A disgusting vat of filth that no self-respecting intelligent person would wade into.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
True - but they have not been fighting at all. And the Pashtuns have accepted a government put together by the Northern Alliance.

Why would they? If the central government essentially rules Kabul, what's the point of a civil war? There's no point in having a civil war unless you have an effective national government. If the tax man is collecting in the provinces, who cares who he's reporting back to?

I think it was just Arab nationalisim. I think you are right below when you say Iraq was just an artificial construct put together by the British. Prior to that I don't believe anyone considered themselves an Iraqi.

I'm not sure how many people consider themselves Iraqis now, as opposed to Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. At least the latter allegiances seem to dominate.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Spanky and others aren't waiting that long. They're laying the groundwork now.

there are no "others." you've won! congrats!

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Reagan would never have done this. Reagan's legacy was similar to Bush I's. He was a pragmatist.

Iraq was a wild bet. Reagan was a cowboy with a quick trigger finger, but he had the good sense not to invade a country the size and polymorphous nature of Iraq and try to manage it. Bush bet on the Iraqis melding. He bet wrong. He'll go down about 25 slots lower than Reagan, and frankly, I can't say he doesn't deserve it. He had a chance to be the start of a new Republican dynsaty, and the ability to roll back the worst elements of the New Deal mindset, and make this country leaner and more competitive in the world market over the next 50 years. He pissed it away on a crazy neocon bet, hoodwinked by a pack of assholes like Kristol, Wolfowitz, Perle and Cheney. At least Rumsfeld was trying to develop a quick strike military force, which is a very good idea. The dumbass neocons fucked that effort up by trying to use it as a police force, the very thing it could never be.

This shitty mess is a great lesson in mob psychology. Everybody got behind Bush after 9/11 like he could do no wrong. Maybe we'll get lucky now and Rudy will ride in to save us. God, can we elect a Rudy/Bloomberg ticket? What a perfect yin/yang.

Reagan took on a much bigger, but sicker, enemy in the Soviet Union. It was a massive bet, one that required an enormous amount of defense spending that kept him from significant and fundamental changes in domestic budget policy (If he hadn't needed the money for defense, I believe he could have gotten a flat tax through).

In retrospect, it was a helluva bet.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Just a couple quick facts to correct some misstatements made above.

There was extensive resistance to British occupation prior to 1933. And, as you might expect, the colonized fought among themselves as well as with the British; both tribal and religious differences were fought over.

Polities that have boundries similar to Iraq today have existed through the years. The provinces ruled out of Baghdad under the Ottomans generally reached up into the Tigris foothills, ran down to the gulf, ended somewhere in the desert on the way to Syria, and ran over to a constantly changing Persian border. The boundries of Iraq today may have come from colonial divisions between France and the UK, but they were essential set by the Ottomans. There is some historic rationality to them (unlike, for example, most African colonial borders).

I have to hand it to you GGG that is something that I did not know and is definitely contrary to the conventional wisdom. At least the conventional wisdom Ty and I have been subscribing to.

So, generally then, is it safe to say Syria has not traditionaly been part of Iraq but Kuwait has? So the civil wars you talk about clearly should have been an indicator to Bush that there would be trouble, but on the other hand, the fact that area has always been traditionally held together, wouldn't that have signalled to Bush that it was certainlly feasible to hold the state together?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
I have to hand it to you GGG that is something that I did not know and is definitely contrary to the conventional wisdom. At least the conventional wisdom Ty and I have been subscribing to.

So, generally then, is it safe to say Syria has not traditionaly been part of Iraq but Kuwait has? So the civil wars you talk about clearly should have been an indicator to Bush that there would be trouble, but on the other hand, the fact that area has always been traditionally held together, wouldn't that have signalled to Bush that it was certainlly feasible to hold the state together?

I'm not sure the resistance against the British means much today other than that no one likes being colonialized.

As to Kuwait, all the little shiekdoms in the Gulf are places where they've always welcomed conquerors, given them a big feast and a good time, maybe even opened up the Harem, agreed to rule in their name, and saw them to the outskirts of town as fast as possible. It works. The gulf has had an economy of its own based on the sea for a long time; those places are more comparable to Venice and Genoa in the west.

As to Iraq and what signals we should have seen, there are both centralizing and decentralizing tendancies, but the big question should have been, OK, we create a power vacuum after removing Saddam - who naturally fills it? And the lack of an answer spells trouble.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
McCarty was dim alcoholic swine. They should've flayed him with rusty razors and hung a flag of his skin in the Capitol to remind people of what happens to that kind. That his grotesque spectacles created a vigilance aginst Communism gives him no pass in my book. Cirrhosis was too kind. He stood for every abuse of power conceivable.

Pinko.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Me. the troll. The guy who quit trying to be for real here, leaving you all to banter with only Spank.

I started this morning with a topic that I thought was somewhat interesting, and certainly was unique for this board.

Hours later, other than SS touch one tangent, you all continue to expound on what the bloggers you have read tell you about the current and past states of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do you really enjoy this?

For some reason I piss them off and you don't. I think I just inspire hate better than you do. They just love to pile on me. You just need to make yourself less likeable. It reminds me of that scene in Vitor Victoria where James Garner wants a fight so he walks into the nastiest bar in town and orders Milk. When the bartender asks Garner if he wants his own mother's milk, he says no, I want your sisters. After that it was game on. They all pile on him like he wore a blank panther outfit to a KKK meeting.

Maybe you need to order milk more?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
I think a lot of the conflict is psychological. In any war, perception is really important. So is morale. As that article pointed out, things in Iraq are really not that bad. I saw on MSNBC last night that the death toll of American soldiers has not reached 3,000 and they said 54,000 Iraqis had died. They also said that number might be inflated. If that number is correct that is 1/5 of one percent of the population. From a historical perspective, for a country to suffer an invasion, and experienced an insurgency for three years that number is a miracle. (two million Vietnames died in the Vietnam war, Maybe three million Koreans in the Korean War. In addition, the deaths are mainly concentrated in three provinces.

But since the day the invasion started there has been a constant press barage of how we are screwing up. Once no WMDs were found the gloves were off. The press just went nuts on how screwed up this war was. The Democrats just piled on also.

War is risky and war is unpredictable. We can't know if more troops would have helped the situation or aggravated it. The point is, the cause was just and we have a chance to establish a democracy in Iraq. Putting democracy right in the middle of the middle east would be a huge coup and would put huge pressure on the countries surrounding it to go Democratic.

It would be a pricelss accomplishment. But since day one of the invasion there has been a strong propaganda machine through out the world undermining the war effort and our own media and the opposition in this country has helped fuel that propaganda machine.

It's strange that conservatives spend so much more time worrying about whether the American people support the war than they do worrying about whether we are doing the right things to win it. We are losing, and it has nothing to do with domestic support. It is because we cannot defeat the insurgency, and because the Iraqi government is ineffective and does not have legitimacy (in the Weberian sense).

I say that this is strange, but part of the explanation is quite simple. If you go to Iraq right now, you have a very good chance of getting killed, particularly if you leave the Green Zone or U.S. bases. For all the happy talk about how the number of deaths is quite low compared to Ypres and Verdun, everyone -- everyone -- understands that for an American to go and walk the streets of Baghdad is akin to suicide. So it's for preferable for conservatives to stay in this country and complain about Democrats than it is for them to go Iraq and get killed.

It would be different if 90 percent of the people complaining about the problems in Iraq werent the exact same people complaining about Iraq right when we went in or the same people who were complaining six months after we went in.

The polls says your math is wrong.

And what's funny about your complaint here is this: Those of us who opposed the war on prudential grounds were right. We were right, and the rest of you were wrong. Doubtless you were wrong for the best of reasons, just like the Portland Trailblazers surely thought long and hard before they drafted Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.

Rather than bitch that the war's opponents were right for the wrong reasons, you might devote some bandwidth to figuring out why you guys got it so wrong.

This war was a risk, but it was a good calculated risk. And it deserved and still deserves the best chance we can give it.

While I disagree about the ex ante assessment of risk, I agree that we must now make the best of the situation. (E.g., by letting John Kerry -- who might have fucked things up -- run the war instead of George W. Bush -- who already had.) But, as I said in another post, the White House and the Pentagon have gotten everything they asked for. The defeat is on them.

From day one there has been a concentrated effort to make the war look bad for partisan purposes and this effort has helped undermine a noble and prudent cause.

In a concrete way, explain how the war's opponents in the U.S. have "undermined" the cause. What a crock.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
given them a big feast and a good time, maybe even opened up the Harem,

How do we get in on this?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Me. the troll. The guy who quit trying to be for real here, leaving you all to banter with only Spank.

I started this morning with a topic that I thought was somewhat interesting, and certainly was unique for this board.

Hours later, other than SS touch one tangent, you all continue to expound on what the bloggers you have read tell you about the current and past states of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do you really enjoy this?

I thought you made an interesting point, but then signalled with the gratuitous swipe at HRC that you weren't interested in talking further about it. People in most states effectively have no role in presidential elections. If California is going red or Texas is going blue, so are the rest of the country.

Ending the electoral college would change this. You would much more likely see candidates visit San Francisco or Houston, because those visits would excite voters and increase turn-out. But you seemed to think it was stupid to talk about that.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
McCarty was dim alcoholic swine. They should've flayed him with rusty razors and hung a flag of his skin in the Capitol to remind people of what happens to that kind. That his grotesque spectacles created a vigilance aginst Communism gives him no pass in my book. Cirrhosis was too kind. He stood for every abuse of power conceivable.

I may have already said this, but my grandfather and McCarthy were in the Marine reserves together during WWII. My grandfather brought him over to the house, and he drank himself silly. After he left, the maid told my grandparents that she would not be in the house at the same time as him again. I have always wondered what happened.

Anyway, there was something seriously wrong with that guy.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
He will be seen as the guy who woke us up to what had been going on for a decade, and set the policy of no longer ignoring militant Islamic actions.

I think future historians will attribute America's awakened state to the actions of the nineteen suicide bombers, and not to George W. Bush's response to them.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
I don't support everything that McCarthy did, but his effect has been greatly exagerrated by the left.

You think the left misguidedly focuses on McCarthy's effect on popular sentiment, as opposed to the few people he himself got fired?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
I have to hand it to you GGG that is something that I did not know and is definitely contrary to the conventional wisdom. At least the conventional wisdom Ty and I have been subscribing to.

The point I was trying to make was not about boundaries, it was about the concept of an Iraqi "nation." Europe is full of nations now where other polities once were.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
For some reason I piss them off and you don't.

The conversation we've been having about Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't piss me off in the slightest, and I think it's been very interesting.