NoDick30mm,

You mean avoiding responsibility from dictators we no longer train, arm, and support. How convenient. Two words: Palavi and SAVAK.

Look up Resolution 1441, Raj, if you can, and read the fact of what Saddam’s noncompliance was. Since you insist that there was no other reason whatsoever to remove Saddam, you might as well see the whole truth.

And actually, Raj and Chandler, containment is the liberal’s way of avoiding responsibility for the death of millions of people. “Containing” Saddam and Kim Jong-il means that you expect them to act rationally and not starve/torture/mutilate/maim/destroy their people and their countries to carry out their insane designs. It doesn’t work.

I’m glad my house is paid for.

He was contained.
Just like North Korea.

I’ll admit that I haven’t been following this thread. North Korea is being contained by the PRC and SKorea, both of which apparently want the US to butt out. They believe that they can contain the NKorean regime, and the beligerence from the Bushies is only causing them problems in trying to do so. Kim Jung Il isn’t going to live forever.

No, it was based on what GWBush said, and a report from the NYDaily News from March 9, 2002. I’m sure that you know how to do a Google search.

Saddam should never have been supported in the first place. However, blaming the fact that Dems left him in power and proactively worked to keep him there on Reagan is nonsensical.

I think that assessment is based on the Michael Moore and DNC version of history, which shows Saddam as a benevolent and beloved ruler presiding over a kite-flying paradise.

I’m villifying you for God’s sake. Pay attention!

“What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?”

I was opposed to the actions in Yugoslavia for two reasons. 1- I didn’t have a clear idea of why we were getting involved. and 2- Clinton’s “no risk” military involvement struck me as fundamentally immoral. In combination the two issues led me to believe that the situation there didn’t actually merit our involvement. No, we shouldn’t risk our people if we can help it, but if a cause is not *worth* American deaths then it sure as heck isn’t worth anyone elses deaths either. Dropping bombs kills people. The rhetoric at the time seemed rather clear that our involvement would only be tolerated if it could be accomplished without risk. (Shades of Mogadishu.)

Yes, that changed over time as we became involved.

Yes, the area was turned over to UN peacekeepers. Which is what I often hear we should do in Iraq because the UN, by definition, is legitimate.

Often enough, definitions are simply wrong.

Interesting comment: “The older I get, the more optimistic I get.”

Me too. I’ve been thinking recently about how this may be related to the stereotype of the teenage liberal who becomes the thirty-year-old conservative…

I’m not sure that “optimistic/pessimistic” captures it precisely, but the conservative/liberal divide in this country definitely seems to be a glass-half-full/glass-half-empty sort of a disagreement.

It’s interesting thinking back to when I was a liberal. My perception then was that liberalism was optimistic (“we don’t need to accept how awful things are” — though that usually meant making enormous, and unrealistic, revolutionary changes to things) while conservatism was very cynical and pragmatic.

It sounds like I was in High School about five years after you — my seriously believed fear was that one day, without warning, the greater New York area would simply be vaporized by Soviet hydrogen bombs, and that would be the end of it. And I certainly believed that Reagan was both stupid and making things worse.

Probably just enough older than your sister that I had my (political) world rocked by the events in Europe in the summer of ’89 (made personal by a foreign-exchange with students from Moscow in ’88 and ’89). Give her time — eventually, at time will come when even the New York Times will have to admit that a free Iraq is flourishing, and a staunch and essential ally in the war against Islamic Radicalism (or Caliphatism or Islamofascism… or whatever we eventually settle on). Hard to say what the one defining event will be — I was convinced the purple fingers in January would be it. Perhaps it will be something more dramatic, like the first free elections in Iran — after that country is liberated by the Iraqi military next year, with some U.S. air support (tongue half-in-cheek). In any case, quite a few of this generation of young liberals will eventually wake up to discover, as we did, that the dire predictions of the doom-sayers look ludicrous with hindsight.

Anyway, rambling way to say — I agree with what you wrote.

I’m sorry to hear that you won’t have time for a detailed discussion.

Suffice it to say, I have strong disagreements with several of your points:

(a) that the rationale for the War has changed (it was the same in Bush’s first post-9/11 address, the incredibly detailed authorizing legislation passed by both houses of Congress, and every other address he’s given on the topic — though the oversimplified version presented if you only read the headlines of the articles in the paper has certainly shifted.) (longer answer — there are multiple legal justifications for the war, multiple moral justifications for the war, and multiple reasons why it’s in our national interest to have fought the war — there is no one single “reason” for the war, and never has been.)

(b) about the nature of Treasure bonds (China can’t “call those notes due” — though they can stop buying new ones, if they like — the interest schedule is preset, and already factored into our budget deficit.)

(c) about the relevance of Cuba and North Korea (yes, if we could remove those dictators without too much fuss or muss, of course we should — the question is whether the actual cost would be worth it. But neither country has that much to do with the root causes of Islamic Terrorism — so they really have very little relevance to the topic at hand.)

(d) that we went in with too few troops (we’re accomplishing our military objectives almost as quickly as we can think them up, and the pace of events is set by Iraqi political developments, not our troop numbers. More troops would result in more U.S. casualties, without speeding up the pace of Iraqi constitutional negotiations and elections at all.)

and (e) that we’re trying to “shove [democracy] down the barrel of a gun”. (You don’t force people to be free, you force their oppressors to stop preventing them from being free. That, you certainly can do at the barrel of a gun. Ask Saddam Hussein or Mullah Omar, to name two. What they’ll make of their freedom is a different question — but the signs look good so far.)

Have a nice time in Israel. I’m glad to hear that you aren’t a “cut-and-run”ner. If you’re interested in how to fix things in Iraq, you might try reading the President’s recent speech (the subject of the post we’re commenting on) or this recent address by Condoleeza Rice at Princeton or this one given the next day by General Petraeus (the officer in charge of training for the new Iraqi military) — both via tigerhawk.

Just wanted to say that I’m glad to hear you say this…

“i’m hopeful democracy will take root in iraq, but trying to shove it down the barrel of a gun is a difficult thing to do. time will tell whether it was a wise move to invade, but at this point, it’s still too bleak to have much hope.”

The older I get, the more optimistic I get. People pretty much understand the reality of their own situations and by making individual choices we usually end up with something that works well enough.

Plus I’m old enough to have lived through several cycles of doom-saying… when I graduated from highschool I truely expected never to have anything because our economy was going irrevocably down the tubes. These days people whine and I wonder at their inability to put the economy into context, afterall, unemployment isn’t between 10-14%, but apparently the negativity doesn’t depend on facts. Mutually assured distruction never happened… how much of a shock was that? I watched the Berlin wall come down and the USSR crumble… something not even concievable when I was in school. Overpopulation and the o-zone was going to destroy the entire world. The generation between myself and my baby sister (I’m 41 and she will be 31) is a generation raised to believe that having children is the ultimate destruction of one’s life and aspirations, and selfish to boot. Her friends aren’t having babies. I look at Europe, with an across the board negative fertility rate, were it not for Moslem immegrants, and I see yet another destructive cycle beginning. But people are resilient. Preaching doom isn’t any more legit coming from a secular perspective than it is coming from a pulpit.

Which is another reason I continue to get more optimistic. I was told, since I was tiny, that the world was headed down the crapper. But only a little bit of History showed that, overall, things are better for people now than they were only a few years ago and much better than they were decades ago. The simple evidence is that despite strife and chaos, the world is improving.

Bruce has a link to Iraq the Model up there. Go to it. Omar and his brother don’t paint a rosy picture but they do paint a hopeful one. The Iraqi people are smart. They stumble along like the rest of us, but they aren’t children who can’t run their own lives. They have a different culture, but are we bound by our culture? There is evidence every day that they *get it*. Adapting to a representative government isn’t going to be all that hard. Integrating may be trickier, but you know how I said that Iraqis are smart? They realize it’s going to be difficult. Iraq is as multicultural as the US. We usually only hear about the Shiite, Sunni and Kurds. There’s lots more. I hadn’t realized that the Kurds were primarily Sunni. Most people don’t realize that the Shiite majority and the Shiites in Iran are completely different language and ethnic groups. This multi-ethnicity is the normal context of of life in Iraq.

Will it work out perfectly? Not a chance. Nothing ever does. But individuals will make decisions based on the truth of their lives and it will all work out well enough.

Part of optimism, an important part, is believing and working for that good outcome. Negativity is not, by any means, more intellectually noble. A person is not smarter by being sure to point out all the bad stuff that could happen. It’s not blinders or rose colored glasses that drives optimism. In a sense it’s taking the difficulties for granted. Problems simply *are*. They come up, you deal with them. You keep the goal in sight.

You mentioned “not enough troops.” When I hear that and my reaction is to dismiss it as an issue, I’m not pretending their were enough troops, I’m simply accepting the fact that there hasn’t been a war in History that was ever done right. I don’t have that expectation. If it weren’t “not enough troops” it would be “too many” or else it would be something else entirely. Trade speed for numbers… who’s to say which is best and quite frankly, from a military standpoint, it doesn’t matter. My optimism is based on the fact that it really, truely, *doesn’t* matter. The military is set up so that any number of things will work well enough. No plan survives contact with the enemy and we’re the best military in the world because we can adapt. The military, by design, is made to function in the absence of brilliant leadership.

Seeing failure in the lack of perfection is a choice that will always see failure because it will never see perfection. It’s depressing and defeatist. I gave it up, way back when, with all that other angst stuff.