the movie Rendition, I prefer the movie "Rescue Dawn". Rescue Dawn is the best movie of the year - bar none. The movie is a true story of a Navy pilot and his escape from a Viet Cong POW camp.
In one scene the Colonel of the POW camp promises Lt. Dengler food and other comforts if he signs a paper denouncing America. Lt. Dengler looks at the piece of paper and says:
"I can't do that, no, no, hell no, America has been good to me, the Navy gave me my wings, I am not going to sign that, absolutely not".
For this refusal to sign this statement against America, Lt. Dengler suffered horribly. To say he was tortured is an understatement. In the end he won his freedom. He never quit. God Bless him. Rest in Peace Lt. Dieter Dengler, and thank you for your service to our country.
I hope President Bush continues Rendition to keep the evil-doers from harming our loved ones.
-- Modified on 11/1/2007 10:25:07 PM
all the explosions and flying spittle make me so hot!!
goes to BreakerMorant for somehow conflating the torture of a Vietnam POW for his refusal to denounce America with the random abduction and torture of just about anyone by the Bush Crime Family with no recourse.
Please, please, please tell me what drug you are taking. If I can get my hands on it I might just be able to cruise through what's left of the most corrupt and venal government since the fall of the Roman Empire in ignorant bliss too.
who don't really think in terms of "the muslims" having most of the same problems as any schmoe.
The logic is that muslims are all clones of Osama bin Laden, not as I would suspect that Mohammed 6-pack has less in common with Osama, than I do with GW.
And there are large parts of the muslim world that, in groups, will act as jihadists, given the opportunity. What Breaker & Co won't recognize is
(1) that a lot of that may be the immediate result of our own indiscriminate bombing, whether or not perceived as a crusade - few people like foreigners bombing their countrymen. You have to be pretty fucking obtuse to miss that, but a lot of us missed it in RVN, and even more of us - GWB being the chief - are missing it now.
(2) That regardless of their desire, many of them are such fucking pathetic 3rd worlders that they might was well hope to fuck Madonna.
(3) That there are one hell of a lot of muslims who are pretty cool about material possessions that the west offers, and have no fucking desire whatever to pick a fight - unless of course we come to their town to save them from the local parties.
To the Breakers, it's just a matter of being a John Wayne, like in the movies. There's no sense that every pilot that gets captured has to be supported by the scut work logistics of an air wing, even if in fact that's what the Breakers do - and that the pilot's failure was getting his ass shot down in the 1st place, as the leaders' failure was putting him in a place where he could be shot down.
To the Breakers, it's US vs. THEM, the GOOD GUYS vs. the BAD GUYS. Never mind that it simply doesn't work that way in real life; just as we all rationalize from some sort of model, they are rationalizing from the movie model.
So the Breakers' solution is really pretty simple: find the jihadists and kill them. They want to give GW Bush every possible tool to find and kill jihadists, and aren't too picky about a few collateral ragheads here & there (which is a matter of degree to me).
What the Breakers think is that the questions of liberals are keeping GW from doing his job; not GW's own native spasticity and stupidity. I'm normally pretty sympathetic to such a view, except that this war is going pretty much as Jim Webb & I thought it would, ie a complete fucking lashup, and for all material purposes, a re-run of Vietnam.
What the Breakers aren't seeing is what Petraus points out in his own COIN FM, that in co-in ops, the people are the terrain, and you move at your own risk. JUST LIKE MAO ZEDONG SAID!!! 70 years ago.
But you see, most of the Breakers and Quads think it's just a matter of bulling our way thru this problem, ie, the problem of Mideast politics. I have much respect for bulling a way thru problems, but IMHO, this is not something we can plan on bulling our way thru.
If you have ever worked on a military staff and been asked, "exactly how the fuck do you think this is going to work?!" you have a completely different perspective than the guy out watching our fire support do its shock & awe thing. Because believe me, the Republican Guard knew exactly where we were coming, and couldn't do a damn thing about it - that's how overwhelming the US military is. They STILL can't change a diaper, convince a voter, and they don't do social or even police work. The US (and most) military forces SUCK at political work. Notice OTOH how much emphasis the Chicoms and NVA put on political work, EVEN among their own people.
THAT is the reason I perked up when I noticed the Army was using field anthropologists in Afghanistan. All politics is local, and foreign armies are the absolute worst at it.
-- Modified on 11/2/2007 12:31:51 PM
we could say Petreaus but we already got him pegged as a fuckstick....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21602649/
-- Modified on 11/2/2007 9:46:44 PM
but everybody's job has parts that suck, and making up bullshit excuses to Congress for GW is part of his. Working for people who have their heads up their asses would be another.
One month's falling casualty list doesn't mean a whole lot.
Just like you bought into your brother's pet project telling the wife it'd run up in 3 weeks, and you'd be out in a year with a handy profit. 4 years later you've pissed it away and are afraid to get out because of open end liability, and the wife is PISSED.
What do you do?
Casualties fluctuate like stock prices, and don't determine whether you "win" or not in the end anyway.
The questions are, (1) what's our goal? (2) what's our plan? (3) what's it going to cost? There's just no way that you can avoid the fact that GW sold Americans a bill of goods.
Whatever the answers are here, GW has fucked them up good. If the answer is killing jihadists, why hasn't he broken out the nukes?
It seems to me the answers are much more complex, and GW just isn't up to the task. He never learned he shouldn't start things he can't finish, and is leaving it up to us. Shit, that's pretty much his resume - get into some mess, and get bailed out by somebody else.
OK, it's not just GW. It's the GOP and their constituencies, some of which are venal, and some just stupid-assed.
-- Modified on 11/3/2007 1:42:08 PM
if you were my commander i'd be worried that it's you who's stuck on fixed ideas...
You're right, he ain't.
But nor can we expect him to make silk purses out of sows' ears. Just another good man who looks as if he's been asked to do the impossible, and take the hit when he can't salvage ths shipwreck of a policy.
well from where i sit, bush's biggest mistake was thinking that once free of saddam, the iraqi people would put aside differences and work together. shame on him (and me) for thinking they were capable of doing that,,,
but, we broke it, now we have to fix it and from these reports it seems, for the time being, things are getting better. I know for the those overinvested in Defeat, the news is troubling but oh well...
longer term, we as a nation, and the people of Iraq will be better off if we can stabalize things to the point they can self-rule to the best of their ability. so much better than if we had just loaded up the ship and left the sunnis to the wrath of the shia...dontcha think?
-- Modified on 11/3/2007 12:59:43 PM
after Gulf 1 that taking Baghdad and occupying Iraq would be "a quagmire".
Any undergraduate could see that displacing the Tito that held together an artificial state was going to be pulling the pin on a grenade and then going to sit on the gas tank.
And it's just as easy to see that we'd be exposed to the same problems as in Vietnam, and ask, why the fuck should we do that instead of chasing bin Laden? ANY troops in Iraq would have to be taken from the effort to hunt down bin Laden, but that doesn't seem to have bothered the GOP.
Bush didn't think the iraqis would put aside their differences. He didn't think AT ALL. Cheney seems to have figured that (a) the war would provide a good way to prolong and consolidate GOP power by feeding GOP constituencies, and (b) continued predictable instability provides an excuse for the military presence needed to guarantee enforcement of oil legislation that divvies up the money to the oil companies and the dozen or so sheiks that they need to buy off. IOW, you use the military to freeze out the maximum number of people by calling it a war here, and over there, you just shoot them.
GW parked the troops in a kill zone without any orders. No mission, and what's more, no training in what they knew they were going to face.
We broke it, but we don't have to fix it. Our 1st obligation is to ourselves. We cannot do ANYTHING if we don't look out for ourselves 1st.
The 1st question I would ask is, ARE we fixing it? CAN we fix it? If we can, I don't see that Blackwater is helping one hell of a lot. We're hiring Blackwater because it feeds the GOP consituency, and we can't draft - a draft would create an open revolt, because Americans simply do not want this war enough to fight it - and particularly the Republicans.
How many generations do you think it will be, before we change Iraqi cultural attitudes? How long do you think it will be before they hate us for being foreign occupiers? We're already there, aren't we? How would YOU react if the Mexicans came to save you from the politicians you hate the most?
Yeah, I'd impeach him and the whole mob. Pelosi could tell us to sell Girl Scout cookies in Bagdad and the results couldn't possibly get worse.
2 quick pts.
1 i believe the thinking w/ cheney was that 10 years of sanctions UNDER CLIFTON, that killed 1/2 million themselves made conditions right internally. granted, this was a mistake but i don't think you can quote cheney 91' and think the would believe NOTHING had changed into 01-02'''
2. things are changing, we do have co-in training and it's showing results. this is NOT THE TIME to send the message to locals we're on our way out the door.
How many SVN signed up for the program after walter cronkite turned the tide?
this is the message Ried/Pigloosey have been sending and it is a counterweight we've had to endure...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21611469/
"Granted, this was a mistake..."
The wheels of justice grind slowly, but not as slowly as enlightenment marches.
If we limit ourselves to party admissions, Cheney's explanation (of the quagmire comment) was "9/11 changed everything". Not that it *wouldn't* be a quagmire, or that we could manage it.
The only logic to that is that, after 9/11, we NEED quagmires, ie, unprofitable, indefinite fights.
Of course that's nonsense & total BS. That's saying, since we're in danger, we need to look for losing fights. And of course he won't talk about it any more than that, because that is his most convincing argument.
We can't even consider what we OUGHT to do, as a matter of ethics, until we've done what we HAVE to do, to preserve our own power & resources. Otherwise we don't have choices. Our ethical priorities have to be to keeping our own troops alive, 1st.
2nd, you hope things are changing, and you don't want to encourage insurgents by leaving. Well, my problem has always been that this is not just throwing good money after bad, but it was harebrained project to begin with. Like sinking more & more money into your brother-in-law's latest multi-level marketing bullshit, except this one kills people, and has TRILLION $$ bills.
Look, we went thru this "body count" thing in RVN. It's bullshit, and every LCpl knows it. 1st, you can't be sure, and 2nd, bodies don't tell you if you've accomplished your mission. In fact, captured weapons are just as good an indication.
Frankly, I don't trust much of any information coming out of there. Remember Cheney worked for Nixon, and helped him drag out the Vietnam debacle.
You saw it time & again, it wasn't that the NVA/VC were all that hard to beat in the field; it was that the southerners really didn't give a shit. The locals didn't want us there. Just as in Iraq, the only people who wanted us there are the 1% making money off us directly.
It's not about encouraging the enemy or anybody else. It's about whether we can do the job, and the 1st task is to define the job. The enemy figures out for themselves who is winning, by whether they can get a bead on us before we get them. And that's the counterinsurgency problem.
The job is NOT depose Saddam or the Republican Guard. That's done. What is LEFT to be done, is reform the Iraqi state and culture into some sort of a stable state.
Guess what? The Army can't do that. That's not a military job. It's up to the Iraqis, and bluntly, they'd rather fight each other.
How can we keep them from fighting each other?
Simple. Buy them out. Tell the 2 biggest dudes, look, we'll give you a cut of the oil money and a ration of ammo. You play them off against each other, and let them murder all the small fry.
The problems come when they wise up, and gang up on you, and want a bigger cut. Really not much you can do about that, it's a risk you take. The best thing you can do, is keep some family hostage, and hold their supply lifeline, and keep their ammo dumps & motor pools registered, so you can blow them on 3 minutes' notice.
The 2nd problem is, the minute you turn your back or leave, it's like you were never there. We're talking about occupying this place as long as we want a voice, and Iraq isn't any Korea, ie small place with limited access.
The GOP would never have made GW make this big a blunder. It's not a blunder, and it's not about Iraq. It's about controlling Washington DC.
Anybody that thinks we're gonna reform Iraqi culture is high. If we wanted to do that, we'd have sent McDonald's & Pepsi. Seriously. The Army creates a political REACTION, just as it would here.
Yeah, but we simply didn't have to break it. And lots of "responsible" people knew better, in the not-so-distant past, even though they allowed themselves to forget, and worse still were convinced to forget.
Saddam provided order but no justice. Now Iraq enjoys neither order nor justice. That's progresss all right, if you're walking backwards.
But in the end, you are right -- we're responsible for turning a common cold into viral pnuemonia. The least we could do is manifest a sense of responsibility and call the doctor and pick up the RX tab.
Though we could have been less-than-cosmically ignorant and left bad enough alone. Sigh.
i guess if you forget about the tens of thousands of kids that were dying every year as the result of UN sanctions that were in place....
and if you stick your head in the sand and not listen to the dulfur report that says saddams plan was to resume WMD programs AFTER sanctions were lifted...
and for good measure, if you were in on the oil for food scam UN scam then yeah, leaving well enough alone was a good deal...
butcha know? as time goes on, if things keep coming together, being "right" way back when won't look so "right" afteralll....
the GOP is as stupid as GW sounds. It completely begs credibility.
So my approach is to reverse-engineer the situation, looking at what the HMFIC is doing, because I know he can change his plan if he doesn't like the results he's getting.
If he isn't changing anything, it's because, on balance, he's getting the results he wants.
So where does that logic lead you?
only what I want. And you'd know that beyond a reasonable doubt.
A lot of the problem seems to be that the GOP/GW doesn't understand that co-in ops arise out of political problems, and there is damn little that a foreign army can do directly about those.
Or, it's also possible and even probable that they understand that very well, and that is their plan.