accurate statement, but so what? I started off by asking a couple of questions, and that's pretty much all I'm still doing; asking questions such as "isn't it odd that this left-wing woman says some of the same things as David Duke?" and getting some heated disagreement in return.

I wrote:
E "1. Mrs. Sheehan has made some statements that reek of "Jewish Conspiracy Theory" thinking,"

Father Mocker replied:
She has. She's an evil phony, in my estimation.

That could be true, or other things could be true. I don't know what she is, so all I can do is read as many words that she herself says and evaluate accordingly.

Father Mocker went on:
That doesn't automatically make her good buddies with all other evil phonies, or even with all other antisemitic evil phonies.

That is true. But on the other hand, most people would recoil in horror if David Duke came out and publicly endorsed their political position that they were standing for & offered support, right? So why the silence from Mrs. Sheehan and the camp meeting down in Crawford over David Duke and now some other disgusting figures trying to join in the hoedown?

I wrote:
E "2. Racists such as David Duke and the National Vanguard have flocked to support her,"

Father Mocker replied:
Yeah, and THEY issue press releases about it; THEY find microphones. THEY flock to support HER. She has not yet audibly reciprocated, and it's been almost a week.

That is true. On the other hand, neither Mrs. Sheehan nor anyone else in the camp meeting down in Crawford has come out and told David Duke et all get lost, and it's been over a week.

Isn't that odd? Isn't that strange? Am I the only one who has noticed? Shouldn't the usual anti-hate organizations be informing us of these facts, instead of remaining silent? Where's Morris Dees, for example? Where's Jesse Jackson? Has the ADL issued any kind of statement? Why the silence on the part of so many people?

I wrote:
E "3. She's not rejecting these foul racists in any way..."

Father Mocker replied:
She's also, (how can I put this?), apparently not real bright.

How do we know this?

It's *quite* possible that she's not put any real mental wattage into the question of what company she's keeping, or more correctly, what company is trying to keep her. She may not have even noticed their advances and/or her "handlers" (whatever they call themselves) may not be letting them get at her. We don't know, so we ought not act as if we did.

She is an adult human being, and thus responsible for her own actions and her own words. Words mean things, as I said many years before any radio ranter had a microphone. Mrs. Sheehan is on the public record making certain statements. If she's so incredibly naive as to not know what "get the Israelis out of Palestine" and "my son died for Israel" means, then she's pathetically ignorant. However, from reading one other speech she has given, apparently while sharing a stage with some hard core Leftists in the San Francisco Bay area, it seems unlikely that Mrs. Sheehan is all that ignorant.

It seems, in other words, that she knows what she's saying.

I wrote:
E "Mrs. Cindy Sheehan in particular, and the anti war left in general, is willing to accept support from the anti-Jewish, racist far Right. She and others on the left increasingly use the same tropes as the anti-Jewish, racist far Right when discussing events in the Middle East."

Father Mocker wrote:
That could change real quickly, were she ever to meet these [bad fellows] in person.

Possibly, possibly not. I don't know, and I doubt that anyone else does, either. All I have are facts, and the facts speak pretty plainly.

I wrote:
E "And nobody wants to talk about that, probably because it upsets all manner of preconceptions, self images and other apple carts."

Father Mocker wrote:
Okay, we'll deal in those. Ste. Cindy is a HIPPY.

How do we know this? From her speeches at the camp meeting down in Crawford and from the one other speech I've been able to find, she looks a lot like a very far left-wing person who has bought in to some conspiracy theories. Now, maybe that's equivalent to a "hippy", and maybe it isn't. The hippies I recall were all over the lot on quite a few topics...

Father Mocker:
Hippies Don't Like Nazis. Even if there's a big overlap in their ideologies, Hippies and Nazis do not get along. It's a personal issue, not an ideological one.

Maybe so, but it is an open question whether Mrs. Sheehan is a hippy or not, and it's not clear if it matters or not. The hippy movement was at its height in the period from 1968 to about 1972 or so; 30+ years ago. I'm not sure how relevent it is to current events even though there are 40+ year old hippies around.

Father Mocker went on:
Now I get that you're anxious to paint Saint Cindy as a Jew-hater, and on the strength of her own dizzy comments, you seem to have a pretty good case.

I'm anxious to get the facts straight. Mrs. Sheehan is on record saying some things that are straight out of the National Alliance / Willis Carto / "Spotlight" / Liberty Lobby / David Duke / American Nazi Party propaganda line. Basic human decency demands that someone should find out what she means by this garbage, and the fact that the entire MSM and the entire left wing noise machine refuses to even touch it just makes me wonder what is going on. When there's an elephant in the living room and nobody will even admit that it is there, then that's very interesting and makes me want to ask more questions, not fewer ones.

I'm not interested in "painting" Mrs. Sheehan with anything other than the truth.

Father Mocker concluded:
But it does *not* bolster your case to claim that she's good buddies with D.D. et al, UNTIL and unless she actually says so. Until that time, it's just a buncha skeevy innuendo. Stop it.

Then I've written poorly. I do not deal in innuendo, I deal in facts; the facts in this case are simple and I've stated them plainly several times now: Mrs. Sheehan has said things that are just like things David Duke and other haters of Jewish people routinely say. Nobody on the left or in the MSM has come anywhere near even touching on these statements, and that's pretty interesting as well as more than a little bit unusual.

Or, as I wrote quite a while earlier:

"Is it just me, or are some people going out of their way to avoid confronting the fact that some of their ideas about the war are exactly the same as those of certified, hate-filled right-wing nutcases who see "Jewish Conspiracies" under their beds?"

I'm asking questions and making observations based upon facts. It is interesting that the mere act of asking questions arouses such anger...

I thought it was A Good Thing always and everywhere to Question Authority?

Father Mocker wrote:

Ellipsis persists:
""Guilt by association" does not seem to apply in this case. Mrs. Sheehan has said some of the same things that David Duke routinely says."

Duke is famous for saying those things; Sheehan is not.

David Duke is (in)famous for saying anti Jewish things because the Main Stream Media has been all over him for years. Mrs. Cindy Sheehan is not equally (in)famous for saying the same things as David Duke because the Main Stream Media has apparently chosen to willfully ignore her statements. I'm daring to ask the question: "Why?".

(If a tree falls in the forest and there's no MSM camera team to cover the event, it still happened, didn't it?)

Father Mocker continues:
Moreover, Sheehan is apparently embarassed about saying those things, and has since tried to pretend to not have said them.

Excuse me? How do you know this?

Father Mocker:
But Hitchens has stayed on her case, and she's still busted. If she ever gets around to having a confab w/ D.Duke, she'll be busted again. Until then, it's still just loose talk. Why is that a problem for you?

Well, gee, I dunno.
Why should it be a problem for anyone when a major public figure touts "Jewish Conspiracy Theories" of the sort one usually finds in sewers like the late, unlamented "Spotlight" or at Ku Klux Klan meetings, is that the question?

Or is your question "Why should anyone care that a prominent figure of the Left is saying the same thing about Jewish people as the American Nazi Party"? Can I reframe the question any more starkly than that?

I wrote:
". But there also is no evidence that she rejects his support."

Father Mocker wrote:
Okay then, when Fred Phelps shows up at this circus, are you going to start calling her a gay-bashing homophobe too? After all, there's no evidence of her rejecting his support either.

Well, hmm, if the "Reverend" Phelps and his bizarre clan show up down at the camp meeting in Crawford, and nobody there protests his presence then I'm going to ask some questions. However, I suspect that there would be some people who would protest against him and his cult.

As it happens, I've been following in an idle fashion the visitations that "Reverend" Phelps and his cult have been making to military funerals. Guess what? When he shows up, ordinary people get in his face, tell him to take a hike, make up signs that tell him and his crew to get lost, and so forth.

In other words, they do all the things they can legally do to show their dislike of Phelps and opposition to him.

How come Sheehan and all the rest of the camp meeting Left can't do that with regard to David Duke, hmmm?

Before I respond to some of the latest posts, I just want to ask a few questions.

Ellipsis writes:

>>>"Mrs. Cindy Sheehan in particular, and the anti war left in general, is willing to accept support from the anti-Jewish, racist far Right. She and others on the left increasingly use the same tropes as the anti-Jewish, racist far Right when discussing events in the Middle East.

And nobody wants to talk about that, probably because it upsets all manner of preconceptions, self images and other apple carts."

I think the problem you run into with this argument is that you're conflating anti-semitism with anti-zionism, and that upsets a few apple carts because there are Jews who take the same position as Cindy Sheehan does. Exhibit A:

>>>Orthodox Jews gathered Monday, August 15 , 2005 in various locations around the world to demonstrate that entire Holy Land be returned to palestinian sovereignty and to clarify the Orthodox Jewish position on the Palestinian settlements in the Holy Land...
...The debate continues between the Zionists, give up the settlements or not.

“The world should be aware that this is not a Jewish problem, this is a Zionist problem only”, said Rabbi Yisroel Weiss, “because the State of “Israel” is not a Jewish state but a Zionist state”."

http://www.nkusa.org/activities/demonstrations/2005Aug14nyc.cfm

Now, I'll be honest with you, Ellipsis, I'm the first guy to hit the beach if I come across comments and statements that I discern to be racist, especially against African Americans. Lord knows I've had some donnybrooks with neo-eugenicists on this very blog, so don't think I'm trying to trivialize the very real existance of anti-semitism from folks like ex-Republican gubernatorial candidate David("I got 55% of the white vote")Duke.

As far as the Project For the New American Century, (which I believe is the REAL purpose for this war), read the letter addressed to President Bush on September 20, 2001 and tell me what conclusions can be reached from it, noting the total number of allies mentioned versus enemies, which missions are emphasized, and how far reaching of scope the plans are.
Also take note of the signators.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm

Again, there can be a real debate on either side about the amount of weight placed upon the administration by lobbyists both foreign and corporate, but it's a long way from being "anti-semitic" to suggest that Israeli interests were taken into account with the drafting of this strategy.

--Cobra

Oh dear, now some of the thread's participants who share common ground are bickering over definition minutae.

I do believe it is time to coin the Friedrich Nietzsche principle for threads that extend in such manner: Thread is dead.

Randy writes:

>>>The insurgents in Iraq most definitely are freedom fighters. They are fighting for the freedom to run the county just as they did in the past. I respect them for their courage. Still, we are going to have to kill them."

That's a fair comment, and you, unlike some other posters grasp the fact that people OTHER than Americans might have pride, nationalism, devotion, determination and self-sacrifice enough to fight and die for something they believe in.

For those posters who believe our strategy is to "hunt down and kill all the insurgents", let me remind you what our SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, Donald Rumsfeld says about our approach in Iraq:

>>>Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday he anticipates even more violence in Iraq and acknowledged that the insurgency “could go on for any number of years...”
...Defeating the insurgency may take as long as 12 years, he said, with Iraqi security forces, not U.S. and foreign troops, taking the lead and finishing the job...
...“Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We’re going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency,” he said...
A British newspaper reported Sunday that American officials recently met secretly with Iraqi insurgent commanders north of Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the bloodshed...
Meetings with insurgents
Speaking generally, Rumsfeld said those kinds of meetings “go on all the time” and that Iraqis “will decide what their relationships with various elements of insurgents will be. We facilitate those from time to time.”"

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8366705/

Now, the ABOVE statements weren't made by some moon-bat liberal peacenik. They were made by the Defense Secretary of the United States. Read a few times again. He states two main points in my opinion:
A) Coalition forces are NOT going to defeat the insurgents and
B) There are negotiations (appeasement?) going on right now with the same people many warhawks in this thread are screaming for annihilation.

Arguing with anti-Iraq war types like me is futile. Jingoists and "kill 'em all" types should have more of a problem with the Administration's handling of the war.

--Cobra

Randy writes:
>>>The insurgents in Iraq most definitely are freedom fighters. They are fighting for the freedom to run the county just as they did in the past. I respect them for their courage. Still, we are going to have to kill them."
Cobra echoes:
"That's a fair comment, and you, unlike some other posters grasp the fact that people OTHER than Americans might have pride, nationalism, devotion, determination and self-sacrifice enough to fight and die for something they believe in."

And some Americans might have enough pom-poms to cheerlead for civilian-killing Arab-murdering bomb planters. That would be you.

Logical Reasoning Fairy tries to wise us up:
"Oh dear, now some of the thread's participants who share common ground are bickering over definition minutae."

Are we? It looks to me like we're arguing about the appropriateness, the correctness, the justice of a particularly hackneyed and skeevy propoganda technique, the ever-disreputable "guilt by association" or "ad hominem" argument. Yeah we have gotten kind of wordy, and no I don't have anything further to add, but "definition minutae"? No, these ain't that.

Like an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters, it was inevitable that Cobra would utter words that, regardless of his intent, merit examination. He writes:

"Jingoists and "kill 'em all" types should have more of a problem with the Administration's handling of the war."

Falling into Cobra's second category, I am critical of the administration for doing a poor job, to say the least, of leading the country day in and day out. We absolutely should have expanded our armed forces post 9-11 and we should have a lot more feet on the ground in Iraq, with adequate reserves to deal with flare ups in Taiwan and Korea. The Syrian border issue should never have come up and, above all else, quite making stupid statements about imminent success, e.g. 'mission accomplished', 'insurgency in its last throes'.

The above assumes Cobra actually is a real person who believes what he writes. I still say Cobra is really Jane just trying to stir up the jingoist, kill 'em all types. She's doing a great job.

Cobra-
If you want to know "the REAL purpose for this war" why don't you read the Iraq War resolution (http://www.yourcongress.com/ViewArticle.asp?article_id=2686). It's actually a legal document that lays out the reasoning of the elected officials who voted for the war.
You don't have to embrace paranoia.

Arguing with anti-Iraq war types like me is futile.

Cobra makes an accurate statement! Well, even a blind pig can find an acorn once in awhile...

McKinney:
"The above assumes Cobra actually is a real person who believes what he writes. I still say Cobra is really Jane just trying to stir up the jingoist, kill 'em all types."

Not buying it. Not to suck up to the host too much, but I strongly doubt that Jane could gin up this much dishonest claptrap, for this long, at least without snickering loudly enough to tip us off. I DO however strongly strongly suspect our jihadi-wannabees "Randy" and "Cobra" of being the same critter, but personally, I'm ill-positioned to complain about that. That is, Mr & Mrs Mocker never really did christen their baby "Father," so I'm kind of disqualified from raising that sort of issue. Plus I lack the techno-smarts to investigate the question. Sigh.

Dad--that is exactly my point. You write, correctly, "I strongly doubt that Jane could gin up this much dishonest claptrap, for this long, at least without snickering loudly enough to tip us off." Well, it is funny stuff, if you don't try to deal with it on the merits. So, I'm left with one of two thoughts: either (a) Cobra is laughing his slimy backside off by making these hugely ridiculous arguments and watching us take the bait or (b) Cobra, while on vaction in the worker's paradise known as Viet Nam, was shanghied into a re-education camp where he had his neurons rearranged.

When someone begins asserting that the letters "PNAC" prove something, I find myself wondering where the 'black helicopters' are and when they'll show up. I've read quite a bit of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think-tank piece. It's not unlike many other think-tank pieces that have been written over the last 40 or more years; something of a thumb-sucker, laying out broad and sweeping goals, making some statements that could become embarrassing in certain situations, such as the post September 2001 world.

So I understand why some on the Left see all manner of sinister linkages in PNAC documents, just as I understood some 10 years ago why some on the Right saw all manner of sinister linkages in some of the Clinton administration activities.

But when "PNAC" starts getting thrown around like a magic charm, I find myself recalling the "Clinton Death List", the "Mena Airport Drug Nexus" and of course the "Secret UN Invasion plans" that were going to rely on those little tags on the backs of highway signs to guide UN troops to their destinations...

In other words, conspiracy theory thinking. Loony conspiracy theory thinking, to be specific. The sort of thing that got handed around via email, with ever more breathless claims that UN concentration camps with electrically-powered guillotines were being built from the deserts of Utah to the forests of Oregon to the decaying factory towns of the Midwest. (My apologies in advance to anyone reading this who may have gotten wrapped up in such theories; you have my sympathy.)

It should be needless to say that I don't take conspiracy theory thinking as a serious argument...but I'll say so anyway. Nothing personal, but Occam's Razor and a little logic are handier to me than watching the skies for "blak helikopters of the New World Order /PNAC".

Cobra's real - he's a friend o'mine. He's clearly passionate on this and other subjects. I also (sorry, Cobra) disagree with him on almost all of them, but my hat's off to anyone who can continue to come to a venue where s/he'll be outnumbered as utterly as Cobra and his fellows are here.

That said... I agree with Sec. Rumsfeld that the coalition is not going to win against the "insurgency"; it's not actually our brief to do so. It's our goal to engage the Iraqi majority that does not support the insurgency to take matters into their own hands, so as to accomplish two (at least) further things: 1. To provide us with the much-sought "exit strategy" - a reasonable, supportable, honorable way home that does not leave Iraq tied to the bedposts, so to speak (forgive me, I'm not usually so graphic) - based on Iraqi security forces' demonstrated ability to act against these "freedom fighters" without our continued help; this day is coming. If we leave before it arrives, we are morally decrepit. Please, DNC, put up a hawk in 2008, if you have one. And 2. to show Iraq, the Arab League, Iran, basically anybody who cares that Iraq is its own nation, not an American puppet, and that Muslims and Arabs can participate in the modern world without losing their souls or measuring their participation in body counts.

The latest soundbyte I heard from Cindy Sheehan was that she's discovered the "noble cause" for which her son died: he was sent (by Bush, if anyone's missed that) to die because others have died before him. Bush, she stated in the snippet I heard, wants more American servicemen and -women to die. I think she's unhinged. I have no idea for how long she's been insane, but that statement pretty clearly shows she is now.

But that doesn't excuse her handlers from putting distance between her+themselves and elements they ought to be vehemently opposing, as we on the right already oppose, revile, and have to the best of our ability exiled Duke. What on Earth is Sharpton doing down there on the same side as Duke? (The greater question being why is anyone on the same side as Duke, but that's what we're talking about, isn't it?)

BTW, "appeasement" would mean that they got something of what they wanted, beyond simply being allowed to live out their lives in impotence. So far, in spite of gracious concessions by the Shi'ites and Kurds involving proportional distribution of oil revenues and a recreation of the Ba'athist party sans Saddamist elements, the Sunnis apparently don't think they're being "appeased." They are, however, in danger of being further marginalized if they aren't careful.

Father Mocker wrote:

Are we? It looks to me like we're arguing about the appropriateness, the correctness, the justice of a particularly hackneyed and skeevy propoganda technique, the ever-disreputable "guilt by association" or "ad hominem" argument.

Argumentum ad hominem is a logical fallacy. Please find a good definition, perhaps at Wikipedia, and then show where I've engaged in this fallacy. For example, did I ever claim that Mrs. Sheehan is homely, and therefore can't be telling the truth? No, I did not. Did I claim that because she's supported by many on the Left, therefore she must be wrong or a bad person? No, I did not. Those would be examples of the ad hominem, or "to the man", fallacy. Reporting the facts, asking questions and/or drawing a logical conclusion isn't the ad hominem fallacy.

Guilt by association is not a fallacy per se, but again I suggest reading a good definition and then showing where I've done that. An example of "guilt by association" would be this: "Smith is a vegetarian, Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore Smith is JUST LIKE HITLER!!![1]" and it is more common than I would like to see.

I have not done that. I have reported the words of Mrs. Cindy Sheehan, as found in multiple sources (including brief mention in one MSM article) regarding the Iraq war and terrorism, and pointed out that the phrases and terms she used are identical to phrases and terms used by people and organizations known to hate Jewish people because they are Jews. I have then asked why no one finds this to be an offensive, or at least unusual thing worthy of asking questions about. I then drew a logical conclusion from the facts as shown.

Once again, I'm asking questions and drawing a conclusion. Nowhere have I attacked Mrs. Sheehan personally. Nowhere have I claimed that she's a bad person because of her associations; I have rather pointed out that her own words have drawn some bad people to support her cause. Nowhere have I engaged in either ad hominem or guilt by association.

Feel free to challenge the facts, or to disagree with my conclusion, but please do so in a logical manner.

Yeah we have gotten kind of wordy, and no I don't have anything further to add, but "definition minutae"? No, these ain't that.

I strongly suggest that Father Mocker review the definitions of terms prior to using them in debate, in order to avoid such mistakes.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that Hitler wasn't really a vegetarian. However, this example is one I've actually seen posted more than once in debate over the years...

Jamie: " What on Earth is Sharpton doing down there on the same side as Duke? (The greater question being why is anyone on the same side as Duke, but that's what we're talking about, isn't it?)"

I wish it wasn't, but the conversation does keep on veering back to him. So it's fair to ask: Has Duke actually physically Shown Up at Sheehapalooza 2005? If so, what kind of reception has he received? Fred Phelps, too, did he show up yet, or was he just bluffing?

Father Mocker,

Re; "Did you just say "our success" depends on that? So whadda you? You here on behalf of the Jihadi-American community, or what?"

To repeat, our success depends on finding a way to reconcile our concept of individual freedom, with Islam, in which one is free to serve Allah.

The Islamic world is at a tipping point. A way of life that served well for over 1000 years is proving inadequate to a rapidly expanding population that is increasingly aware of the standard of living enjoyed by most of the rest of the world. Islamic radicals are fighting a losing battle. Its just a matter of time. But there will be a period of violence as these radicals attempt to hold on to the past. The same thing happened to Christianity a few hundred years ago. The goal, the opportunity, is to push them over the edge and thus decrease the length of the period of violence. Reconciliation is possible. It has been done. We here in the US have radical religionists in our midst. We don't like them but we tolerate them. They would like to run the world but know they will not be allowed to do so. Can such a reconciliation be achieved in the Islamic world? If so, then we will have achieved our goal. If not, then the violence will continue for its natural period and we will have failed. The final outcome is certain. Only the time required is in question. And reconciliation is the key.

I'm looking for confirmation that Al Sharpton has joined the camp meeting in Crawford. If true, then clearly I've once again underestimated his lust for 'face time' on TV.

With regard to Father Mocker's questions, I see no evidence that David Duke has been or is now actually at the hoedown in the ditches of Crawford, he's merely been giving his utmost support to Mrs. Sheehan at his web site.

I did find the transcript to "Hardball" and Hitchens remarks regarding Mrs. Sheehan; there was reference to some backtracking on her part along the lines of "I didn't say that" but no source where I can read her on the issue.

Here's the picture I saw of Sharpton & Sheehan.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=17266_How_Phony_Can_They_Get&only

Randy wrote:

To repeat, our success depends on finding a way to reconcile our concept of individual freedom, with Islam, in which one is free to serve Allah.

This is a reasonable summation of the key issue. We in the Western world need to know if Muslims are capable of engaging in representative, republican government. A form of representative, republican government exists in Turkey, although until recently the Army played a special role...and the veneration of Ataturk is in some respects almost a state religion. Another form of representative government can be said to exist in Indonesia, although the massacres of non-Muslims in the last 10 years or so is not cause for optimism about that country in the longer term.

Iraq and Lebanon arguably have the best chance at this in the current middle East. Western powers have influence in both countries, and of course Iraq occupies the center stage because of the invasion and occupation.

The Islamic world is at a tipping point. A way of life that served well for over 1000 years is proving inadequate to a rapidly expanding population that is increasingly aware of the standard of living enjoyed by most of the rest of the world.

Actually, the Ummah is going to see the same population trajectory as the industrialized world, just a bit later. The same problems of a "greying" population and a birth dearth are coming to places like Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and so forth later on in this century, absent some dramatic change. I suspect that urbanization has more than a little to do with it; having 10 children in a hut in the country isn't the same thing as having the same number of children in an apartment of the same size in the middle of a city.

But the key issue is indeed "Islam" and how that term is defined.

Islamic radicals are fighting a losing battle. Its just a matter of time.

I hope so, but there are some deep, systematic problems within the Arab culture and within Islam (which arguably derives from Arab culture); the focus on the clan, the utter subjugation of women, the antipathy to learning anything beyond the Koran, a fatalistic view of predestination...and, of course, the fundamental tenets of the religion as acted out in the life of Mohammend.

But there will be a period of violence as these radicals attempt to hold on to the past. The same thing happened to Christianity a few hundred years ago.

I'm sorry, this last statement is so overbroad as to be meaningless. There is a whole world of difference between the culture of Christianity and the culture of Islam. Certainly some superficial simularities can be found, but there are too many deep differences: the attitude towards government is one key, contrast "Render unto Caesar what is Caesars" with the Sharia law of the Koran, for example.

The goal, the opportunity, is to push them over the edge and thus decrease the length of the period of violence. Reconciliation is possible. It has been done. We here in the US have radical religionists in our midst. We don't like them but we tolerate them. They would like to run the world but know they will not be allowed to do so.

Of course the 'radical religionists' in the United States don't have a holy book that explicitly orders them to "fight the infidels wherever you find them" or to "strike them at the neck" or to kill infidels 'until they submit and pay a tax, or convert' to Allah-worship. A big part of the problem is the huge lack of knowledge about Islam in the West. The ongoing whitewash of Islam as a "religion of peace" by Bush, as well as by authors such as Karen Armstrong, does not help.

Can such a reconciliation be achieved in the Islamic world? If so, then we will have achieved our goal. If not, then the violence will continue for its natural period and we will have failed.

If it is not possible for Islam and representative government to exist in the same country, then not only will the Islamic world have to be cordoned off from the rest of us, but some dramatic changes will have to occur in Europe. It would be far, far better for the world for Islam to find a way to co-exist with "infidels" in peace as equals, and to learn to participate in secular societies.

But this means that the Islamic world will have to modify some key concepts such as "Jihad", the right of Islam to dominate the world, the Koran as sole source of all law...it is an open question whether than can be done in a lasting way or not. The last 1,300+ years of history are instructive...

The final outcome is certain. Only the time required is in question. And reconciliation is the key.

Nothing is certain, that is why we need to know as many facts as we can get, in order to know what is possible and what is not possible.

In the mean time, stopping jihadis from re-establishing tyranny in Iraq is still the first order of business.

Rex wrote:
Here's the picture I saw of Sharpton & Sheehan.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=17266_How_Phony_Can_They_Get&only

Thanks for that pointer. I found another article; it seems that after getting his bit of 'face time', Sharpton was in a hurry to get back to New York. His car was clocked at 110 MPH on an Interstate highway heading for the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (probably I-35) and eventually stopped for violation of the speed limit...whereupon the driver was arrested.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050829/ap_on_re_us/sharpton_driver_arrest_1

Clearly one of the more dangerous places one can be is between Al Sharpton and a live TV camera...

Ellipsis,

Re; "In the mean time, stopping jihadis from re-establishing tyranny in Iraq is still the first order of business."

Absolutely agreed. Those willing to fight must be fought. But winning "hearts and minds" has been the ultimate objective since at least the time of Napolean (see Clauswitz). There's simply too many people to kill them all and let god sort them out. The idea, common among our left leaning posters, that there was no plan for after the war, is absurd, and an insult to military professionals. It isn't easy - and no one expected that it would be.

Just to add a slight echo, there are two types of plans: strategic and tactical. The strategic plan for Iraq is basically to get the country to the point where they have extablished a democracy and have the internal forces, military and police, to maintain that democracy. The strategic plan hasn't changed since before the war.

The tactical plan(s)change constantly. Garner had his own set of tactical plans, as did Bremer. The tactical plans change as the situation warrants. The tactical plans support the strategic plan.

In a larger sense, converting Iraq to a democracy (and removing it from being an incubator for terrorists) is one of the tactics for combating terrorism on a global scale. So what is strategic at one level might be tactical at another.

So, what are the strategies for combating global terrorism? I can think of several. One is to remove terrorist bases and training grounds. Another is to remove state-sponsored support. Another is to promote democracy and capitalism. Another is to make it impossible (or at least really really difficult) to hide the revenue transfers that finance terrorism. Another is to increase world-wide awareness of terror as a serious problem. I am sure that readers can come up with other obvious strategies.

Note: I have never seen a listing of the strategies we as a country are actively pursuing. I don't know if this is for security reasons or just because this administration had been remarkably inept at getting their message out to the public. But if I can think of obvious strategies, so can the administration and so can the terrorists. The difficult part is implementing tactical plans that move towards the strategic objectives.

Jamie writes:

>>>Cobra's real - he's a friend o'mine. He's clearly passionate on this and other subjects. I also (sorry, Cobra) disagree with him on almost all of them, but my hat's off to anyone who can continue to come to a venue where s/he'll be outnumbered as utterly as Cobra and his fellows are here."

Thanks Jamie. We have disagreements, but we also find consensus on topics. I don't mind being a minority in blogs because...hey,...I AM a minority. I'm used to it. I'm against this war, and I've made that point emphatically here, but the difference between some of the jingoists online here and your viewpoint is encompassed in this paragraph:

>>>That said... I agree with Sec. Rumsfeld that the coalition is not going to win against the "insurgency"; it's not actually our brief to do so. It's our goal to engage the Iraqi majority that does not support the insurgency to take matters into their own hands, so as to accomplish two (at least) further things: 1. To provide us with the much-sought "exit strategy" - a reasonable, supportable, honorable way home that does not leave Iraq tied to the bedposts, so to speak (forgive me, I'm not usually so graphic) - based on Iraqi security forces' demonstrated ability to act against these "freedom fighters" without our continued help; this day is coming. If we leave before it arrives, we are morally decrepit. Please, DNC, put up a hawk in 2008, if you have one. And 2. to show Iraq, the Arab League, Iran, basically anybody who cares that Iraq is its own nation, not an American puppet, and that Muslims and Arabs can participate in the modern world without losing their souls or measuring their participation in body counts."

You should be writing Bush's speeches, FYI, becasue the man usually resorts to cliches and sloganeering when confronted with these kinds of questions.

Here's a newsflash, though, Jamie...for the most part, I agree with most of your conclusions out of pure NECCESSITY. I don't have the same faith as you that it will be successful, but you make sound, realistic explanations that A) Don't consist of bloodthirsty, genocidal proclaimations B) Doesn't ignore what government officials are actually saying their agenda is, despite the cacophy of jingoistic rhetoric C) Separates support for Republicans from support for what you feel is the best future for all parties.

Now that being said, I STILL believe that invading Iraq was a terrible idea based upon neo-con imperialist ideology.
This is what happens when you surround a non-curious, admittedly anti-intellectual president with a cabinet full of PNACers. (you'll notice those who raised questions in that cabinet are no longer there).

I actually HOPE that your scenario comes true, but I have grave doubts, watching thousands of Sunnis march through the streets in protest of the Constitution, some of which holding pictures of Saddam Hussein aloft.

I have grave doubts when I see an insurgency increasing in sophistication, and a Shia majority getting more and more comfortable with Iran.

I have grave doubts when I realize that the PNAC goal of establishing up to a dozen or more PERMANENT millitary bases in Iraq is a guarantee that there will NEVER be a true "exit strategy" and there will ALWAYS be catalyst for radical Islamofacists to declare fatwas on us.

I have grave doubts when our armed forces are facing THIRD tours, and MILITARY experts (not tree-hugging liberals) claim our troops are stretched too thin.

I have grave doubts because there is rampant corruption, graft, waste and incompetance in the reconstruction, to the point that US promises to the Iraqi people aren't being met, fueling resentment and aiding insurgent recruitment.

I have grave doubts when CONVICTED felons (Jordan) like Ahmed Chalabi can rise to the level of Deputy Oil Minister in the interim government, with mechanizations to climb even higher.

These are all issues that I'm sure you've thought about, because you aren't simply a "cheer for the home-team slugger despite the steroids" type.

--Cobra

Cobra:

Thanks back atcha... A fundamental difference in our views herein is that I think Bush's problem is predominantly that of inarticulateness in putting out a message that, to me, is incontrovertible; you think it's not only quite controvertible but begins from false premises, and that Bush himself is the problem. Another area in which we'll never agree (like so many others), but what the heck.

As to your doubts, most if not all appear to me to arise from making the good the enemy of the perfect, and interpreting the news in the most negative sense possible. For instance: permanent military bases. American military personnel throughout the world enjoy the relative comfort of "permanent" facilities on the soil of our allies; we're no more "occupiers" of Spain, for instance, than we will be of Iraq once our still-preeminent role has been played. A "permanent" military facility is not "permanent" in the sense of the Rock of Gibraltar; it's just more rigid than a tent and less noisy than a Quonset hut. I'd add that some military folk have made the claim that troops in some situations are stretched thin (and have been refuted by other and generally better placed military folk); by no means is this a widespread perception in the military or a nationwide one.

As for the "insurgency's" gaining sophistication, well, depends how you define it; they've started stacking mines to make a bigger boom, I understand, but in terms of their ability to infiltrate secured areas, no dice; in terms of their ability to create "smart" IEDs, no dice (and Wretchard over at Belmont recently had a great post on IEDs as the perceived "super-weapon" of this war); in terms, for heaven's sake, of their ability to up their kill ratio, no dice. They're expending more explosive power for less gain(=loss of life) all the time, and our troops continue to develop counters to them.

"Rampant corruption, graft, waste, and incompetence" mark both life in the Middle East and life in a bureaucratic setting, I understand (and can testify, as to the bureaucracy side); I wouldn't expect a streamlined and squeaky-clean procurement process in Iraq even under far better circumstances than the ones in which we're operating. We don't have that here, for that matter.

Wow. Far afield from Cindy Sheehan. But perceptions of the war by the Left are still salient to the post, I'd say.

If this is considered a "hijack," I apologize to all.

Jamie,

You're not hijacking at all in my opinion. Your offering a non-bellacose, sensible argument supporting the administration's handling of this war. I disagree, of course, but that's the joy of America.

This thread was started by Jane on this comment:

>>>Having spent the last week complaining vociferously that conservatives were just making it all up about high-profile liberals who are rooting for the insurgents, the left half of the blogosphere cannot be happy to discover that Cindy Sheehan thinks that the folks infiltrating into Iraq to blow up cars in large crowds are "freedom fighters". "

One doesn't have to "root for the insurgency" to understand the effectiveness of suicide bombers.

>>>Suicide attack is a tactic. It used by Japanese pilots during WW2 (kamikazees) and also by Japanese sailors, who used to "drive torpedos" into American ships.

>>>

The doctrine of asymmetric warfare views suicide bombing as an imbalance of power, in which groups with little significant power resort to suicide bombing as a response to actions or policies of a group with greater power. Groups which have significant power have no need to resort to suicide bombing to achieve their aims; consequently, suicide bombing is overwhelmingly used by guerrilla, and other irregular fighting forces. Among many such groups, there are religious overtones: bombers and their supporters may believe that their sacrifice will be rewarded in an afterlife. Suicide bombers often believe that their actions are in accordance with moral or social standards because they are aimed at fighting forces and conditions that they perceive as unjust."

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Iiws1ONPj-QJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bombing+Islam,+suicide+bombing&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Al Qeada is even more pragmatic about suicide attacks.

>>>""The method of martyrdom operation [is] the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahidin in terms of casualties"

--Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda leader

Even our own military leaders speak of its effectiveness:

>>>"One of the obstacles the troops face is the physical and psychological toll of attacks.

"I think that the sensational attacks have a corrosive effect," he said, particularly in Baghdad where much of the country's press is concentrated. Such "horrific attacks" would have a clear effect on "advances."

(Lt. Gen. David) Petraeus said Iraq "is an extraordinarily tough environment" for all soldiers.

"When you have suicide vest bombers, not just suicide car bombers, this is about as difficult and as challenging an environment as you can imagine for our soldiers as well as our Iraqi police and soldiers."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/08/13/iraq.petraeus/

>>>"Suicide attacks are on the rise because the explosive devices "are simple to construct and easy to operate, thus making suicide bombers difficult to detect," said Navy Cmdr. Fred Gaghan, in charge of the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell in Iraq, which studies bomb scenes for clues to insurgent tactics...

..."At this time, there is nothing to indicate that the availability of volunteers is on the decline," he said, noting the media coverage and videos of suicide bombings posted on the Internet that fuel extremist recruitment...

...Saad Obeidi, a retired Iraqi major general and security expert, suggested that President Bush had invited Islamic extremists to bring to Iraq their fight against the United States. "One aim of the U.S. military, once it invaded Iraq, was to lure all insurgents and terrorists from all over the world to confront them here," he said...
...Obeidi, the retired general, sees the rise in suicide bombings as recognition among Iraqi extremists that they are an effective weapon against the superior numbers and arms of the occupying forces"
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05153/514358.stm

It's also not a new tactic, or unique to the Middle East. It just happens to be effective.

--Cobra

Randy rebuts me:
"To repeat, our success depends on finding a way to reconcile our concept of individual freedom, with Islam, in which one is free to serve Allah."

My ill-mannered question at that time was about the "our" in "our" success. It very seriously did not then look to me as if you meant "America's" success. But I could be wrong, and often am.
Up front, I don't think "individual freedom" IS compatible with subservience to Allah, except at the level of the individual citizen.

"The Islamic world is at a tipping point. .... The goal, the opportunity, is to push them over the edge and thus decrease the length of the period of violence. Reconciliation is possible."

Maybe. Hopefully a shorter, sharper period of conflict (a) is possible and (b) would lead to a better outcome. But reconciliation doesn't really become possible until after the dust settles and the bodies are buried.

"... Can such a reconciliation be achieved in the Islamic world? If so, then we will have achieved our goal. If not, then the violence will continue for its natural period and we will have failed."

Violence will continue for the duration of human history, no matter what. This particular violence, Islamism versus Westernism, might very well be shorter-lived. For that to happen, Westernism needs to win a series of large-scale decisive victories. The democratization of Iraq, if it works out well, would be one of those.
For the record, I opposed the invasion of Iraq. But given that there is, now, a shooting war in progress, I must just as strenuously oppose the UN-invasion of Iraq. Sorry if that puts us at odds.

"The final outcome is certain. Only the time required is in question. And reconciliation is the key."

The final outcome ain't really all that certain. This could still go very badly for America. Thing is, for America to voluntarily lose the war, as Saint Cindy (peace be NOT upon her) calls for us to do, would guarantee the worst possible outcomes all around. So she's wrong, and people need to talk back to her, even if she IS all girded up in the holy aegis of bereaved victimhood. None of that is directly relevant to your point, but that's the baggage that comes with it.

Ellipsis persists:
"Guilt by association is not a fallacy per se, but again I suggest reading a good definition and then showing where I've done that."

Ohhhhh, if I must ...
This thread, 55th comment, you: "Is it just me, or have a number of people gone out of their way to avoid the fact that racist, anti-Jewish David Duke and now the bizarro-world anti-everything National Vanguard have come to the support of Mrs. Sheehan and her ideas?"
This thread, 66th comment, you: "That Mrs. Sheehan has remained silent about Duke et al while commenting freely on Michael Moore's website and other left-wing places about Bush, the war, Israel and other topics is revealing."
This thread, 72nd comment, you: "Or could you explain why David Duke is supporting her, and the MSM is keeping that fact as quiet as possible?
[...] 2. Racists such as David Duke and the National Vanguard have flocked to support her, 3. She's not rejecting these foul racists in any way... Therefore: Mrs. Cindy Sheehan in particular, and the anti war left in general, is willing to accept support from the anti-Jewish, racist far Right."
This thread, 79th comment, you: " But there also is no evidence that she rejects his support."
This thread, 82nd comment, you: "most people would recoil in horror if David Duke came out and publicly endorsed their political position that they were standing for & offered support, right? So why the silence from Mrs. Sheehan and the camp meeting down in Crawford over David Duke and now some other disgusting figures trying to join in the hoedown? [...] Why the silence on the part of so many people? [...] I do not deal in innuendo, I deal in facts; "

ALL of the above are examples of guilt by association.
1/ You point to Duke's support for Sheehan without pointing to any corresponding support for Duke BY Sheehan.
2/ You claim that she "accepts" support from Duke, et.al. but your only evidence for this "acceptance" is her failure to repudiate them. That's an "argument from silence." There is no evidence that she's enthusiastic about Duke's support; there is no evidence that she's even AWARE of Duke's support.
3/ The only association between Duke and her is in Duke's rhetoric, and in yours. As for Ste. Cindy's rhetoric, it is CONSIDERABLY more nebulous and back-tracky than Duke's. She complains about "Israel" which leaves her plenty of wiggle room to claim to be complaining about that nation's foreign policy rather than (as we both suspect) about some shadowy gang of hook-nosed neo-con-spiratorial Jooooos running America from a back room in the White House.
4/ In my opinion, Ste. Cindy is accountable for her own rhetoric, but not for Duke's. Your hanging his hat at her door is a classic case of "guilt by association."
5/ You claim to deal in facts and not in innuendo. Truth is, you deal in facts PLUS attempt to support those facts with innuendo. That's still wrong. The facts alone SHOULD be plenty.
6/ You can continue your ridiculous denial of this obviosity as long as you like; I am finished with replying to it. Our off-topic word-mincing space-wasting spat is clogging up an otherwise very interesting thread. Feel free to have the last word, if that makes you feel studly, or whatever, but from this point forth you're on your own.

Jamie,

Nicely summarized.

Father Mocker,

I can empathize with Sheehan. But my guess is that her son would disagree with her current stand. The implication of her position is that her son was either a victim or just plain stupid, and having served myself, that really pisses me off. Our troops deserve respect - and Sheehan's current stand is simply disrespectful - of the president, the troops, and her own son.

I can no longer empathize with Sheehan, having read so many of her vile comments. Other than that, we're in complete agreement on this point.

Re: effectiveness of IEDs: I mentioned Wretchard's post on Belmont Club not to demonstrate that IEDs are not an effective asymmetric weapon, but to point out that each war has its "superweapon" and each weapon is eventually dealt with effectively (except maybe for atomic weapons, the effects of which can be minimized by aggressive decentralization - though so far nobody does that). There's no way to stop suicide bombings entirely, and I'd assume no way to stop IED attacks either (a different beast), but we can mitigate and are mitigating their effects and effectiveness through several means, including remote-control road sweepers (since convoys are a big fat target), those fake cellphone towers that grab hold of "insurgents'" cellphone signals, fool them into thinking they're actually sending a signal to the IED, and keep them from making real contact, better quality and better placed armor, better intelligence and more civilian tips, curfews, high and vigilant security at places of public gathering, etc.

What you do about a rumor of a suicide bomb, I don't know. RIP.

nice to be seen

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