| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"Yang, AthD h.c, Kicking AWOLs Cocaine Snorting Ass" |
| Date: |
13 Jun 2006 12:05:51 AM |
| Object: |
Right Wing Columnist Apologizes for Iraq |
Apology accepted. Now do something about your mess.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmYxNjgzMjFkMTQ3MDE1ZTIyYzFlNDc3ZWFlZjY4NzI=
Apologizing for Iraq
Allow me to eat crow.
By John Derbyshire
My son is passing through that very annoying stage of development in
which a child discovers that language is not so much like a solid
landscape of rocks and trees, but much more like a well-equipped
theater stage, fitted out with screens, doors to nowhere, trick
lighting, turntables, trapdoors, and wires to lift you up into the
flies. He has, in short, discovered ambiguity. Asked whether he has
finished his homework, he will furrow his brow and say: “Define
‘finished’.” No doubt the lad will make a fine attorney (or opinion
journalist) one day. In the meantime we must endure his relentless
parsing.
I retreat to that developmental phase myself when friends ask me, as
they do on average about once a week, whether I feel embarrassed at
having supported the Iraq war. “Define ‘war,’” is the thing I want to
say. I don’t say it, of course, exactly because it sounds like an
irritating 11-year-old, but it’s really the essence of the matter. Did
I support the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Yes I did. Do I support the
continuing effort to get civil society going in Iraq? No I don’t, and
haven’t for over two years. So do I support the war? Well... define
“war.”
Let’s start from the fact that the whole thing, taken in one
piece—attack plus follow-up nation-building effort—has been a huge
negative for the USA. Is there anyone, really, who is glad we did it?
Most of my NR colleagues are still talking up the administration’s
Iraq policy. It’s hard not to think, though, that if wired up to a
polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie
back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative
answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over
the graph paper.
We are stuck there in that wretched place with no way out that would
not involve massive loss of geostrategic face. Getting on for 3,000 of
our troops have been killed, and close to 20,000 maimed. We’ve spent
untold billions of dollars. For what?
One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the
Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver
a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we’d just
rubbled the place then left. As it is, the shock value has all been
frittered away. Far from being seen as a nation willing to act
resolutely, a nation that knows how to punish our enemies, a nation
that can smash one of those ramshackle Mideast despotisms with one
blow from our mailed fist, a nation to be feared and respected, we are
perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories
and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by
teenagers with homemade bombs—that lets crooks and bandits tie it
down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail,
trickery, lies, and petty violence.
Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that
region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we
would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President
Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his
honest answer be?
We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling
us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the
puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of
confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men,
and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we
have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle
Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been
rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the
bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular
condescension of ***** Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of
Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be
in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation
we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a
run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on
our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a
place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson.
Since the Iraq war was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those
of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology? Here we
are—we, the United States—in our fourth year of occupying that
sinkhole, and it looks pretty much like the third year, or the second.
Will the eighth year of our occupation, or our twelfth, look any
better? I know people who will say yes, but I no longer know any who
will say it with real conviction. It’s a tough thing, to admit you
were wrong. It’s way tough if you’re a big-name pundit with a
reputation to preserve. For those of us down at the bottom of the
pundit pecking order, the stakes aren’t so high. I, at any rate, am
willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support
to this fool war.
I am spared major embarrassment not only by the slightness of my own
reputation, as by the fact that while I supported the invasion of Iraq
and the overthrow of the regime, I never thought much of the
nation-building exercise that followed. It took me a while to figure
out that the administration actually believed all the guff about
“establishing democracy in the Middle East,” but once it had sunk in,
and the party enthusiasms of the 2004 election season had subsided, I
was calling for withdrawal. (The first time I gave over a column to it
was, I think, in mid-September of 2004.) I wish I had done so earlier.
And, yes, I’ll admit, I wish I hadn’t supported the invasion in the
first place.
Why did I? For the reasons I declared on another website, just a year
after the invasion:
[M]y attitude to the war is really just punitive, and Iraq was a
target of opportunity. I am not a Wilsonian nation-builder. I don’t
want to “bring democracy to Iraq.” I don’t, in fact, give a fig about
the Iraqis. I am happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their
unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples.
When they do bother us, though, I want them smacked down with great
ferocity. Saddam Hussein had been scoffing for years at the very
concept of international order, in the belief that we would never pass
from words to deeds. I wanted to see that belief confounded, and I am
pleased that it has been. If the civilized world is never willing to
back up its agreements, resolutions, and communiqués with force, then
those fine documents are all worthless and civilization is impotent
against its enemies. I am very glad to know that we have not yet
reached that sorry pass.
I worry a lot that the civilized world, of which this nation is faute
de mieux the leader, has sunk into an enervated lassitude, a condition
in which it is unwilling to act against threatening, or just annoying,
barbarians. Every time we defer to some United Nations resolution,
every time we offer an olive branch to some thug ruler, every time we
declare our willingness to sit around a table with some crazy
demagogue, I think of the old League of Nations, which was mighty big
on resolutions, olive branches, and sittings-around of tables. Of
course, those things are the basic stuff of diplomacy, and we have to
do a certain amount of them. There comes a point, though, where they
don’t suffice, and a nation must act. Back in mid-2002 I feared that
we had no will to attack Iraq, though I said I wanted us to. I really
feared that we had no will, no guts, to chastise our enemies the way I
wanted them chastised—not with U.N. resolutions, but with bombs,
tanks, and artillery shells. When events proved me wrong, I was
delighted. (I felt the same delight when Margaret Thatcher, Whom God
Preserve, went to war over the Falkland Islands in 1982.) Now we must
act, we really must act, against Iran; but we can’t, because of Iraq.
I’ve never been able to work up any guilt, either on my own behalf or
the administration’s, about the WMD issue. So far as I am concerned,
what did I know? Saddam’s behavior sure made it look as though he was
hiding something nasty. As an ordinary citizen, getting my information
from newspapers and the TV, I had every reason to suppose that the WMD
claims were true. Just why Saddam was behaving like that is now a bit
of a mystery. Possibly he was a secret fan of classic Chinese
literature (or opera) attempting a sort of Empty Fort Strategy. As for
the administration: Well, either they knew the intelligence was
worthless, or they didn’t. If they knew, then their duty was to assume
the worst, and present it to us as the worst. If they didn’t know,
then they honestly believed the lousy intelligence. None of this
excuses the CIA’s incompetence, of course; but even that incompetence
serves the good conservative purpose of driving home to the populace
the fact that the federal government sucks at pretty much everything.
So why am I eating crow? Because I think it was foolish of me to
suppose that the administration would act with the punitive
ruthlessness I hoped to see. The rubble-and-out approach was not one
that this administration, or perhaps any administration in the present
state of our culture, would be willing to pursue. The universalist
dogmas that rule unchallenged in our media and educational
institutions have fixed their grip on our foreign policy, too. When
the Founders of our nation said “all men” they had in mind Christian
Anglo-Saxon men. Our leaders, though, want to bring the whole world
under the scope of those grand Lockeian principles.
Perhaps this will work, or perhaps it won’t. My belief is, and always
has been, that it won’t. My fault was in not grasping the scale of the
administration’s multiculturalist ambitions. (Of which, to be fair to
them, they had given plenty of hints, and even one or two frank
declarations of intent.) George W. Bush believes that, to borrow and
adjust a line from the colonel in Full Metal Jacket: “Inside every
Middle East Muslim there is an American trying to get out.” The effort
to stabilize Iraq, and the reluctance to just leave the Iraqis to
fight each other among the rubble, followed inevitably from that
belief, which is, according to me, a false belief. I see all that now.
I didn’t see it then. I am sorry.
-----
Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin
EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division
The Bush 'balanced' budget: 2 trillion and worsening
The Bush 'economic' policy: 12.5 million FEWER jobs than Clinton and counting
The Bush Iraq lie: -2491 GIs, one friend's co-worker's son and mounting
Having Bush ***** up my country: Worthless
-----
"Ahhhhhh, yessssssss, ummmmmmm - Alito, Alito, Alito"
-duke (duckgumbo@cox.net), aka PedophilEarl J Weber, 59
year old mateless, heirless biological failure
of Afton Oaks Apartment, Baton Rouge,who pussied
out of the Vietnam draft, showing his gay side
despite his avowed anti-gay bigotry
Contact duke's priest and ask
him why duke is such a racist:
http://www.stpatrickbr.org/
Father Gerard "Jerry" Martin
stpatrickbr<AT>bellsouth<DOT>net
Saint Patrick Catholic Church
12424 Brogdon Lane
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70816
.
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| User: "7gg10" |
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| Title: Re: Right Wing Columnist Apologizes for Iraq |
13 Jun 2006 03:54:34 AM |
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Yang,
Yang,
fantastic story about lids homework, getting this myself
define this, define that, my usual reply is stephen, define early
bedtime or define lack of cash
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| User: "Ronald More-More Moshki" |
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| Title: Re: Right Wing Columnist Apologizes for Iraq |
13 Jun 2006 01:11:51 PM |
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Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's Cocaine Snorting ***** wrote:
Apology accepted. Now do something about your mess.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmYxNjgzMjFkMTQ3MDE1ZTIyYzFlNDc3ZWFlZjY4NzI=
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ya' see, 'The Sacredness-of-Human-Life' crowd ought to be
demanding that those who created the Iraq debacle be held accountable.
Yet, there have no no trials for War Criminals since Nurenberg. Why?
Because the Human-Life-anoids have not the slightest regard for
human life.
Can there be anything more obvious? Answer "is a big no."
.
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| User: "Ronald More-More Moshki" |
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| Title: Re: Right Wing Columnist Apologizes for Iraq |
13 Jun 2006 01:19:20 PM |
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Ronald 'More-More' Moshki wrote:
Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's Cocaine Snorting ***** wrote:
Apology accepted. Now do something about your mess.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmYxNjgzMjFkMTQ3MDE1ZTIyYzFlNDc3ZWFlZjY4NzI=
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ya' see, 'The Sacredness-of-Human-Life' crowd ought to be
demanding that those who created the Iraq debacle be held accountable.
Yet, there have no no trials for War Criminals since Nurenberg. Why?
Because the Human-Life-anoids have not the slightest regard for
human life.
Can there be anything more obvious? Answer "is a big no."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, silly Ronnie--------------the Human Life-frauds ARE the same
creeps
who started the Iraq bloodbath.
.
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