Released three days before midterm elections. Does our side have some high level strategist who suddenly started channeling Karl Rove? It's about time.
Posted by ISITTHATOBVIOUS on FARK:
We ignored the "Powell doctrine" and the "Sun Tzu doctrine"If you don't know what the Vizzini Doctrine is, shame on you.
Also, ... we ignored the "Vizzini doctrine"
We face a gambler's dilema now. Having lost too much to just walk away, we risk losing more on the chance of winning.
And thus, we're ignoring the "Kenny Rogers doctrine" (you got to know when to hold em, etc.)
6 comments:
Personally, I am beginning to side with your theory that some people are just batshit crazy, and no amount of nation-building, reconstruction, or other incentives work on them.
See, Pashtuns, Shias, Sunnis, and Haitians. (just to keep it not 100% muslim.)
The Pashtuns I can understand, since they are remote, isolated, and warlike with little prospects except the drug trade anyways.
I wonder about the Sunnis...who if they win in Iraq then get the prize of being ethnically cleansed by the Shia and having their chance at oil money squashed.
Oh, and for the record, the Democrats have always been the master of pre-election media bombs.
How many gays have been outed this election cycle? Two-three? I lost count.
meanwhile the GOP has Congressional hearing on Sandy Berger's stolen docs scheduled for after the elections....duh.
Now, these all seem fair to me...what I really hate is the NASA proposals to go to Mars that are inevitably aired in presidential election cycles to hook the nerds, and then dropped right afterwards. It seems doubly cynical to exploit geeks and nerds like that.
As a nerd, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Also, I try to reserve the 'batshit crazy' sobriquet for North Koreans. I'm thinking this about the Iraqis recently: They are not Iraqis. I mean, they identify themselves by all kinds of things, religion, clan, ethnicity, but 'Iraqi Citizen' is way down the list of identities.
So I'm not sure I can call them crazy for this. If I say: "Why don't you guys take your identity as a citizen of this nation state as the primary one?", some Iraqi guy is going to ask me why should his main allegiance go to what is basically a colonial construct? Then he'll make a sarcastic comment about how seriously *I* take my role as an American citizen.
Maybe they are crazy. Maybe they are something else that I don't understand very well.
How do they decide whether this week they need to support the Clan, the religion, or the ethnic group? or the guy they elected? Seriously, I think an oil trust might have helped. (Note that Hillary liked that idea too.)
Okay, now, an actual comment that might be useful. The CNN story you are linking to is not working, but I did read Tommy Franks biography, and indeed, the initial war plans needed 400K, but then Tommy thought those were outdated as the Iraqi forces had fallen apart by 2003. From his biography, he's always been a less is more, go light, kind of guy. Now what I thought was weird was why he gets to retire right after the initial campaign (which did show that for the actual invasion, we had more than enough troops.) Shouldn't he have had to stay a little longer to provide some transition?
In any case, I am not a committed "more troops would be better" guy because it's hypothetical - maybe it would have been WORSE. See Soviet Union in Afghanistan. See Vietnam. Notice how when Brits moved into Helmand province things have not gotten better than we had our super-light touch there. If we could say, "more troops, including MPs, special forces and those who speak Arabic" I might agree. (There is another strategy that says bring home the bulk of the troops and leave the intel and special ops guys who operate better than your basic army guys.)
Now, the planning portion and probably the training portion were definitely pooch screwed. But I'm thinking we switch completely to punitive expeditions in the future instead of re-building. Jesus, we still have guy in Kosovo for God's sake. We're just lucky that the Serbs are pussies compared to Arabs.
I also think we won't be touching North Korea or Iran, and will resort to kill lists for deterrence, i.e. any nuke goes off anywhere, we hit countries on a list regardless of evidence. Want off the list? Let's talk.
Gotta go do some work now. Damn.
They are not batshit crazy. Batshit crazy is when you invade a group of people who hate you, in order to liberate them, bring one-fourth the troops you actually need even though you have years of simulation and all military experts telling you the opposite, piss off the entire world, break your budget, fail ignominously, and then claim that everyone who wants the stupidity to stop is a terrorist.
That's batshit crazy.
Killing invaders by any means available isn't batshit crazy. It's perfectly normal. The first IEDs, after all, were artillery shells buried in the path of Sherman's advance through Georgia. Sherman stopped that by the simple tactic of marching locals ahead of his troops at gunpoint.
Batshit crazy is easy to see in others. It's hardest to see in oneself.
Michael
What I was trying to say up there got said better by someone called uncoverer on Fark today:
"Iraq was never winnable. It is some lines the British Empire drew on a map. This does not make the people inside the lines a nation. A stable democracy cannot happen in an artificial creation like that. Only a strongman ruler can hold it together. Look to Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia if you need an example.
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