The Jerusalem Post, passing along a Japanese news account, reports that Kim Jong Il meant to skim Hawaii with his recent missile “test.”
North Korea targeted waters near Hawaii when it fired a long-range missile this week, a Japanese newspaper reported Friday.
The long-range Taepodong-2 was part of a barrage of seven missiles test-fired by North Korea on Wednesday. They all fell harmlessly into the Sea of Japan, but South Korean officials said the long-range missile had malfunctioned, suggesting it was intended for a more remote target.
Japan’s conservative mainstream daily Sankei said that Japanese and US defense officials have concluded that the Taepodong-2 had targeted US state of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, after analyzing data collected from their intelligence equipment.
The newspaper quoted unidentified Japanese and US government officials.
Let’s clear up two points up front. First, a functioning Taepodong-II should have no problem hitting Hawaii, even LA. This test failed but sooner or later they will figure out what went wrong. So the threat is definitely there. Second, North Korea would have to be insane to drop a missile on Hawaii unprovoked. Yes, I know that Kim Jong Il really is insane but is he that insane? Even if the missile carried a nuclear payload it wouldn’t scratch America’s ability to retaliate. You could factor in that an American strike, even in retaliation, would basically doom Seoul to annihalation and would start a land war that we are not prepared to fight, but I don’t think that outweighs the sheer looniness of attacking Hawaii.
Setting aside whether this report is real, it seems like something is missing here. Nobody with a pulse disagrees that the DPRK is run by a fanatical madman, possibly the worst world leader alive right now, who gleefully massacres his own people. Threatens his neighbors? And then some. K-J Il has flat-out announced that the DPRK has the worst kind of Weapons of Mass Destruction and has ongoing programs to build more. His basic economic model rests on building strategic weapons and selling them to whatever loonytunes state or non-state actor submits the winning bid. In a nutshell Kim Jong Il is everything that war supporters wrongly accused Saddam Hussein of being but more so to the nth degree.
So somebody please explain why the government remains practically catatonic on the question of North Korea.
The president, 10/8/02:
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
You know the rest. The entire presidential administration mortgaged its credibility over the threat from Iraq. The threat that wasn’t. So now you have an actual madman with WMDs and plans to sell them on the global black market. And you get…crickets chirping.
Tony Snow, dismissing concerns about North Korea yesterday:
The United States has…robust and mobile military capabilities. But again, I want to steer you away. There are attempts to try to describe this almost in breathless World War III terms. This is not such a situation.
Steve Benen lists briefly the things that the administration believes that we should talk about in breathless World War III terms. Iraq, obviously, is one.
So what’s the deal? Maybe the idea of a land war in Korea has become militarily unfeasible, in large part due to our commitment in Iraq. Maybe the administration wants to keep its powder dry for Iran, which has offered comprehensive talks since 2003. You can suggest your ideas in the comments. Whatever the cause, the disparity between our handling of a bogus threat and a threat that is very real is startling.
Jim Allen
Quick correction — Seoul is in South Korea. I think you meant Pyongyang.
Jim Allen
Oh, wait. I re-read that. Did you mean that an American retailiation against North Korea would result in an attack on Seoul by South Korea?
Steve
Tim: There is an ad for Embarq in the left margin that broadcasts a very annoying dial tone sound. Maybe you or John could do something about it.
Jim Allen
Dammit! Should read “would result in an attack on Seoul by North Korea?”
The Other Steve
What I think is interesting…
The Bush administration keeps saying that Military response is not off the table, because you know you have to keep your options open.
Ok. But then they say bribery is off the table, because they don’t want to pay a madman to not attack us.
So other than going to war, I’m curious what options we really have left?
Paul Wartenberg
The reason why we don’t really care about North Korea:
No oil.
If there was oil there BOOM we’ve have pushed thru the DMZ and forced Kim Ill to hide in one of his many golf bunkers years ago. But sadly, nope, no oil, so Bush/CheneyCo. have no concerns, none, none at all…
Santa Claus
We’re going in to Iran.
It’s not quite a done deal, but they really seem to be planning for it
Joel
Tim, are you searching for coherency in Bush policy?
fwiffo
He’s a stalinist, bat-shit crazy manchild with a napoleon complex, but provoking nuclear annihilation at the hands of the greatest miliatry superpower in the history of the world run by a power-drunk cowboy/chimpanzee? Yeah, that takes a special kind of stupid.
Nutcutter
That’s an obvious and necessary question for anyone who pays attention to the crazy people now running OUR country.
I think the answer is so obvious and so simple that we shrink from just looking it in the eye:
The war in Iraq, the situation in Korea … don’t really matter. These are just cards in the deck to be played as required by the political necessities of the moment. Just cards, like Terri Schiavo was a card, like Social Security was a card, like Wanted Dead or Alive was a card, like 911 is a card, like Swift Boats were a card and McCain’s dark baby was a card.
Everything is just a card in the game. Events, nations, people, lives, reality itself …. meaningless. All is politics and politics is all.
It is actually that simple, that elegant, and that terrible. These people don’t have ideas, Tim. They don’t know how to fashion policy and employ critical thinking.
They are immensely dangerous, and we are in big fucking trouble. That’s why we (those of us who see this and are determined to try to do something about it) are fighting this fight.
If we let these people keep going, we’re fucked.
Ancient Purple
That is exactly the problem. Remember, Seoul is only about 50 or so miles from the DMZ. McCain once stated that going to war with DPRK would mean heavy casualites in Seoul. And, one nuclear weapon would take out most of the city.
K-JI is crazy enough to go after Seoul if the U.S. were to attack.
richard
The possible upside of our inaction and essential disengagement from NoKo, even under fire, is that it may force China to engage more vigorously with the regime. In the best case, Kim’s government might collapse and China would have to invade. Having them enmeshed in their very own Iraq would be economically and geopolitically salutary to the US, I think. A Korean occupation would be forever by the occupying power, which is why the US needs to hold back. There is not one organization in North Korea that could provide any seed of a new government, and a civil society would have to be recreated without any of the advantages we failed to capitalize on in Iraq. Fortunately, the DMZ is probably sufficient to prevent a refugee crises to the South. Refugees will probably be the trigger for Chinese engagement, because the Northern border is so much longer and more porous- and the last thing the Chinese want is a vast outmigration of Koreans. In the event of regime collapse, the Chinese may have to step in and stabilize the country- the US doesn’t need to, and a Chinese occupation will probably forestall any threat of WMD spread to other rogues and terrorists.
Punchy
What he said.
The Other Steve
Actually, I don’t think that particular scenario would be good for the US.
First of all, our disengagement and the promotion of China in this context places China as the power-broker for the region. In other words, we have lost our position as a arbitrator.
That lack of position, places a great deal of concern on another power in the region, namely Japan. If Japan thinks the US is out and China is the new head dog, they are likely to reinvigorate their own weapons defense capacity.
Fair point.
But I don’t think that it would be as difficult for China to occupy North Korea. Remember, China has no concern for human rights. If they invade and then decide they are going to line up everybody and shoot every other person in the back of the head, they will do so.
I think you’re right that China might do this to halt outward refugee immigration in the event of a North Korean collapse.
But I’m still not convinced this is good for the US.
Rather this seems like another lose-lose scenario that the Bush administration has gotten us into.
VidaLoca
Nutcutter,
I agree with your main point; on some of the details I’d have a different emphaisis.
“These are just cards in the deck… [followed by a list of domestic political issues]…” Agreed. They have no domestic policy that extends beyond staying in power. Policy then becomes a mere question of what to do next to service their base.
Internationally, however, they have a real material concern, one that goes beyond politics: the geopolitics of oil and the coming point in time where the oil demand and oil supply curves cross. The former goes up, the latter goes down, and in the growing space between the two there’s hell to pay. In particular the whole ability of the US to continue to play the role of superpower comes down to petroleum and petro-economics.
Pacific rim countries: oil consumers. Central Asia/mideast/pipelineistan: oil producers. Control the latter, you control the world. Control the former, you control bupkis.
So, we work up plans to attack [cite here the New Yourker article by Hersh] a country that doesn’t have the ability to produce a nuclear weapon or the missile to deliver it while we do nothing about a country that has the former and is trying actively to develop the latter.
D. Mason
He would be crazy to not go after Seoul if we did attack. The safety of South Korea has arguably been his only deterant, his ace in the hole if you will. From his perspective it is the first logical recourse to being attacked. He doesn’t have the strength to fight an enemy of any consequence so that makes it blaze of glory time. Doesn’t it?
Slide.
Another interesting aspect of this story. South Korea is saying that the Taepodong missile lasted for 7 minutes, not the 42 seconds that this administration told us. Now if that report is true we once again have been lied to by this administration. After all this was the most watched and monitored launch in history. We must have known very precisely how long it lasted. Why would they lie to us? oh… I almost forgot, this is the Bush administration where lying is just second nature. Question: Does ANYBODY belive ANYTHING this administration says? ANYTHING?
capelza
So…this admin is pretty dismissive of the little madman from North Korea, and apparantly the really tall madman that supposedly lives in some cave.
That narrows it down to?????
Slide.
Bush got hammered on his N Korea policy at his press conference. He was not a happy camper. You can tell how pissed he was even being asked these questions.
canuckistani
I think KIJ has figured out the same thing Iran has figured out; when you have nuclear weapons, no one fucks with you.
Slide.
Exactly. Bush’s Iraq folly, rather than demonstrating strength and intimidating our “enemies” to give up their weapons, has had exactly the opposite effect. The worst President in history continues to endanger us all with his gross incompetence.
demimondian
Seoul is about 30 mi south of the DMZ, so the city’s incineration would be collateral damage to any nuclear attack on the DPRK. In addition, DPRK keeps huge masses of artillery on the northern boundary of the DMZ, to finish the job if we don’t do it for them.
The one thing which would tip the balance against DPRK would be an actual attack on the US, the ROK, or Japan. Anything short of that is just not worth responding to — the risk to Seoul and her people is too great.
moonbiter
… a functioning Taepodong-II should have no problem hitting Hawaii, even LA.
Tim, what exactly is your source for this? The Taepodong-2 is assumed to have a maximum range or 4,900km (yes, it’s a Wikipedia link, but links to primary sources can be found there). Breaking out my handy-dandy Google Earth program, I note that it’s about 7,000km to Hawaii from NK and about 9,000km to LA. Furthermore, this listed range is with the lightest payload — a heavier payload (as would be required by a primitive nuclear device) shortens the range quite a bit.
Punchy
He may be crazy, but not THAT crazy. There’s no way he starts this conflict, b/c he knows he’d be annililated. He’s trying to get our insane, nutjob neocons (neocants?) to start it for him…and if it wasn’t for Iraq, I think we’d be in there by now…
rachel
They wouldn’t drop a nuke on the DMZ; even they’re not that stupid. There’s nothing up there but landmines, deserted villages, intermittent US, ROK and DPRK patrols trying to avoid each other and wild animals. Plus it runs all the way across Korea. They’d be more likely to drop one on a target of actual military value.
That’s why I’m not worried about North Korean nukes; for the last fifty years, there have been enough of explosive and incendiary rounds aimed at Seoul to demolish it. A nuke wouldn’t kill me any deader than those would, since I live right at what would be ground zero.
From your mouth to God’s ear.
Nutcutter
Vida, the oil point is well taken. I don’t totally agree with it but it’s hard to ignore or argue the fact that there is at least a correlation between oil and policy WRT Iran versus N. Korea. Whether that correlation equals causation or not, I don’t know.
I am basically arguing that when it comes to these buttheads running our country, the oil is probably important, but nothing in the long run trumps politics. And nothing in the long run will go contrary to the idiot thoughts that dance through the heads of this stupid president and his people. If he gets up every day and things that “total victory” is something you get by stayin the course in Iraq until after November 2006, then that’s the policy, and nobody will challenge him.
He’s a fucking wanker who, like Nixon, thinks that something is good for America just because he says it is. His saying it makes it so.
max
Where were Putin’s aimed during his 7 hour nuclear war?
ACE:
An error occurred:
Invalid [] range “i-b” in regex; marked by
richard
Othersteve- good points. Thereis so little public information available about North Korea that I am quite happy to state that I am speculating in the entirety of my comments. Unfortunately, the administration has ignored and neglected the situation for so long that it is probably in the same boat. Some reponses, however, with that caveat:
What Japan thinks will stem more from top-level diplomacy between our countries than from what is revealed publicly. It would be perfectly justifiable to ramp up US forces in the South and in the Pacific theater in general in the event of a collapse in the North and any action by China that might follow. That is an opportunity of sorts, to increase forces available for the defense of Taiwan and Japan without having to deal with allegations of provocation. That would not only suit Japan just fine, but also provide a platform for dealing with GWOT issues in Indonesia if they flare up again. I think that the US is likely to remain the power in the region by being militarily unengaged, and I think that our situation in Iraq, particularly in relation to our ability to influence events in Iran, is evidence that getting an army into a swamp is as good a way to neuter yourself as any.
well I can’t argue much with that. South Korea wouldn’t take kindly to that, for what it’s worth, although that might cause them to try and force the US hand and take action to protect their countrymen. That would be the Korean war all over again. However, it’s possible that North Korea is a warlord oligopoly with Kim walking a fine line to balance various factions, rather than having an iron rule over every aspect of existence. There are certainly people there who are enriched and empowered by the illegal drugs and arms trade, who might defend their respective corners with some vigour. If the military bunkers are as extensive and widely dispersed as they believed to be, military factions might be well placed to fight on for a while. The tragedy would be, as you suggest, that really no one is especially concerned about the ongoing civilian genocide in North Korea.
Darrell
You mean Jimmah Carter and Bill Clinton lied to us when they told us that North Korea had halted their weapons development? Didn’t Carter say “we can trust the North Koreans” or similar words to that effect?
Hilarious to see the ever so naive and stupid lefties now trying to pin N. Korea all on Bush.
Darrell
So kindly old Saddam is now a “bogus” threat.. how reality based.
Darrell
I wouldn’t doubt that much of our response to the N. Korean missile launch is top secret. No doubt the US has been itching for a real test of it’s missile defense technology. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if we slapped it down to send a message, while keeping our actions military secret.
Perhaps the NYT will publish details of our response in the “public interest”.
Darrell
Oops. Should have read: No doubt the US military has been…
Jon H
Tim,
At best, the Taepodong would be able to hit Alaska.
Bush could actually use this to his advantage. If NK nukes ANWAR, there won’t be any excuse for not drilling there.
Of course, if the missile were carring crude oil and was launched by Exxon, Bush probably wouldn’t care if it messed up Alaska.
Perry Como
And think of all the earmarks Ted Stevens could get out of it.
richard
I lived in Israel during Gulf War 1.0, quite near to Dimona, and so paid a lot of attention to Saddam’s use of SCUD missiles to attack Israel in an attempt to coopt Arab nation’s support. My recollection was, that in an attempt to get the necessary range to land anywhere in Israel, the Iraqis had to remove most of the warhead and a good deal of the systems that were not absolutely essential to keeping the thing in the air. I expect that the North Koreans are doing the same thing, with the end result being that they have a limited number of glorified fireworks that would probably only kill anyone if they either landed on them directly or brought down a building on them. The chance of randomly hitting either a building or a person in Alaska is pretty slim. In any case, where is Cheney’s 1% doctine now?
chopper
and here comes darrell to try to queer the thread with talk of clinton. how unexpected.
slickdpdx
No one has mentioned Bush’s stepped up research and formulation of missle defense systems and decision to move on from the ABM treaty. I also don’t see any proposals for real alternatives to what Bush has done. Finally, you all cannot be seriously arguing that neither Iran or N. Korea would not be pursuing the technologies you are talking about, those efforts precede the Bush administration and the GWOT. Can you?
slickdpdx
i apologize for the double negative and generaly screwed up grammar in the last sentence above…
Cyrus
That’s right. Carter was apparently wrong about something in an unsourced and fragmentary quote, in a different time when things were, you know, different. Therefore, everyone who thinks Bush isn’t doing a great job is one of the “naive and stupid lefties”. That sure makes sense to me.
Oh, so they managed to dig up his nuclear weapons program? I must have missed that news. For that matter, I’d settle for WMDs. Where were the plants — north, south, east, or west of Baghdad, or all of the above, like Rumsfeld said?
Whatever Netvocates is paying you, it’s too much.
Mr Furious
Yeah. Yet for some reason KJI lobbing a half-assed missile into the Sea of Japan means my gas flew up past $3/gallon in one day..
How the fuck does that work exactly?
Darrell
Duelfer report:
Pharniel
slickdpdx – no. but we can say that instead of looking closer at N Korea (which we’ve suspected had managed to get nukes quite some time ago) and Iran (who’s been trying for-fucking-ever) after the Pakistanis started ramping up thier own WMD program to supposedly fruitfull results.
Instead of focusing on Iraq (which, hey, it’s great we gave those people freedome from sadom. it was just handled in the worst possible way and will be a textbook example of a botched initial occupation and nationbuilding for generations to come)perhaps we should be more concerned with the psychotic madman who has rased generations to worship him as a living god?
I mean, even the nutjobs in Iran have to answer to someone, KJ the second is the only Communist Monarch and has no one to answer to but himself. And he’s growing more and more batshit as he gets older.
It’s like Baron Unterbite meets Dr. Doom with a with a Japanese actress fetish.
Pharniel
Darrel – no one cares what saddam was trying to do. or what he wanted.
he wanted alot of things, sadly, the world wasn’t ready to let him do alot of them.
nice try though.
Nutcutter
Finally, a thread where Darrell can showcase his expertise on East Asian policy.
Nutcutter
Interesting. Because the lie we were told four years ago was that he was developing, not that he “aspired.”
The world is full of wannabees, we don’t start wars with them.
Fucking idiot.
LITBMueller
Personally, I think concern over a No. Korean reaction is what is driving (holding back?) the Bush Warhawks. People tend to forget that So. Korea is WAAAAYyyyyyyy more interested in unifying with No. Korea than the West is, especially the US. The administration has been doing all it can to sabotage such talk by lumping KJI in with the Axis of Evil(tm).
The Administration know that if they are perceived by the So. Koreans to be wildly overreacting to this missile “crisis,” then that could be bad news. Much like what will happen in Iraq, the temporary defense of So. Korea has lead to a permanent, and massive, US presence in Asia. As much as our 30,000 troops are there because of No. Korea, they are also there because of China. And, although the administration would love to slap down the “defiant” (i.e., he won’t do what we want) KJI, they won’t be able to just “kick his ass” like they did with Saddam because of the political dimension in So. Korea.
Darrell
How, without credible threat of force, do you imagine “the world” could have stopped him? Hilarious how you reality based types have spun Saddam into being a ‘harmless tyrant’.
VidaLoca
Darrell,
And I want a pony — but wanting a pony and having a pony, or anything approaching the means to build or acquire a pony, are two different things.
LITBMueller
Darell, Saddam was in an economic fucking box, he couldn’t fly fucking planes over 2/3 of his country, he had absolutely no control over the northern part of his country, and he couldn’t get the damn electricity to work.
When you get a clue, let us know.
N. Korea is much the same. That nighttime sattellite photo of N. Korea, where there are no lights at all, says all you need to know.
Perry Como
Magic 8-ball. The same way Bush decides foreign policy issues.
demimondian
rachel makes a bunch of good points about DPRK, the Korean DMZ, and the location of Seoul. The only one I’d quibble with is the first one.
I’m not worried about a rational DPRK nuking the DMZ. Unfortunately, I don’t see the DPRK as a rational enemy, so that’s one strike against it. Second, I’m understand that that the US itself once included a nuclear strike against the DMZ as a precautionary step in any land war in Korea; the location of the North’s tunnels is unknown, and they are assumed to be sufficiently well-stocked that their destruction would be an essential part of neutralizing what would otherwise be an effective conventional first-strike capability.
Of course, I hope I’m wrong…
Nutcutter
Go back and review the public face of the warmongering in 2002-2003. Was it a story about some tinhorn asshole in Iraq who “wanted” nukes, or was it a story about an immediate and real threat that did not, in fact, exist?
The answer is in polling for support of the war. People aren’t stupid, they know they were lied to.
The question for BJ is, how long does Darrell continue to queer these thread with this crap? What is he doing here, exactly? Is he comic relief, or …. ?
When does Darrell get revealed as spoof? Spoof at least has the quality of being what it is … a gag. What do you call Darrell?
Slide
The bush administration keeping us safe:
remember how the right wingnuts attacked the Clinton administrations policy regarding North Korea…lol… boy that bush and company have been so much more effective right? What a disaster this moron president is.
More to inspire confidence in the gang that couldn’t shoot straight:
and some more
ahhh… the foreign policy successes of Bush are hard to keep track off… war in the middleast, Somalia taken over by Islamic fundamentalists, Iran openly defying us, N Korea laughing at our threats, Iraq a disaster of huge magnitude, Russia rolling back democratic reforms, yada yada yada.. yes… Republican governace gets results.
Darrell
Are you suggesting with all the ‘duel use’ equipment found, his proven history of WMD development, and Saddam’s preservation of his WMD brain trust (documented in Kay and Duelfer reports), that he could not have immediately reconstituted his chem weapon WMD program, shortly followed by bio weapons, then nukes? even if he had to purchase technology on the black market?
This is what I mean about leftists being stupid, naive, and dangerous if you ever got power. You wonder why no one takes you lefties seriously on matters of national security? Re-read this thread to understand why
Nutcutter
Yes, and Darrell will be shocked to learn that Vladimir Putin might not be a guy you want your kids to go camping with … even though Bush has looked into his soul.
Darrell
More deep thoughts from ‘Nutcutter’
Nutcutter
No, pay attention you horse’s ass.
We’re saying, not suggesting, that the immediate threat and danger that was represented to be there was not there.
Period. Plain and simple.
How long do you think you can go on trying to spin that into something it isn’t?
Fuck off.
Nutcutter
You really want to make this a contest between you and me, Darrell?
Think it over.
capelza
Darrell, if the “leftists” who have “taken over” this site are so stupid, why do you then continue to post here? Don’t you get tired of repeating yourself. Certainly we are too stupid to come around to your way of thinking..so why waste the breath?
Is it some kind of release for you? Have you considered masterbation? It’s faster and so much more private.
Darrell
That is some funny shit. Thanks for queering the thread halfwit.
Perry Como
He may not have any Boy Scout troops close by.
Anderson
I wouldn’t doubt that much of our response to the N. Korean missile launch is top secret.
LOL!!!!!!! “Yes, our administration APPEARS incompetent, but BEHIND THE SCENES they are masterminding the whole thing!”
Here’s a thought: maybe Bush & Gore reached a compromise in 2000, and Bush took the *office* while Gore was pulling all the strings! So really it’s been a DEMOCRAT ruining things the past 5 years!
Have you tried that one yet, Darrell? Or is your “secret geniuses” theory enough to comfort you?
(I mean, come on. Darrell used to be on the ball, he used to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee … and now all he can muster is our top-secret competence? A pale shadow of the Darrell he once was ….)
Off Colfax
Seeing as how no one else has offered the most obvious snark, I’m afraid that I have to.
And my response:
Then again, we still technically have a land war in Asia going on, as there is still no formal peace treaty and neighborly exchanges of gunfire still cross the DMZ on a regular basis. Maybe we would’ve been able to avoid the whole mess, if not actually bring it to a finality, if William Goldman had written that book before the Korean War ever started.
Probably not.
Darrell
Looks like capelza is hoping to take the big Gulp.
Nutcutter
Yeah? I thought you still trying to pimp the “big scary Saddam” threat of 2002 was funny.
That is what you’re doing, right? Still pimping the runup to war that has been completely discredited even by George Fucking Bush hisself?
Fuck off, Darrell. You’re a joke.
Anderson
Are you suggesting with all the ‘duel use’ equipment found
“You have insulted me, sir! WMD’s at dawn! Choose your mass destruction!”
Nutcutter
Darrell has apparently confused Saddam with Aaron Burr.
capelza
What’s the big Gulp?
Nutcutter
It’s Darrell’s clever way of suggesting that you give him a …. Oh wait, that would be Clintonesque of him.
No, I think he was just making what is called a “serving suggestion.”
Steve
Yeah, and if you want to know why no one takes right-wingers seriously on national security, why don’t you re-read your own posts in this thread. Are you seriously under the delusion that Bush was re-elected as part of some massive public endorsement of right-wing foreign policy? The vast majority of voters I know looked at Bush and Kerry and said, “Oh my God, THESE are my choices?”
Your entire point of view regarding North Korea is encapsulated by saying, “Lefties weren’t serious about Saddam, therefore all I have to do to be right about North Korea is to oppose the lefties.” Yes, that’s a very “serious” approach to national security that you’re advocating.
The Republican slogan still remains “at least we’re not the Democrats.” Even if that’s 100% true, is it really what you aspire to for your national leadership?
VidaLoca
Dammit, you’re right. OK, I want a ‘duel use’ pony!
Sort answer: yes.
Are you suggesting that all the lives lost, all the money wasted, all the horrors we’ve seen and those yet to come are justified by something that so far (four years and counting…) has not even been shown to exist?
capelza
Oh….ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Social conservatism at it’s finest I must say. All the spittle frothing from his mouth must have washed away the veneer to reveal his true self. Yeah, that’s the high road right there. Who’s the scum again?
Darrell
Keep pounding those strawmen Steve… good exercise for you twits
Darrell
My comment was in response to this verbatim quote from you which I highlighted in the post:
high road indeed
Nutcutter
Darrell is on the phone with Rush, but he is nodding: Yes.
capelza
Well Darrell…I’m leftist scum, so says you. You just proved that you are certainly no better at all.
And it is rather obvious you are only here to see your own words in print, as NOONE takes ANYTHING you say seriously, so I can only assume you are herer for your own pleasure, whatever form that comes in. Apparantly spouting off the words “Leftist scum” really work their magic for you…and “stupid leftist scum” is you’re blog equivalent to “god, yes, yes…..oh god!!!!”.
You didn’t answer (no suprise here) the question though..why do you continue to post here? What’s the point?
And I apologise for allowing myself to “darrell” this thread.
Nutcutter
Mind you, Darrell is the fellow who is sure that it’s not safe to send your kids camping with gays.
Because, you know, lots of people say so.
Darrell
I think N. Korea is a serious problem. I don’t have any good solutions on what to do there. I also think it’s entirely fair to point out to leftists who are now pointing fingers at Bush, that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton told us that N. Korea had abandonded their WMD aspirations.
Steve
Keep showing how serious you righties are about North Korea, by doing nothing but bashing liberals while refusing to offer anything constructive.
Do you want to offer a policy position for debate? Of course not, because articulating and defending a position isn’t what you’re about. All you want to do is carp and criticize other people’s statements while never taking any position besides “whatever the liberals want to do is wrong.”
The guy who repeatedly attempts to criticize “the Left” by linking random pictures of a nutty anti-war protestor wants to talk about strawmen? Yes, please go there. It’s not like you have any credibility left to lose.
Nutcutter
“Leftist scum” is what Darrell wipes off his mouth after a long night at Drinking Liberally.
Slartibartfast
Globalsecurity says Taepodong-2 has a range of up to 15,000km. Dunno if I believe it; guess I’d believe it when they test it out that far. Fas.org‘s page still says just over 4000km, although there’s some discussion by Rumsfeld that a “lightened” version could go up to 10,000km. FAS doesn’t update all that diligently, though, so take that for whatever it’s worth. I’m guessing that “lightened” means structurally, because the max range doesn’t seem to be a big function of payload mass, meaning that there’s a lot of dead weight in the booster stack.
There’s so much variation in what’s said publicly about the Taepodong-2’s max range that I’m disinclined to believe that anyone really knows. I know I’ve seen one account that says 6000 km, which could put it right about on Midway Island.
Why he’d want to put one on Hawaii, nuclear-tipped or not, is really a mystery. Why anyone’s reporting that as a serious possibility is also a mystery. My guess is that it went off course and either crashed or was terminated by range safety, although the concept of range safety might not even exist over there.
Slide
I thank Darrell.. for being such a wonderful represenantive of modern conservative thought. You are right up there in the pantheon of right winger intellectuals we all look up to. Thank-you Ann adam’s apple bobbing plagerising Coulter. Thank-you Rush viagra using drug addict Limbaugh. Thank-you Bill big head loafa phone wackoff artist O’Reilly. Thank-you Rick Man/Dog Sex Santorum. Thank-you Dick shoot old men in the face with 17% approval ratings Cheney. But most of all thank-you Darrell – never have I felt so good about my political leanings..
Nutcutter
We will soon start the 6th year of this disastrous presidency. When does the lying prick start taking responsibility for his own watch, again?
Jimmy Carter? You are sitting here talking about Jimmy Carter in fucking 2006?
GET OUT OF HERE.
richard
He may not have any Boy Scout troops close by.
Can we create a Godwin’s Law parallel whereby anyone who invokes molesting boy scouts thereby closes the thread?
capelza
I wonder if Kim was responding to the rocket base on Kodiak Island? It’s the one that has been firing the test missles that are supposed to be intercepted. I think they finally had a success. That just popped in my head. It wouldn’t suprise me. Not that I am saying that it is our fault that he did this..so nip that in the bud here now.
But we have been firing missles in his neighbourhood.
Anderson
Can we create a Godwin’s Law parallel whereby anyone who invokes molesting boy scouts thereby closes the thread?
Oh, come on, why bestow that power on anyone?
But, agreed: how about *girl* scouts?
Andrei
If we are to take the administration’s (and neocon’s) foreign policy at face value, it seems to me at least that they honestly thought taking out Iraq would create a dramatic shift of economic and political power on the far side of the world that helped U.S. and democratic interests in the long run. In doing so, they probably did have the best intenions at heart. That is to say, what they were looking for was a shift that worked on multiple levels: protect the current economic model in the U.S. with regard to oil, reduce terrorist activity by crushing many of it’s long time supporters (including a high profile guy like Saddam who vocally supported terrorists even if he didn’t help them as much as we thought), and splitting up middle east countries like Syria and Iran by creating a presence dead center in between them.
The main problem is obviously — no matter how much many conservatives seem to refuse to acknolwedge — that they botched the plan. They did in a multitude of ways. They weren’t entirely honest with the country so when reasons of WMD and other not so well supported intel proved false, they lost major support of the public at an emotional level. They didn’t institute something like a draft and fill the ranks in the fighting forces enough to occupy Iraq after an overwhleming successful technological war. And they didn’t bother to get the public involved with the idea of the sacrifices needed as we have done past wars like World War II.
Why on earth would you raise taxes in time of war unless you are basically overconfident in your plan?
And now we are faced with a mediocre success in Iraq even if we do indeed succeed, which has had the effect of giving leaders in Iraq and North Korea the means to play war games with us.
Would Kim Jong Il be so crazy as to send missels into Seoul? That’s Cheney’s 1% scenario. It doesn’t matter how unlikely it is, if it does happen, it’s actually catastrophic on so many levels that to even allow it a 1% to happen is something we cannot allow.
And here’s the rub for me. People like ppGaz/Nutcutter keep proclaiming the administration is incompetent. Yeah, most of us got that and really don’t care that a guy like Darrell doesn’t seem to get it. But calling the other guy a moron — no matter how much it makes me feel good to do so — doesn’t change the problem.
The Democrats if they want to succeed have to do what the Republicans refuse. The GOP had both houses of Congress and the Executive. They have a large presence in the mainstream media no matter how much they want to whine about the New York Times. It was the GOPs game to win. If their strategy in Iraq was honest even if not in good faith — which is the whole point of the Plame affair that so many seem to miss, that people felt they were played instead of treated like people who could understand th e bigger picture of a war in Iraq — all the GOP had to do was make it happen.
And they blew it. They blew it big time.
Had the GOP won the Iraq and Afghanistan wars outright and occupied both countries through strong political transitions, they would have locked up political power and forward looking policy in the same way FDR set up the Dems for most of the 20th century.
So yelling at the GOP that they are idiots doesn’t change anything.
IMHO, I think the way the Dems win, and help us all to turn around a situation that is not working out as intended, is to take the neocon plan at face value: It was a good try, but it’s not working regardless of why. (Calling them idiots only turns the argument into a name calling match which the GOP tends to win, as witnessed by the success of books by someone like Coulter.) But that would require the Dems to come up with a real plan of their own, and one they can defend at face value while also pointing out how the neocon plan is not working. Something the Dems seem incapable of doing.
So independents like me seem to be stuck waiting for one side of the aisle to actually wake the fuck up and stop playing political football. I don’t care which political party wins anymore, I’m just sick of a country as great as ours reduced to impotence by the likes of leaders in Iran and North Korea.
VidaLoca
Darrell,
OK — that’s fair enough. I don’t have any good solutions on what to do there either. I don’t see the carrot policy working much, but the consequences of the some kind of military action (see rachel above) are not worth contemplating. Nor do sanctions look that great. Bottom line is I’m hoping that the lid stays on there for at least two more years until the Clownocracy is gone. Yes, that’s not much of a solution.
that … there goes a jackalope!
Slartibartfast
Kodiak Island’s 5500km from the closest point in North Korea, so he’s probably only a tiny bit annoyed by those launches.
Andrei
That should obviously say “lower taxes.” Sigh. Fridays.
Slartibartfast
And if Kim’s annoyed, imagine how PRC feels. Not to mention Russia and Japan.
capelza
Slartibartfast (one of my favourite characters of all time!): While the island it self might be that far, the missle test fired from there was intercepted NW of the Hawaiian ( how far I don’t know), not so far then?
Though you are right…I had a visual of the Kamchetka landmass when I was qucikly visualising it. My mistake.
Steve
Andrei makes some valid points, but the fact is, there are plenty of viable foreign policy proposals from the left. There’s not one “Democratic position,” true – but guess what, President Bush would do things differently from President McCain who would do things differently from President Brownback. And don’t get me started on President Buchanan!
The only reason the Republicans are kind of unified is because they have one guy at the top who gets to make the calls, and unless someone strongly disagrees they’re going to support the President’s plan even if it’s not the same thing they would do if they were President. If Kerry were President, the Democrats would be mostly unified behind his foreign policy in the same way.
The only real solution is for the Democrats to take over and simply do a better job (maybe I should say a GOOD job, since it would be virtually impossible for them not to be better). There’s simply no way for them to have any meaningful input as the minority party, not in this political climate the Republicans have created.
srv
That’s what happens when you tilt against windmills.
I hear there was an American Flag on that missile, and it burned up on re-entry.
As always, NK is just jerking our chain and the Darrells of the world jump in response. If Kim were smart, he’d be asking for a cut of the BMD funding program.
In the meantime, NK freighters troll the seas while we sink billions into something that will never, ever be demonstrated to actually work. And we’ll keep pursuing 20-party negotiations. Next Tony Snow will announce “we will negotiate 1-on-1 with NK as soon as they agree to disband their army”.
VidaLoca
Andrei,
You make some good points, though I’m not as willing as you are to assume good faith on the part of the neocons. But as to this
We may simply have to learn to “allow” it in some sense. We may not like it, we should seek to conain/neutralize/mitigate it — but I see nothing but bad consequences flowing from the presumption that we can disallow it. On the other hand we got through 45 years of the cold war on about the same basis, it’s not like it can’t be done.
That required having a foreign policy — something which I’m not sure we have at the moment. No matter what anyone puts on the table for debate at the moment, I don’t see anything we can really do while we’re stuck in the mess of Iraq.
Andrei
While I would love to believe that, I consider myslef fairly up to date politically speaking and I couldn’t tell you what any of them are.
So, maybe some links?
Mac Buckets
I’m not sure why you categorize current efforts as “catatonic.” Is your trigger-finger getting itchy, Tim? More likely, you’re just going partisan here, ignoring the fact that we’ve been engaged in talks with China/Japan/Russia/SK/NK (I thought you guys loved internationalist peace efforts!) for three years, the last being as recent as April.
We can blame Clinton/Albright and Bush/Powell all day for the problem with NK, but the truth is it’s everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault. The Clinton team talked and bargained and ransomed and trusted for six years… and NK took advantage of their bureaucratic ineptness, lied to us, cheated us, and went nuclear anyway. Was it Clinton’s naivety, Albright’s stupidity, or is just that international politics is built on a level of trust such that when a total malfeasant nut like KJI comes along, it fries real politicians’ brains?
Bush isn’t into blackmail, hates terrorists and dictators, reacted badly to the initial reports that NK was enriching uranium, and is unable to work a subtle angle against the honorless, whackjob irrationality of KJI, preferring that China, Japan, and SK talk to Krazy Kim (probably since Bush knows they all speak that “ching-chong-ching” jibberish). We know he’d like to bury KJI, but he’d have to do it with big bombs from the sky and endire massive reprecussions, and I doubt he has the bottle for it after the last five years of media torment.
The point is that when a total loon without honor, scruples, or money gets a nuke or five, he’s either planning to use them to explode something or to use them to extort, and even if he goes for Door #2, you still can’t rule out that he’ll still explode something. So it’s probably going to end very badly.
So what do you do, if you don’t want millions dead? You get big dogs like China to talk to the rational people in KJI’s party — there’ve got to be some dudes rolling their eyes at Lil’ Elvis, right? — and convince them that the US doesn’t give a rat’s ass about taking over NK (since KJI doesn’t seem to believe it coming from Clinton or Bush), you hope the starving N. Koreans will rise up in rebellion before they end up vaporized (fat chance — well, actually, very, very starvation-thin chance), and you talk up the Sunshine reunification with SK, knowing that SK will come to dominate a unified Korea and sooth the economic and political tensions until KJI takes a dirt nap. And you capitulate to a little blackmail, in the guise of humanitarian food/energy aid to the Korean people (which will, of course, end up in KJI’s pocket). All of these things are being done now.
chopper
darrell is accusing someone of queering a thread? what is this, bizarro balloon juice?
god, “saddam was a huge threat”, this is getting funnier by the minute. i guess some people just can’t let go.
Slartibartfast
Hmmm…I always thought that missiles launched toward Hawaii and Kwaj came out of Vandenburg. The Kodiak site is still fairly new (interwebs thingy says late September 2001), though, and I’m less in touch with the goings-on in the missile defense community than I used to be. Most of what I can find for it is commercial launches.
And somehow, without me noticing it, there’s a site at Vandenburg equipped with the same interceptors (and, one would think, the same surveillance/tracking radars) that are emplaced at Fort Greely, Alaska. Odd.
Andrei
From my understanding of history, we came very close many times to the worst case scenario. It seems to me we got very lucky on a few occasions to avoid it.
And maybe that approach is valid with the likes of North Korea. But technology has advanced in way that has created a much different climate than during the 20th century. To play the same game as was played then would seem to require far more nimble tactics to be successful, and its not clear to me that large beurocracies like our government can play the game in the same way as a lone dictator given the changes and advancements in technology.
But I’d love to be wrong on this point of view.
Andrei
Minor point, but I was stating that if one takes the neocon plan at face value, which is possible to do even if you feel they didn’t create their policy in good faith by not being entirely honest with the American public.
capelza
Well all I know is that the Kodiak complex is part of the whole testing thing. It isn’t a big secret at all. I spend time up there working, it’s hard to miss the rocket going off and people generally know what it’s for. Some satelites, some testing of the system. It was explained when the place was put in that the location was ideal for that kind of thing. Certainly the physical location isn’t…40 miles of bad road to get anything there. Took out some great sport fishing, too. :(
To be honest, it’s another pork fest, Alaska style…
Steve
Off the top of my head, here is a recently-published book with some solid ideas. I could offer a few more but you know what happens to posts with a lot of links.
There’s also some very meaty blogging on these subjects at http://www.democracyarsenal.org.
Steve
Good post, Mac. By the way, we know the NK government keeps all the humanitarian aid for themselves, but this is a railroad bridge too far!
What a fucked-up country to have to deal with.
capelza
I wonder how long China’s patience will last with this guy?
Nothing like bitng the hand that is literally feeding you.
Steve
It’s seriously amazing how the US sucks up to China – to the point of overlooking the First Amendment to prove how much we love their dignitaries – and yet countries like North Korea manage to get away with the most brazen acts of defiance imaginable.
I have to admit, it sticks in my craw as an American whenever I see our diplomats forced to kiss China’s ass. It’s like, if we ever make the blunder of suggesting Taiwan might be independent someday, we end up spending a month in time-out. Whoever blew up their embassy is my hero, seriously.
Nutcutter
Well, that’s the blogosphere for you. It isn’t whether the guy is actually a moron. It’s about how you feel about it. (You=generic, not you personally).
In the blogosphere, how things look and how one feels about them always take precedence over the simple reality.
Otherwise …. why HAVE a blogosphere?
Mac Buckets
Dude. Seriously — dude. They are provoking…the Chinese. Dude.
I had not read that — thanks (though the link didn’t work for me).
I hate to laugh at those nuts, but seriously, the Marx Brothers couldn’t have written it better.
The Other Steve
I find it difficult to believe anybody can estimate the range of a missile which isn’t operational. It’s not like the guys building these are rocket scientists who have vast experience with this technology and know how to do the calculations.
So I’m not surprised at the wild guesses.
The Other Steve
You know, I have to agree to a large degree.
My father did his Air Force tour in Taiwan from ’60-’62 monitoring Chinese radio broadcasts. So maybe I’m a bit biased here.
I fear if China decided to invade Taiwan tomorrow, the Bush administration wouldn’t raise a finger against them. All this bluster about freedom, democracy and what not, but the only thing they care about are the small fishes. They quiver in their shoes at the thought of taking on the big fishes.
BTW… That P-3 Orion that went down in 2001 which landed in China… I was talking to a former pilot who used to fly those back in the 70’s and 80’s. He was utterly amazed at what happened. He said back then his orders were if something went wrong you set the destruction charges and bailed out. You have a homer beacon, and the Navy would find you. Landing the plane on non-allied soil would have been grounds for a courts martial.
The Other Steve
Interesting.
It’s amazing to me how Democrats are the only parties with any good ideas of how to deal with your problems. The Republicans seem only interested in what I call Arson… that is creating more fires so that they can campaign on putting them out. And then being utterly amazed and looking for someone to blame when the building burns to the ground.
Davebo
Huh? The Taep’o-dong-2 (TD-2) is said to be a two or three stage missile with a range estimated at approximately 3650-3750 km with a 700-1000 kg payload.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/missile/td-2.htm
The distance between Seoul and Honolulu (couldn’t find it for Pyongyang) is 7321 km.
Andrei
Thanks for the links Steve. I’ll check them out. I’ll just note that glancing through them just now is fine for the choir types, but they are not positions I see the Democractic party taking on the whole to get the message out in a broader sense.
Where are the pols on the talk shows and in the news media? It’s one thing to run a blog that makes some rationale points for progressives, it’s quite another to have those points pushed consistently through more mainstream channels.
Punchy
It’s supposed to be private?
Steve
The link (which works for me) is to an MSNBC story regarding a Falun Gong reporter who was charged with a crime for heckling President Hu during his White House appearance. I mean, you can heckle President Bush all day, and the worst thing that might happen is that security could throw you out. But when it’s the President of China whose dignity is on the line, somehow that dignity trumps our commitment to the First Amendment.
There was a similar situation recently at the World Baseball Classic in Florida where some Cuban diplomat got all up in arms because an audience member had an anti-Castro sign. Our officials were like “Uh, we apologize for the offense, but we have free speech in this country so you’re just going to have to live with it.” You’d think that would be the American way to deal with the China incident as well.
HyperIon
I came over here during the Schiavo debacle, liked what I read, and lurked for more than a year before I ever posted. Over that time I sort of got “to know” some of the regular commenters here, that is, I got a sense of their personalities/world views. I looked forward to my daily B-J visits. But currently I’m annoyed/disappointed because:
1. the blog owner seems disinterested. Not surprising. The blogging novelity must eventually wear off and I certainly couldn’t find the energy to keep it up. I hope he bounces back but I can understand if he doesn’t. At that point I guess I’ll just have to find somewhere else to go to listen to (and occasionally participate in) thoughtful discussions. I’m not sure where this would be though as I have not found any other site with real discussion between folks having a range of views.
2. the level of debate has recently sunk. A little high-schoolish back and forth goes a long way. Please, ignore Darrell when he starts with “You lefties are poop heads; no wonder you never win elections.” When he posts something reasonable, then argue away. But when he does his pinhead impersonation, why respond to him? (BTW mentioning “poop heads” reminds me, where is Pooh these days?)
3. the “spoof” stuff has gotten out of hand. Again, use sparingly. In some ways this distresses me even more than the silly “I know you are but what am I?” responses. More and more people put more and more energy into pretending to be something they despise. For what purpose? We must keep our eye on the prize and not be distracted by jackalopes or spoofs.
4. the world is a very strange place these days and it is pissing me off. My frustration with my government and my shame about what is being done in the name of my country increase daily.
I used to feel better after I visited this site but no more, or much less frequently. Several friends suggest anti-depressants, saying that this works for them, but I demur. Come on, boys and girls, help me out here! Do that voodoo that you used to do so well. Or at minimum advise me on which anti-depressant to take.
Punchy
Now THAT is funny shit. Next time I see some guy shoving the shopping cart in his car along with his groceries, I’ll just assume he’s North Korean.
Steve
Well, I agree. Part of it is that wonkery really doesn’t count for much in purely political terms. The political battle, unfortunately, is more about convincing people you have a plan than it is about actually having a plan. Kerry published a campaign book, he had plenty of detailed plans to offer regarding everything, but because he didn’t have a catchy sound bite it seemed like he had no plan.
The other problem, I hate to admit, is that there’s a genuine lack of interest in some quarters. Certain Democratic constituencies are more focused on bread-and-butter issues which leads some politicians to disregard the world picture. For example (I don’t remember where I read this), General Wesley Clark said he used to get asked to give foreign policy briefings to the Senate Democratic caucus, and like a handful of people would show up. Now, I’m not saying the entire Republican caucus would be there with bells on in an analogous situation, but still, it was a depressing anecdote.
VidaLoca
Andrei,
You put your finger on two things: Dems don’t have agreed-upon positions, and they don’t explain them clearly. And I think you’re right on both counts. It will take probably on the order of several years for them to make much progress on either. Meanwhile the GOP will beat on them like a red-headed stepchild and the media will repeat it word for word.
On the other hand, the good news is that at least someone is trying to elaborate an alternative position (Steve, thx for the links). All I can think to do at the moment is get that book and others like it, read it, discuss it with people e.g. at places such as this. Sad that it’s come to the point where our useful options look so slim.
slickdpdx
Incidentally, in addition to overlooking Bush’s anti-missle efforts (the factor we as a nation or Bush as decider in chief have/has the most control over), why is none of the blame laid at the feet of other countries? I understand why you’d analyze purported failures of the U.S. first – it is the country most of us vote in. But as far as the blaming goes, it seems a little insane. Why focus the blame and all this hate on Bush? Do you really think things in N. Korea or Iran would be much different under (insert your fantasy president here)? These are not the anti-Bush crowd’s shining moments.
Darrell
Problem is, that position (from what I read on the “With all our might” book summary) was sorely lacking in concrete ideas, only vague suggestions, most of which are already being pursued by the current admin to one degree or another. For example, from the ‘Progressive Action Plan’:
We’ve already used carrots and sticks with Iran and they’re not budging. What next? They don’t say. And how do they suggest we hold N. Korea to it’s pledge? Again, nothing concrete. Not much of an “action” plan
Don’t get me wrong, it’s refreshing to read something from serious Dems who are not raving moonbats on national defense, but there were no substantive details proposed on issues which revolve entirely around such details.
Steve says it’s because the public doesn’t want to hear ‘wonkery’. That may be true, but by the same token, there are no clear ideas in that action plan which significantly differ from what’s being done now under Republicans. If you feel differently, then explain what they are, because I’m not seeing it.
The other problem is that leftists, which dominate Dem primary voting, do not appear willing to tolerate any plan which involves a vigorous national defense. Doubt me? Look at what’s happening with Joe Lieberman and then tell me I’m wrong.
jg
I do think that is we had six years of a different president things would not be the way they are after six years of Bush. Don’t you? It seems logical. Or were you asking a different question? A question that is answered by pretending Bush hasn’t had any involvement in whats come to pass, by pretending he’s just reacting to the world thats been fucked up by (insert your democrat president here).
jg
Except that republicans don’t believe in this task so therefore they fuck it up when asked to undertake it. Diplomatically preventing war is not a republican trait, wouldn’t you agree?
Andrei
While I think your use of the Lieberman example is a bit off the mark, I have to say I’m shocked that I actually agree with your main point about Democractic primaries.
Where is Friday vodka blogging? I need a stiff martini.
VidaLoca
Hyperion,
I think it was just after the Schaivo debacle that I started reading BJ and spent a while lurking before I started commenting, sort of like yourself. I’ve enjoyed the experience for the same reasons I gather you have, the discussion between people of differing views. It’s hard to find elsewhere, and I appreciate it both for that intellectual value as well as the entertainment value — some of the snark is really well done, but like any comedic styling you have to take the good with the bad IMO.
I’ve seen the level of debate go up and down — I think you point to some reasons; I also think that the range of opinions has narrowed here somewhat as some of the more conservative people have left and others are so disgusted with the Bush administration that they can’t defend it any more (for example: think what the conversation would be like in the wake of another hurricane Katrina disaster, as compared to the one last August).
Ah yes — but you won’t find the cure for that here. When I start feeling that way I go visit the Jane Hamshers of the Left at firedoglake.
For that, I recommend Sadly, No.
And, last but not least, if you think the level of commentary is falling off, do something to kick it up! Comment, already!
Darrell
No, I don’t – see multilateral talks over N. Korea, and push to have UN deal with Sudan as examples of such Republican diplomacy. How is diplomacy working in those areas?
Truth is, Dems tend to place too much faith in diplomacy without recognizing that force sometimes is the “least bad” option.
slickdpdx
JG: as often happens in blog comments, i think you are mostly arguing with someone else in your response to me. i have not referred to any other president or suggested that another president would have fared better (with the exception of missle defense – which is in Bush’s favor)
Nutcutter
I have to ask again, why is this person allowed to post here?
Dems place too much faith in diplomacy? Who thinks like this? It’s nonsensical on its face. There is no partywise quanitification of “faith in diplomacy” in effect anywhere in the world that I’m aware of.
Why is a person who just makes up this kind of contentious shit allowed to post here? I’m serious. Don’t lecture me about free speech or open comments. How is this kind of pure shit any different from somebody calling another poster a c**t? Because words, and not ideas, are banned here? You can say anything but you can’t use this word?
That in itself makes no fucking sense. A word is banned, but any toxic idea on earth can be posted here over and over and over and over and over again and it’s okay? Anything at all, whether it is even remotely within the realm of truth …. no test is applied. But certain words are prohibited.
The world is in greater danger from the use of “c**t” than it is from the toxic idea that “faith in diplomacy” is a defect that applies to a particular party?
WHAT THE FUCK?
jg
Then what the hell are you suggesting when you ask us:
?
Maybe you’re point is that lefties only blame Bush when its not only his fault since he isn’t president of the whole world or some other nonsense where you can make this a left vs right partisan issue.
Maybe you could rephrase the question so it doesn’t sound like you’re just trying to excuse Bush.
jg
Pretty badly but to my point look who’s undertaking the task, republicans. Get someone who thinks the taks has merit involved in the task and you’ll see a differetn result. Something like a country that agrees to lock up its nuclear material and refrain from further enrichment activities. N. Korea was there once.
Nutcutter
Bush speaks, on the subject of N. Korea and diplomacy.
Repubs, you see, have too little faith in diplomacy because they are TOO STUPID TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IT IS.
Besides in today’s world, who needs slow cumbersome diplomacy when we have nukes?
Join the GOP — the Nuke Party. The fucking party of stupid fucking asshole nimrods who sling stupid shit like this around blogs all day and act like other people are the stupid ones.
Remember, you can say anything here, just don’t call me a c**t. Because WORDS ARE BANNED.
Starting wars? Okay. Naughty words? BANNED.
VidaLoca
Darrell,
Well, I think your example’s off in the sense that a lot of the reason that people are hating on Lieberman has nothing to do with “strong defense” in the abstract, and everything to do with his tendency to stab his party in the back and suck up to the Republicans (if you want examples, the best place to start is firedoglake. Now calm down, you can handle the “extemism” over there, I know you can :). Take a deep breath, follow the links. A lot of issues get covered, you’ll probably disagree with a lot of it, but the question of “strong defense” or opposition to it doesn’t come up in what I’ve seen. The war in Iraq certainly does come up, but if you want to take the position that the only way one can be for “strong national defense” is to support that war, well, we’re really back to square one).
Anyhow. On “vigorous national defense” and the left, you can make a stronger argument. There are, and I know you’ve seen them, pictures of leftists supporting the killing of military officers by their troops. So I’ll stipulate that those leftists are not concerned much with the defense question, if you’ll stipulate that they aren’t that germane to your point about who dominates Dem primary voting.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that among the reality-based left, you didn’t see a whole lot of opposition to going over to Afghanistan and kicking Osama and the Taliban. So that’s an example of “vigorous national defense” post facto. As for Iraq, even the (non-gevernment) right (I’m thinking Buckley here, don’t have the link at hand) is saying that that one was a mistake.
Nutcutter
Who could believe that we’d have president in this day and age, in this dangerous world, who says something like this:
Duh. Sounds like somebody just came from a briefing where they told him what a diplomatic process was.
And then we have posters here who defend this fucking moron and say things like this:
Who could invent this shit? Joseph Heller, maybe, would write about it and describe a place where you couldn’t say I’m a c**t but you could say that the moron who made the first statement highlighted above can be president and the moron who made the second one would defend him no matter what.
Welcome to the bizarro world of Balloon-Juice and today’s Republicans.
VidaLoca
slickdpdx,
An example in the Iran case that speaks to your point is cited in the WaPo article that Tim links in the post. In 2003 the Iranians were willing to deal with us because they thought we looked strong enough, after Iraq, that they should deal. We, on the other hand, didn’t want to talk to them, we wanted more regime change. Three years down the road, this looks like an opportunity missed, primarily because of ideology and blind hubris.
Darrell
Point taken, and I would add that most Dems (except for the far left ones) voted to give Bush authorization for the invasion of Iraq. I was thinking more along the line of this type of thing, which is not an everyday occurance, it has happened repeatedly. More subtly, leftists have barred military recruiting on quite a number of campuses. That, combined with what I believe are unrealistic expectations of what diplomacy can achieve, is what I meant by leftists not pursuing actions consistent with a strong national defense. “Build schools, not bombs” and “visualize world peace” type of mentality is pervasive on the left.
Slide
Some problems do not lend themselves to nice neat solutions. I do not look for the Democratic party, as apparently Andrei does, to articulate a point by point plan on how they would deal with Iran or North Korea or even Iraq. Those problems are much too dynamic to be approached in that way. What I do expect from a Democratic party in power is the hope that they would execute policy in a much more competent manner.
The blunders of this administration with regards to Iraq are staggering. I just finished reading Cobra II and it was an eye opener. Mistake after mistake. Ideology trumping reason. Optimistic hopes overriding prior meticulous planning. This group in power currently operate from a belief system that is completely divorced from reality. They ignored the generals in the Pentagon. They ignored the planning of the State Department. They ignored those in the intelligence community that didn’t hold their pre-conceived views. At every opportunity they violated good management principles and were driven instead by pure ideology. Even a simple thing like staffing Bremer’s provisional government went not to those that had experience in such things (Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.) but rather to young ideologues recruited from the Heritage foundation. The absolute arrogance of these closed minded idiots would have fucked up ANY plan whether it was the right one or not.
So, I am less concerned by a point by point plan at this point but I am looking to have people in positions of power that don’t have such utter disdain for career professionals. We need a professionally led government. Not Brown at FEMA, not Feith at the Pentagon, not some Heritage foundation kid that never held a job running a ministry in Iraq. There is an old saying in Management which this administration violates on a daily basis, “hope for the best, but plan for the worst”. Their failure to plan in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of many brave young Americans.
Steve
Given the number of right-wingers who supported the invasion of Iraq, and continue to support it even today, the empirical evidence demonstrates that right-wingers have no interest in a strong national defense. This is their idea of how to make America safer? Wow.
As I said above, the Democrats’ goal should be to be GOOD, not simply better than the Republicans, but in terms of being better they could get their foreign policy from an Ouija board and do better than the current administration.
Darrell
I’d be happy see that debate play out on a national election, in which Dems tell us how much safer we’d be if we had left Saddam in power. Bring it on Dems.. show your true colors
Steve
Thanks for yet another demonstration of what it means to be “serious” about foreign policy.
Nutcutter
What, you mean a “strong national defense” doesn’t mean lying about a threat and then trying to ignore the reality of the nonexistent threat once the mistake is acted upon?
And then defending the boner four fucking years later and acting as if it wasn’t the most collossal failure of intelligence and policy in US history?
And then talking through one’s ass and acting as if anybody who doesn’t go along with this ruse is the one with the problem?
That’s not what a “strong national defense” is?
Nutcutter
Oh, you mean attacking a country that puts up no defense, and turns out to have no weapons and no capacity to make weapons, doesn’t make America stronger and safer?
Darrell
What are you talking about? You made a knee jerk assertion that the invasion of Iraq made us less safe. I called you on it by (seriously) suggesting that you Dems run with that idea. I guess that’s all you’ve got
Nutcutter
This is about what you’ve got.
What you’ve got is an assertion that attacking a country that put up no defense and had no weapons or capacity to make weapons makes this country safer.
On that basis, you claim any authority to declare who is and who is not able to promote a “strong national defense?”
You have never done anything but pull shit out of your ass and try to pass it off as fact, truth or evidence. That’s why nobody here listens to you. You’re a joke and an embarassment to the blog.
Darrell
If you want to know why liberals can’t be trusted with national security, this is exhibit A.
Nutcutter
What is Exhibit A? Your assertion that it’s not true?
Prove it. Prove that Iraq was a threat worthy of a four year war costing billions a month and tens of thousands of lives. Prove it or SHUT THE FUCK UP.
jg
Explain. Show that he had capacity.
Mac Buckets
But think of this: On the plus side, this standard means that you’re still allowed to post your endless rubbish here! So quit whining and live it up!
Slide
Flailing Darrell:
No, thats not just want we got. We got the experts agreeing with us. OVERWHELMINGLY.
.
Darrell
You’ve got to be kidding me. Leaving aside the obvious fact that Iraq under Saddam had a long history of chem and bio WMD production and use (along with hundreds of tons of unaccounted for KNOWN chem weapons and Vx which Iraq had admitted to having), both Duelfer and Kay detailed not only vast networks of ‘duel use’ labs and manufacturing facilities. Are you seriously suggesting that Saddam didn’t even have the capacity to produce WMDs? That’s an extreme position which I believe many leftists have unfortunately deluded themselves into believing. We’ll call this Exhibit B
Darrell
By all means, let’s have the debate then if you libs feel so confident. Make it a national campaign issue, telling Americans that we would have been SAFER to leave Saddam in power in Iraq, and that by toppling him and his regime, we are less safe as a result. Bring it on, seriously
Nutcutter
Where are the weapons?
Judging from the duration and nature of the invasion, he didn’t even have the capacity to put up a fight for ten days. The invasion encountered little resistance.
Where was the threat? Even if he had had weapons, what would he have used as a delivery system? How could he have manifested that threat outside his own borders?
No defenses, no weapons of mass destruction, no delivery system.
What was the threat again? The possibility that he might do something? We started a war over a possibility of a threat?
That’s your idea of a “strong national defense?” Panicky warmongering in the face of “possible” threats?
Slide
Much safer with Saddam in power. Not a question about it. Can you question whether it would have been safer for the 2,500+ Americans that have been killed in Iraq? or for the tens of thousands horribly wounded? The numbers of dead Americans in Iraq is approaching the number killed on 911. So I take your challenge, you convice the American public that invading a country that had no intention nor ability to hurt us somehow make us safer. Go right ahead. Tell the mothers of those dead soldiers how much safer we are.
I’m really amazed how scared the right wing bedwetters must be all the time. Cowering in fear at the big bad terrorists. Its really pathetic to watch them trembling with fear all the time.
Nutcutter
Yes it is, and I think the terrorists are laughing their asses off.
jg
Yes. Duelfer and Kay also said he has done absolutely nothing and that everything he used to have is degraded to the point of uselessness. He couldn’t possibly get started on a new wmd program under sanction.
Darrell
Saddam had 3.9 tons of unaccounted for Vx which Iraq admitted to the UN they had (UN suspected more), a small amount of which could kill 10’s of thousands. Then there’s anthrax and all the other nasty substances Saddam had a history of manufacturing and using.
But Saddam, who invaded two neighbors, used chem weapons on his own people, and tried to assasinate a US President.. he would NEVER be so bold as to pass any of this to terrorists who want to kill us, right? That is your position, is it not ‘Nutcutter’? Exhibit C
Steve
Thanks for making my point yet again. Right-wingers like Darrell have no capacity to be serious about foreign policy, all they can do is repeat the same old slogans to bash liberals. Yes, while people are dying every day in Iraq, and our country is spending billions, let’s dumb down our discussion of foreign policy to stupid campaign sound bites like “cut and run” and “liberals want Saddam to still be in power.”
That’s how the “serious” party goes about it, friends. Because “serious” people understand there are only two possible scenarios, the actual world we live in and a world just like this one but with Saddam still in power.
I’d be so utterly embarassed if the Democrats were in power and this kind of sloganeering was the only kind of governance they could offer.
Darrell
Are you unaware that Saddam ejected UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq back in 1998? how does that reality jive with he “couldn’t possibly”? I’m not sure many on the left are capable of rational discussion on this issue, the delusions are so ingrained
Darrell
How honest of you Steve. I was responding to your matter-of-fact assertion (from which you appear to be backpeddling) that we are decidedly less safe because we toppled Saddam. Here is your post verbatim.. no ‘sound bites’ needed since your words speak for themselves:
Wow indeed
Nutcutter
We started a war because he “had a history?”
My position is the same one I held in 2002. Saddam had no particular capability to do anything. He was strapped, and preoccupied. His objective was theft, pocketing the mountains of cash represented by his country’s oil. Everything he did was aimed at protecting that racket. Provoking a war, or doing something that would invite disastrous retaliation, would have been suicidal and totally incongruent with his motives. He was a poker player who liked to bluff and bluster about how scary he was. He was not a friend, as our Republican government treated him in the 1980’s. He was not Hitler, as our Republican government tried to portray him in the early 1990’s. He was not a terrorist, as yet another wrongheaded Republican government tried to portray him in 2002. He was always mainly a thief and an opportunist who would have been happy to have been invited to dinner in the White House East Room like his alter-ego, the Shah of Iran was not long ago. He was just like the Shah but wore cheaper suits. Same game, same motives.
Events since 2002 have borne out my views from that time. No, America is not safer now. Terrorism worldwide appears to be on the increase, not the decrease. Iraq is in civil war. The Middle East is every bit as unstable. Not even Bush pretends to be supporting true liberal democracy in Iraq any more. The lying president who once told us that Osama Bin Laden was our worst enemy has now shut down the operation that was looking for him. Then he told us that Saddam was our worst enemy and we found out that he was an impotent enemy who was too busy stuffing cash into underground storage units to be planning any action against us or our allies.
Right now, the government run by this little asshole is telling us that the plan to withdraw our troops recommended by the duly elected government of Iraq is called “cut and run” when the same plan is suggested by the Democrats in his own country. So it’s clear that Iraq policy is just another pawn in the political gameplaying of this shithead president who has no clue.
His plan for dealing with Iraq now is to wait for “a future president” to figure out what to do.
Safer? If you really cared about making America safer, you’d promote getting us a safe president who knows how to pronounce “nuclear.”
Nutcutter
Given that the weapons weren’t there 5 years later, why do you suppose he did that, dumbfuck?
Any schoolkid can figure this one out.
jg
Yes I’m aware of that. Are you aware that they were let back in late in 2002 and reported back that absolutely NO progress had been made by Saddam during the time the inspectors were barred?
Couldn’t possibly? All he had before the first gulf war was destroyed. He would have to start from the beginning. Its taken Iran almost 20 years without crippling sanctions to reach the point of enriching uranium to only fuel grade. You think Saddam did it in 4 years with hardly any cash flow?
Nutcutter
Why would Saddam throw out inspectors when he didn’t have any weapons programs going?
Given his true history — not the ongoing clusterfucked wrong one invented by US government manipulators for the two decades preceding the current war — why would he do that?
Because he was just a blustering, bluffing Oz-like character who wanted to appear scarier than he was.
And a really thorough and open inspection would have revealed the truth he wanted to hide: That he had NOTHING to scare the world with after all. That was the truth about him. He was a bullshit artist. He didn’t have to build costly and dangerous weapons when the could get the US to convince the world that he already had them.
Darrell
Both Duelfer and Kay reports described the networks of dual use labs and manufacturing facilities. Interviews with Saddam’s lieutenants and scientists further further confirmed Saddam’s intent to preserve his WMD brain trust. He could have reconstituted a large portion of his chem weapons production in no time, followed by bio weapon production. These facts really aren’t in dispute.
As for nukes, you have a point that he was a ways off.. but as we saw with Khaddafi in Libya, a lot of nuke technology is available on the black market.
Saddam had palaces upon lavish palaces stacked to the ceiling with cash and guns, but you’re asserting he was lacking “cash flow”? Incredible really.. but I see these types of delusions a lot from the left
Nutcutter
You can’t possibly be that much of an idiot.
His entire reason for being, his entire schtick, was keeping the wealth for himself and his family. He was a thief, nothing more or less.
Why would he squander that wealth on weapons programs that he didn’t need? He wasn’t mad. And he wasn’t stupid. He was shrewd. By pretending to be scary, and preventing a thorough inspection that would have revealed his true modus operandi, he could keep the cash, appear really scary, and keep the world at bay all at the same time.
Not particularly brilliant, just common sense on his part. And it wouldn’t have taken rocket science for people on our side to figure this stuff out. The problem is, we had a government in Washington that didn’t want the truth known either. Who would want the American people to find out that this big scary “monster” was just a murdering thief who had no particular capacity — or motive — to mount a threat at all?
Nutcutter
Mind you, shitforbrains Darrell, we had intelligence that was tracking truckloads of oil out of Iraq before the war started.
Think about that. We could track truckloads of oil, but couldn’t figure out a simple weapons shell game without inventing a whole empire of threats and scary shit that never even existed.
We tracked the oil, but couldn’t figure out the weapons thing. Oil, got it nailed. Weapons, blew it completely.
What does that tell you, Darrell?
Nutcutter
Coulda woulda shoulda.
But didn’t.
Because he had no need to, no desire to, and no incentive to. His aim was to present the appearance of a scary strongman, to keep his enemies at bay, without actually spending his hard-gotten cash on weapons he would never use.
Darrell
My exchange with Steve above demonstrates something about liberals that’s worth noting. Steve showed his colors and made a definitive statement that toppling Saddam made us less safe. But when challenged on this assertion that he made, he (like most liberals) ignores what he actually wrote and launches into knee-jerk accusations against unfair conservatives who only want ‘sloganeering’ while “people are dying every day in Iraq” for emotional effect (sloganeering?).. that is to say, the unfairness of those who dare to point out what liberals actually say and what they do. Typical
Darrell
Why had he “squandered” his wealth on WMD programs for decades if he felt he didn’t need them? You ain’t too bright are you ‘Nutcutter’?
Nutcutter
Neither Steve nor anyone else is under any obligation to prove that toppling Saddam makes us either more, or less, safe. That ship has sailed. A majority of Americans now believe that the war wasn’t warranted and that the country was misled.
You’ve made a career here out of hiding behind crowds when your idiot views are challenged. Well, the crowd thinks you are full of shit on this one. Just because a bunch of nutty Republicans still tell each other the Saddam story, and believe it, doesn’t make it true, and doesn’t mean that the rest of the people are buying it.
The Iraq war as a mistake that the nation was misled into … not a “leftist” view, Darrell. It’s totally mainstream. You’re the one with the fucking delusions that for some reason the proprietors here think it’s amusing to let you post over and over again.
Personally, I think they do it for page views. I think they see you as a monkey on a rope that they can put in the store window every day to attract onlookers.
Nutcutter
Produce the weapons, you lying sack of shit. Where are they?
Steve
Liar. You’re the only one who wants to pretend that the complex issue of whether the Iraq war made us less safe boils down to nothing more than “are we safer with Saddam in power or out of power?” I guess you’ve spent so many years repeating these cheap slogans that you don’t even realize you’re doing it any more.
In the real world, we have to deal with the massive cost of the war, the stretching and overcommitment of our armed forces to a single area of the world, the recruiting gift we handed to terrorists by invading a Middle Eastern country and through wartime abuses like Abu Ghraib, and the postwar chaos that we’re still not out of. All of these things are real costs, all of them make America less safe. Getting rid of Saddam, if we could have done it in a vacuum without affecting anything else, could very well have made us more safe. Too bad that wasn’t a physical possibility in the real world. You have to take the bad with the good.
It may be a great campaign idea to ignore all this and pretend that the Iraq war had no other effects than getting rid of Saddam, but to claim I made a “definitive statement that toppling Saddam made us less safe” is simply a lie.
Darrell
Oh yeah? from your 7:06pm post:
But by pointing out what you actually wrote, I’m the “liar”?
Darrell
I thought you leftists supported the invasion of Afghanistan
Steve
I’m pretty sure, as usual, that what I wrote is eminently clear to everyone but Darrell, who as usual prefers to deliberately misunderstand rather than debate on the merits. Not surprising, but my patience for that game is exhausted.
srv
In other news today, 8 guys who have never been to the New York City, let alone the US, were involved in an elaborate plot to blow up the Hudson River subway and flood NY.
This “real deal” was obviously dreamed up after the “blow torch” the Brooklyn Bridge plan failed.
Darrell – follow the money. I bet that’s where the WMD’s are. We better check Kofi’s back yard.
Steve
Just in case anyone missed the links above, a current survey of foreign policy experts finds that 87% of them believe the Iraq war has been a net negative for our national security. Even the subset of conservative foreign policy experts agrees that the impact of Iraq has been negative, by a more than 3-1 margin.
But Darrell knows better than all of them, of course. “The Iraq war was solely about toppling Saddam, and how could toppling Saddam possibly have made us less safe???” Clearly the foreign policy experts are retarded, and Darrell is 100% correct. Why, you’d have to be a raving moonbat to believe the Iraq war has made us less safe!
jg
Nor are they relevant. We’re talking nukes. And we’re talking about what he had not what he could have.
Then what do you have to say about the whole mushroom cloud talk before the war?
Yes. He wouldn’t use his own cash. Hi searly stuff was financed through his countries wealth. He could barely tap his countries wealth during sanction. He simply didn’t have the cash flow to run a clandestine wmd program and do what he was doing with the bucks from OIL for FOOD.
srv
You moonbats. Any reasonable person can see that there is far less terrorism in the world today than there was before 3/2003. We and the world are far safer today. You are so overcome with BDS that you can’t see the truth.
Steve
The fact that liberals agree with the overwhelming majority of foreign policy experts proves that they cannot be taken seriously on issues of foreign policy.
FernBlog
Well, Well What do We Have Here…
I am not a reporter of any kind but it took me less than a few minutes of “elbow grease” to find the dreaded WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). I seemed to have “out-scooped” the entire Democratic Party, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and several other liberal biased reporting outlets out there. Of course I had help, Powerline Blog pointed me to a website operated by the DoD (Department of Defense) by called “Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center” (http://70.168.46.200/default.aspx). This location contains a treasure trove of document summaries of translated Iraqi documents created during the Saddam reign of terror. The website has the following paragragh as it’s purpose for existence:
At the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office has created this portal to provide the general public with access to unclassified documents and media captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Of the many documents present I would want to direct the gentle reader to one summary in particular released recently. This pdf document labeled with the cryptic number of CMPC-2003-00011084-HT-DHM2A.pdf
This document was written in 1999 and it outlines the process by which the “Director of the Criminal Department, Na`man `Ali Muhammad” would hide “non-conventional
weapons and other chemical agents” from “the International Inspection Committee” and thereby hiding them from not only the United Nations but 100 % of the Democrats in this country. Please read the letter:
He added that the following procedures were implemented on the fifth month of this year [TC: May 1999] in order to prevent disclosure of the locations:
1- Relocate all IIS “I[raqi] I[ntelligence] S[ervice]” documents
2- Relocate all IIS chemical materials and equipment
3- Designate a group of employees from the Ministry of Health to replace the IIS employees
4- Relocate some of the officers and employees, whose job descriptions are not compatible with the Ministry of Health to Al-Rashidiah, and implement other appropriate concealment procedures. [TC: no further information].
He continues to state that present situation of the Directorate could be extended for an unspecified period of time. This situation could frequently reoccur, which has a direct negative impact on the performance and duties of the Directorate, with regards to providing essential levels of security. Consequently, the location of the site could be discovered. In addition the Ministry of Health may not be able to afford releasing its employees for a long period of time. Also, the presence of the Ministry of Health employees, and their integration with our employees, is a security breach. The close location of the directorate to other public locations, such as Al-Thaurah and Hay Al- Sinak, makes it a non-secure location. He added that the location is within the range of the enemy’s coordinates, and that special attention should be given to the collaborators who are present within these areas. The following alternate locations were suggested:
1- The Technical Research Center located on Palestine Street (previous Olympic
Committee), since part of its Criminology Research Department was transferred to the Criminology Department.
2- Scientific Research Center, since it contains some laboratories that can be used for the work of the Criminology Department.
Now if I could look up Palestine Street (previous Olympic Committee) in Mapquest…
Nutcutter
Behold, the perils of being a country run by a bungling, lying potatohead. We stumble into an unncessary war with a country that has no actual nuclear threat, and stumble our way into a much more dangerous situation with a country that does present an actual nuclear threat.
Safer? Like I said, for America to be safer, it would have to have competant leadership. Saddam Hussein is in jail? He is now, as he was four years ago, the least of our worries.
Nutcutter
“It would be suicidal for him to give nuclear weapons to terrorists. He knows that Americans would retaliate and that it would be the end of (his country). He isn’t crazy. He isn’t going to do it.”
Who said it? And what dictator was he talking about?
Mac Buckets
Gee, thanks, to whoever queered this “North Korea” thread into episode #9,372 of “Iraq Invasion Nightly.”
Accepting that, this whole “Is the US safer with Saddam out?” is an unanswerable question. We can’t zip into a timeline where Saddam and Sons stayed in power, sanctions were recinded (or not) and Saddam was able do what Deulfer said he was going to do (or not), or where we had to fight terrorists “over here” because we weren’t giving them a target “over there” (or not), and figure out whether ousting him was a net good or net bad. We simply don’t know what would’ve happened, and it’s foolish and a bit arrogant to assume that we do.
And, no way! A lefty think-tank publishes a study saying “experts” agree with lefty think-tanks?? You’re kidding! A huge grain of salt for that one.
DougJ
What if what is happening now is all part of an elaborate plot by Saddam Hussein to get WMDs without anyone knowing it? Think about it — you have a WMD program, you allow your country to be invaded just after you move the WMD to Syria, then you hide out in spider hole for a few weeks before allowing youself to be arrested and tried as a criminal, then when everyone is sure that you had no WMD to begin with, your old friends sneak the WMDs back into the country while no one is looking. It’s genius, if you think about it.
Steve
Absolutely a fair comment. Darrell sure thinks it’s cut and dried though!
Nutcutter
But like everything you post, off point and misleading.
The question isn’t “what would have happened.”
The question is “what HAS happened, and what is the state of the world now?” Is the world safer now?
And then there’s the other righty deflecto question: Is the world “better off?” I think that John Cole himself has addressed that question. No, I am not going looking for the post, it was at least a year ago.
However, let’s not quibble over your incessant twisting of others’ words into your own, let’s address this question:
If “we don’t know” then why is Darrell here constantly talking as if we do?
Are you a Darrell defender? Do you agree that (a) the world is safer and better off and that any statement of doubt makes one into “lefty scum?” Do you agree that gays can’t be trusted to go camping with kids? Do you agree that “Joe Taxpayer” is being unfairly burdened by the costs of educating the kids of illegal aliens?
Because these are the kinds of things that Darrell apparently believes, even though he has never produced a fact to support any of them, and using this proof by assertion, he bludgeons every discussion he doesn’t agree with with this kind of crap day in and day out, never bothering to answer direct questions that he finds inconvenient, or acknowledging that even the slightest disagreement with him would be tolerable by even the lowliest lowlife on earth.
Are you for Darrell, or against him?
If you don’t like the “nightly” quality of things here, why don’t you change them? What is your great contribution, besides the relentless posturing of a superior air and condescension?
If I understand you correctly, which is only possible if I guess correctly since you aren’t going to take the time to explain yourself unless it advances your position, you aren’t really a Bush supporter, but your entertainment consists of coming here and belittling people who want to get rid of him. Because you’re smarter, somehow, than they are.
Did I miss anything, Mister Failed Troll?
Punchy
Snap!
As to America being “safer” now that Saddam is “gone”…WOW, what a dumb comment. I bet the families of 2500+ soliders would disagree.
AND, of course, I feel REALLY safe now that we closed up our “Get OBL Division” of the CIA. Nice to know we’ll blow 500 Bill on an asshole–a relatively harmless asshole–but won’t drop a few mill to find the guy that mastermimded ~3000 New York Murders….
Richard 23
And thanks to the asshole who said this:
What a jackass.
The Other Steve
Well then they really weren’t conservatives were they? They were just moonbats claiming they were conservatives!
LOL!
All of this is for naught. Anybody still arguing going into Iraq was a good idea is clearly a fruitcake. So why do Darrell and Mac Buckets keep bringing it up?
Punchy
Jackass, perhaps, but still damn funny.
Mac Buckets
There’s a 7’1″, 350 lbs. World Champion center who’d like to discuss your choice of the word “asshole.”
Sure, that’s the quesion…if you’re a halfwit. The rest of us understand that time always moves forward. I’m as unsurprised that you do not get it as I am that Steve gets it.
I think you’ve got to get over your Darrell fetish.
Slide.
What the morons like Darrell, MacBuckets and the neocons seem to not understand is that our “ememy” in this incorrectly named War on Terrorism are not some some finite group of individuals that once we kill them the problem is over. It is a movement. We are in a war of ideas, a war of influencing the billions of Muslims in the world. Are they leaning towards bin Laden or leaning towards USA. The London bombers were motivated (they say) by our invading Iraq. Today my local paper, Newsday, reports that the latest Lebanese that supposedly plotted to blow up our Path tunnels, became a radical because he was “outraged” at our invading Iraq. The point is that the way we decide to “kill” terrorists might have the unintended consequences of “creating” more terrorists than we killed. Even Don Rumsfeld admitted as much.
Every single thing that this administration has done has make it MORE likely rather than LESS likely that a young 17 year old Muslim would be willing to sacrifice his life to kill Americans. Multiply that by the billion plus Muslims and that makes us less safe. And no Darrell, invading Afghanistan is NOT the same as invading Iraq. Reasonalbe people, Muslims included, can see the justification of going after those that killed us. Iraq had NOTHING to do with 911. Iraq had NO WMD. Iraq had done nothing to threaten us. Iraq was contained. To invade THAT middle east Muslim country rich in oil angers most Muslims. Enough so to take those already on the fringe over the edge into suicidal terrorism.
Scoff at the experts that say overwhelmingly that Iraq has made us much less safer. Experts are always wrong. The experts at the Pentagon were wrong when they suggested much more troops were necessary to control Iraq. The ‘experts’ at the State Department were wrong when their huge post war plan was discarded. The “experts” in the CIA and other intelligence agencies were wrong when they disputed the aluminum tube purpose or the uranium from Niger fairy tail. The “experts” that left FEMA in disgust as that department became a political patronage retirement house. This administration hates experts. Hates intellectuals. Hates reading newspapers. Hates differing positions. Hates being questioned on their rock solid ideological beliefs. In other words they are JUST LIKE MacBuckets and Darrell. God help us all.
Slide.
Another reason why we are not safe with the policies of the Bush administration. Sorry this is a bit long but well worth reading. The passage below comes after a horrible depiction of how the US kidnapped an Algerian and tortured him for basically a case of a mistranslation of a phone conversation he had with a relative. Read the whole thing its worth it, but Digby continues:
.
Bob In Pacifica
Which island was Kim aiming at? As long as it’s not Maui I think we can make accommodations.
Nutcutter
Yeah, you got nothing. Your whole diatribe was “We can’t know what would have happened if ….”
What horseshit, pure horseshit. Americans are called upon to govern themselves, and they can do this by looking at their circumstances and judging what their interests are.
Looking at the circumstances does not require a blogospherish mindfuck about whether this or that might have happened if this or that hadn’t happened. It simply requires looking at the facts and the world as they are and making a judgment.
Is the world better after five and a half years of George Bush than it was before them?
You can answer yes or no, but don’t sit there and tell me that we aren’t able to answer the question. And don’t tell me that we can’t hold the Iraq war up to that light and make a determination. We can, we will, we do, and we have.
As for Darrell, he’s the only thing on this blog that is more of a drag than you are. He sucks. I don’t like him, and I don’t like you. I will say so at my pleasure and as I like. If you don’t like eat, kiss my ass.
Nutcutter
“don’t like it”
Sorry, typing while eating, listening to the tv and a crying baby, and fulminating at idiots is not as easy as it looks.
Nutcutter
From an MSNBC story about the great strides we’re making training a new Iraqi army.
Only four years, and already they know how to hold their weapons properly!
Freedom is truly on the march.
Mac Buckets
Right. OK. What does your crystal ball say, then, about the course of history had Bush not invaded Iraq? All kite-flying and group-hugs? I’ll try really hard to care about your fortune-telling.
I’m not sure that this post does anything to disprove a Darrell fetish (I’ll bet you’re a Darrell-created spoof!) Yeah, that Darrell should be banned for his posts, right? Wink-wink! Your brilliant “insights,” though — priceless!
And come on, man, I know you aren’t very bright, but you should at least know by now that I will never give the tiniest rat’s anus about your opinion of me.
Slide.
The question was not directed at me but I’ll weigh in anyway. No group hugs nitwit, but we can say that 2,500 young Americans would now be alive. That perhaps up to as many as 100,000 innocent Iraqis would still be alive. That tens of thousands of Americans would not have been horribly wounded. That we would have hundreds of billions of dollars more to provide better homeland security. That abu Ghraib wouldn’t have happend. That Haditha wouldn’t have happened. That the rape and murder of a 15 year old girl woudn’t have happened. And more importantly the incredible damage those incidents have had on this country’s reputation fueling white hot hatred around the world wouldn’t have happened.
Your failure to see the dredful consequences of this disaster of a war is truly staggering. I guess the blind ideology of the moronic right wingnuts requires a complete inability to see reality. Even ardent supporters of the Iraq war have slowly come to the conclusion that the policy is an unmitigated disaster. That is except for the fringe wackos that have been totally discredited of which Darrell and MacBuckets empitomize.
Nutcutter
You’re still going to pretend not to get this?
There’s no crystal ball involved. There is simply an estimation of reality, and one’s interests. That’s all it takes to answer the important questions. It’s the most basic process of self-government.
Under the Mac Buckets/Darrell Mindfuck Rule, the people can’t decide anything or judge anything. Someone else always knows better. Important people in Washington must know better. Pundits must know better. “Who can say what might have happened …. blah blah blah …”
The Mac Buckets Principle: Don’t try to judge the circumstances you are in, you are too inferior and too feeble to do that. Don’t ask if you are safer, who can know? Don’t ask if you are better off, who can say what might have happened if Kerry had won?
On the one hand, I find it in the realm of bizarroland that anyone could think that they could persuade another person to believe such crap. On the other hand, there are you and Darrell, the mindfuckers, who apparently think that since the government can get you to believe anything, you in turn can get others to believe anything.
The world is much simpler than you want to admit, Mac.
Am I safer today than I was before George Bush? Am I better off? Is the country better off? Is the country safer? I don’t need advice from you to answer those questions. Any more than you need advice from me.
Can I hold the Iraq war up to simple scrutiny and ask the right questions? Of course. Can I answer them? Of course. Should I be persuaded otherwise by you?
And you think this is worth mentioning …. why?
This ain’t about my opinion of you. It’s about whether people can ask and answer simple questions about the world and the country and their lives, without having to go through a mindfuck invented by you and Darrell.
They can, and you are just annoying debris on the toilet paper of the process.
That’s your ridiculous brain fart from 10:54 last night, and it sums up your presence here perfectly: You aren’t qualified to judge the state of your world and take stock of your interests. It’s “unanswerable.”
At least Darrell is smart enough to peddle that bullshit like it’s a popsicle: Just keep sucking on it. Don’t examine it. But you … you think you are smart enough to drill into it and explore it. Win win for the Macster. He can look smarter than the rubes who are trying to answer the unanswerable question, and look smarter than Darrell, who asked it, all at the same time!
You stupid fuck. Please, spend another day telling me that I can’t judge the state of the world I live in and make basic decisions about it. In fact, why don’t you run for office on that platform? Hint: You probably want to run as a Republican, where you’ll get a good reception at the primary level.
Nutcutter
Via DKos, this quick rundown of what your Darrell/MacBuckets House of Representatives has planned for the summer:
Darrell/Mac, which I shall call D-Mac, has this to say to all Americans:
“Ask not whether your country is better for you, ask whether you are good enough to ask a question.”