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Here We Go Again
Critics of President George Bush’s surge/escalation/augmentation plan for Iraq are undercutting the troops (does this include the military present and past who’ve criticized it?).
Can you guess who said this? Here’s more…and you’ll know:
Cheney brought Osama bin Laden in to the argument, saying that attempts to reverse U.S. policy on Iraq was exactly “what he wants.” He claimed that al-Qaeda pays a good deal of attention to criticism in Congress and polls. He said war decisions can’t be based on polls. Reminded by Wallace this it was more than polls — voters had spoken loudly in November — Cheney said that didn’t change the matter.When Wallace pointed out that many Republicans opposed the latest plan, Cheney said, “Chuck Hagel hasn’t been with us for a long time.”
But aren’t there more….Republicans…opposing it….than…Chuck… Hagel?
(Just a question..)
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30 Responses to “Here We Go Again”
Joe, which statements of the Vice-President’s, specifically, do you think are not accurate? Do you assert that opposition to the war does not in fact undercut the troops? Do you claim that Osama Bin Laden does not, in fact, want us to abandon Iraq in defeat? Do you think it incorrect that al-Qaeda follows American Congressional and public debate very closely?
Look around Dubya.
The first thing you do if you’re trying to sell a new plan to the public or congress, is to relocate Dick Cheney to an undisclosed location.
Just a hint. We’re talking about Iraq here. Osama bin Laden just loves seeing America bogged down in Iraq.
Only a kool-aid drinker would make that blanket assertion. Sorry, but opposition to a horrendous mis-execution of military strategy is seeking to correct a mistake that is currently endangering our troops and losing our war on terror. We should be – and could be – doing much much better actually getting at the real terrorists with amply supported troops following strategic and tactical doctrines that make a great deal more sense. Only someone in Cheney’s (or Bin Laden’s!) camp would wish the US to continue on the current disasterous course.
And incindently according to the VP and you well over half the US population is actively against our troops and pro-terrorist. Its crap partisan hackery like that which has gotten Bush into this no-win situation he finds himself today. Cheney is demonstrating the lazy man’s definition of leadership since he is incapable of actually demonstrating the real thing now that its demanded of him. Good riddance.
Pat,
I have no doubt that Osama is very happy that the Bush Administration has led us into a hole so deep in Iraq that it is quite likely that we can’t get out of it. I don’t think anyone undercut the troops more than those who sent too few of them in with too little equipment and has done as little as possible to correct the situation because of political considerations.
I have no doubt that the greatest thrill Osama has had in years is when the Bush administration abandoned our unfinished tasks in Afghanistan to go off on their Iraq adventure leaving him and his to rebuild and attack Afghanistan again.
I also have no doubt that most of the Middle East thinks that Bush’s pronouncements of how he views their part of the world should be on their equivalent of the Comedy Channel.
The truth and Cheney opening his mouth and speaking are incongruent. I’m still waiting for the surge in FTD and Morley candy orders for our troops in Iraq. The insurency is also in it’s last throws. FTD will get an order when Mary makes Cheney a grandfather again(Alan Keyes family values – LOL).
America’s had it with this insulting “you’re with us or with the terrorists” line. “Criticizing us is hurting the troops” is just more of the same. Those of you who really don’t want to see the GOP vanish entirely need to jump off of Bush’s coattails. I’m content to watch this entire line of divisive bull drive the GOP into single digits, but those of you who want to stop the bleeding need to consider whether this helps or hurts your cause. Now you’re treating 70% of the country as terrorist sympathizers or as hurting the troops? How smart is that?
But if you insist on playing that game, doesn’t Sadr’s decision to have the militia cool it for awhile prove that Iran wants Bush to appear successful? So supporting Bush is what the terrorists want. See? Supporting the surge is undermining our troops and the terrorists will win.
“Undercut” is a statement of effect, not motive. To say that the relentless criticism of President Bush and the war in Iraq has “undercut” the troops’ ability to carry out their missions is not to say that those doing the undercutting desire that outcome, just that their actions will have that effect.
Now, by show of hands, how many people who are trumpeting the current poll numbers said the war was ok back when it started because polls showed that 70% of the people supported it at that time?
As for al Qaeda’s desires, here’s what al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s deputy, said were al Qaeda’s 4 long-term goals: 1. expel American forces from Iraq. 2. Establish a caliphate over as much of Iraq as possible. 3. Extend the jihad into neighboring countries, including Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. 4. War against Israel.
He also made clear, in the same letter, that the goal was not just to get the U.S. out. “And it is that the Mujaheddin must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal. We will return to having the secularists and traitors holding sway over us.”
For those of you who say we’ve ignored Afghanistan, are you in favor of war with Pakistan? You’re quick to condemn your imagined secret Bush plan to invade Iran. Do you think we should have pursued Bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan, over the strong objections of the Musharraf government and in violation of their sovereignty? Why is your proposed solution for Iraq to have the Iraqis do more, but in Afghanistan, it’s have the U.S. do everything?
what is happening in iraq right now is exactly what bin laden wanted.
he wanted to draw the united states into a morass that we could not get out of, and spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives to do.
for bin laden, this is a win/win situation
we stay….we still dont defeat the insurgency, support continues to grow for those who wish us harm
we leave…they claim victory, support continues to grow for those who wish us harm
and the fact remains….the prez cannot say we are winning the war, and there is no need for more troops, and then less than a year later do a 180 and say that we need more troops because things are going as well as they thought.
and darth cheney is just plain evil
PatHMV–
I don’t see how public lack of support for the war undercuts the troops. No one I know thinks the troops are to blame for anything. Everyone I know thinks the troops do their best to carry out an uncertain policy.
I don’t see why Osama bin Laden wouldn’t want us to stay in Iraq forever. It’s not like he’s anywhere near Iraq, himself.
I’m reasonably certain that even some citizens of the Neatherlands follow American Congressional and public debate very closely. So wouldn’t al-Queda?
So, in my opinion at least, the Vice President is one for three on your questions.
You really ought to read up some more on al Qaeda, Bin Laden, and their goals. They want the U.S. out of Iraq because they want to force all westerners (not just the U.S.) and all Christians (and Jews) out of the Middle East, because that “belongs” to Muslims. Al Qaeda will not give up until it is either defeated or it has established a Taliban-style government of Sharia law over the entire region.
They won’t ultimately succeed, of course, because there are enough people in the region who would, in the end, oppose that goal. But there are enough sympathizers to that viewpoint that al Qaeda could wreak a lot of havoc along the way.
BYG- OSB definitely wanted us to stay in Iraq indefinitely. He knows that the USSR went down in defeat after a long grueling war with the muhajadeen in Afghanistan, and hoped we would get stuck there also. Instead we got stuck in Iraq. When you look at our weakened position in the world and the strain on our military as a result of Iraq, how can that not be a big win for him???
PatHMV–
I’m perfectly willing to take you at your word on the long-term goals of al-Queda and bin Laden. But I think the war in Iraq is probably serving their short-term goals: recruitment and distraction.
By the way, I’m sure you’re familar with polls showing that a majority of Americans are opposed to the war. (ABC News article HERE.) I imagine you haven’t thought about it this way–but do you really think a majority of Americans are trying to undercut the troops?
Once again, “undercut” refers to the effect, not the intent. As an example, I believe that there are committed socialists who sincerely believe that socialism will produce a better society than capitalism. I believe they’re very wrong, and that their efforts to bring about socialism will cause a great deal of harm, but I don’t believe that they desire to harm society.
To return to the topic at hand, yes, I think that having 70% of the American public voicing opposition to the war as it’s going now (and polls are just not very good at telling us how strongly people feel about something, how hardened their opinions are… a couple of weeks of good results from the surge would change those numbers) does in fact undercut the ability of the troops to carry out their mission. It makes it more difficult. It hurts their morale. Talk of withdrawal emboldens our enemies and encourages them to hold on a while longer.
Does that make the people who oppose the war bad people, or unpatriotic? No. Should they all shut up just because of it? I’d kind of like them to, but they have a right to speak out. But the Vice President, and I, are also free to speak out about the effect we think the strident opposition to the war has on our troops and their mission.
How is it that even 1/3 of this country still believes an administration that told us-we were absolutely winning two months ago, that they were absolutely keeping Rumsfeld for the long haul, that the war would be a “cakewalk”, that reconstruction in Iraq would pay for itself with oil revenue, that we’d be greeted as liberators, that the Iraqi army and police forces were making steady progress, that the insurgency was being wiped out, etc. etc. Either they are horrendous planners or just plain out deceptive with the public or both. So we’re supposed to paint targets on the backs of 21,000 more of American’s finest young men and women who have been either detained past the end of their tour of duty or rushed over there before being fully trained, because it might work this time????
I’d say Chuck Hagel has more credibility than Cheney any day. Hagel can look you square in the eye and actually consistently make sense. He has served as a grunt on the ground- while Cheney dodged the draft. No contest there.
There is a difference between long term and short term goals. Bin Laden doesn’t simply want us out of that part of the world. He wants the process to cost us blood and treasure. He knows that there is no simple way to achieve what he wants and that we will have to suffer a great deal before his goals are achieved. The Bush administration is helping him meet his goals better than any of their critics.
Most of those people you list arre not Republicans. The American Republican Guard has been purging for absolute purity, capitalism is to be government contracts to the chosen and foreign policy is attacking Iran and Syria because things worked out so well in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.
There may be an effort by those considered Republicans to reclaim the party, but usinmg an analogy the old Republican party is like the Bolsheviks of 1905 and the Bushevik party is rapidly becoming the Bolsheviks of 1935. Notice the things directly out of Orwell, double plus ungood thoughts are why bad things happen, thus the media destroyed our victory, there are only 2 ways to think about the war, for terrorism or against terrorism, the stripping away of complex semantics.
I consider those who defend the Republican party as now ruled morally eqivalent to those leftists who found rationalizations for the Bolsheviks or those moderates who claimec Uncle Ho ran a basically agricultural reformist arty rather than a movement tightly bound to Comintern.
And purging the impure is a part of the movement. This is logically were it’s heading. Hopefully we have safeguards built into our system crazed ideas such as millions upon millions of Kluxers in the twenties have been moderated before, but read the comments on the the rightist blogs, Democrats are traitors, vigilante action is justified and Michelle Malkin innocently posting phone numbers and addresses of the ungood.
We have already had people mailing packets of white powder. These people are thugs. But then again as Sinclair Lewis wrote: “It can’t happen here.”
Even though it is repeated often and rarely challenged, this seems to me a curious claim. After all, it was the Democratic Party that made by far the most vigorous effort to purge internal dissent (Joe Lieberman) while Republican leadership tolerates extremely vigorous dissent from the likes of Hagel and Brownback with ZERO evidence of retribution.
Jason–
It’s more than just an assertion that moderate Republicans are subject to challenges by more conservative elements of the Republican Party. It’s a completely true fact. Anyone with an internet connection can look it up.
For example, moderate Republican congressman Joe Schwartz of Michigan was defeated in a primary by a candidate backed by the Club for Growth. (Hotline link HERE.)
Republican senator Lincoln Caffee was challenged in his most recent primary election, also by a candidate supported by the Club for Growth.(Townhall link HERE.)
And in the 2004 elections, Republican senator Arlen Specter also had a primary challenger supported by the Club for Growth. (A link from National Review complaining about Rick Santorum’s support for Specter is HERE.)
You’re entitled to your own opinion, Jason. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
Don’t you care about your own credibility?
The Hotline link for the above comment is–please let it work!!-HERE.
The National Review link–maybe?–is HERE.
If it were possible to preview comments, I might fix my mistakes before posting them.
Be Your Guest… I never saw Jason say that Republicans were “never” subject to attacks from more conservatives, just that the Democrats, on the whole, did it more. Finding a handful of examples does not itself refute Jason’s point.
I would also point out that your examples aren’t all that hot. The Club for Growth is not the Republican Party. The official Republican Party entities supported Lincoln Chaffee and Arlen Specter (and I presume Schwarz, but I didn’t follow that race that closely). And Chaffee and Specter won their primaries, in the end.
Meanwhile, the currently leading Republican presidential candidates are John McCain (no arch-conservative) and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom had prominent speaking roles at the last GOP national convention. Can you name the last anti-gay-marriage, pro-life Democrat to be given a prominent speaking role at their national convention?
PatHMV–
I’d prefer to keep the goalposts where Jason placed them. To that end, here’s a quote from Jason:
His single example of this was Joe Lieberman. Didn’t the “official” Democratic Party support Lieberman until he lost the Democratic primary, at which point he he was no longer the “official” Democratic candidate?
By the way, the netroots, or whatever group that preferred Ned Lamont to Lieberman, is not the Democratic Party.
As usual, Jason is still in denial.
The Democrats tried to purge Joe Lieberman. By sending Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Mary Landriau, and a host of others to CT to campaign on his behalf.
Now, what Jason wanted, was for all of those people to continue to campaign for Lieberman after he lost the Democratic Primary.
Sort of like how Jason kept campaigning for John McCain after he lost the GOP primary in 2000.
You did do that right Jason?
Hey, Pat, Jason and Marc. I’m with you. The Repub noise machine, the rightist blogs, Bush/Cheney and you guys are doing exactly what I want to see right now: alienating voters with rabid claims of hurting our troops and treason (not you guys specifically. I mean Bill O, Coulter et al. You just wish dissenters –uh, that would be the majority of Americans–would just shut up.)
Your team, and you’re free to disagree, has maligned patriots and even crippled and decorated war veterans and now many thousands of families who have made the ultimate sacrifice of their sons’ life or limb. Your side continues to equate disagreement with “the Deceiver” is unpatriotic, and the less people believe in Bush, and the more you guys continue to trumpet their divisive hate speech, the farther down your party is going to fall.
This is utterly reprehensible, and if this is what the GOP stands for now, may it go down in flaming, ignoble and total defeat, for as long as this hateful screed rules your party.
You don’t see the damage this has done to your party. Some of my friends were among your top donors. No more. Now they’re saying “I have no party”.
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy, all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.â€? JOSEPH GOEBBELS
Wow. Great quote, Jason S. Here are a few more:
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.�
—General Douglas MacArthur
The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.
~Tacitus
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official…
~Theodore Roosevelt
I’ve never been one to accuse our government of acting like fascists, but they have used – conciously or unconciously- authoritarian tactics on their own people, haven’t they? John Dean’s book “Conservatives Without Conscience” gives a good description of this trend.
If Democrats were so bent on driving out moderates would they have enlisted candidates like Heath Shuler, Tester, Jim Webb or Bob Casey to run for office? The party now has a large wing – the Blue Dogs that don’t subscribe to liberal orthodoxy. Another sign of the influence of moderates is their election of moderate Steny Hoyer in the House over anti-war Jack Murtha.
Lieberman was actually closer to Bush’s position on the war than many Republicans. He urged his Democratic colleagues to be more loyal to Bush in a time of war- which was extremely annoying. One of his first decisions since the election was to drop the subpoena for WH records during Katrina. So, he has some issues of loyalty of his own.
And Club for Growth has run conservative GOP candidates in primaries in an attempt to defeat Republican moderates.
If Al Queda’s long term goal #1 is the US Out of Iraq, what was their Long term Goal #1 in February of 2002 when we were not in Iraq? Was it trying to find more airplanes to hijack? Does sending 130,000 (+/-) troops and $400 Billion to Iraq change that goal for them? Does pulling 130,000 (+/-) troops out of Iraq change that goal?
Hopefully Shuler does a better job in Washington than he did quarterbacking my R*dskins, that’s for sure!
Motive
According to official U.S. government sources, the September 11th attacks were consistent with the mission statement of al-Qaeda. The overarching motivation for the present al-Qaeda campaign was set out in a 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu-Yasir Rifa’i Ahmad Taha, Shaykh Mir Hamzah, and the (Amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh, Fazlur Rahman).[53]
The fatwa lists three “crimes and sins” committed by the Americans:
* U.S. military occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.
* U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people.
* U.S. support of Israel.
The fatwa states that the United States:
* Plunders the resources of the Arabian Peninsula.
* Dictates policy to the rulers of those countries.
* Supports abusive regimes and monarchies in the Middle East, thereby oppressing their people.
* Has military bases and installations upon the Arabian Peninsula, which violates the Muslim holy land, in order to threaten neighboring Muslim countries.
* Intends thereby to create disunion between Muslim states, thus weakening them as a political force.
* Supports Israel, and wishes to divert international attention from (and tacitly maintain) the occupation of Palestine.
C Prez- Yes, I remember those days well! He never lived up to his promise, but thought that after he was traded that his performance perked up! That seems to be part of the Washington quarterback syndrome, lol, as they never seem to be able to get a good one who lasts more than one season, and have had many who were replaced midseason. Shuler seems like a decent guy- but very conservative for the Democrats!