Anne Applebaum made a good point about the Iraq war in her op-ed piece for The Washington Post:
“But what if all of this vocabulary — winning, losing, victory, defeat — is simply misplaced? There are, after all, wars that are not actually won or lost. There are wars that achieve some of their goals, that result only in partial solutions and that leave much business unfinished. There are wars that do not end with helicopters evacuating Americans from the embassy roof but that do not produce a victorious march into Berlin, either. There are wars that end ambivalently — wars, for example, such as the one we fought in Korea.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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19 Comments
No, it’s not what Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Randy meant. They want America to lose the war on terror, Bush to be humiliated and Democrats to pick up seats in the ‘06 elections.
Yes! Technically the Korean conflict is a cease fire stalemate, but that has not resolve the issue. 55,000 Americans died in the war, known as the Forgotten War, because nobody speaks about it. We spend billions of dollars a year, and we have tens of thousands of troops in Korea, gaurding that border and we have been doing so for over 50 years.
Seoul Korea and the immidete area has around 20 million people and they are only minutes away from being destoryed by North Korea, for which has over 20,000 rocket bombs pointed towards it. They can fire it off at any second.
That is hair-raising, and I don’t think we ever want to have another one to deal with either. In Iraq, we need to kick butt and take names. Finish the job that was outlined by the President Plan. Yes Lefties! He does have one.
Joe Blow,You, we on the Left want America to be overrun with the brown Islamic menace? How stupid would a person have to be in order to believe that? I mean, truly, irredeemably, STUPID?
Joe Williams,
For Bush to say–as he goes on saying–that “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down” doesn’t count as a plan.
Argh–early morning typo. Please insert ‘think’ on the first line, second word, in the message to Joe Blow.
Blow, we lost the war on terror the moment Bush got involved. Bush makes a fool of himself every time he opens his mouth. I’d say he does a fine job of humiliating himself without any help from Liberals.Democrats pick up seats in the ‘06 elections?
Bringing sanity back to government really worries you repubs, don’t it?
And Mr Williams,”20,000 rocket bombs pointed towards it. They can fire it off at any second.”What color is the sky in your paranoid fearful little world? Don’t you conservatives ever tire of wetting yourselves every time Bush says “Boo”?
Indeed, bush has a plan. Too bad his plan isn’t meant to benefit this country.
The only “problem solving victory” is to make peace with the Arabs. The “phony war on terrorism” does not offer any solutions, with the exception of death and destruction. The “phony patriot act” is only needed to “fight” the “phony war on terrorism” of which “terrorism” is also a phony.
“Three phonies do not a real make.”
Israel won’t like that, which is yet another victory, a victory of having Israel no longer decide what’s best for America, which includes how and where we spend our money. Not how and where Israel spends our money, which is what is happening now.
At some point Americans will figure-out the truth about what is actually happening and draw this same conclusion. The only question remaining is how many of our soldiers will need to be killed before America realizes what Israel is doing to us.
Making peace with the Arabs is the best plan.
Why are there no blogs here to talk about General Murtha’s plan?
Why are we focusing on Dean and Kerry, but not one blog to discuss Murtha’s suggestion?
Albert Einstein made a great quote that would be relevant in todays environment.
“He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
Here is a transcript of Murtha’s last speech replying to bush’s no strategy victory speech.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120701588.html?nav=rss_politics
Sum, you and Albert are correct.Nobody wins when killing is the game.
Appearently XXX, you cannot handle a debate on the issues. It is the leftist in this country that are parinoid and upset that they have not had the power in Congress for many years, and they will continue to lose their position.
I guess I’m so wrong about Korea, because it is about “Bush”? I guess somebody skipped history class. I assume that tens of thousands of American troops on the border of DMZ of the Koreas for over 50 years is just a waste of time. Plus it’s Bush’s fault, because he scared everybody. And the North Korea threat was dreamed up by Karl Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the Bush family.
I guess talking to trees and whales all the time makes the left know everything about foreign policy.
Plus I’m not even a conservative. But it doesn’t matter. As long as I’m not a leftist, it makes me wrong, stupid, troubled, and appearently beneath the left’s intellect. I guess you can enslave me and place me in shackles, because I’m sub-human.
Iraq is a long way from the 38th parallel, Mr. Williams. Your comparison strikes me as incredibly superficial and inappropriate. Care to elaborate?
By the way, you have 24 hours before the slave wagon arrives to take you away (we’ve arranged for you to be sold to a kind, wealthy master because WE LIKE YOU!).
Uh, Joe….calm down. Where did I say you were stupid, troubled, or beneath leftist intellect? And if I “enslaved” you and put you in shackles, you’d probably expect me to feed you and provide shelter. Whether you care to admit it or not, you ARE a conservative. Joe, my point is, you and your conservative friends have let BushCo stampede you. You’re so busy being afraid of terrorists you’re prepared to give up what makes us Americans. Joe, North Korea has nothing to do with terrorists. Granted, the 38th parallel is a hot spot. But it isn’t a terror issue.
You may be ready to live in a police state in return for security. I’m not.
And Joe, I’ve never talked to a whale. I have talked to a few trees, but if you cut a lot of firewood, you do that.
Ease up, Mr Grumpy. While I disagree with most of what you believe, I don’t consider you sub-human, just misguided.
The feeling is mutual XXX.
;)
The feeling is mutual XXX.
;)
This little group hug moment has been very instructive on the topic of right wing rhetoric.
Joe Williams, whether or not he wants to call himself one, is a conservative. Or, better, he advocates on this blog for conservative politicians and causes. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is how he portrays himself as the victim of bad, mean, powerful, liberals.
For one to be a victim, one needs to occupy a lesser position than one’s adversaries. Can anyone who is on the right claim victim status, with any credibility at all? The right holds power in all three branches of national government, and here in Kansas have virtual hegemony, with the exception of the Governor’s office. Yet one constantly hears them whining like persecuted minorities, playthings in the hands of diabolical Democratic power.
This victim complex is highly pathological. It’s also politically savvy, since if Bush et al can take the moral high ground as the victim, just as Joe Williams has done here, they can manipulate public opinion to their favor. Look at Tom Delay’s rhetoric. Or Dobson’s. Or Ann (Courtney Love) Coulter. All of them evince this righteous indignation at being the aggreived party. But of course, this is just to secure the license to go after their enemies without limits or scruple.
Whether Joe Williams intended all of this or not is beside the point. But the fact is, the face he showed above is a widespread tactical response that one sees whenever right wingers are challenged. Just as possums play dead when threatened, so Wingnuts love to play the victim.
Agreed, CF. I read William Shirer’s monumental work on Hitler a few months ago, and what struck me was that the first thing Hitler did to consolidate power was to rail at the leaders who “stabbed us in the back” in the WWI settlement. Nevermind that Germany was the aggressor in that war too and was lucky not to have been utterly annihilated.
That of course was soon followed by the scapegoating and demonizing of “the Jew” for every indignation the Nazis could think of.
I’m not saying that Bush or even Rush Limbaugh is Hitler, but some of their tactics are remarkably similar, i.e., making the powerful majority into an aggrieved “victim” at the hands of “feminists,” “secular humanists” and “welfare queens” so that they can then further justify their priviledged status.
Bush’s recent permanent tax cuts for “capital gains” (on profits that rich stock owners make by not working for a living) is exhibit A.
There’s no way you can justify taking 40 percent of some poor schmo’s gross (in FICA, medicare, state, local, and property taxes) and tax the billionaire’s at a quarter of that rate unless you’re convinced that rich people are just “better” and somehow more “deserving.”
By the way, Joe Williams. You call yourself a “libertarian,” but from what you post, you sound exactly like a Wall Street Journal conservative.
If you want to see what a REAL libertarian looks like, read Justin Raimondo at Anti-War.com:
“Let’s start with the neocons’ reactions to the gigantic antiwar march held in Washington this past weekend: if you like your humor dark – and I do – you’ll get a horse laugh out of poor old David Horowitz, whose bile threatens to eat away at his insides until all that’s left is a hollow husk: “100,000 Zarqawi supporters mass in D.C.,” he screeches. Now there’s a headline that surely deserves some sort of special recognition: Smear of the Year, or perhaps a prominent entry in Hysterical Outbursts of Note. And what vivid imagery it conjures! Seen through a Horowitzian prism, those 200,000-plus Americans from every walk of life who came to Washington to protest an unjust and intolerable war were really turbaned terrorists: instead of chanting “Peace, now!” what they were really saying was “Zar-qa-wi! Zar-qa-wi!”
. . . .
“The hallucinatory effects of drinking the Horowitzian Kool-Aid are readily apparent: if you don’t support the war, the neocons, and the Bush regime, you’re a “leftist.” These people are so indoctrinated, so unwilling to consider anything outside their own narrow and cartoonishly simple paradigm, that they’re no longer capable of perceiving even the vaguest outlines of reality. In this, they resemble nothing so much as old-time Stalinists, of the sort that Horowitz in his New Left Period at least pretended to abhor.”
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7425