Wasted! Youth!
David Weigel | February 13, 2007, 10:51am
Here's more fodder for the
"which pundits believe their own bullshit" debate: pro-war blogs (and a bunch of Fox News shows) fomenting scandal over Barack Obama saying "
over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans" were "wasted" in Iraq. Michelle Malkin's got the most comprehensive carp, but the excellent racism on this Little Green Footballs thread [UPDATE: It's been deleted.] pushes it into the winner's circle.
So, 3000 wasted, yo, O'bomba, about the Buffalo Troops who went after the uncivil war out west with Gen. Sherman, your "Black History" studies did it include the facts of the Apache babies who were taken by the heels by said troops and the scull cracked on the rocks of the fire pits,and the women raped and then set on fire.
No e-mail address, though, so it's not clear where John Edwards should send the application.
Obama
changed the "wasted" wording when a reporter asked him about it, demonstrating why Republicans fear him more than they ever did John Kerry. But I don't get it: Why do the Hannities and Malkins et al sweat this stuff? Around half the country has given up on the war;
about 1/4 is waiting to see if the surge can work. If* it doesn't, by November 2008 you could take all the people who don't think the thousands of lives lost in Iraq were "wasted" and fit them in a Des Moines rec center. It'll be fun! They can reminisce about March 2003 and field calls for book deals and
columnist gigs. *hah!
joe | February 13, 2007, 12:02pm | #
Was the Mahdi Army carrying out attacks against Sunnis pre-Najaf? The answer is "no."
Look, even George W. Bush admitted, in his State of the Union Address, that al Qaeda's terrorist campaign to provoke the Shiites into attacking Sunnis had worked.
"Further, do you really think there would have been a peaceful Shia revolution had Saddam fallen on his own?" I don't know what would have happened. There was certainly the potential for conflict, as there was clearly a fault line, but not all conflict necessarily turns into the horrific slaughter we're seeing, and which is likely to turn worse.
"I recall you saying that every time someone says there can be a democracy in Iraq." You recall wrong, as I have pointed out to you every time you self-servingly misstated my comments over the past three years.
I believe there will be democracy in Iraq someday, and I've long posted very explicit explainations of why this war was never going to be able to bring it about. But since you've never had a response to my argument, you've just been pretending I've been making a different argument.
Just to show you how it's done, here goes:
You are right, attributing the violence and the failure to achieve a peaceful, liberal order to the political and security situation is not at all the same thing as attributing it to their culture or history. I have seen a lot of former war supporters fall back on this racist trope, but I agree, you have not.
Now, your turn. Once again, as you have so often done over the last few years, you have accused me making that racist statement, because it allows you to ignore what I have been saying about the political and security conditions we created making peace and liberal democracy impossible. I think you should apologize.
Gray Ghost | February 13, 2007, 3:55pm | #
Sorry for the post length. I would feel a lot more sanguine about the viability of a democracy in the MidEast/S. Asia if there were any examples besides Israel and now Gaza(Rick Barton's protests to the contrary). Moreover, I'm not sure an Arab democracy is in the U.S. interest, given the antipathy of the man in the street to the US. Hamas is a majority in Gaza and Hezbollah is a significant minority in Lebanon.
If I recall correctly, we were sold this war for two things:
1) Saddam had WMDs and was either going to use them against the West himself or give them to folks who would use them &
2) Our invasion would bring about a flowering of democracy through the region. We were going to have "Switzerland on the Tigris", which would spread like a virus throughout the region.
#1 didn't turn out true. Either the WMDs were destroyed or they're in Syria. In either case they're not threatening the US at the moment.
#2 supposes that you can bring democracy at the point of a gun to someone, in an environment 10,000 miles away, surrounded by nations that would like nothing more than for your experiment to fail. Think the Saudis, Gulf states, Iran, the Stans, etc... were all that excited to see democracy bloom?
In any event, that's all blood under the bridge. So what do we do now? The current Iraqi goverment can't even keep militiamen out of Saddam's execution; too many Iraqis have loyalties to the tribe/religion and not to the idea of being an Iraqi. It bears unsettling resemblance to Yugoslavia immediately post-Tito. Like many of the commentors here, I see the fledgling Iraq republic imploding into a three-way partition: Shia south, Sunni central & west, Kurd north. You'll see violence on par with the 1947 partition of India.
I don't see 21,000 additional troops helping matters. 210,000 might. Or perhaps a smaller army would work, if they spoke Arabic and acted as ruthlessly as Saddam's. I don't want to pervert our armed forces that way; I'd rather see them go home. I definitely do not want to see them strike Iran.
Iran is trying to get the bomb. Who will they threaten with it? The US? Does anyone think that the US won't kill people on a Mongol-like scale in Iran, Pakistan, N. Korea---anyplace that could have putatively made the device---if a nuke goes off here? It's far more likely they'll threaten Israel with it, but then isn't it Israel's problem? Why should the US do their dirty work?
Again, sorry for the length.
