Bush Meets Deficit Commitment- Early

I am a regular reader of VDH's columns and essays. This is how I know he doesn't know enough about warfare to throw to a cat. He's OK on Thuycidides, but the old British translation and commentaries on T are better.
OK, let's have a dialogue, then.
Please defend the planning and execution and casus belli -- particularly the latter -- for the current unpleasantness in Iraq.

 

Its a war on terror - Iraq under Saddam was a terrorist state. What part of that don't you comprehend?

Would you rather have Saddam still in power? What sort of bleeding heart liberal are you?

You say you are a regular rwader of VDH - give me one example where VDH has been wrong. He has a Ph. D and has taught at the Naval Academy - so excuse me if I just take your criticism of VDH as just more disparagement of people who don't agree with your 60's hippy world-view (which isn't an insult - just an observation of where your mind set is stuck).

BTW - You spelled Thucydides wrong (so excuse me if I dismiss your "expert" knowledge of another subject)

 

And it's not a war on terror. It's a war that's created terror and terrorists.

Would we be better off if Saddam was in power? Wouldn't matter at all to us.

Would the Iraqis be better off? It's looking more and more like they would.

By the way, you misspelled "reader." (So excuse all of us if we never take anything you post seriously)

 

Uh, no it wasn't. Iraq was a secular country very far removed from the extremist jihadist form of Islam that was born in Saudi Arabia. Were there some terrorists in the country? Yeah. There are terrorists in our country, too.

Check the nationalities of the perpetrators of Islamic terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. Check the nationalities of the 50 or so top men in Al-Qaeda.

A stable dictatorship plodding along under sanctions and the watchful eye of weapons inspectors is better than an unstable country with no sense of law and order overrun by terrorists that averages 90 terror attacks every day. By the way, a year ago the average was about 70 attacks a day. This is progress?

Here was the plan:

1. Oust Saddam.
2. Be hailed as liberators by the Iraqi people.
3. Establish a peaceful democracy.
4. Let the Iraqi oil pay for our mission.
5. Watch as the world saw what a wonderful place Iraq became and terrorism slowly died away.

Well, we got No. 1 right and fucked everything up after that.



What part of THAT don't you comprehend?

 

It's true. I don't understand how the invasion and occupation of Iraq is part of the "war on terror." I don't even understand "the war on terror," except as cheap domestic political sloganeering. You cannot make war on a tactic. Iraq under Saddam in 2003 was a strip of land the size of Rhode Island. The kurds controlled one part of the country and the combined Allied air forces controlled the other. If that weren't the case, there would have been no reason to lie the country into a war.
New topic --- which part of The Peloponessian War is most relevant to our current discussion? The invasion of Syracuse or the Melian Dialogue. Discuss.

 

can't we go one night without the coked-out bonehead being on page 1?

 

It's tough because he keeps starting anti-US threads (although I think FB actually posts most in the morning).

 

"George Bush also should begin addressing his most venomous critics at home, by condemning their current extremism. He must explain to the nation how a radical, vicious Left has more or less gotten a free pass in its rhetoric of hate, and has now passed the limits of accepted debate."

VDH gets to tell us what "accepted debate" is?
He's wrong there, for sure.

 

So I'm looking at a gallery of photos of Fiona Apple, who I think is drop-dead gorgeous, and it finally dawned on me: In the 10 years I've known her as a musician who can bring me to tears (Shadowboxer puts the cobra clutch on my heart every time), I've never once see her smile. Is she EVER going to smile?

She's got great eyes.

 

"The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of Yorktown–or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa."

During his time at Annapolis, VDH somehow misses the eight separate investigations into the events at Pearl Harbor that went on with no perceptible efffect on the outcome of WWII.
He's a fine classics scholar, according to other classics scholars I know. As a geopolitician, as a military strategist, and as a political commentator, he's a fine classics scholar.

Fiona can't smile. It's a shame.

 

Give the girl a break. She was raped when she was like 12. If she doesn't feel like smiling, it's fine by me.

 

What? I've never heard that.

If it's true, then it's a shame and I can understand it.

If not, I pretty much want to see a smile.

Where did you hear or read that?