Democrats versus Republicans

[camaraderie]

I am livid about Pelosi's visit to Syria. The PRESIDENT is responsible for the conduct of foreign policy and diplomacy. Can you imagine the uproar if Gingrich had done the same under Clinton?? Why not visit Iran and North Korea too?? Triple Play!! What an idiot she is.

[PBzeer]

She's simply a meglamaniac who puts politics before the country, knowing as she does, that she knows what is best for the rest of us. The rest of us, being unsophisticated rubes, that shouldn't even really be allowed to vote in the first place.

[sailaway21]

As I see it.

There are two sides in the debate on Iraq. Unfortunately, one of the sides is emanating from the viewer call-in list of American Idol, and the other side. with reality on it's side isn't sexy.

The American Idol frequent voter position is; the people have spoken, in the last election, and we should get out asap. Closely following, on the heels, of this sentiment is the ubiquitous slur against Bush. Pick one. The problem with this position is similar to the problem of sunburn while sailing; nobody set out to end up in the position we're in, blame of any sort does nothing to alleviate the pain, and we have to get through it in the best possible way, while continuing to sail the ship.

Simply put, the stakes in Iraq are just too high for failure to be an option. The image of the US would be irrepairably harmed and that is synonymous with the encouragement of the jihadists. The very real threat of the projection of US power, in a meaningful way, is what keeps the US safe. If we have to colonize Iraq, it would be better than some type of retreat with dignity. There will be no dignity, and the region will be worse off than before our arrival. If the US is seen as not having the will power to fight this battle out to the end, we will be assuring ourselves of more battles in the future.

The fact that a lot of Americans, perhaps a majority, view the war as 'unpopular' is irrelevant. We live in a representative democracy, not a democracy, and this is an instance where the distinction is crucial. Our elected officials are paid to see the big picture, and not be swayed by the latest Gallup poll. What many of them seem to want to do is the equivalent of stopping Patton at the Rhine. I believe the people will follow leadership, and GW Bush has not shown enough on this issue. Failure is not an option, and that point should be ingrained in the American public's psyche. To the extent that it is not, the consequences of failure are trivialized. Since 9/11, there is no going back to 9/10, these terrorists mean what they say, and they say we, and western culture, must be eradicated. so, we can pay now or we can pay alot more later.

A westernized Iraq would represent a huge STOP sign to the recent history of the middle east. It does not have to be a perfect democracy, it can even, as Taiwan and South Korea do from time to time, live under martial law. A westernized Iraq will put enormous pressure on the real problem areas of the middle east, to wit, Saudi Arabia and Iran. To the extent that those regimes begin to be fundamentally changed from within, the entire middle east begins to change, and the production of jihadists starts to be curtailed. I omitted Syria, inadvertently. Change in those regimes will bring peace to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, as well as a ground swell of liberalism in places such as Egypt, the Emirates, and Yemen.

Serious thinkers, on both sides of the political aisle, understand this point. A failure of the Bush administration was in allowing the message to be conveyed that we could fight the war on terror on the cheap. When you put something on sale, you engender a race to the bottom, ie..a clearance sale. That is what the popular vision of the Bush policy has become. Getting out is perceived as more important than winning. Anything less than victory is going to result in decades of deeper strife, probably world-wide, too. We reaped a decade of genocide and slavery for our 'peace with honor' withdrawal from Viet Nam.

It is truly shameful that a great number of politicians, and pundits, feel free to play political games with what is ultimately world-wide security. If the US withdraws from the field, any field in this war on terror, the game is lost. The harsh facts are, that there is no other power that can do anything, anything at all, without the massive presence of the US military. British Navy? What British Navy? German Army? French Air Force? Canadian Anything? The reality is that, the western democracies have sacrificed their militaries to social spending at home, and such arms as they have are best suited for search and rescue missions. Hell, the Brits would have a hard time going back to the Falklands again. With the resurgence of the Russian Bear, we are more likely to find our strongest NATO allies in the newest members, such as Poland. They perceive a threat, and will arm to confront it. The rest of Yurrup will wait for the US to do something, anything, and then decide if it suits their posture of the moment. Their ineptitude is best symbolized by the debacle of Bosnia. In their own backyard, against a relatively minor force, they dawdled around until the US did something. Why we just didn't leave them to it in that case remains a mystery to me. In short, we are the only one's who can, and so, we must. Not an enviable position, but we've seen worse.

BTW, where's the JFK in the presidential field of Dems? Where's the "bear any burden, pay any price" Democrat who will stand up and say this war is important?

Some will object to my saying that we are fighting this war on the cheap. I think the numbers show otherwise. Sacrifice at home? What sacrifice? Soldiers lost? We all regret men killed. It is perhaps instructive to remember the bloodiest day in American history. Antietam. 25,000. One day. With the stakes so high, can ayone say we risk too much today?

[PBzeer]

The main reason, in my thinking, that there hasn't been another major incident on American soil is that the jihadist know it would change the political climate and mobilize US public opinion behind the War on Terror. As long as they believe the Democrats will give them a political victory that they can't achieve any other way, there will be no co-ordinated attacks such as 9/11. In other words, we can fight them there, or fignt them here. Personally, I vote for there.

[hellosailor]

John-
A true politician, either natural-born or self-made professional, neither has to put up or shut up. I reluctantly admit that it can be a thing of wonder to watch the weasel-words flow forth as they squirm out of direct questions.
For instance, an alleged exchange during a House Inquiry:

"Senator, is it true you beat your wife?"
"I did not beat my wife!"
"Then Senator, who was that women you were beating?"

If players in Congress can't be masters of the spoken word, we've truly got a problem on our hands.

Cam-
"The PRESIDENT is responsible for the conduct of foreign policy and diplomacy." Who revised the charters of the Republic while I wasn't looking? AFAIK Article II, section 2, of the Constitution states that the president "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, ... " and that means it isn't HIS job alone.

Sailaway-
"the people have spoken," Yeah, but they're the same dumb rubes who bought the story of the Lusitania (that there were no military supplies on the ship, even though it was laden with war material and munitions) and then they bought the Gulf of Tokin incident three generations later, proving they were no smarter. Oh, and then on 9/11 they believed that terrorists were totally responsible for it all, and that Congress (who shut the sky marshal program because the airlines said "it costs too much" in the 80's) and the airlines (who had the unique position of surrendering the cockpit rather than securing it) weren't at least half to blame. Even Al-Qaeda said that the attacks could only have been executed in the US, because our security policies were so lax and so contrary to world standards. If "we the people" don't grasp that and accept at least half the blame--we're still in denial and we deserve whatever else is to come. Sadly, we're still putting on dog and pony shows and there is still no real security, so it probably will come again.
Wouldn't it be funny [not] if the "poison in the dog food" wasn't an accident, but part of a larger program to poison US food supplies, perhaps with a carcinogen that wouldn't be found for another two decades? A free nation cannot be secure by the means we are embracing, it can only be fettered.

Nah, sorry, the American public lacks the intellect to grasp the issues, lacks the curiousity to examine them, lacks the situational awareness to suspect the light at the end of the tunnel just might be a runaway train.
Some may be good-hearted and well-intentioned people, but too many are just rubes, plain and simple. They should be encouraged to donate their votes by proxie to folks who can at least read, and promise to do so.

[camaraderie]

HelloS...yeah...with respect to treaties that is true...but I don't see any mention of the House of Representatives there! Diplomacy requires ONE voice at a GOVERNMENTAL level...then whatever is negotiated can be approved or turned down by the Senate. I would say the same thing if McCain had gone there too. Just plain wrong.

Now you say...
then on 9/11 they believed that terrorists were totally responsible for it all, and that Congress (who shut the sky marshal program because the airlines said "it costs too much" in the 80's) and the airlines (who had the unique position of surrendering the cockpit rather than securing it) weren't at least half to blame

Are you friggin NUTS?? We are HALF responsible for 9/11 because we didn't have better security in place?? If I go to your house and shoot your family are you 1/2 responsible cause you didn't think it was cost effective to post a guard??? I think I'll use that in court...Your honor...it wasn't my fault...he left the doors unlocked and it was too tempting for me to resist killing his family. If I go to jail he should go too for tempting me!!

[cardiacpaul]

"We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged -- and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."-Barak Obama

OOPS....

"“Well as I said, it is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any of them felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they'd shown. You know, and if you look at all the other speeches that I've made, that is always the starting point in my view of this war.''

-Barak Obama

[PBzeer]

Politicans can only lie out of both sides of their mouths because people let them get away with it.

The Senate is charged with advise and consent, not on policy, but on appointments and treaties. And the House has no role, beyond appropriations.

[hellosailor]

Cam-
Look at it this way. The world has known for fifty years that seat belts save lives. So, if you take your family for a ride in the car, and you remove the seats belts, and give your family no chance to use them, aren't you at least half responsible when they go through the windshield when some drunk hits you?

Sure, the drunk hit you. But *you* made the decision to remove the safety equipment. That's exactly what happened here. The US government, and the US airline industry, and the US people (at least, those who bother to keep informed) all knew that there were bad guys out to get us. That there were armed hijackers on the planet, all over the planet.

And yet it was *our* industry alone that chose to say this was not a threat, and *our* government that chose to accept the lobbyists paying them off for shutting the sky marshal program down. Nuts? No, I don't think so. The ragheads have been preaching jihad and talking about how they must clean the world of infidels for a very long time. The danger was clear and present, and the only two bodies who could protect us (the government and the airline industry) jointly decided to shut down the only protection we had, in the interest of making higher profits.
A higher profit of perhaps 1% (at the gross level) for the airlines. A buck or two or five on the average ticket price. And they figured, so what, if a plane crashed it would only cost $300 million or so. That's official FAA policy, a payment of $3 million (2.3 million actually, IIRC) per person, maybe a hundred people on a typical plane, a total loss of $300 million to be paid out once eery couple of years instead of paying for security.
That the actual bill was $50 *B*illion and up, never occurred to them. Their math was a bit optimistic.

Fortunately Al-Q were a batch of numnuts who screwed the job up. The death toll was less than 10% of what it would have been, had a proper special operations team executed the mission. 3000-odd instead of the 40,000 that could have easily been trapped in the building--a real mission failure. And, a real success would have brought the towers over sideways, laying a swath of fires and collapses through the Wall Street district, easily running up tenfold in damages.
So...from the terrorist point of view, it may have vastly exceeded their expectations but we got very lucky that they didn't have any brains. Or, that they didn't take out a better target like the Indian Point reactor, five minutes north of the WTC. That target is still available, still unprotected, and still has no effective evacuation plan possible.

So yeah, the vermin made the act of aggression. But we've spent decades enabling them, encouraging them, and outright ASSISTING THEM. There was a scandal around 1970 when it was discovered that the UN was funding "math books" for young arab children in the middle east, with math exercises that along the very express lines of "If you capture five Jews and kill two of them, how many do you have left?"

We've known the Jihadi schools were there, and what they have been teaching, for a long time. And as usual, we've said "that's someone else's problem." Well, guess what? Who was it who said "All that it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." ??

[camaraderie]

No....I am NOT 1/2 responsible for my family getting killed by a drunk cause I took out the seatbelts. The DRUNK is 100% responsible. I will have to live with my decision but the DRUNK is responsible for the deaths. There is also the matter of a conscious decision to KILL vs. an accident. False analogy...try guy with road rage driving their car off a cliff instead of a drunk.
I am in full sympathy with you on how stupid and futile our progress has been toward real security despite billions of wasted tax dollars. But I in know way blame this administration or the Clinton administration for what terrorists did to us. Could BOTH admins have done a LOT more to better protect us...OF COURSE...but that does not equate with blame for the event and the loss of life. You are confusing blame for PREPAREDNESS with blame for the MURDER.