Random Rants

[Shuriken]

I thought I would start a thread just to rant about whatever is on my mind.

IRAQ'S A LOST CAUSE? ASK THE REAL EXPERTS

by Max Boot


When it comes to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.

A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion.

Yet in a survey last month from the U.S.-based International Republican Institute, 47% of Iraqis polled said their country was headed in the right direction, as opposed to 37% who said they thought that it was going in the wrong direction. And 56% thought things would be better in six months. Only 16% thought they would be worse.

American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians. The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits — no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq — reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting.

Now, it could be that the Iraqi public and the U.S. armed forces are delusional. Maybe things really are on an irreversible downward slope. But before reaching such an apocalyptic conclusion, stop to consider why so many with firsthand experience have more hope than those without any.

For starters, one can point to two successful elections this year, on Jan. 30 and Oct. 15, in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. Since then, Sunni political parties have made clear their determination to also participate in the Dec. 15 parliamentary election. This is big news.

The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.

There are also positive economic indicators that receive little or no coverage in the Western media. For all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy, the Brookings Institution reports that per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war. Thanks primarily to the increase in oil prices, the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% next year. According to Brookings' Iraq index, there are five times more cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five times more telephone subscribers and 32 times more Internet users.

The growth of the independent media — a prerequisite of liberal democracy — is even more inspiring. Before 2003 there was not a single independent media outlet in Iraq. Today, Brookings reports, there are 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations and more than 100 newspapers.

But aren't bombs still going off at an alarming rate? Of course. It's almost impossible to stop a few thousand fanatics who are willing to commit suicide to slaughter others.

Yet there is hope on the security front. Since the Jan. 30 election, not a single Iraqi unit has crumbled in battle, according to Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who until September was in charge of their training. Iraqi soldiers are showing impressive determination in fighting the terrorists, notwithstanding the terrible casualties they have taken. Their increasing success is evident on "Route Irish," from Baghdad International Airport. Once the most dangerous road in Iraq, it is now one of the safest. The last coalition fatality there that was a result of enemy action occurred in March.

This is not meant to suggest that everything is wonderful in Iraq. The situation remains grim in many respects. But the most disheartening indicator of all is simply the American public's loss of confidence in the war effort. Abu Musab Zarqawi may be losing on the Arab street (his own family has disowned him), but he's winning on Main Street. And, as the Vietnam War showed, defeatism on the home front can become self-fulfilling.

Yes, Max, I’m sure that several things are going well in Iraq. I hope that some things are going well in Iraq because I don’t want U.S. forces — excuse me, I mean coalition forces — to become a permanent occupier, which might be the case if nothing at all were to improve.

But your article, Max, overlooks an important issue: The war that we are now fighting in Iraq was not the war that the Bush administration sold us. If enthusiasm about how things are going in that country is starting to sag, it’s because the Bush administration all but promised that a military invasion of Iraq would be a quick and bloodless fix for that particular front of “the war on terror.”

As Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed writer Jay Bookman says in a recent column, the Bush administration egregiously underestimated how long and how costly a military engagement with Iraq would be: “As proof:

“•They budgeted a total of $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq — we now spend more than that in Iraq in about a week.

“•They thought they could occupy Iraq with a third of the troops that experienced generals told them they needed; today, our troops are getting maimed and killed with explosives looted from Iraqi weapons sites because we lacked the manpower to guard those sites.

“•They expected to have the country on its feet and financing itself from oil in 90 days; 30 months later, we are farther from that dream than ever.”

Bush’s now infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo-op aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in 2003 marked what the president surely thought was the end of the war. He was predicting a quick Desert Storm-like victory, all the while ignoring warnings from Gulf War architects like Brent Scrowcroft that a military invasion of Baghdad would be a different kettle of fish entirely.

Now that the administration’s fairy tale of a swift and painless victory has not come true, administration officials and their neocon apologists are chiding us because we should have expected war with Iraq to be, in Rumsfeld’s words, “a long, hard slog.” But in their build-up to war, the Bush administration did not prepare us for a slog of any sort. I wonder if the term “bait and switch” means anything to them.

I’m tired of being lectured by war apologists that, because the Bush administration’s unrealistic and ill-advised fantasies about a quick and easy victory in Iraq have not come true, the American people are at fault for not energetically supporting the administration’s catastrophic blundering. Why don’t you say anything about that in your article, Max?

[LaiSteve66]

[BUSH]We must stay the course.[/BUSH]

* gets slapped by Shuriken *

[LaiSteve66]LMAO![/LaiSteve66]

[Leinad]

aaarrrrgggghhhh !!!!! ...howz that

Originally Posted by Leinad

aaarrrrgggghhhh !!!!! ...howz that

o and a little grrrrrrrrrr

[Hiroshi2]

Buck Fush

[Emperor_Mike]

And in other news, more American deaths in Iraq (five to be precise) along with another thirty civilians killed by a car bomb.

Officially, the American death count is at 2,104.

Yes, things are WONDERFUL over there. It's certainly NOT a lost cause, absolutely not! Order will be restored shortly because the insurgency is *obviously* on the verge of defeat. No, it won't take YEARS to stabilise the country and it certainly won't require more lives. No, no, things are FINE.

Do these people listen to the words coming out of their mouths or read what they themselves write?

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by Emperor_Mike

And in other news, more American deaths in Iraq (five to be precise) along with another thirty civilians killed by a car bomb.

Officially, the American death count is at 2,104.
...

Where does that count actually come from? The folks who die right then and there?

What about the people who die in route to the hospital or die at the hospital? Given this, the number of dead Americans could be a lot higher.

[Shuriken]

Here are a couple of letters that I wrote to the Los Angeles Times that weren’t printed:

To the Editor:

I've held off on writing you for the past few days because I thought that I would have seen something in your paper addressing this point by now. I'm writing at this relatively late date because I haven't.

In his campaign-style Veteran’s Day speech in Pennsylvania, President Bush defended his administration's conduct in the build-up to the war with Iraq by saying, “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.”

Of the two official reports into pre-war intelligence, one authorized by the White House and one by the Senate, Bush is clearly referring to the Senate's. But your Nov. 12 story “Bush Goes on the Offensive Against Critics of War in Iraq” confuses this with the White House report headed by Republican Laurence Silberman and Democrat Charles Robb.

What’s important is that neither report completely absolved the White House of intelligence manipulation because neither report was very thorough. The Senate report that Bush claims as proof of his pre-war truthfulness was only preliminary, with Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) promising a more complete follow-up report. It was to quicken the release of this follow-up that Democrats called for a closed-door session of the Senate on Nov. 1.

Now, Bush is going around the world implying that this incomplete report exonerates his administration's handling of pre-war intelligence when it really doesn't. If Bush didn't mislead this country into war, why is he misleading us now?

[Hiroshi2]

And to think he probably won't be challenged quite as hard for his misleadings as Clinton was for his supposed "obstruction of justice" since the Republicans/conservatives dominate all three branches of government.


While reading about Ronald Reagan, or even the first Bush, and the stuff they did, I used to think it was kinda fucked up how they led the country. But compared to Bush, they might as well have been Abe Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

[Shuriken]

LINCOLN'S WORDS, OUR PLEDGE

by David Gelernter


The Pledge of Allegiance has been in legal jeopardy for years, all because it contains the words "under God" — a phrase Abraham Lincoln stamped on the American consciousness when he used it on Nov. 19, 1863, 142 years ago, in the Gettysburg Address.

The Pledge originated in 1892, was modified in 1923 and again in 1924, and most recently in 1954 when the words "under God" were added. In 2004, and again in 2005, a California atheist named Michael Newdow filed lawsuits claiming that it was unconstitutional for children to be asked to say the Pledge in public schools. In September, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled for Newdow. Inviting students to say the pledge violates their right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God," he wrote. Presumably the pledge — or at least the words "under God" — will wind up being vetted by the Supreme Court.

One of the tragedies in all of this is the attempt to remove history's footprint from the Pledge. The Pledge asks children to state their allegiance to " … one nation, under God … " Lincoln spoke the words "this nation, under God" at the spiritual center point of American history. Today they remind us (or ought to) of how hard this nation has struggled and how dearly it has paid to move closer to its own sublime declaration that "all men are created equal."

Lincoln hated slavery. But he led the Northern states into the Civil War for only one stated, official reason: to hold the Union together by preventing the Confederate states from seceding. At the start of the fighting, public opinion would not have supported a war to end slavery. But as casualties mounted, the public's ideas shifted, and Lincoln felt them shifting. (As soldiers die in war, Americans raise their sights — as they have in Iraq. If Americans are to die, they must die for the greatest, noblest cause the public and its leaders can imagine.)

In September 1862, Lincoln dramatically changed the war's character by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. As of Jan. 1, 1863, all slaves in rebellious regions of the country "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Lincoln saw the proclamation as a first step. Eventually all slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment in 1865.

The Emancipation Proclamation "lifted the Civil War to the dignity of a crusade," wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg in their classic history, "Growth of the American Republic." But crusades can succeed or fail. When the proclamation was issued, no one knew whether the North could beat the South and enforce the president's dramatic edict.

The question was answered on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of July 1863, in the bloody battle of Gettysburg. On the Union side alone, roughly 23,000 men were killed, wounded or missing. There was far more fighting ahead, but after Gettysburg there was virtually no doubt that the Union would win — and at last be in a position to free the slaves and start on the long, hard road to justice and reunification.

By delivering the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln built a sacred shrine out of words on the most important battlefield in American history — a small shrine, of wonderful beauty, that reminds us why an earlier generation of Northerners fought, bled and died to win the Civil War: So that "this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom."

Lincoln added the words "under God" at the last minute. They don't appear in drafts of the speech prepared beforehand. But he included them in copies he made afterward, and historians believe he said them in the speech. Lincoln had grown steadily more religious as he grew older. As his political and spiritual genius flowered, he re-conceived America as a nation where high ideals were not just words on parchment, they were marching orders, principles to fight and die for.

"It is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence," he said, "and if I can learn what it is, I will do it." He wished to be a "humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people." He knew well that Americans are far from perfect. But he believed in their duty to make themselves better.

When we invite our children to say the Pledge, including "one nation, under God," we are asking them to repeat Lincoln's phrase, and perhaps even to feel his presence. Children who were reared as atheists, whose parents are wiser than Lincoln on the subject of God, are free to keep quiet.

And even if children should feel coerced by peer pressure (as the lawsuits have argued) to say that terrible G-word, they won't be magically converted into Christians or Jews or God-believers of any stripe. In fact, children who don't believe in God might still like to be reminded how Lincoln saw this nation, might like to test drive the worldview of the man who saved the Union and set it on the path to justice.

If that's unconstitutional, we have made a serious mistake somewhere along the line. If we have any guts, we will go back and put it right.

To the Editor:

David Gelernter’s article “Lincoln’s Words, Our Pledge” (Nov. 18) — which argues that the phrase “under God” belongs in the Pledge of Allegiance because President Lincoln used it in his Gettysburg Address — is absurd, to put it kindly. When schoolchildren recite the Pledge, I doubt that they are thinking of the Civil War.

The phrase “under God” does not belong in the Pledge — nor “in God we trust” on our money — for one simple reason: it is unfair to religious minorities, just as Jim Crow laws were unfair to racial minorities. Granted, there is a world of difference between the government compelling (explicitly or implicitly) an atheistic public-schoolchild to profess a belief in monotheism and the government ordering an African American to sit in the back of a bus. But the government's message is still the same: something is wrong with you.

The American Flag stands for the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right not to believe in monotheism, so any reference to God in the Pledge is contradictory.

As a monotheist myself, I wouldn’t go so far as to rename towns with Christian namesakes or frown upon a politician ending a speech with “God bless America,” but the government should refrain from endorsing theism whever it can.

I believe that the interpolation of “under God” into the Pledge in 1954 was not to acknowledge monotheism’s role in this country’s history, as its supporters claim, but to inculcate a belief in monotheism (where needed) among our schoolchildren by rote. Gelernter admits as much when he says that, via the Pledge, “children who don't believe in God...might like to test drive the worldview of the man who saved the Union [Lincoln] and set it on the path to justice.” Isn’t Gelernter advocating, in effect, the government unconstitutionally endorsing one religious belief system over others?

I think that many religious conservatives know, in their hearts, that invocations of God by the government are a mark of religious preference, going against the spirit of the First Amendment. But they make disingenuous arguments of support because it is their belief system that is being preferred. Suddenly, governmental neutrality towards religion has become “hostility” towards religion, and governmental advocacy of one theism over another has become “the public square.” But Gelernter’s contorted argument wins a Gold Medal for logical gymnastics.

[Afterward: I’m sure that someone will point out to me that the civil-rights movement was religiously inspired. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was, after all, a minister. But I believe that we can indeed acknowledge the role, positive and otherwise, that religion has played in this country’s history without the government — including our public schools — forcing its people to profess a belief in monotheism, or any religious belief system over another. I believe that is what the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment stands for. ]

[Emperor_Mike]

Originally Posted by ChottoMatte

Where does that count actually come from? The folks who die right then and there?

What about the people who die in route to the hospital or die at the hospital? Given this, the number of dead Americans could be a lot higher.

CNN figures and no, I don't doubt that the count could very well be a lot higher. I think the number includes those who died of injuries too, though I cannot be sure.

Body bags aren't good morale boosters.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by Emperor_Mike

CNN figures and no, I don't doubt that the count could very well be a lot higher. I think the number includes those who died of injuries too, though I cannot be sure.

Body bags aren't good morale boosters.

A site keeping a monthly track of the deaths.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/ira...es/casualties/

But according to this site, U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005. The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate. The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones.

http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1682.htm

[Faithless]

Want some more fun stuff out of Iraq?

How about the claims in the first article that there is torture going on in Iraq that is as bad as during Saddam's reign.

And the second that further emphasizes that the US needs to get out of Iraq in order for Iraqi forces to take the right course.

‘Human Rights Abuses Worse than Saddam Era’

By AA, Cihan * Published: Monday, November 28, 2005 * zaman.com

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said human rights abuses were even worse now than they were under Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Speaking to The Observer Allawi said, “People are doing the same as (in) Saddam's time and worse.” Noting that the comparison was an appropriate one, Allawi also warned against the elimination of the records attesting to the current situation. Allawi held responsible Shiites in the government in relation to reports of torture and maltreatment, and indicated that those circles possessed secret torture chambers and death squads. Allawi related that many of those interrogated in these chambers by the secret police units died from the torture and mistreatment.

Referring to the recent revelation of 170 maltreated and tortured Iraqis discovered in a bunker at the Shiite run Interior Ministry, Allawi said, “The Ministry of the Interior is at the heart of the matter; I am not blaming the minister himself, but the rank and file are behind the secret dungeons and some of the executions that are taking place.”

Meanwhile, the trial of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam and seven of his aides in relation to the 1982 massacre in Dujail will continue on Monday.

Iraqi president listens to insurgents

16:48 2005-11-28

Iraq said Sunday it has delayed a major anti-insurgent offensive ahead of December's elections, as President Jalal Talabani confirmed he had been contacted by rebels wanting to join the political process.

The announcement came as the leader of the country's most powerful political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, criticized U.S. forces for preventing Iraqi troops tackling the insurgency head-on.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr announced the suspension of the large-scale offensive against "hotbeds of terrorism" following an appeal by Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa.

"President Talabani got in touch with me after receiving a call from Mr. Moussa, and asked me to call off this operation to ensure the success of the national reconciliation conference" in February, Jabr told.

Disparate Iraqi groups met in Cairo early this month to prepare for a full-fledged reconciliation meeting in Iraq.

The Sunni-based Committee of Muslim Scholars had called on the Arab League to prevent such an operation, saying there had been too many cases of innocent people being rounded up and detained.

Meanwhile, Talabani confirmed he had received calls from people claiming to be linked to the insurgency, saying they were ready to engage in political talks.

Despite Talabani's conciliatory words, SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim lamented what he said were U.S. "obstacles" to Iraqi forces dealing with rebels.

U.S. forces are sometimes "an obstacle preventing Iraqi forces from taking the right course," he told. "U.S. mistakes have cost us dearly in the past and still cost us dearly today."

The accusations came as former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi said in another interview that human rights abuses in Iraq were now as bad, or worse, than when Saddam was in power.

Hitting back, Talabani insisted that the government was against any form of torture or harming of detainees.

Allawi's comments followed recent revelations that some 170 detainees were illegally held, tortured and starved at a clandestine center run by the Interior Ministry, AFP reports.

[Shuriken]

I’ve just finished reading Al Franken’s new book, The Truth (with jokes), which I enjoyed a lot. Many of the things he says are thoughts that have already occurred to me, and I found myself nodding in agreement and saying to myself, “It’s about time someone put these things in a book.”

As well researched and documented as Franken’s book is, I know that it’s only a matter of time before political opponents attack its truthfulness. I know that some are already attacking Franken’s previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, for using a group of college-funded interns (read: “government money”) to check his facts. This supposedly affirms the belief that liberal opinions rely on patronage from the non-private sector to survive — in other words, if left to duke it out solely in the “free market,” liberalism would get clobbered — as well as the supposed untrustworthy liberal bias of academia. Little appreciation is shown for the idea that Franken, unlike many of his conservative counterparts, wanted his facts checked in the first place. According to this view, a private-funded lie is given more credibility than its public-funded rebuttal.

Already, conservative writers have come out with books and articles challenging what Franken has said. But from the few that I’ve seen, they indulge in the same kind of legalistic parsing of words that conservatives found so unacceptable when practiced (usually regarding less important matters) by the Clinton administration. What’s good for the goose is apparently not good for the gander.

Drastically different views are shaping up about recent history. I’m not saying that competing views of earlier historical events don’t exist, but at least we have a consensus about what those historical events are. When a historian says that Allied troops defeated Axis troops at the end of World War II, no credible person says, “Not so fast.” We may be ending that luxury. Already, conservative publishers like the Regnery Press are putting out books on such subjects as attributing the 9/11 attacks to negligence by the Clinton administration and Al Gore trying to steal the 2000 election from Bush. This isn’t to say that Clinton, Gore, or anyone else I approve of shouldn’t be viewed through a critical lens by historians (they should), but the recent crop of conservative books seem more about character assassination than considerate perspectives on recent events.

I wonder if future history books will say that Bush won the 2000 election in a landslide and that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD when Bush invaded Iraq just in the nick of time.

[bluemonq]

Originally Posted by ChottoMatte

Where does that count actually come from? The folks who die right then and there?

What about the people who die in route to the hospital or die at the hospital? Given this, the number of dead Americans could be a lot higher.

the word is that only people who die while in a battlezone are counted as fatalities. once they leave the country, they are not included. some good non-partisan reading:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...ties_notes.htm
a good excerpt about the "evac" issue:

It is somewhat difficult to imagine that nearly 15,000 people were sufficiently sick or injured to require evacuation from the theater, but that only ten of them subsequently succumbed to the condition that required their evacuation. Overall, the ratio between wounded to killed-in-action is running about ten to one -- about 7,000 wounded in action with over 700 killed in action. The ratio of those evacuated due to combat wounds [over 1,500 as of 01 August 2004] to those who died subsequent to evacuation [eight reported], presents a ratio on the order of two-hundred to one, which is puzzling. It is also puzzling that over 4,000 were evacuated due to non-battle injuries, but only two subsequently died and that over 7,000 were evacuated due to disease, but that none of them died.

on the flipside, holes in the lancet's tally of civilian casualties:

...they did not find 98,000 additional deaths, but a range from 8,000 to 194,000 -- a range is so broad as to be nearly meaningless. And of the 61 actual violent deaths attributed to Coalition forces, three were blamed on ground forces, while 58 deaths were attributed to "helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry" (p. 7). This might suggest that the air war had been infinitely more intense than previously believed, which is difficult to believe. For the "about 100,000 killed" to be correct, almost all of these deaths would have been women and children killed by American air power, at a rate of nearly 200 a day. At least some of these deaths may have been due to the insurgency, since at least some Iraqis interpret insurgent car bombs as American cruise missile attacks.

These numbers would suggest that the US is fighting two wars: a well-publicized ground campaign in which US ground forces have killed over 5,000 enemy combatants this year [at an average rate of maybe 20 per day], and an invisible air campaign in which American helicopters are killing nearly 200 women and children every day. This is difficult to believe.

[Shuriken]

I swear, I would give conservative commentators the benefit of the doubt more often if they would stop making such disingenuous arguments to support their claims. But instead of reasoned logic, they fall back onto extreme either/or propositions or bumper-sticker slogans to paint those with differing perspectives as beyond the pale. Actual thoughtful debate seems to be alien to them.

To illustrate my point, I like to cite some examples by our old friend Max “Give Him The” Boot:

WHITE-FLAG DEMOCRATS

by Max Boot


And the Democrats wonder why they are considered weak on national security? It's not because anyone doubts their patriotism. It's because a lot of people doubt their judgment and toughness.

As if to prove the skeptics right, Democrats have been stepping forth to renounce their previous support for the liberation of Iraq even as Iraqis prepare to vote in a general election. Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, John Murtha — that's quite a list of heavyweight flip-floppers.

Again, the disingenuous description of the Iraq War as the “liberation” of the country. The main reason that we went to war, Bush told us, was to disarm Saddam Hussein of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction which he was going to use against us at any moment. Removing Hussein from power and the liberation of his people were portrayed by the administration only as secondary effects of this “disarmament.” Now that no stockpiles have been found, the administration and its apologists are insisting that the liberation of Iraq was the primary causus belli. They know that it wasn’t. But they keep referring to our near-unilateral invasion of Iraq as a “liberation” because it makes the administration’s intentions sound more noble than they actually were.

Clinton characteristically wants to have it both ways. He says the invasion was a "big mistake" but that we shouldn't pull out now because "there's a lot of evidence it can still work." (You mean, Mr. President, that we should continue sacrificing soldiers for a mistake?) ...

Well, Bush didn’t leave us much choice. Going into Iraq militarily was indeed a mistake. But now that we’re there, we can’t just immediately pull out. To do so would, as Bush himself now says, lay the groundwork for civil war and the emergence of a Taliban-like theocracy (funny how Bush’s outlook for a post-war outcome before the invasion was a lot rosier). So, yes, Max, thanks to people like you, our troops are put in the position of possibly having to die for a mistake. Maybe democracy in Iraq will indeed work out, as Clinton says, but if it does, it will be despite — not because of — the misguided notion that Jeffersonian democracy can be imposed from without at the point of a gun.

Just a few years ago, it seemed as if the Democrats had finally kicked the post-Vietnam, peace-at-any-price syndrome. Before the invasion of Iraq, leading Democrats sounded hawkish in demanding action to deal with what Kerry called the "particularly grievous threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. But it seems that they only wanted to do something if the cost would be minuscule. Now that the war has turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated, the Democrats want to run up the white flag.

Kerry was going on intelligence — misleading intelligence — passed onto him by the Bush administration. The administration knew — or should have known — that much of the “information” about Hussein’s weapons program came from an Iraqi asylum-seeker in Germany called “Curveball,” a source that German intelligence said was very unreliable. The Bush administration did not pass along to the Congress the caveats and dissenting opinions that were included in the intelligence that they received. Consequently, several Democrats in Congress echoed the administration’s misleading warnings about what an imminent threat Hussein was.

Now that the Congress knows that the information given to it by the administration was so much hooey, several Democrats are speaking out against the war on the basis of what is now known. So, administration apologists are throwing the Democrats’ pre-invasion words back at them in an effort to portray them as flip-floppers. The administration and its supporters must know that this is an intellectually dishonest thing to do, and the fact that they resort to such a tactic, instead of a more honest one, tells me that they have a very untenable position.

Furthermore, it was the Bush administration — not the Democrats — that expected the costs of this war to be miniscule, allocating only a fraction of the troops and treasure that experienced military advisors told them that they would need. Now that the war has turned out to be harder than he anticipated, Bush has shown a stubborn unwilingness to acknowledge the facts on the ground, insisting that we “stay the course.” His speech in Annapolis yesterday was his first real acknowledgement that the war (or counter-insurgency or call it what you will — it won’t change the fact that Americans are needlessly dying) has not been going that well. Choosing between Democrats who recognize that news from Iraq is not good and want to change things accordingly (on the one hand) and a president who will not recognize this and only talks about “staying the course” (on the other), I’ll take the Democrats. To Boot, this is “running up the whaite flag” — what a pathetic argument.

They are offering two excuses for their loss of will. First, they claim they were "misled into war" by a duplicitous administration. But it wasn't George W. Bush who said, "I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons [of mass destruction] again." It was Bill Clinton on Dec. 16, 1998. As this example indicates, the warnings issued by Bush were virtually identical to those of his Democratic predecessor.

But Bush’s stampede to war was — to put it sarcastically — not identical to that of his Democratic predecessor (who, of course, did not go to war). Clinton found a way to contain and disempower Hussein without costing the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. I know that some war apologists say that Hussein’s remaining in power was an obvious destabilizing influence on the Middle East, but — given the destabilizing influences that Bush’s invasion has unleashed — it’s not at all obvious to me. Furthermore, the fact that Clinton said similar things about Hussein does not argue against the possibility that the Bush administration indeed misled the country to war. Bush said that Hussein was an imminent threat; Clinton did not.

The Democrats' other excuse is that they never imagined that Bush would bollix up post-invasion planning as badly as he did. It's true that the president blundered, but it's not as if things usually go smoothly in the chaos of conflict. In any case, it's doubtful that the war would have been a cakewalk even if we had been better prepared....

But throughout the build-up to war, Bush portrayed the invasion as something that would be quick and relatively bloodless. Then-CIA director George Tenet told Bush that the invasion would be a “cakewalk.” Now that Bush’s propaganda has proved untrue, it’s the Democrats’ fault in the Republican-controlled Congress that things haven’t gone as smootly as Bush said?

Even most Republican senators are demanding a withdrawal strategy. But it is the Democrats who are stampeding toward the exits. Apparently the death of about 2,100 soldiers over the course of almost three years is more than they can bear. Good thing these were not the same Democrats who were running the country in 1944, or else they would have pulled out of France after the loss of 5,000 Allied servicemen on D-Day....

This is a duplicitous argument that really drives me up the wall, and other war apologists have made it. Conservatives keep comparing the war in Iraq to the Civil War or World War II and wonder what Iraq War opponents would have done in those situations. I’ll state the obvious: The Civil War was a war of necessity. World War II was a war of necessity. The war in Iraq is a war of choice. We didn’t need to invade Iraq when we did or the way we did. And I would submit that we did not need to invade Iraq at all. The fact that war apologists keep making such a dishonest comparison of the Iraq War to wars of necessity also tells me that their position is a dishonest one.

"Things may develop faster than we imagine," Al Qaeda's deputy commander, Ayman Zawahiri, apparently [!] wrote to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the top terrorist in Iraq. "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam — and how they ran and left their agents — is noteworthy." Even more noteworthy is that so many Democrats seem so sanguine about letting history repeat itself.

Unfortunately, if there is any sanguinity, I think it’s from war supporters affected by “Gulf War syndrome.” Now, I supported the Gulf War back in 1991, and I support it today. I think that Saddam Hussein did an absolutely monstrous thing by invading Kuwait, and it was right for President George H.W. Bush and an actual coalition of the international community to drive Hussein out of that country, out of a respect for international borders. So, although I usually prefer peace to war, I’m not in the peace-at-all-costs camp, and I was relieved that the 1991 Gulf War was over so quickly and with a minimal loss of life.

However, because of the Gulf War, I think that a lot of war buffs began to think of military conflict as something that could be waged quickly and easily. They ignored the prudent way that the elder President Bush put together a genuine international force in the build-up to war — assembling a true coalition, getting U.N. approval, etc. — which was largely responsible for the Gulf War’s success. And these war buffs began to think that America, as the world’s only superpower, could do whatever it jolly well pleased around the world. In doing so, they overlooked some of the obvious similarities between Vietnam and Iraq — for instance, between the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” and WMD, the lack of a realistic exit strategy for either, etc. — which made the possibiity of a quagmire more likely.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is what went down: Being run by oil executives, the current Bush administration wanted control of Iraq’s petroleum from the moment it entered office. They made plans for an invasion of Iraq and eventually saw the 9/11 attacks as an opening for implementing them. Neocons in the administration then cherry-picked intelligence, however dubious its origin, and passed it off to an intellectually lazy president as proof that Hussein had meaningful ties to 9/11 and was reconstituting his nuclear-arms program. Bush and his surrogates then went around the country saying that Hussein was an imminent threat to America and questioning the patriotism of anyone who said otherwise.

Now that the administration’s dire warnings have been utterly discredited, the Bush administration and its apologists are changing their story about why we went in and what they told us at the time. To say that this is dishonest would be an understatement. And the fact that conservative commentators are making such deceitful arguments in support of the war tells me that the administration’s reasons for war were deceitful from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, you can’t reduce all of this to a bumper sticker, so I imagine that most Americans will continue to be bamboozled by Bush’s lies.