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Title: Top Ten Myths about the Libya War
Source:
Juan Cole
URL Source: http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/top ... myths-about-the-libya-war.html
Published: Aug 22, 2011
Author: Juan Cole
Post Date: 2011-08-22 12:54:28 by go65
Keywords: None
Views: 6021
Comments: 19
The Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a moment of celebration, not only for Libyans but for a youth generation in the Arab world that has pursued a political opening across the region. The secret of the uprising’s final days of success lay in a popular revolt in the working-class districts of the capital, which did most of the hard work of throwing off the rule of secret police and military cliques. It succeeded so well that when revolutionary brigades entered the city from the west, many encountered little or no resistance, and they walked right into the center of the capital. Muammar Qaddafi was in hiding as I went to press, and three of his sons were in custody. Saif al-Islam Qaddafi had apparently been the de facto ruler of the country in recent years, so his capture signaled a checkmate. (Checkmate is a corruption of the Persian “shah maat,” the “king is confounded,” since chess came west from India via Iran). Checkmate. The end game, wherein the people of Tripoli overthrew the Qaddafis and joined the opposition Transitional National Council, is the best case scenario that I had suggested was the most likely denouement for the revolution. I have been making this argument for some time, and it evoked a certain amount of incredulity when I said it in a lecture in the Netherlands in mid-June, but it has all along been my best guess that things would end the way they have. I got it right where others did not because my premises turned out to be sounder, i.e., that Qaddafi had lost popular support across the board and was in power only through main force. Once enough of his heavy weapons capability was disrupted, and his fuel and ammunition supplies blocked, the underlying hostility of the common people to the regime could again manifest itself, as it had in February. I was moreover convinced that the generality of Libyans were attracted by the revolution and by the idea of a political opening, and that there was no great danger to national unity here. I do not mean to underestimate the challenges that still lie ahead– mopping up operations against regime loyalists, reestablishing law and order in cities that have seen popular revolutions, reconstituting police and the national army, moving the Transitional National Council to Tripoli, founding political parties, and building a new, parliamentary regime. Even in much more institutionalized and less clan- based societies such as Tunisia and Egypt, these tasks have proved anything but easy. But it would be wrong, in this moment of triumph for the Libyan Second Republic, to dwell on the difficulties to come. Libyans deserve a moment of exultation. I have taken a lot of heat for my support of the revolution and of the United Nations-authorized intervention by the Arab League and NATO that kept it from being crushed. I haven’t taken nearly as much heat as the youth of Misrata who fought off Qaddafi’s tank barrages, though, so it is OK. I hate war, having actually lived through one in Lebanon, and I hate the idea of people being killed. My critics who imagined me thrilling at NATO bombing raids were just being cruel. But here I agree with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can’t protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good. I mourn the deaths of all the people who died in this revolution, especially since many of the Qaddafi brigades were clearly coerced (they deserted in large numbers as soon as they felt it safe). But it was clear to me that Qaddafi was not a man to compromise, and that his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries if it were allowed to. Moreover, those who question whether there were US interests in Libya seem to me a little blind. The US has an interest in there not being massacres of people for merely exercising their right to free assembly. The US has an interest in a lawful world order, and therefore in the United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Libyans be protected from their murderous government. The US has an interest in its NATO alliance, and NATO allies France and Britain felt strongly about this intervention. The US has a deep interest in the fate of Egypt, and what happened in Libya would have affected Egypt (Qaddafi allegedly had high Egyptian officials on his payroll). Given the controversies about the revolution, it is worthwhile reviewing the myths about the Libyan Revolution that led so many observers to make so many fantastic or just mistaken assertions about it. 1. Qaddafi was a progressive in his domestic policies. While back in the 1970s, Qaddafi was probably more generous in sharing around the oil wealth with the population, buying tractors for farmers, etc., in the past couple of decades that policy changed. He became vindictive against tribes in the east and in the southwest that had crossed him politically, depriving them of their fair share in the country’s resources. And in the past decade and a half, extreme corruption and the rise of post-Soviet-style oligarchs, including Qaddafi and his sons, have discouraged investment and blighted the economy. Workers were strictly controlled and unable to collectively bargain for improvements in their conditions. There was much more poverty and poor infrastructure in Libya than there should have been in an oil state. 2. Qaddafi was a progressive in his foreign policy. Again, he traded for decades on positions, or postures, he took in the 1970s. In contrast, in recent years he played a sinister role in Africa, bankrolling brutal dictators and helping foment ruinous wars. In 1996 the supposed champion of the Palestinian cause expelled 30,000 stateless Palestinians from the country. After he came in from the cold, ending European and US sanctions, he began buddying around with George W. Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and other right wing figures. Berlusconi has even said that he considered resigning as Italian prime minister once NATO began its intervention, given his close personal relationship to Qaddafi. Such a progressive. 3. It was only natural that Qaddafi sent his military against the protesters and revolutionaries; any country would have done the same. No, it wouldn’t, and this is the argument of a moral cretin. In fact, the Tunisian officer corps refused to fire on Tunisian crowds for dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and the Egyptian officer corps refused to fire on Egyptian crowds for Hosni Mubarak. The willingness of the Libyan officer corps to visit macabre violence on protesting crowds derived from the centrality of the Qaddafi sons and cronies at the top of the military hierarchy and from the lack of connection between the people and the professional soldiers and mercenaries. Deploying the military against non- combatants was a war crime, and doing so in a widespread and systematic way was a crime against humanity. Qaddafi and his sons will be tried for this crime, which is not “perfectly natural.” 4. There was a long stalemate in the fighting between the revolutionaries and the Qaddafi military. There was not. This idea was fostered by the vantage point of many Western observers, in Benghazi. It is true that there was a long stalemate at Brega, which ended yesterday when the pro-Qaddafi troops there surrendered. But the two most active fronts in the war were Misrata and its environs, and the Western Mountain region. Misrata fought an epic, Stalingrad-style, struggle of self-defense against attacking Qaddafi armor and troops, finally proving victorious with NATO help, and then they gradually fought to the west toward Tripoli. The most dramatic battles and advances were in the largely Berber Western Mountain region, where, again, Qaddafi armored units relentlessly shelled small towns and villages but were fought off (with less help from NATO initially, which I think did not recognize the importance of this theater). It was the revolutionary volunteers from this region who eventually took Zawiya, with the help of the people of Zawiya, last Friday and who thereby cut Tripoli off from fuel and ammunition coming from Tunisia and made the fall of the capital possible. Any close observer of the war since April has seen constant movement, first at Misrata and then in the Western Mountains, and there was never an over-all stalemate. 5. The Libyan Revolution was a civil war. It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing their city quarters taking on trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a civil war. Only in a few small pockets of territory, such as Sirte and its environs, did pro-Qaddafi civilians oppose the revolutionaries, but it would be wrong to magnify a handful of skirmishes of that sort into a civil war. Qaddafi’s support was too limited, too thin, and too centered in the professional military, to allow us to speak of a civil war. 6. Libya is not a real country and could have been partitioned between east and west. Alexander Cockburn wrote, “It requites no great prescience to see that this will all end up badly. Qaddafi’s failure to collapse on schedule is prompting increasing pressure to start a ground war, since the NATO operation is, in terms of prestige, like the banks Obama has bailed out, Too Big to Fail. Libya will probably be balkanized.” I don’t understand the propensity of Western analysts to keep pronouncing nations in the global south “artificial” and on the verge of splitting up. It is a kind of Orientalism. All nations are artificial. Benedict Anderson dates the nation-state to the late 1700s, and even if it were a bit earlier, it is a new thing in history. Moreover, most nation-states are multi-ethnic, and many long-established ones have sub- nationalisms that threaten their unity. Thus, the Catalans and Basque are uneasy inside Spain, the Scottish may bolt Britain any moment, etc., etc. In contrast, Libya does not have any well-organized, popular separatist movements. It does have tribal divisions, but these are not the basis for nationalist separatism, and tribal alliances and fissures are more fluid than ethnicity (which is itself less fixed than people assume). Everyone speaks Arabic, though for Berbers it is the public language; Berbers were among the central Libyan heroes of the revolution, and will be rewarded with a more pluralist Libya. This generation of young Libyans, who waged the revolution, have mostly been through state schools and have a strong allegiance to the idea of Libya. Throughout the revolution, the people of Benghazi insisted that Tripoli was and would remain the capital. Westerners looking for break-ups after dictatorships are fixated on the Balkan events after 1989, but there most often isn’t an exact analogue to those in the contemporary Arab world. 7. There had to be NATO infantry brigades on the ground for the revolution to succeed. Everyone from Cockburn to Max Boot (scary when those two agree) put forward this idea. But there are not any foreign infantry brigades in Libya, and there are unlikely to be any. Libyans are very nationalistic and they made this clear from the beginning. Likewise the Arab League. NATO had some intelligence assets on the ground, but they were small in number, were requested behind the scenes for liaison and spotting by the revolutionaries, and did not amount to an invasion force. The Libyan people never needed foreign ground brigades to succeed in their revolution. 8. The United States led the charge to war. There is no evidence for this allegation whatsoever. When I asked Glenn Greenwald whether a US refusal to join France and Britain in a NATO united front might not have destroyed NATO, he replied that NATO would never have gone forward unless the US had plumped for the intervention in the first place. I fear that answer was less fact-based and more doctrinaire than we are accustomed to hearing from Mr. Greenwald, whose research and analysis on domestic issues is generally first-rate. As someone not a stranger to diplomatic history, and who has actually heard briefings in Europe from foreign ministries and officers of NATO members, I’m offended at the glibness of an answer given with no more substantiation than an idee fixe. The excellent McClatchy wire service reported on the reasons for which then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Pentagon, and Obama himself were extremely reluctant to become involved in yet another war in the Muslim world. It is obvious that the French and the British led the charge on this intervention, likely because they believed that a protracted struggle over years between the opposition and Qaddafi in Libya would radicalize it and give an opening to al-Qaeda and so pose various threats to Europe. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had been politically mauled, as well, by the offer of his defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, to send French troops to assist Ben Ali in Tunisia (Alliot-Marie had been Ben Ali’s guest on fancy vacations), and may have wanted to restore traditional French cachet in the Arab world as well as to look decisive to his electorate. Whatever Western Europe’s motivations, they were the decisive ones, and the Obama administration clearly came along as a junior partner (something Sen. John McCain is complaining bitterly about). 9. Qaddafi would not have killed or imprisoned large numbers of dissidents in Benghazi, Derna, al- Bayda and Tobruk if he had been allowed to pursue his March Blitzkrieg toward the eastern cities that had defied him. But we have real-world examples of how he would have behaved, in Zawiya, Tawargha, Misrata and elsewhere. His indiscriminate shelling of Misrata had already killed between 1000 and 2000 by last April,, and it continued all summer. At least one Qaddafi mass grave with 150 bodies in it has been discovered. And the full story of the horrors in Zawiya and elsewhere in the west has yet to emerge, but it will not be pretty. The opposition claims Qaddafi’s forces killed tens of thousands. Public health studies may eventually settle this issue, but we know definitively what Qaddafi was capable of. 10. This was a war for Libya’s oil. That is daft. Libya was already integrated into the international oil markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them. They had often already had the trauma of having to compete for post-war Iraqi contracts, a process in which many did less well than they would have liked. ENI’s profits were hurt by the Libyan revolution, as were those of Total SA. and Repsol. Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is no good evidence for it (that Qaddafi was erratic is not enough), and is therefore just a conspiracy theory.
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#1. To: go65 (#0)
GOP on the wrong side of history...again... Maybe they keep confusing it with "hysteria"?
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
So whatever happened to the USA minding its own business?
__________________________________________________________________________________________ Your hero Ronald Reagan certainly followed that one, eh?
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
I wouldn't "go there" if I were you, Mr. Obama Pin-up. And no, he didn't. When did I ever say he did?
__________________________________________________________________________________________ But he was a republican and white, tho, eh?
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
Unlike you apparently are, I'm not obsessed with Party and race. Get back to me when you can post an intelligent answer to the question: __________________________________________________________________________________________ Bull. You have used terms for Obama that refer directly to his race. That dog won't hunt. Feel free to point out a post in which you favored a dem's POV over a republican's. Thanks. What ever happened to the USA minding it's own business? Do you mind your own business when your neighbor is a crack whore? The US is a member of the international community and has a vested stake in its peaceful order. Any policy decision that we make regarding conflicts that have the potential of far reaching international implications has to be based upon what kind of "neighbor" and "neighborhhod" we exist with and within.
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
If you're going to make a charge like that, I assume you can back it up. If not, retract. Thanks. As far as democrats go, I like Dennis Kucinich position on the wars. But I disagree with him on just about everything else. The US is a member of the international community and has a vested stake in its peaceful order. Any policy decision that we make regarding conflicts that have the potential of far reaching international implications has to be based upon what kind of "neighbor" and "neighborhhod" we exist with and within. __________________________________________________________________________________________ The so called conservative myth that they are upholding the constitution because they did not like the liberal swing of the country in the 60s (i.e. they were against the Federal govt enforcing Civil Rights for minorities)......
With the economy still in the dumper -- maybe permanently? -- and full-time jobs becoming as scarce as rain during a drought, huge percentages of Americans have had their (misplaced) faith in the American dream shaken, the upper-middle-class consumerist lifestyle is exposed as a mirage for anybody who plays by the rules. Capitalism and the America that embraced it as a way of life is now and forever more a failure. It does me good to know that the generation that voted in Reagan and his ideology will see their America die from that ideology before their very own eyes and knowing they had a hand in its destruction.
Okay...you may be correct...I know you've referred to him as "Zero blah blah"...maybe it wasn't race based...so, I'll reserve judgment on that for now. But I will be watching!!! {;^D I'm a Constitutional Conservative - where would I ever favor the statist democrat party position over anything. The only republican it's looking like I could support is Ron Paul. The US Constitution wasn't designed as a domestic document only. POTUS and Congress most certainly have foreign policy powers. Those powers most certainly imply that they have the power to weigh internationial incidents as they pertain to the physical and economic safety of the US. Isolationism is good in theory and crap in practice. ON the other hand, your argument against overt interventionism, e.g. post WWII mid-east policy, is valid as well. But there is a balance. Where the US has gotten off track - and this goes back to Roosevelt, Teddy not Franklin, is that foreign policy has gotten entangled with CORPORATE policy. With TR, the US Navy was used in Central American to benefit United Fruit. It's how Panama was created. Since WWII, foreign policy has been used to benefit both defense contractors and oil companies. We have gone to war to defend a steady supply of oil. We've paid for that supply with American lives while allowing corporations to profit. NOne of that is lost on me. All of that, however, does not negate the fact that sometimes interventionism can have a benefit with the most important being regional and thus international stabilitry. You threw Iraq in my face. That region had been relatively stable since Poppy's war. There was absolutely no reason to invade. ON the other hand, Khadaffy had, without any real provocation, attacked US citizens and then thumbed his nose at us. I believe his actions regarding the Lockerbie bomber more than proved that any "rehabilitation" that we may have believed had occurred in his attitude was overly optimistic. I believe that in this case that the US had a moral obligation to evaluate taking a role in any popular uprising against him.
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
I've heard that for years. But as you pointed out, since TR we've practiced interventionalism in varying degress - not isolationism. I counter that you can't say it's crap because we haven't seen it in practice. I cannot understand why a policy of "trade with everyone, but mind our own business" is not desirable. Also, earlier you attempted to make an analogy between individuals and nations. (something like would I intercede if I lived next door to a crack house or something to that effect?) Nations are not individuals. What is right and proper for individuals to do is not necessarily right and proper for nations. If I want to go into a crack house with guns a-blazin' and kick some ass, then I am only placing myself in danger. While that might be noble and good, it wouldn't be if instead of going in myself, I accosted some passer-by on the street at gunpoint, and forced HIM to go into the crack house. Once a nation goes down the interventionist road - even for noble and good reasons - it ALWAYS gets corrupted. For every "Greneda" (and I'm not arguing FOR that operation), we get a Viet Nam and an Iraq.
__________________________________________________________________________________________ We saw it during the Taft years. We also saw it in the 1930's. The problem, as I stated, is where is the "balance"? And, I believe that skepiticism in any policy that is dependent upon the use of the military is a healthy use of skepticism. It does not mean that the military option is one that should never be used. We've seen this type of limited action/intervention work prior in the Balkans. I'm glad that it worked here.
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
Because there are those who would harm us. We ended trade with Khaddafy - rightly so, IMHO - because of his penchant for commiting violence against US citizens. I was 100% in support of RR in his treatment of Libya and we should have demanded that the bomber be brought to the US for trial. Nations are not individuals. What is right and proper for individuals to do is not necessarily right and proper for nations. Nations have intercourse with each other...you, yourself, just cited trade. There are laws among and between nations and most of those are rooted in confirming the premise that nations have the power to determine how it will govern its own national security in the face of both direct and indirect belligerence. For every "Greneda" (and I'm not arguing FOR that operation), we get a Viet Nam and an Iraq. I'd make it for every "Panama" but your point is not lost on me.
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
The excuse needed to get NATO involved in Libya was the threat of mass killing of areas that broke away form Qaddafi's rule to mostly non violent protests. Having the Qaddafi regime threaten mass killings regardless of provocation, set up an excuse for intervention whose mission is to prevent some form of "genocide". This allowed the intervention the fig leaf of legality.
With the economy still in the dumper -- maybe permanently? -- and full-time jobs becoming as scarce as rain during a drought, huge percentages of Americans have had their (misplaced) faith in the American dream shaken, the upper-middle-class consumerist lifestyle is exposed as a mirage for anybody who plays by the rules. Capitalism and the America that embraced it as a way of life is now and forever more a failure. It does me good to know that the generation that voted in Reagan and his ideology will see their America die from that ideology before their very own eyes and knowing they had a hand in its destruction.
This was about oil, and defense contractors. Anyone wishing to do us harm should understand they've taken on a suicidal mission.
__________________________________________________________________________________________ There is more than one way to harm.
"...all of the equations in neoclassical economics are rubbish. The differential equations describe nothing. Economics is not about mathematics, it is about the human being." Sandeep Jaitly
You may find this an incredulous statement but yours is a dubious argument. "War", as anticpated by the USCON, is the absolute mobilization of the nation's resources to engage in a total armed conflict with another nation. Washington raised an army based soley on his proclamation that Western PA was in rebellion and had a Federal magistrate certify it. Adams orderded the US Navy to mobilize against France in the XYZ Affair. The true check of the Framers on any capricious use of the military was that the military itself was to be limited in size.
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
"War", as anticpated by the USCON, is the absolute mobilization of the nation's resources to engage in a total armed conflict with another nation. Washington raised an army based soley on his proclamation that Western PA was in rebellion and had a Federal magistrate certify it. Adams orderded the US Navy to mobilize against France in the XYZ Affair. The true check of the Framers on any capricious use of the military was that the military itself was to be limited in size. I'm not sure what to make of your two examples. The Whiskey Rebellion involved people inside US territory, not foreign nations. It is an interesting event, however. In reading the article at the link, I can sympathize with both the farmers AND the president. No one likes taxes, but given the situation at the time one can certainly see why they in particular felt the tax was unfair. But Washington did what he had to do, also, and I don't fault him. As the head of the FEDERAL gov't, he was obliged to deal with a threat to that entity. (and I draw a distinction between this and the Civil War. This was not a state or states threatening to seceed, but a group of people rebelling against a tax. I believe then, as I do now, that states have a Constitutional right to seceed. The Civil War notwithstanding.) This was not an issue of the US declaring war on a foreign country, so I don't think Congressional consent was necessary (even though had the situation gone on longer Washington probably would have sought - and gotten - approval.) As it is, the militia he raised ended up not being needed as the rebellion was over by the time he arrived. (the PA turnpike was years away, and travel was slow). You're on firmer footing with THE XYZ AFFAIR example - it appears that did result in an un-declared war with France. Of course, neither President Adams nor French minister Tallyrand really wanted war, but war fever was spreading throughout the US. Adams used this as a pretext to build a fledgling US Navy - which saw some success against France. The three-year "war" ended in 1800. I'm not clear as to why Adams did not go ahead and declare war - I'm sure Congress would have gone along. Perhaps it was a case of everyone getting what they want, so why rock the boat? Back to the original point - I still believe it is the spirit and the letter of the Constitution to restrain the president from foreign "adventures" by requiring Congressional approval for wars. And calling them "police actions" should not change the facts. The fact that there are examples where that hasn't happened (mostly recent ones, but even this one early on) reflects poorly on those WHO govern - not on the governing document.
__________________________________________________________________________________________ Actually, I had forgotten about the Militia ACt of 1792 which gave that power to the POTUS.
America...My Kind Of Place... "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]..." "THE MILITIA IS COMING!!! THE MILITIA IS COMING!!!" I lurk to see if someone other than Myst or Pookie posts anything...
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#2. To: war (#1)
HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#3. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#2)
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#4. To: war (#3)
(Edited)
So whatever happened to the USA minding its own business?
Your hero Ronald Reagan certainly followed that one, eh?
HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#5. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#4)
(Edited)
And no, he didn't.
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#6. To: war (#5)
But he was a republican and white, tho, eh?
What ever happened to the USA minding it's own business?
HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#7. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#6)
(Edited)
Unlike you apparently are, I'm not obsessed with Party and race.
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#8. To: war (#7)
Bull. You have used terms for Obama that refer directly to his race. That dog won't hunt.
Feel free to point out a post in which you favored a dem's POV over a republican's. Thanks.
I'm a Constitutional Conservative - where would I ever favor the statist democrat party position over anything. The only republican it's looking like I could support is Ron Paul. Do you mind your own business when your neighbor is a crack whore?
Thank you Mr. Bush.
HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#9. To: Get Outta Dodge!, war (#8)
I'm a Constitutional Conservative -
#10. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#8)
(Edited)
If you're going to make a charge like that, I assume you can back it up. If not, retract. Thanks.
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#11. To: war (#10)
(Edited)
Isolationism is good in theory and crap in practice.
HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#12. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#11)
I counter that you can't say it's crap because we haven't seen it in practice.
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#13. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#11)
I cannot understand why a policy of "trade with everyone, but mind our own business" is not desirable.
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#14. To: war, Get Outta Dodge! (#13)
(Edited)
Nations have intercourse with each other...you, yourself, just cited trade. There are laws among and between nations and most of those are rooted in confirming the premise that nations have the power to determine how it will govern its own national security in the face of both direct and indirect belligerence.
#15. To: war (#13)
We saw it during the Taft years.
I stand corrected. I would also add the post WWI decade (Harding and Coolidge). What was common about those eras? We were pretty good economically, and we were AT PEACE. We also saw it in the 1930's.
I'm not so sure - some historians suggest we were meddling in Japanese affairs during the later 30s, which conceivably led to Pearl Harbor. The problem, as I stated, is where is the "balance"? And, I believe that skepiticism in any policy that is dependent upon the use of the military is a healthy use of skepticism.
As Brian S would say - Indeed. It does not mean that the military option is one that should never be used.
Only - repeat, ONLY - when Congress has made a formal declaration of war. We've seen this type of limited action/intervention work prior in the Balkans. I'm glad that it worked here.
And you're okay that Congress wasn't consulted? Because there are those who would harm us. We ended trade with Khaddafy - rightly so, IMHO - because of his penchant for commiting violence against US citizens. I was 100% in support of RR in his treatment of Libya and we should have demanded that the bomber be brought to the US for trial.
Ending trade with Khaddafi was one thing. But justice needs to be swift - I'm not buying this was in response to Lockerbie which happened what? 22 years ago? Nations have intercourse with each other...you, yourself, just cited trade. There are laws among and between nations and most of those are rooted in confirming the premise that nations have the power to determine how it will govern its own national security in the face of both direct and indirect belligerence.
We are a hugely stong military nation - capable of turning any real or imagined enemy into a glass corpse. HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#16. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#15)
Anyone wishing to do us harm should understand they've taken on a suicidal mission.
#17. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#15)
Only - repeat, ONLY - when Congress has made a formal declaration of war.
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
#18. To: war (#17)
You may find this an incredulous statement but yours is a dubious argument.
HA! The tea-party, INDEED! They're so . . . ah . . . common
#19. To: Get Outta Dodge! (#18)
(Edited)
This was not an issue of the US declaring war on a foreign country, so I don't think Congressional consent was necessary (even though had the situation gone on longer Washington probably would have sought - and gotten - approval.)
--GW Bush
--Sarah Palin's version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul revere"
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