[saab95]

Originally posted by Nicko:
gee, that strategy might work if one was conducting a genocide...but we aren't quite there yet are we? Oh and we all know how well that stratgey worked out for the Russians in Chechnya, I mean they sure crushed them didn't they.

The Russians crushed Chechnya? Huh?

The Russians are an excellent example of how NOT to fight a war on terrorism.

There have been little skirmishes to find pockets of gangs who are the frontline bombers- the Russians sometimes capture them and even kill them, but they've to date completely ignored the organizations and nations that sponsored them.

To make matters worse, the Russians are actually helping Iran build nuke plants.

That's great

So now the Chechnyan rebels will have direct access to nukes.

What does it take for the Russians to wake up- a hijacked Aeroflot crashed into the Kremlin, killing hundreds?

[Orion27]

Troll:Actually I think the point that Madeleine Albright and Kerry are making about the war of ideas is an excellent one. I think the greatest weapon the West has against international terrorism is the strength of our ideas on how societies should function. I think that if these ideas are put forward in the right way, they have the power to change the course of events in the Middle East. Bush hasn't maximised the impact of our ideas; he's tried to maximise brute force. He is driving people to fundamentalism and exhibiting the worst aspects of Western, democratic society:


These are not ignorant, uneducated people. De jure, they reject western society. This battle is thousands of years old. They now have modern weapons to fight us with. This liberal credo of conversion is a joke. We can keep them at bay by force of arms but conversion is not going to happen.

[ebuddy]

Please continue to ride the "NO WMD" bandwagon. Please. I warned you people a long time ago. Trust me. WMD will appear and at the worst possible time. Perhaps some just before the DNC, then more in say...September of this year. I cannot stress enough my pleasure in watching you deny that WMD exist in Iraq.

Terror is fostered from a hatred for the West and the ideals of Capitalism. (or really any opposing ideal to be quite honest) It grows like a cancer. There is no better way to influence the entire Middle East than to democratize the very core of it. Dems critique Bush's foreign policy while at the same time having NO foreign policy of their own other than appeasing and auditing the pulse of an International Community that would giggle at our demise. Those we need to support us in Iraq, support us. The others have never supported us, not before Iraq and not after. Therefore, it is inefficient for us to concern ourselves with them.

This world will eventually come to a head of ideals. It's an unfortunate fact regarding our flawed human-nature. the US is posturing itself for this eventual outcome.

Quick question; Is Serrin Gas a WMD?

[christ]

Originally posted by saab95:
America, as a free country and one where a large amount of individual rights are still enjoyed, has the right to defend itself against brutal attack in a forceful manner.

America had no choice but to go to war against Afghanistan, a country that sponsored, trained, supported, and harbored Al Qaeda, the very people who attacked us on September 11th. What's pathetic is that Bush Administration thought they could solve this matter by diplomacy, not even by brinkmanship, thereby wasting nearly a month to respond.

I don't believe that annihilating all opposition will make us sleep well. I believe that fighting a war against a known enemy who attacked you, and annihilating THEM, or otherwise forcing them to unconditional surrender, is a strong step in the right direction and fully justified.

The Bush Administration failed miserably in Afghanistan to do this. Osama Bin Laden's still on the loose. All that means is that they cannot declare victory as the enemy is still ever-present.

All this is about Afghanistan - the original article was about Iraq (for the uneducated, Fallujah is in Iraq).

So, tell me again, why are you at war in Iraq?

Would you have preferred total annihilation of Afghanistan? Even though the threat that you were defending against was not Afghan, although it was living in Afghanistan.

The good thing about theoretical nonsense is that you don't have to consider the real world, which is messy and gets in the way of a good theory.

Unless you are advocating genocide, compassion is necessary.

When you have no clear objective, there can be no right way of achieving it.

[christ]

Originally posted by ebuddy:
Trust me

No

[dreilly1]

Originally posted by Orion27:
These are not ignorant, uneducated people. De jure, they reject western society. This battle is thousands of years old. They now have modern weapons to fight us with. This liberal credo of conversion is a joke. We can keep them at bay by force of arms but conversion is not going to happen.

Originally posted by ebuddy:
Terror is fostered from a hatred for the West and the ideals of Capitalism. (or really any opposing ideal to be quite honest) It grows like a cancer. There is no better way to influence the entire Middle East than to democratize the very core of it.
...
This world will eventually come to a head of ideals. It's an unfortunate fact regarding our flawed human-nature. the US is posturing itself for this eventual outcome.

So, here's some questions I'll throw out to both of you, and the rest of you here. I'll admit that they are intentionally leading, Western-centric, and even somewhat racist, but nonetheless, they are important to understand what's really going on here. There are intentional flaws in the questions -- go ahead and tear them apart if you like, but please consider them anyway:

Are the Iraqis (and, by extension, any Arab people) able to govern themselves according to principles that Western countries hold to be self-evident (like universal equality, liberty, etc.), and are they able to take responsibility for problems in their own countries (like Al-Qaeda style terrorism) and deal with them? Or will any attempt to impose a Western-style government in any Arab country deteriorate into an effective dictatorship, whether based into religion or secularism, which will promote violent and/or corrupt solutions to problems?

Note that I'm not saying that Arabs need to import Western culture, they can reject it while still embracing Western democracy, right? Or is democracy itself something that Arabs will never be able to get? If so, is that really a bad thing?

I've been doing some reading about the history of the Middle East, and it seems like so much of Western policy towards the Middle East, from the time of the fall of the Ottoman Empire until today, is based on how people in power have answered these same types of questions.

[Troll]

Originally posted by Orion27:
These are not ignorant, uneducated people. De jure, they reject western society. This battle is thousands of years old. They now have modern weapons to fight us with. This liberal credo of conversion is a joke. We can keep them at bay by force of arms but conversion is not going to happen.

We have to distinguish between two different groups of people here. On the one hand we have the fundamentalists who belong to Al Qaeda. I call them the lost causes. This is a small group of people who do indeed reject the ideas that Western society is based on and there's probably nothing we can do to change them. Certainly the effort involved in changing them is not worth the risk of them committing some ghastly act during the process of their conversion. These people need to be eliminated.

The vast majority of people in the Middle East are in the second group. I'd call them the blank slates. They aren't fundamentalists or members of Al Qaeda. They haven't been exposed to the ideas that Western democracies are based on or if they have, they've never been exposed to them in a way which is conducive to them applying those ideas. They're mostly open to persuasion particularly since in the past their governmental systems have not been particularly kind to them. I believe all people want freedom and security and happiness and I believe it to be self-evident they have a better chance of achieving that through democracy than fundamentalism. All we have to do is show them the way. One of our weapons in the struggle against terrorism should be exposing the blank slates to our ideas. But we need to do that through positive association; we can't impose democracy on them by force because that undermines our message and reinforces the fundamentalist message. Telling them that we bring good tidings of a system that will let them be free and realise their dreams while at the same time killing, torturing, stealing from and raping them, is hardly the way to convince them.

In a climate such as that the US has created in Iraq, those who say that we shouldn't be trusted and that we are dangerous, gain credence. Fundamentalists who say that we want to kill Arabs and wipe out their culture and way of life seem to have a point. The response the fundamentalists preach of reinforcing the fundamentals of their culture and religion in response to the attack on those ideals from the West appeals.

I see so many people on TV saying that the West is not about imposing values; that the bad things that happen are not representative of what we are about, but this is incongruous. What the US is doing in Iraq and the way the West in general has dumped the Palestinians IS what we are about. It's as much what we are about as terrorism is what they are about. If we want to convince blank slates, we have to be addressing all of the problems in our interactions with these people. We have to be more selective about using violence and supporting people who use violence.

The blank slates and the lost causes need to be dealt with differently - we have to annihilate the lost causes through force whilst at the same time extending the appeal of our ideas to the blank slates. Bush has done some of the first but none of the second. Bush's problem IMHO is that he doesn't appear to have the intelligence to understand anything but binaries. He sees everything as black and white. He has decided to deal with security problems by acting decisively with force. Iraq is a security problem therefore attack it quickly and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. He seems to believe that appearing to be tough is the solution to everything. His approach worked better in Afghanistan because Afghanistan was filled with lost causes that needed to be eliminated. Iraq was filled with blank slates and invading it in the way the US did was precisely the wrong thing to do. An invasion that had the support of the global community and that focussed on Iraqi needs, restoring sovereignty, getting services up and running etc. - that sort of action may have generated the right environment for a flourishing of democratic ideas. The climate in Iraq is not conducive to converting blank slates to our side. At the moment I don't think we're killing fundamentalists in any part of the world faster than the US increasing the appeal of the fundamentalist message.

[zigzag]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
That's not my position. What Democrats (or at least a good chunk of them) fervently oppose isn't terrorism itself. It's treating terrorism as the threat it is.

Many of you seem willing to "fight terror" if that is defined as taking only passive measures -- fortifying buildings, conducting police investigations. But you oppose anything beyond the powers authorized prior to 9/11. Hence the paranoid attacks on the Patriot Act.

But you won't look at the full dimensions of terror. Specificacally, you won't look at its state sponsors. Now that Afghanistan is a fact on the ground, many of you claim to support the use of military power there. But many Democrats were muttering about "carpet bombing" and so on when that campaign was underway. The opposition to the war in Iraq was underway then. It was just less open.

Painting broadly, what many Democrats oppose is the "war" on terror. But you are ok with the "law enforcement operation" against terror. In other words, what you want to do is to return to the pre-9/11 policy. You know, the policy that lead to 9/11. That was the Dean POV, and Kerry has suggested it too. And it's really dangerous -- an indication that a lesson has not been learned.

Of course, there is a fringe that does support terrorism. Or basically any anti-western military force. Those are the ones out there praising the "resistance" in Iraq. I believe that Michael Moore called them "the Minutemen." Those are crazies. But the pacifist wing of the Democratic Party is powerful. So is the wing that sees Bush as a much more important enemy than Al-Queda. You'd support any of this if a Democrat was in the White House. But not with a Republican.

Until I see Democrats grapple with the full dimentions of the war on terror and start doing more than coming up with objections, silly "lied" claims, stop cheering the bad news and booing the good, and stop all the stupid, childish conspiracy theories, I conclude that any mouthings of support for the WOT are insincere.The Democratic Party of today is not the Scoop Jackson party, or the JFK party. The Democratic Party today is the party of Cynthia McKinney and Nancy Pelosi. You simply aren't a serious national defense party. You are not ready to take the reins in a war you basically don't believe in.

There's certainly some truth in what you say - on balance, Democrats are a lot less hawkish, and there are pacifist/appeasement elements - but I think you're oversimplifying. As far as I can tell, Democrats represent a range of views, as do Republicans. I don't think a more nuanced approach is reducible to mere passivity and "law enforcement." I wouldn't reduce the views of Colin Powell and John McCain, which as far as I can tell are closer to Kerry's than to Bush's, to mere law enforcement.

Certainly there are those who are more interested in defeating Bush than in defeating terrorism, but that's politics. Many Republicans objected to Clinton's initiatives for the same reason.

Then there's the question of Bush's strategy, which seems resolute but of uncertain effectiveness. The situation in Afghanistan remains iffy - shouldn't we have focused on that before spreading ourselves thin in Iraq, which was at best only loosely linked to Islamist terrorism? Has misstating the nature and degree of the Iraq threat, thumbing our noses at former allies, and bumbling the occupation helped or hurt our cause? Has this been the best use of our resources? It may be too early to tell but there's certainly reason to believe that Bush's strategy is misguided, or at least has been poorly implemented. He doesn't strike me as being up to the complexity of the job.

Would I like to see more Democrats recognize the seriousness of the threats we face, Islamic fundamentalism in particular? Yes. I'm just not convinced that Bush's approach is the most prudent or workable, or that he's sufficiently competent to implement it, although I continue to hope he proves me wrong.

[voyageur]

Simey, I think many democrats do indeed look at the nations who support terror. It's just that the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda was contrived; even the administration now admits Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Saddam was not exporting terrorists. But Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan were. But we've remained friends with Saudi Arabia, and largely abandoned the fight in Afghanistan and focussed on Iraq. It makes no sense.

Many democrats are now alarmed because we have created a new breeding ground for terror in Iraq. Doesn't that bother you?

[Orion27]

Originally posted by Troll:
We have to distinguish between two different groups of people here. On the one hand we have the fundamentalists who belong to Al Qaeda. I call them the lost causes. This is a small group of people who do indeed reject the ideas that Western society is based on and there's probably nothing we can do to change them. Certainly the effort involved in changing them is not worth the risk of them committing some ghastly act during the process of their conversion. These people need to be eliminated.

The vast majority of people in the Middle East are in the second group. I'd call them the blank slates. They aren't fundamentalists or members of Al Qaeda. They haven't been exposed to the ideas that Western democracies are based on or if they have, they've never been exposed to them in a way which is conducive to them applying those ideas. They're mostly open to persuasion particularly since in the past their governmental systems have not been particularly kind to them. I believe all people want freedom and security and happiness and I believe it to be self-evident they have a better chance of achieving that through democracy than fundamentalism. All we have to do is show them the way. One of our weapons in the struggle against terrorism should be exposing the blank slates to our ideas. But we need to do that through positive association; we can't impose democracy on them by force because that undermines our message and reinforces the fundamentalist message. Telling them that we bring good tidings of a system that will let them be free and realise their dreams while at the same time killing, torturing, stealing from and raping them, is hardly the way to convince them.

In a climate such as that the US has created in Iraq, those who say that we shouldn't be trusted and that we are dangerous, gain credence. Fundamentalists who say that we want to kill Arabs and wipe out their culture and way of life seem to have a point. The response the fundamentalists preach of reinforcing the fundamentals of their culture and religion in response to the attack on those ideals from the West appeals.

I see so many people on TV saying that the West is not about imposing values; that the bad things that happen are not representative of what we are about, but this is incongruous. What the US is doing in Iraq and the way the West in general has dumped the Palestinians IS what we are about. It's as much what we are about as terrorism is what they are about. If we want to convince blank slates, we have to be addressing all of the problems in our interactions with these people. We have to be more selective about using violence and supporting people who use violence.

The blank slates and the lost causes need to be dealt with differently - we have to annihilate the lost causes through force whilst at the same time extending the appeal of our ideas to the blank slates. Bush has done some of the first but none of the second. Bush's problem IMHO is that he doesn't appear to have the intelligence to understand anything but binaries. He sees everything as black and white. He has decided to deal with security problems by acting decisively with force. Iraq is a security problem therefore attack it quickly and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. He seems to believe that appearing to be tough is the solution to everything. His approach worked better in Afghanistan because Afghanistan was filled with lost causes that needed to be eliminated. Iraq was filled with blank slates and invading it in the way the US did was precisely the wrong thing to do. An invasion that had the support of the global community and that focussed on Iraqi needs, restoring sovereignty, getting services up and running etc. - that sort of action may have generated the right environment for a flourishing of democratic ideas. The climate in Iraq is not conducive to converting blank slates to our side. At the moment I don't think we're killing fundamentalists in any part of the world faster than the US increasing the appeal of the fundamentalist message.

Yes, there is a secular element to these societies. These elements are overwhelmed by tribalism and fundamentalist theology. The fundamentalist and tribal elements combine to give each legitimacy and strength. They both employ violence to secure their positions and maintain a certain sense of stability. Pluralism, as we know it, is rejected by Islamic Law.
We were attacked by elements of Islamic fundamentalism with the support of tribal elements some of which is and was state sponsored; Iraq, Iran, Syria and Iran with North Korea as a supplier of arms.

What are we to do? I'm certain in time we will be attacked again. The the world will gloat again at our vulnerability and hurt. The next time it will be a catastrophe for the world because we will not be inclined to pull our punch. That much, however soft we appear now in the war of "ideas", is clear.

[ebuddy]

Democracies in the Middle East will look very different while maintaining the successes of an electorate. Turkey for example and while not immediately relevant; Israel. Their democracies look very little like ours yet they are very successful. We give them a guidline blueprint, not a girdle and you'll be amazed at what people will do with freedom. One thing is for sure, the continued fostering of hatred for a people based on ignorance and indoctrination and ruled by dictatorship will NEVER, I repeat NEVER thrive. Trust me christy.

[Saad]

Democracies in the Middle East will look very different while maintaining the successes of an electorate. Turkey for example and while not immediately relevant; Israel. Their democracies look very little like ours yet they are very successful. We give them a guidline blueprint, not a girdle and you'll be amazed at what people will do with freedom. One thing is for sure, the continued fostering of hatred for a people based on ignorance and indoctrination and ruled by dictatorship will NEVER, I repeat NEVER thrive. Trust me christy.

I agree full heartedly. Jordan is another example of a liberal democracy.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by zigzag:
Certainly there are those who are more interested in defeating Bush than in defeating terrorism, but that's politics. Many Republicans objected to Clinton's initiatives for the same reason.

I agree up to a point, but there is a difference. There was a lot less at stake with most of Clinton's initiatives.

And yes, I agree that Democrat have a range of points of view. The problem is I can't tell which part of that range we'd be electing if they were to take over and I'm not going to risk it being the lunatic end.

That's why I said to tie that I want the Democrats to convince me they are serious about national defense. So far, they have done an excellent job of convincing me that they are profoundly unserious about it.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by saab95:
Today's Republicans are . . . a bunch of humanist homos,

Why, thank you.