by Charles
I was listening to one of NPR’s hourly news updates last Wednesday, and they were talking about the bombing that killed nine of our soldiers from the 82th Airborne. They covered the who, what, when and where, but not the why and not all of the who. Because of this, their report was misleading. They stated that a "car bomb" struck the soldiers, but failed to mention that it was a suicide bombing and failed to mention that an al Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility. By excluding the likely perpetrators, NPR is telling us only part of the story. The part they aren’t telling us is the increasing involvement of al Qaeda in these attention-getting attacks.
The mainstream media is spinning suicide attacks as "sectarian violence", trying to fold it it all into one big civil war. It’s not. When al Qaeda hits, it’s an enemy attack, not a sectarian attack. Civil strife between the different sects still exists, but it has abated. If it’s a suicide bombing, then the automatic translation should be "al Qaeda or an al Qaeda affiliate did it". Most of the suicide bombers are non-Iraqis. Starting in 2006, the al Qaeda confederation has ramped up the suicide attacks. The picture doesn’t lie.
If your browser can’t pick up the image (mine can’t), then Wikipedia has list of suicide bombings in Iraq, and number and magnitude of the attacks is significant (hat tip to Back Talk). If you want to get a frank assessment of the current situation, then I suggest a full read of Thursday’s new conference with General Petraeus. Here’s part of what he said:
First of all, we do definitely see links to the greater al Qaeda network. I think you know that we have at various times intercepted messages to and from. There is no question but that there is a network that supports the movement of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq.
It is something we can, you know, keep some track of in a broad way. Obviously, when we can get the final 50 meters, if you will, we then take action against it.
It is clearly the element in Iraq that conducts the sensational attacks, these attacks that, as I mentioned, cause not just horrific physical damage — and which, by the way, have been increasingly indiscriminate. Secretary Gates noted the other day that al Qaeda has declared war on all Iraqis, and I think that that is an accurate statement. They have killed and wounded and maimed countless Iraqi civilians in addition to, certainly, coalition and Iraqi security forces, and they have done that, again, without regard to ethnosectarian identity.
That significance of al Qaeda in the conduct of the sensational attacks, the huge car bomb attacks against which we have been hardening markets, hardening neighborhoods, trying to limit movement and so forth — those attacks, again, are of extraordinary significance because they can literally drown out anything else that might be happening.
As I mentioned, we generally in many areas — not all, but in many areas — have a sense of sort of incremental progress. Again, that is not transmitted at all. Of course it will never break through the noise and the understandable coverage given to it in the press of a sensational attack that kills many Iraqis.
So this is a — you know, it is a very significant enemy. I think it is probably public enemy number one. It is the enemy whose actions sparked the enormous increase in sectarian violence that did so much damage to Iraq in 2006, the bombing of the Al Askari mosque in Samarra, the gold-domed mosque there, the third holiest Shi’a shrine. And it is the organization that continues to try to reignite not just sectarian violence but ethnic violence, as well, going after Iraqi Kurds in Nineveh province and Kirkuk and areas such as that, as well. So again, I think a very, very significant enemy in that regard.
The central front in the War Against Militant Islamism is Iraq. Don’t believe me? Then believe the U.S. commander in Iraq: "Iraq is, in fact, the central front of al Qaeda’s global campaign and we devote considerable resources to the fight against al Qaeda Iraq."
Yes, there is sectarian violence and plenty of it, but I submit that al Qaeda is conducting terrorist and guerilla violence, not sectarian violence per se. They’re trying to foment sectarian responses, trying to push Iraqi militias into civil war (or hotter civil war). Al Qaeda kills Sunnis in Anbar, Yezidis in Mosul, Shiites in the Baghdad area, Iraqi forces and U.S. forces wherever, and anyone in a public place who happens to be to close to a suicide bomber when the button is pushed. They’re fighting whoever is fighting them, and they don’t care who else they take out in the process.
The best way to fight al Qaeda is the new strategy we’re putting into place, in my opinion. Why? Because the clear-hold-build doctrine allows U.S. forces to embed with Iraqis, it allows better contacts and better relations with neighborhood residents, thus building trust. People who have more trust in the forces provide us better intelligence, and good intelligence is lethal against terrorist outfits like al Qaeda. This is why the turnaround in Anbar is so important, and this is why phased cut-and-run legislation will damage our efforts if enacted.
General Petraeus also pointed out the difficulties: Iranians are directly involved against the Iraqi government, the Iraqi government is moving too slowly, extremist militias and Sunni insurgents are still out there. I thought his presentation on CNN yesterday was straightforward, and he was careful to temper favorable events with acknowledgement that huge challenges lay ahead. Mudville catalogues the political spin here.
Changing gears a little. If I get an hour of sit-down time this weekend (I have a Camp Fire dad-daughter overnighter), then I’ll be watching the PBS series Gangs of Iraq.
Switching gears again, a Lieutenant Colonel in Armed Forces Journal makes the case that our failure in Vietnam and failings in Iraq are the result of the generals in charge:
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.
Lt. Col. Yingling outlines the generals’ responsibilities:
The correct estimation of strategic possibilities can be further subdivided into the preparation for war and the conduct of war. Preparation for war consists in the raising, arming, equipping and training of forces. The conduct of war consists of both planning for the use of those forces and directing those forces in operations.
To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises. Of course, not even the most skilled general can visualize precisely how future wars will be fought. According to British military historian and soldier Sir Michael Howard, "In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."
The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past. Following World War I, French generals committed this error, assuming that the next war would involve static battles dominated by firepower and fixed fortifications. Throughout the interwar years, French generals raised, equipped, armed and trained the French military to fight the last war. In stark contrast, German generals spent the interwar years attempting to break the stalemate created by firepower and fortifications. They developed a new form of war — the blitzkrieg — that integrated mobility, firepower and decentralized tactics. The German Army did not get this new form of warfare precisely right. After the 1939 conquest of Poland, the German Army undertook a critical self-examination of its operations. However, German generals did not get it too far wrong either, and in less than a year had adapted their tactics for the invasion of France.
After visualizing the conditions of future combat, the general is responsible for explaining to civilian policymakers the demands of future combat and the risks entailed in failing to meet those demands. Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future. Policymakers, especially elected representatives, face powerful incentives to focus on near-term challenges that are of immediate concern to the public. Generating military capability is the labor of decades. If the general waits until the public and its elected representatives are immediately concerned with national security threats before finding his voice, he has waited too long. The general who speaks too loudly of preparing for war while the nation is at peace places at risk his position and status. However, the general who speaks too softly places at risk the security of his country.
Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.
In Vietnam:
America’s defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America’s general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America’s generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.
Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America’s enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America’s political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of "another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him." In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America’s armed forces for counterinsurgency.
Not only did we use the wrong strategy, we failed to adapt quickly and convincingly enough to a right one.
Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America’s generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department’s "Blowtorch" Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public’s commitment to the conflict began to wane.
The problem in Vietnam wasn’t just poor strategy. There were plenty more factors that led to our loss. In Iraq, Yingling finds similar fault with the generals.
America’s generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America’s generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America’s generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.
[…]
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America’s generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America’s generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America’s generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America’s generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America’s generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation’s deployable land power to a single theater of operations.
The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.
Sounds reasonable. Yingling proposes a new way of promoting soldiers to generals, noting that the best ones are smart, innovative, physically and morally courageous, well-educated and physically fit. I would add adaptable to the mix. If a chosen strategy is failing, then the leadership should be able to see it quickly enough and change the plan to get to a better solution. In Vietnam, we never mounted a serious counterinsurgency strategy, even though the situation desperately called for it. In Iraq, we’re about two years too late, but at least it’s happening now.
The cynical part of me wonders if Yingling himself isn’t vying for a generalship, but he’s had two tours in Iraq and some time to think through the situation, so I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt. The author may also be generalizing the problem too much. In both wars, the main military problem came down to its inability to plan and implement proper counterinsurgency doctrine. It’s a tougher form of war to fight, and it places greater demands on soldiers and the upper echelons. We have overwhelming firepower, so no military force is going to confront us directly. The fallback strategy, therefore, is to mount insurgencies, using other means to expel the U.S. military presence. It worked in Vietnam, and it may work still in Iraq.
An interview of LTC Yingling is here. One of the key quotes: "Don’t train on finding the enemy; train on finding your friends and they will help you find your enemy." His detailed explanation of how U.S. forces pacified Tall Afar is illuminating. While it’s easy to question the man’s motives, he was one of the good guys in the field where it counts, and there is no doubt that he put his career on the line by writing the AFJ article.
Disclaimers: I don’t believe we’re at the point of no return in Iraq. Yet. I believe the Petraeus plan should be given a fair chance to work. If there is no discernible progress by year end, I may just join the defeatist camp. I use the term defeatist purposely, by the very definition of the word [Update: And I’m going strictly by the dictionary reference: Acceptance of or resignation to the prospect of defeat. Nothing more, nothing less. /Update] I don’t know how the new COIN strategy is going to work out, and I range from mildly pessimistic to mildly optimistic that it will work, depending on the news of the day. Nevertheless, I think it’s our last best hope. I don’t see a Plan B out there, except for an orderly reduction of our forces. I strongly oppose Reid, Pelosi & Co. in their portrayal of Iraq and in their legislative proposals. This doesn’t mean that I believe they are traitors or are betraying their country, but I do believe they are turning their backs on those American soldiers in Iraq who believe in their mission. I also believe that they believe that they are acting in our country’s best interests. However, their "solutions", such as they are, will do the opposite of what they intend, in my opinion.
I can’t agree that our new strategy is the best way to move forward. It relies much too heavily on the Iraqi government, which can’t bear the burden of both our expectations and those of its constituent elements, and doesn’t take into account the extent to which AQ “civilian” support, such as it is, is motivated by anti-occupation Sunnis.
IMO, AQ would be in a much weaker strategic position facing only indigenous Iraqi factions.
Interesting post, Charles.
One head-scratcher: “…. but I do believe they are turning their backs on those American soldiers who believe in their mission.”
How is it supposed to work?
My meager military experience (military academy as a kid, if you can believe it) gave me the impression that no one particularly cared about my opinions one way or the other. There were orders to proceed or to stand down and that was about it, soldier.
Are things so bollixed up now that we may need to sing the “kumbaya” lullaby to our warriors with the hurt feelings.
I have no comment on the strength of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
I can’t help but notice the symmetry between my observation of NPR and Hil’s critique of AP concerning the bomb that was “left” at the Austin clinic.
And while criticizing the military leadership has its merits, we should not forget the civilian leadership above it. Do not forget that the current administration has a habit of firing everyone who comes up with either criticism or ideas that do not fit into the preconceived ‘reality’ model.
Apart from that, I do not trust by now any official announcement (military or civilian) without confirmation from an independent source, especially if the ‘facts’ rhyme too conveniently with an official agenda.
This does not mean that I automatically accuse Petraeus of lying but that “trust is good, control is better” (Lenin, though authenticity in dispute).
So even though every step in Iraq has been ultimately a failure, and even though the same people remain in charge and remain unrepetant, you want to give them another three-quarters of a year to throw American lives and resources (and Iraqi lives and resources in much greater number) into the blender. That’s very generous of you, and I hope that you will be generous when the time comes in apologizing to the victims who wouldn’t have died if we’d followed the counsel you’re now just barely admitting might be wise, months or years ago.
I also swipe a point from Jim Henley: Counter-insurgency is the domain of an occupying army fighting to suppress self-determination. Whenever we are called upon to engage in it, the odds are very good we’re on the wrong side.
I’m still agnostic on the “stay or go” question – mainly for humanitarian reasons.
But for god’s sake all these questions and criticisms you mention should have been raised in 2002 and indeed many of them were but brushed aside as defeatist or whatnot. It is indicative of the unseriousness with which this adventure in Iraq was undertaken, that they didn’t give a second thought to these things before going to war. Consequently I have huge doubts that they are serious now – and the abandonment of Afghanistan is a good indicator they are not.
I also agree with Hartmut about information. We know by now, thanks to the statements of high- and low-ranking officials alike, that this administration sees precisely nothing wrong with omitting, distorting, or fabricating claims. They feel neither a moral nor a legal obligation to tell us the truth, ever. Precisely because Yngling is correct about the willingness of senior offices to aid and abet the administration in what they know are bad ends and means, we should insist – always, at every point – on independent verification.
If people like Charles had done that as a matter of habit all along, we wouldn’t now be having some of this current tragedy, because they’d have seen the lies that much sooner.
“Bombs Assemble Themselves, Distribute Shrapnel To Eager Collectors”
“Dresden Attracts Bomb-Shaped Objects, Responds with Firestorm”
“World Trade Center Construction Crews Build Towers Directly In Path of Oncoming Airliners”
“Fetus Detonates Bomb In Womb In Bid To Avoid Abortion”
“Saddam Relinquishes Leadership Position In Desperate Attempt by Former Ally to Invite Al Qaeda Into Iraq”
So even though every step in Iraq has been ultimately a failure, and even though the same people remain in charge and remain unrepetant, you want to give them another three-quarters of a year to throw American lives and resources…
There are two major differences between now and pre-2007, Bruce: (1) we’ve finally adopted a strategy that can be successful, (2) there is a U.S. commander in the theater who wrote the book on the subject. The one person in charge (Bush) is still there, I grant you, but the command structure and strategy has changed dramatically. If there is discernible progess, then those lives and resources will not have been “thrown”. I’ve been advocating that a proper COIN strategy be implemented for awhile, and I think it’s worth a fair shot, and I realize that I’m in the minority here.
I would also suggest flipping through the COIN manual. It’s not how Henley describes it, whatsoever.
To answer Hartmut, Bush is clearly at fault for the Iraq mess, by leaving Rumsfeld in place for at least two years too long, and for approving a goddawful and practically non-existent post-war plan. My party paid for Bush’s incompetence last November.
Charles, you’ve been assuring us for years that the new strategy would work. Then it doesn’t. Nor do we have the slightest reason to believe that the White House will refrain from its constant practice of meddling that would sabotage any strategy, no matter how good. Nor do we have any good reasons to believe, so nearly as I know, that the government’s committed the resources that effective counter-insurgency fighting might call for, and we know for sure that a large fraction of forces are demoralized, tired, injured, and ill-equipped. I don’t see that General Petraeus has addressed the problem of counter-insurgency operations with such heavy initial damage.
I have read the COIN manual, actually; I’m talking about the political context of counter-insurgency efforts. I prefer America when it isn’t fielding armies of occupation. (Of course I also prefer it when it isn’t making unprovoked attacks on unrelated countries while letting the people who actually do attack us get away, but one thing at a time.)
Charles, let’s face it — you’ve been assuring us that “this time it’s different” about every six months for the last three or four years.
You’re like an abused spouses, tearfully assuring the police that things have changed this time.
Here’s what’s going to happen — three or four months from now, reeling from a new set of bruises and broken bones Iraq has given you, you’ll be tearfully explaining that this new approach will work and that things have changed.
And you know what? We’re all tired of that game, no matter how much you believe it.
Nothing has changed — if anything, it’s gotten worse and it’s going to continue to get worse. I realize you’ve got a lot of self-esteem tied up in Iraq for some reason, but it’s time to admit the pooch-screwing is total and complete, and no superhero/general is going to unscrew it.
Afterthoughts from pressing Post too hastily:
We know there isn’t the linguistic support, for instance. We know that the intelligence support isn’t there, or at least we have no reason to believe it’s suddenly appeared now. We know that the planning process remains led by the same broken people, and we know that the civilian practice has actually been getting more politicized. We know that there’s no civilian force capable of the tasks Petraeus has (soundly, it seems to me) identified as best not handled by the military engaged in counter-insurgency activity, and we know that every benchmark to date in that regard has failed, and that some independent reporting suggests that it may actually be worse now than 2-3 years ago. We know that the Bush administration is decisively committed to allowing no end date or termination of the occupation.
Just going through the table of contents for the manual again, it seems like it predicts failure for this effort. What, exactly, offsets these and all the other factors the manual identifies as important but which aren’t avaiable to Petraeus because of Bush’s leadership?
Well, at least we now have a term for a 9 month period. We should give Bush one more Bird.
John Thullen: It is only my deep respect for the institution of holy matrimony, plus the fact that I think I’d like whoever decided to marry you first, that prevents me from proposing.
Counter-insurgency is the domain of an occupying army fighting to suppress self-determination.
Jim Henley is a smarter guy than I will ever be, but he’s dead from in this case. Insurgencies do not arise only in response to occupation, and counterinsurgency does not necessarily equate to the prevention of self-determination. The situation in Iraq is a bit more complicated than simple maxims can easily assess, and the idea that because there is (among other things) an insurgency in Iraq that it can safely be assumed that the U.S. is ‘in the wrong’ is tenditious at best.
I am agnostic as to whether or not the U.S. can help Iraq’s government defeat the insurgency, although I do hope that they can. Much of that will depend on how badly the Iraqi Army and police forces want to win, and that is a difficult question to answer. I would feel a lot better about it if the U.S. were committing significantly more forces to the fight, since COIN is a manpower-intensive operation, but I don’t believe that it is beyond the realm of possibility for the U.S. to defeat AQI because AQI is no less an outside group in the eyes of most Iraqis than the U.S., and therefore people who feel safe are likely to help the U.S. and the Iraqi government to root out AQI elements. That will still leave the question of sectarian issues, and that will depend to an even greater extent on what the Iraqis want; the U.S. has done about all that it can in that respect. But the COIN fight isn’t over yet, and the idea the U.S. is on the wrong side is, in my opinion, wholly specious.
G’Kar: but I don’t believe that it is beyond the realm of possibility for the U.S. to defeat AQI because AQI is no less an outside group in the eyes of most Iraqis than the U.S., and therefore people who feel safe are likely to help the U.S. and the Iraqi government to root out AQI elements.
The notion that the foreign occupation in Iraq (US, UK, and whoever else is still there) is capable of distinguishing al-Qaeda from native insurgents is certainly deceptively attractive, but has no ring of truth or plausibility to it. I can’t therefore even dignify it with the description “wholly specious”. Half specious?
That will still leave the question of sectarian issues, and that will depend to an even greater extent on what the Iraqis want; the U.S. has done about all that it can in that respect.
No, it hasn’t. What the US can do now is leave, having first made certain that all Iraqis who have worked for the US occupation who want to leave have done so.
Interesting post, Charles.
Re : AQ in Iraq… A point has been made that I want to reiterate. You assume that keeping a heavy US presence in Iraq is going to stamp down AQ attacks. I propose the opposite. We invite their attacks by being prominent. An alternate strategy would be to provide support for a stable Iraqi government with the help of surrounding nations and the Iraqi people. Economic prosperity and stability are the best ways to drive AQ and all foreign fighters from Iraq. This won’t happen soon but I don’t think it will happen at all with a large and prominent US force.
Re : the General’s complicity in the Iraq failure. What about Rumsfeld? He dreamed up the idea that a small force can invade and successfully occupy Iraq. He also pushed hard for transforming the military into what he thought would be the perfect force for these missions. The Generals who disagreed and spoke up have been canned or were not given positions. The active and retired ones who spoke to the media have been roundly criticized by the pro-war ppl. Why do we blame the Generals who kept their head down and did the best job with the tools they were given? Why not blame Rumsfeld and the guy who appointed him? Rumsfeld was very aware of the disagreement among his Generals but he is a stubborn and vain fool.
Another thing to consider : there is an alternate reading of the “surge”. It was never designed to succeed. I skimmed the COIN manual and think that Petraeus has not been given the manpower or support needed to carry out this mission.
Why might that be? I think Bush knows it is impossible and has decided to run out the clock on Iraq in order to pass it off to a Dem President. There has been very little evidence that the Bush administration is willing or able to do the right thing in Iraq. Instead, every effort and measure has been designed for domestic political gain. Why would he stop now? What evidence is of a change of heart?
I disagree with the Colonel in that I think the error lies not in the military but in the political realm. The fundamental goal in each case was flawed. Let’s start with the most basic statement about war:
“War is the extension of policy to other means.”
In other words, war is an act of policy. You expend some blood, some treasure, and some munitions, and you get some policy result. The idea is to make sure that the policy result is is worth the expenditure. It’s a straightforward business proposition, but with a lot of uncertainty and human lives at stake.
So, what was the policy goal in Iraq? Well, we’re now told that the policy goal was the establishment of a stable pro-western government in Iraq. And right there is the failure: that goal is unachievable. In the first place, you can’t get a democracy in Iraq; the culture there is not yet suffused with a respect for the rule of law, and so democracy just can’t happen. The only government that can survive in Iraq is a dictatorship of some sort. Now, we could install our own dictator, but dictatorships are inherently unstable and often lead to gigantic reversals — the Shah of Iran being the perfect example of a nice pro-Western dictator who got dumped for a very anti-Western government.
The best the military can do is stabilize the country so that it can peaceful when the Americans pull out. But shortly afterward there would have been a revolution, civil war, coup d’etat, or something similar and we would have been back to Son of Saddam or some other such disaster.
Thus, the invasion of Iraq was a strategic disaster from the time of its conception. And the only solution now is to recognize our strategic error and pull out before there’s more bloodshed. Yes, there will be a bloodbath — even if we stabilize the country, there will be a bloodbath after our departure. The bloodbath is inevitable. The only thing we control is its timing and the number of people who die in the interim.
There’s quite a lot to both disagree and agree with here, both in Charles’ initial post (which certainly doesn’t suffer the flaw of being insubstantial), and with a few comments.
Charles:
On this claim, you provide only a single random anecdote as visible support; needless to say, a single NPR story, assuming arguendo that you’ve relayed it accurately and fully, proves nothing whatever about the entire “media.”
So, to be clear: you’ve made a claim here that you utterly fail to support.
And given the sweeping nature of the claim, which requires only a reasonable number of mainstream articles that have clearly stated otherwise, I’d suggest that this claim simply can’t be accurately supported.
On the other hand, if you merely modified it to “some media reports,” you’d be making a fairly inarguable case; perhaps something to consider.
Then there’s:
There is absolutely no necessary or inherent contradiction between the two, and your whole argument here seems to be reasonably classifiable as propaganda your POV, supporting no change in the military approach to Iraq. This is, to be sure, arguable, but your distinction being an arguably relatively meaningless one, on the facts, you shouldn’t be surprised that everyone doesn’t accept it.
You continue — and points for consistency, at any rate — to accept and perpetuate the paradigm that there is One Single Homogenous Global War Against Militant Islamism (isn’t the modifier “militant” redundant, by the way?; either “Islamism” itself defines the threatening distinction from mainstream Islam, or it doesn’t; pick one?); I, and many, would contend that this is completely wrong, and self-defeating. Do you disagree with Kilcullen on global counter-insurgency?
Oh, great:
I’ll try splitting the comment.
Nope. Second try.
Nope. Third try.
Hurrah. Let’s see if I have to split the next part, too.
————————
(Unfortunately, George Packer’s New Yorker profile of Kilcullen is not currently available on their site; here is a brief summary; here is another.
Single sentence essence: treating the wide variety of local militant Islamists around the world as a Single Monolithic Threat makes the same mistake we largely made in the Cold War, and it elevates these locals to a vastly greater prominence than they deserve, which is counter-productive, as well as making it almost impossible to effectively reduce their threat, as described completely wrong“>here.
Put another way, the effective paradigm is to look at each situation locally, and deal with it that way, rather than agglomerating them as if they were monolithic and homogenous.
The partial incoherency of this line of argument is clear here: asserting that someone, anyone, is “trying to foment sectarian responses” with violence, but that that’s not sectarian violence is a silly claim on its face. At least as worded. It’s a distinction that, as put, makes no sense.
And in the specific, violence fomented by one of the most radically Sunni-sectarian, anti-Shi’ite, organizations in the world (specifically, “Al Qaeda In Iraq”), against fanatically hated Shi’a, for purposes of inflaming sectarian hatred, can’t be described as somehow “not sectarian violence” is just nonsensical.
As you go on to say: “They’re trying to foment sectarian responses, trying to push Iraqi militias into civil war (or hotter civil war).”
And that’s called “sectarian violence” in English.
So far as I can tell, the remaining ‘graphs of your argument go on to make an entirely non-explicit, implicit-only, argument, or at least rest on the assumption — which I have the odd impression you feel you’ve demonstrated the truth of with your previous graphs, though I could certainly be misreading you, in which case, corrections welcome — that therefore Making Iraq Better rests on defeating al Qaeda In Iraq militarily, and that the entire political inadequacy of the Iraqi government, its structure, its domination by the Shia, and the parties of Sadr and SCIRI, and their more-than-lack-of-interest in compromise with Sunnis, is unimportant.
Interestingly, the parallel to this is precisely what made the U.S. effort in Vietnam futile, futile, futile: the inadequate nature, in structure, in situation, and in specific, of all South Vietnamese governments in having little claim, at any time, on popular nationalistic legitimacy, as well as being entirely corrupt, and overwhelmingly incompent. Emphasis on: all structurally; it didn’t matter how many coups were held, and bodies moved around, either at the top, middle, or bottom, of the South Vietnamese governemtn and Army.
South Vietnam could never be won militarily, because of this utterly basic inadequacy. Period. (And I’ll give you as many quotes by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on this fact, as you like.)
This Iraqi governmental structure and situation look to be, in different ways, similarly inherently beyond inadequate, though as long as it continues, that fact will be pointable to by any who take a different view.
Bottom line: Petraeus (who isn’t in charge, but follows the orders of Admiral Fallon, and SecDef Gates, and — most importantly — the overall stunningly wise policies of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush) doesn’t believe the war in Iraq can be won militarily. Why do you seem to?
I’ll leave further argument for additional comments, if I feel like engaging further, which I don’t entirely at present (but likely will, at least a bit more, anyway).
Crap. Various corrections and changes disappeared.
Let’s try this one again:
The best way to fight al Qaeda is the new strategy we’re putting into place, in my opinion. Why? Because the clear-hold-build doctrine allows U.S. forces to embed with Iraqis, it allows better contacts and better relations with neighborhood residents, thus building trust.
We need to stay in Iraq for another four years for this doctrine to work. Not only that, but to continue fighting a two-front war we must reinstate the draft. No draft, no “assured victory”.
I’ve always wondered why “visionary” goons in the White House appointing men like General Petraeus never concede this point. Then again, at least one general who disagreed with Rumsfeld about the number of soldiers necessary to secure Iraq was “retired”.
Bear into us anti-war people with all the logic you like, Charles. The Bush administration disagrees with you. Iraq is not the central front against the war on Islamofacism (or as you prefer, militant Islam). If it was we would be fighting this like WWII. The public notices the disparity between the White House’s rhetoric and its military retention policy and reacts appropriately by pulling the plug on this nonsense. In my opinion this is the public confrontation the White House avoided for four years by not seizing the opportunity Rep. Rangel provided them, but they can’t avoid the confrontation any longer, no matter how many people support them.
Continuing:
No, that’s not what he said. He outlined failures of the generals; he didn’t at all make the case that absent them, we wouldn’t fail in either place; you’re, well, making that up (charitably, reading into what he wrote something that isn’t there).
Oddly, you acknowledge the facts, though not the contradiction with what you wrote, here:
Which is perfectly true (though extremely understated), but in no way supports either that Yingling’s much-blogged piece “makes the case that our failure in Vietnam and failings in Iraq are the result of the generals in charge” or that this claim is remotely true back on planet Earth.
At which time you may notice that it isn’t a series, but a single documentary.
This is utterly untrue. Do you need cites? Please, Charles, read some good books on Vietnam; I’ve recommended a bunch here before.
In both wars, the main military problems were and are irrelevant; it’s the political problem that is the problem, and it appears insoluable, at least if one wants to maintain any sort of claim of “democracy.”
And if you don’t look at the ratio of soldiers-to-population involved there, or in any successful counter-insurgency, and then notice that it would require orders of magnitude more troops than we have, you’ve learned nothing.
Not a surprise.
What does “turning their backs,” metaphorically, mean in reality? They’re not literally doing this, but what you mean by it isn’t remotely clear, to me, at least.
In any case, all Reid said was what Petraeus has said: the war has to be won politically, not just militarily.
The admirable Bruce Baugh: “I also swipe a point from Jim Henley: Counter-insurgency is the domain of an occupying army fighting to suppress self-determination.”
I have to quibble that this, too, is over-sweeping. “Self-determination” often means a bunch of murderous thugs; see Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Pol Pot, Zaire, Nigeria, Uganda, and just a huge bunch of places, in the past fifty years, for almost innumerable examples.
While it’s hardly always right, or would be — or at least sensible, effective, and practical — for the U.S. to get militarily involved, that doesn’t at all mean that any and all insurgents are admirable or morally wrong to be fought against. (I don’t imagine you actually disagree on this point, but it’s easy to accidently over-state.)
Back to Charles: “There are two major differences between now and pre-2007, Bruce: (1) we’ve finally adopted a strategy that can be successful,”
Charles, when do you see the Iraqi government becoming minimally sufficiently competent, and interested in reconciling sectarian hatred and violence, for the strategy to be successful?
This is the point I absolutely don’t get. Do you think the Iraqi government’s effectiveness, and popular support, and competence, are irrelevant or unimportant to “sucess” in Iraq? Or what? Why do you think the Americans can magically fix their political/structural/government problem, and how will that work? Or is the Iraqi government just irrelevant to Iraq? Or what?
I tend (perhaps wrongly) to assume that the NY Times lead article today, Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling won’t be seen as particularly relevant or accurate, let alone typical, of our endeavors in Iraq, but I’ll mention it anyway, in case someone has missed it.
This is also to second Bruce’s sound 04:23 PM comment.
I also agree with G’Kar’s first paragraph of 04:47 PM, as my previous comment should make clear.
Heet:
I’m afraid I have to say that two assertions here are factually incorrect. Rumsfeld never, to my knowledge, pushed, or even suggested, the notion that the U.S. should engage in a lengthy occupation, let alone that his forces were right for let, let alone “perfect.” His idea was that a smaller force can successfully invade and topple Saddam Hussein (he was perfectly correct), and then he didn’t care about what happened next: somebody else’s problem, and in specific, he favored the Iraqi exiles forming a swift government, which was briefly sort-of the plan, sort-of, before being kiboshed.
One can condemn this as idiotic and irresponsible and perhaps a war crime, and many other things, but the claim about Rumsfeld and the occupation is just wrong in at least four different and separate ways.
Similarly, the claim that “He also pushed hard for transforming the military into what he thought would be the perfect force for these missions” has no basis in fact. Transformation was/is about transforming the military in various hi-tech ways, but had nothing whatever to do with occupying forces; I dunno where you get this from, but it’s simply wrong. It was about fighting battles more effectively, which has no connection whatever with occupations. Bazillions of words have been spilled on “transformation,” and this is not a subtle or little-known point.
There are so many things to accurately blame Rumsfeld for, it’s a little strange to see him inaccurately blamed for something; really, pick about a thousand other possible important and on-target critiques….
who farted?
Don’t believe me? Then believe the U.S. commander in Iraq:
Uh . . . No. And No.
I wonder if, during the Vietnam War, Charles would have been earnestly pointing us to the Five O’clock Follies in Saigon, and explaining how we should respect what’s said there, and by General Westmoreland (although I’d have to say that I do think vastly better of Petraeus), and that those liberal reporters, the Sheehans, and Halberstams and Stanley Karnow, Joe Galloway, Peter Arnett, Wallace Terry, and so on, were all misreporting, not reporting the “successes,” and shouldn’t be paid attention to in comparison to the Saigon briefings, and Westmoreland’s statements.
I don’t know; Charles?
What’s curious — inexplicable to me, so far, in fact — is that Charles, and most of the people urging us to Continue To Support The Wise Bush Plan (it’s work so well so far!), is and are supposed to be “conservatives,” who are said to be suspicious of the efficacy of government, and of Big Social Engineering.
Well, there’s no social engineering that’s Bigger than trying to remake an entire country, and form of government and society. If you believe that’s an achievable task, what principle do you have left as a basis to criticize the New Deal, national health insurance, and other liberal notions of positive government? That they’re insufficiently ambitious?
Where I wrote “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” pleez substitute “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” Thank yew.
First of all, welcome back Charles.
I know you are sincere about all you are writing and really believe everything you have put down in this post. I also appreciate that there was virtually none of the normal name-calling.
However, I disagree with just about every conclusion you have drawn. Unfortunately I will probably make a few overgeneralizations and Gary will catch me on them, but I can accept that.
Let us start with the whole “central front in the war on (use your own term) is Iraq” theme. This, along with “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” and “if we leave they will follow us home” constitutes the three biggest (and false) statements made by this administration and the majority of those few folks who are still supporting this war (or occupation) effort.
The only reason it has an centrality at all is because we are there. Al Qaeda wasn’t there before us, and it is higly possible that they won’t be there once we leave. The Kurdsw don’t like them, the Shiites don’t like them and a high majority of the Sunnis (including some who are cooperating with them at the moment) don’t like them.
For al Qaeda this is a central front, mainly because they are relying on it to help recruit, train and then send terrorists off into the world. Take that away from them and they run into trouble. Particularly if we use our resources correctly.
We can never totally defeat terrorism. That is totally an impossibility. We can however reduce its i,mpact and avoid letting it govern us, which is the exact opposite of what is happening unfer our current policies, including our invasion and occupation of a country that had nothing to do with the global terrorism movement.
I also, at times, really question if there really is an insurgency, in a technical sense. I think you need a viable government for there to be an insurgency, and there isn’t one. I don’t think sectarian violence counts as an insurgency. And I don’t think that terrorist groups are an insurgency. So I think that language needs to be looked at here.
And in regards to the NPR piece, I can say that I heard from several different news sources, including all the networks and published reports that an al Qaeda group claimed responsibility. And that is where the comparison ends with hilzoy’s post, because the only way I heard about that was here.
In tomorrow’s paper, examples of insurgencies whose fights are not particularly for “self-determination” (save for the ability to thrive and grow richer), and which are thoroughly unadmirable, and which if we did support the fight against them, to various degrees, wouldn’t necessarily put us on the wrong side, though it must be emphasized that it’s not uncommon for there to be no right side in many conflicts.
But certainly the Lord’s Resistance Army, say, isn’t one. For those unfamiliar:
Not so much for the “self-determination,” though.
“…I think you need a viable government for there to be an insurgency….”
There’s the point I don’t think is historically justified (not an over-generalization, though!), actually, John. Really, one can point to endless insurgencies against ineffective, not seriously viable, governments, and no one has ever said that this meant that the insurgencies were not insurgencies.
“I don’t think sectarian violence counts as an insurgency.”
If it isn’t primarily directed against the government, it isn’t.
“And I don’t think that terrorist groups are an insurgency.”
If they seriously threaten the government’s ability to govern, even if only in particular regions, and even if the government’s ability to govern is already extremely limited, yeah, that’s the definition of an insurgency.
This is an accurate description of usage:
You do have a point in distinguishing the level of threat, which is what I think I see behind what you’re saying about this: a terrorist group operating with relatively little popular support isn’t an uprising or revolt — the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, or the Weathermen, or the abortion-clinic bombers, for instance.
But that doesn’t mean that serious insurgencies (“serious” enough in scale to significantly interfere with government in a region) can’t or don’t use terrorism as a major weapon, so people can be both insurgents and terrorists. It just depends.
Thank you for that clarification, and yes, that really was my point, just not clearly stated. Additonally, my point would be that even if insurgency is, at some level, a correct term, there is much, much more than just an insurgency going on here and that is what is not necessarily addressed by the current strategy.
McCain and Petraeus:
I look forward to the post from Charles denouncing Senator McCain and General Petraeus as “defeatists.”
Don’t forget Henry Kissinger:
Back to Petraeus:
Damn defeatists.
I’m sure Redstate will be denouncing this rampant defeatism any moment.
I am, just to clarify, quite willing to take a situation that suggests to us that it’d be good to engage in counter-insurgency as a warning sign rather than proof that it’s bad. I do think it makes sense to look for a very strong justification for the effort, but then I think that about going to war, too.
My party paid for Bush’s incompetence last November.
Kind of. I’d say your party paid about two year’s worth of interest on it.
If there’s any justice the GOP won’t finish paying for Bush’s incompetence until about 30 years after we finish paying off the last 6 years worth of the national debt, plus interest.
A few additional notes.
An insurgency is a tactic, no less than terrorism. Insurgents are people attempting to take control of a state but who do not have the ability to do so directly via either political or military means. An insurgency is a means of setting up those necessary conditions by undermining the current government and/or its backers while developing the political and/or military strength necessary to take control.
AQI, the FRE, and JAM (among others) are all using classic insurgent tactics to try and advance their agendas. Terrorism is a tactic of insurgency in many cases because it undermines the central government by demonstrating their inability to protect their citizens. Terrorism does not necessarily equate to insurgency, but where there is insurgency there will often be terrorism and that appears to be the case in Iraq, as the aforementioned groups and others are all seeking to either replace or reshape the Iraqi government to be more favorable to their interests.
A viable government is not a prerequisite for an insurgency, if the dysfunctional government still retains the ability to prevent the insurgents from taking power. In Iraq, the Iraqi government in concert with the U.S. is quite capable of preventing any insurgent group from seizing power militarily, and therefore is sufficiently strong to require the tactics of insurgency. What would happen if the U.S. were to leave is open to question.
“That significance of al Qaeda in the conduct of the sensational attacks, the huge car bomb attacks against which we have been hardening markets, hardening neighborhoods, trying to limit movement and so forth — those attacks, again, are of extraordinary significance because they can literally drown out anything else that might be happening.
“As I mentioned, we generally in many areas — not all, but in many areas — have a sense of sort of incremental progress. Again, that is not transmitted at all. Of course it will never break through the noise and the understandable coverage given to it in the press of a sensational attack that kills many Iraqis.”
So here is Petraeus himself explaining that AQ is vitally important because it has so much influence on the war of spin. AQ makes it look to the media and to the US public like we’r losing the war, it overshadows our subtle progress.
While it’s true that the war on the homefront is the most important one — lose that and we’ll pull out win-or-lose — the fact that Petraeus is taking that majorly into account means we can’t particularly believe anything he says.
Bruce: “I do think it makes sense to look for a very strong justification for the effort, but then I think that about going to war, too.”
Sure. And, of course, not just strong justification, but it must be coupled with an accomplishable mission, and as well, in a democracy, such as the U.S., both wars and counter-insurgencies have to have and maintain domestic U.S. popular support; there’s simply no other option other than in the short-term.
My doubts over major U.S. military intervention in Sudan, which I’ve argued unsuccessfully (so far) with OCSteve here before, isn’t over the justification for such a mission, for instance — preventing genocide is the second-highest justification, more or less, after up-or-down national survival, for intevention and war — it’s over whether that’s a practically accomplishable mission with a visible end-point, withdrawal strategy, and whether the counter-productive aspects (U.S. effectively invades another Muslim-ruled country) might in combination outweigh the great moral good that the idea would seek to obtain.
Put another way, good intentions and motives aren’t sufficient, by themselves, to justify war and intevention.
Even if one stipulates arguendo that that’s all that was ever involved in invading and occupying Iraq, one might think that this should have been a lesson well-learned by now.
This is, of course, the old Weinberger Doctrine, which was successfully renamed the Powell Doctrine. A shame the Republicans decided to throw it in the garbage as too wimpy in the days of the Single Super-Power, and not at all conservative of them, either.
G’Kar: “In Iraq, the Iraqi government in concert with the U.S. is quite capable of preventing any insurgent group from seizing power militarily, and therefore is sufficiently strong to require the tactics of insurgency. What would happen if the U.S. were to leave is open to question.”
True, and I agree with everything else in your comment, but I’ll add to your comment the note that a scenario in which either Al Qaeda In Mesopotamia, or a Sunni or Baathist insurgent group, is actually able to seize and hold power in Iraq seems fairly improbable to me.
It seems to me that such groups can make trouble for an Iraqi government for an unknown amount of time, but I have trouble seeing how any of them could actually seize national power militarily. Which you say, as well. It’s the open-ended nature of “what would happen if the U.S. were to leave is open to question” that I’m attempting to narrow/clarify a bit.
On the other hand, the government more or less collapsing, or restructuring, or changing in any number of manners, seems quite possible to me — not inevitable, but possible — so long as Shi’ites basically remain in charge.
Naturally, the best outcome would be either an entirely non-sectarian government, or a fair coalition of some point; however, there seems no particular signs of such a beast on the horizon, so far as I can tell, other than in dreams and fantasies.
Again, not arguing with you here, G’Kar; just trying to make an additional small point.
What do you think?
You guys are arguing about what an insurgency is. I’d say, look at it operationally.
Say there’s somebody who’s shoving his weight around, saying that things are going to go his way. And he doesn’t take your opinions sufficiently into account, to the point that you’re ready to fight. And you don’t feel like marching off to some battlefield to fight his artillery and airstrikes etc. Then you’re an insurgent.
Most people think that negotiated settlements are better, most of the time. Most people don’t like the idea of permanent insurgency. But right at the moment the negotiations have gone so badly that you think armed resistance is your best alternative, your BATNA. Better than just knuckling under and accepting whatever the guys dish out who’re throwing their weight around.
I tend to disagree with Erasmussimo that iraqis aren’t ready for democracy. See, all it takes is that no one militia is strong enough to beat the others, and they do better to negotiate. And they might as well balance the negotiations on the basis of how many armed followers each negotiator has. That isn’t a certain indicator of who’d win if it came to a fight, but it’s a good rough indicator. And then if you let everybody vote whether they have weapons and training or not, it isn’t as good an indicator but it’s still in the right ballpark. Representative democracy gives you roughly the same result as civil war, but without the bloodshed. If permanent minorities aren’t oppressed so much that they prefer their BATNA then it works. And everybody can understand it easily. “If you lose the vote you’d probably lose the war too.” So don’t fight unless accepting the vote is bad enough to justify the likelihood of losing the war too.
So why fight? Because the iraqi government isn’t allowed to negotiate adequately with the insurgents. Because they have to do what we say and not what they think best. Because we’re in control and we don’t want to negotiate.
How bad is the ethnic violence? I dunno. We did polling that showed the majority of polled iraqis wanted us out within a year. A majority of polled iraqis thought we started more violence than we prevented. And our polling methods tended to choose iraqis who looked prosperous and nonthreatening. If we were going to stay in iraq in spite of that, what did we need? How about — a civil war! Get a lot of ethnic violence and we had a solid excuse to stay, to prevent ethnic cleansing etc. And how come the iraqi army that was supposed to take the casualties for us wasn’t fighting nearly as well as the insurgents? Not because they wanted us gone almost as much as the insurgents did and they liked our money but hated taking our orders. No, it’s because it’s a civil war and they have divided loyalties.
Al qaeda didn’t claim they blew up the Golden Dome. Somebody we claimed was in al qaeda said that under torture.
I don’t know who started it and I don’t know how bad it is.
The majority of polled iraqis say they’re justified to shoot at us. But we have to stay and protect them from each other.
A lot of iraqis are fighting us because it looks like their best alternative. If they had the alternative available of participating in a truly representative government, they might likely take it. But if they had a truly representative government, that government would have told us to go away at least a year ago.
“I think Bush knows it is impossible and has decided to run out the clock on Iraq in order to pass it off to a Dem President. ”
When the Dem President pulls the troops out, if he has a Dem Congress, measures to pull the troops out should also establish the George W. Bush Center For The Study Of Military Failure.
Thanks, Gary, for reminding me that I wanted to take issue with the remark about AQM’s goals. When AQM sends a car bomb to a Shia market, it’s engaging in sectarian violence. Just because sectarian isn’t the only flavor of violence that serves AQM’s needs, doesn’t mean they’re not fully invested in the sectarianness of it. The AQM view of both Shia in the government, and the Sadrists has certainly been made clear enough.
Did folks see the thing about Fadhila v. SCIRI in Basra? What we’ve got here are multiple wars, with ever changing dynamics. We can’t “win” someone else’s war.
G’Kar writes: “In Iraq, the Iraqi government in concert with the U.S. is quite capable of preventing any insurgent group from seizing power militarily, and therefore is sufficiently strong to require the tactics of insurgency”
Why should the Shiite insurgents bother trying to ‘seize power militarily’ when they’ve easily coopted the Iraqi government agencies, police, and military?
“Why should the Shiite insurgents bother trying to ‘seize power militarily'”
Whom are you referring to, exactly?
J. Thomas: “See, all it takes is that no one militia is strong enough to beat the others, and they do better to negotiate.”
This may be true in theory, but hardly always applies in practice; the Lebanese civil war, for instance, lasted fifteen years before they got back to serious negotiating again. Somalia still hasn’t really gotten around to it. There are countless other examples. People are oftimes moved to keep at violence for very long times.
“So why fight? Because the iraqi government isn’t allowed to negotiate adequately with the insurgents.”
Do you have some cites on that? Because I’ve read lots about such negotiations over the past couple of years, and including this week. This, from the Sunday paper (which also has lots of nice positive news for Charles to tout, while downgrading the negatives mentioned) is all about the result of negotiations.
“Because they have to do what we say and not what they think best. Because we’re in control and we don’t want to negotiate.”
How do you explain this?
“We did polling that showed the majority of polled iraqis wanted us out within a year.”
I’m not clear which “we” you are referring to, but the most recent PIPA poll of Iraq says a bit differently:
What poll are you, in turn, referring to?
“The majority of polled iraqis say they’re justified to shoot at us.”
Back to PIPA:
47% not being a majority, I’m wondering again which poll you are citing.
“But if they had a truly representative government, that government would have told us to go away at least a year ago.”
Moktada al-Sadr controls the largest bloc in the government, and he disagrees with you. So does the PIPA poll of Iraqis: how do you explain their contradicting your assertion?
CharleyCarp: “Did folks see the thing about Fadhila v. SCIRI in Basra?”
Hadn’t seen that blog post, or Azzaman quote, but have read various other articles in the American press about it.
Mr. Thomas, your optimism about the prospects for democracy in Iraq is, I fear, misplaced. We’ve got a lot of history to bring to bear on the problem of governments, peoples, and the rule of law. You posit that, once the various factions realize that no single faction has the power to overwhelm the others, they’ll all decide to sit down and negotiate. That would work if each faction believed that the other factions would honor the terms of any settlement. But why should any faction believe that? Why wouldn’t each assume that the other was using negotiations merely to maneuver for enough power to take complete control?
The central issue here is the trust that the other guy will honor the rule of law — that once a law has been established, everybody will honor it. But in fact that idea has already been demolished by the Iraqi response to the new constitution. Nobody’s really paying much attention to it. Yes, the government people act as if it were important, but you can clearly see from the behavior of the factions that nobody really expects the government to solve the serious problems.
This should not surprise anybody. Never in history has there been a single case of any society making the jump from a pure patronage-based system to an actual democracy in a single generation. Perhaps the fastest leap was made by the French. They started in 1789 and didn’t really get anything like a functioning democracy until 1830 — and even then you have to be pretty generous with the term “democracy”. Remember that Napoleon III was running the show in 1870 — and not very democratically.
The Germans show the same pattern. Even though they had a solid middle class, widespread literacy, a long history of concern for rights (“Stadt Luft macht frei”), and a highly decentralized system for centuries, they still had a slow transformation. There was a shred of democracy even under Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck. After World War I, the Weimar Republic actually did an impressive job of hanging on, but the Depression gave it the coup de grace and ushered in the Nazis. After WWII, the new Bundesrepublik was quickly functioning as a genuine democracy. But look how long it took, even with all the positive factors in favor of democracy!
The Japanese had experimented with democratic institutions as early as 1890, but the democracy that was imposed upon them by the Americans was a bit of a farce for the first decade or two. It has slowly developed and is certainly a pretty good democracy now, but the evolution from play-democracy to real democracy was a very slow and smooth process — and there are still lots of institutionalized behaviors that don’t strike us as very democratic. In any case, the Japanese started the game with a very strong respect for the rule of authority, which transferred to a respect for the rule of law rather smoothly. The Iraqis have never had any respect for any rule. Their is absolutely nothing in their long history other than absolutism plus patronage.
Let’s abandon the projection of American world-views onto other nations. They really are different, and what works in the USA won’t necessarily work in Iraq.
My party paid for Bush’s incompetence last November.
Charles,
I don’t think you understand. We opened the gates of hell and 600,000 human lives have been snuffed out. Your party lost a few seats in an election. By my count, your party hasn’t paid for sh*t.
Run your hand over the back of your head. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Do you feel any drill holes? Have you noticed any missing limbs, or the local river filled with the corpses of your family members lately? Because until 600,000 republicans die horrible violent deaths, your party will not have paid anything.
This is not a game. I hope you and your party never have to pay for what you’ve done, in this world or the next, because the price in blood is beyond reckoning.
Please, bear that thought in mind the next time you want to comment about “the terrible price my party has paid.”
They covered the who, what, when and where, but not the why and not all of the who. Because of this, their report was misleading.
This is an NPR news update, not an in-depth analysis. These are usually a few paragraphs long at most. Must *everything* contain the proper administration spin for your panties to remain unbunched?
The best way to fight al Qaeda is the new strategy we’re putting into place, in my opinion. Why?
Because you change your mind as the wind blows. How long ago was it that you told us to get out in six months? Declare victory under the Wise and Benevolent Leader and get the ^%&$ out of Dodge? About a year-and-a-half ago.
What will you think is a great new strategy six months from now?
I mean, you’ve bought into the Petraeus plan- but only after Bush decided to go that way. Prior to that (when it looked like the admin would use the Iraqi Study Group as cover to get out) you were all about getting out. Now you say that the Petraeus plan “should have been in effect over two years ago”. But a year before that post, you were calling for victory-then-retreat, not counterinsurgency…
There are two major differences between now and pre-2007, Bruce: (1) we’ve finally adopted a strategy that can be successful
So, why were you for all of those strategies that couldn’t be successful back in the day? I don’t mean Bush- you’ve made it clear that you think Bush made mistakes- if these other plans were so obviously flawed, why didn’t you say so? In realtime?
In reality, you’ve thought that *everything* was a good idea- until it was implemented, and turned into a disaster. Then, you move to the next administration strategy and proclaim *that* the new good idea.
I’ve been advocating that a proper COIN strategy be implemented for awhile…
The earliest I can see you advocating this is the beginning of 2007. But you might have posted elsewhere- maybe you could link to someplace you were advocating this prior to the admin considering Petraeus?
Or is “awhile” = “since the administration started publicly moving in that direction”?
Switching gears again, a Lieutenant Colonel in Armed Forces Journal makes the case that our failure in Vietnam and failings in Iraq are the result of the generals in charge…
That’s right, it’s better to crap on our soldiers than to admit that the war was a mistake. Focus on that.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be examining different strategies or ways of imporving our military. But to shift the blame like this onto the people fighting the fight rather than the incompetents who started the war with no rational purpose is- well, sad.
“However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.”
OMFG. The likes of Charles Bird would’ve excoriated these folks (verbally, of course) for questioning the Leader.
But let’s blame the underlings for not questioning their CIC publicly or with enough vigor. That makes so much more sense than Truman’s “the buck stops here”.
“The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.”
The mind boggles. What does this guy think the President’s job is? Or is he claiming that the President asked about this stuff & Pentagon blew him off & Bush couldn’t force them to answer? Bush was forced to *guess* how many troops would be required to pacify the country because the bad Generals wouldn’t tell him.
The CEO is in charge of the corporation. If his staff don’t do a good job it’s a reflection of his leadership and choice of staff. If his staff doesn’t plan ahead & he doesn’t care, this is his fault. Yet these sad apologists want so badly to deflect blame that they paint a picture of a president *powerless* to stop the incompetence in his own subordinates.
I use the term defeatist purposely, by the very definition of the word.
We. Won. The. War. Sooner or later, troops have to come home. Admittedly the war will never turn into anything other than an albatross for the GOP, but that’s no reason to continue it into the indefinite future at the cost of American and Iraqi lives- in the hopes that it will turn into a pony in six months.
I do believe they are turning their backs on those American soldiers in Iraq who believe in their mission…
And people who advocate for continuing the occupation are turning their backs on those American soldiers who think their mission is BS & want to come home in one piece to take care of their families.
Or, maybe you could construct an argument that doesn’t depend on hiding behind the troops & their sacrifice? When you’re not blaming them, that is.
“Never in history has there been a single case of any society making the jump from a pure patronage-based system to an actual democracy in a single generation.”
Could you perhaps clarify what you mean by “pure patronage-based system”? Perhaps it’s clear to everyone else, but it’s not quite so to me, and I’m idly curious as to whether I agree or disagree with your statement. 🙂
“That’s right, it’s better to crap on our soldiers than to admit that the war was a mistake.”
I agree with almost everything you say to Charles, Carleton (and your point about Charles thinking “that *everything* was a good idea- until it was implemented, and turned into a disaster. Then, you move to the next administration strategy and proclaim *that* the new good idea” is particularly spot-on) but on this one little point, I think you’re off: criticizing the commanding generals is not remotely the same as “crap[ping] on our soldiers“; they’re two entirely separate sets of people (easily distinguishable by having two, three, or four, stars on their shoulders, actually).
I have mostly stayed out of this thread, since I don’t think I have all that much to add to my previous disagreements with Charles on the subject of Iraq. However:
“The central front in the War Against Militant Islamism is Iraq.” — If so, it’s a pity we decided to make it one. Things were going a lot better back when the CFitWoMI was Afghanistan.
Supposing this is true, the next question to ask, way before drawing any conclusions about staying there, is: so what would be the most productive thing to do about Iraq? I took, as you may recall, a pretty long time coming to this conclusion, but I think the answer is: leave.
You can have all the new strategies you want. I think we passed the point of no return a long time ago. If you don’t want to turn your back on the soldiers, it is essential that you explain why you don’t think this. Throwing good lives away in pursuit of a failed policy is not my idea of supporting the troops. Neither is throwing good lives away because you’ve concluded that Iraq is the CFitWoMI, but failed to ask the question: what, if anything, can we do about that?
This particular strategy was premised on the idea that our troops would bring the violence down in the short term, during which time the Iraqis could make political progress on things like revising de-Ba’athification policy, passing a hydrocarbon law, Sunni-Shi’a reconciliation, and generally transforming themselves into a functioning government. This was always its central flaw. The Iraqi government is not capable of doing any such thing. And it is certainly not doing it now.
If the Iraqi government doesn’t take advantage of the breathing spell that we are buying for them with our soldiers’ lives, then the surge will fail. Moqtada al-Sadr will come out of hiding, and he will start the killing up again. The people who are trying to wait us out will stop. We’ll be back where we were before, only with more dead people.
Charles: tell me why this isn’t what’s going to happen. And tell me why trying our best to stop it constitutes “turning our backs on the troops”.
Carlton, that was excellent. Thank you.
Why I think we should leave: the shorter, funnier version.
The cynical part of me wonders if Yingling himself isn’t vying for a generalship, but he’s had two tours in Iraq and some time to think through the situation, so I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
How very generous of you. Interesting that you don’t feel the need to say anything similar about Petraeus’ comments.
Is that the sound of *Crickets* coming from the Bird Camp?
“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”
Disclaimers: I don’t believe we’re at the point of no return in Iraq. Yet. I believe the Petraeus plan should be given a fair chance to work. If there is no discernible progress by year end, I may just join the defeatist camp.
I seem to recall that, back when the Petraeus plan was first announced, you said you’d give it until summer to work before joining the [[rolls eyes]] “defeatist camp,” but I can’t find the post. Am I misremembering?
Never mind, I found it, and you originally said “November.” I look forward to moving New Year’s Eve up a month.
I have a question about military jargon in the linked Yingling interview (which is way cool, I’ve never read anything more specific than Michael Yon). He refers to some people as Major Robert McGee (ph) and Staff Sergeant Colburn (ph). What’s (ph)?
I don’t think it is military jargon, I think it indicates a name or term that may not be spelled correctly so they are going with what is assumed to be the correct spelling. I suspect that it stands for ‘phonetic’, but it is not a phonetic spelling. Here is a google search with cnn transcripts, they tend to pop up with names.
Oh, it’s transcriber jargon. Different frame. I also never thought of Googling two letters and two punctuation marks — they’re really getting good. Thank you.
Gary,
I concur that it is highly unlikely that either AQI or the FRE could successfully seize and hold power (although obviously not impossible), but that is true of most insurgencies. Even if the U.S. were to pull out, I suspect that AQI and the FRE would find themselves on the losing end of any conflict to hold power.
Jon H,
One, the Shiites are not some monolithic bloc of people who all think identically. JAM in particular is (or at least began) as Moktada al-Sadr’s military wing for the purpose of bringing him to power. Two, not all insurgencies seek to come to power militarily, as I noted in my earlier post. Particularly with a republican form of government such as in Iraq an insurgency can help to set the conditions for one group to take power politically rather than militarily.
hilzoy,
Speaking strictly for myself, while part of me would like nothing more than to simply see the U.S. pull out of Iraq, that is counterbalanced by the degree of responsibility I feel for the U.S. having removed the structures that were holding these problems at bay until 2003. It is therefore very difficult for me to advocate simply leaving when I fear that the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal will be devastating for the people we leave behind. It is a frustrating conundrum.
G’Kar: I agree completely — that was the sole reason why I didn’t support withdrawal until, what, six months ago.
I now think it’s incumbent on us to work as hard as we can to leave behind the best situation we can. I don’t think we can do this by staying in there indefinitely; I think we should instead be working on the best possible version of withdrawal. Since, of course, there are a whole lot of ways to withdraw, and some are a whole lot better than others.
That said, I don’t see this administration doing a decent job of that even if they were trying, and I certainly don’t see Bush deciding that’s something he should even be planning for, let alone undertaking. I very much hope that the army is working on Plan B, even if the admin. won’t hear of it.
And the Congress, of course, has less control than that. There are a whole lot of things that I favor them doing now not because I think they’re good ideas in general, but because they’re the best the Congress can do under the circumstances. Timelines are the most obvious example: in general, I think it’s a dreadful idea to announce to your enemy when you’re planning to withdraw. But I think putting a mandatory timeline in place is the only way to get this President to withdraw at all, so the much better option of an unannounced withdrawal is unavailable.
Mr. Farber asks me to clarify my obscure term “patronage-based system”. I really should have explained it in my earlier post; I apologize.
Patronage-based systems are the earliest form of large-scale social organization. They are a simple, direct extrapolation of chieftainship systems. In the chieftanship system, the group is controlled by a chieftain who knows each member of the tribe personally. The social contract that keeps the tribe together is an exchange of loyalty for economic reward. The chieftain distributes wealth in return for loyalty, usually conferring wealth in proportion to perceived loyalty and social position.
The patronage-based system is an extension of this system to a large society, with distinct levels of leadership and a tyrant at the top of the pyramid. The tyrant distributes wealth among a group of demi-tyrants, who in turn distribute it among their loyalists, and on down to the chieftain level. The Western feudal system was a variation on patronage-based systems (it was more formal in structure).
The patronage-based system is stable even though the holders of its offices are not stable in their positions. At any moment the head of one grouping can oust any of his subordinates. But the overall system is stable and is usually sufficiently fair that society is able to function. We have a good example of a patronage-based system in Zimbabwe, where Mr. Mugabe has engaged in extremely uneven patronage, favoring a small group over the great majority. While this gains him intense loyalty from the small group, the majority’s displeasure is reaching irresistible levels. That’s what happens when a leader mishandles patronage — eventually he’s ousted.
Saudi Arabia has a fairly stable patronage system. It helps, of course, that there’s so MUCH patronage to hand out. But the Sauds have done a pretty good job of handing out the goodies evenly and so enjoy broad support. Sure, it’s tyrannical, but it’s a fairly beneficent tyranny (in economic terms) and so most people are willing to live with it.
The Iraqi patronage system was nowhere near as even-handed as the Saudi system. Mr. Hussein strongly favored the Sunnis and kept the Shiites and Kurds in line with a modicum of goodies and an iron fist. The basis of his power was the solid support of the Sunnis, who recognized that Mr. Hussein was the only one protecting them from Shiite dominance. But even though they were a minority, they were a large enough minority to provide Mr. Hussein with solid power.
The average Iraqi does not look to the government for protection. He looks to his village headman, who in turn looks to his tribal leadership, who in turn look to their sectarian leadership (if there is any). The government can’t deliver anything of significance to the individual, but the village headman can. That’s why the Iraqi has no loyalty to the government. And that’s why Iraq cannot become a democracy anytime soon.
I now think it’s incumbent on us to work as hard as we can to leave behind the best situation we can. I don’t think we can do this by staying in there indefinitely; I think we should instead be working on the best possible version of withdrawal.
The question is whether it’s better to do something now or start working on the best possible version of withdrawal in 2009.
That said, I don’t see this administration doing a decent job of that even if they were trying, and I certainly don’t see Bush deciding that’s something he should even be planning for, let alone undertaking. I very much hope that the army is working on Plan B, even if the admin. won’t hear of it.
The administration had better not hear of it. They’d put a stop to it pretty damn quick.
I really think our only chance other than waiting until 2009 to start planning how to withdraw, is to impeach Bush/Cheney. Maybe if enough republicans see them as loose cannon that have to be ejected from the ship….
“We did polling that showed the majority of polled iraqis wanted us out within a year.”
I’m not clear which “we” you are referring to, but the most recent PIPA poll of Iraq says a bit differently:
I guess I was a little bit misleading there. I was referring first to a 2004 poll.
http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2004/WORLD/meast/04/28/iraq.poll/iraq.poll.4.28.pdf
In April 2004 57% of polled iraqis wanted us out within months.
A few other interesting things from that poll — 52% said that “the attacks against iraqi police” were an effort by US forces to persuade others that they need to remain in iraq, while 44% said the attacks were meant to deter iraqi police from collaborating with coalition forces. 69% said their lives or their families’ lives would be in danger if they were seen to be cooperating with the CPA. (Note that roughly 13% of the sample were kurds.)
Something that would probably be very interesting that I didn’t understand from that survey came at the end. They asked each person whether they lost someone killed, captured, or wounded in the iraq/iran war. 20% said yes and 80% refused to answer. Asked the same questions about the Gulf war, 8% said yes and 91% refused to answer. Asked that question about the period since the invasion, 4% said yes and 96% gave no answer. Why wouldn’t anybody admit to anonymous pollsters that their family hadn’t lost men?
Compare to a 2005 poll.
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1000a1IraqWhereThingsStand.pdf
This one was taken at the height of the enthusiasm for the elections. 26% said we should leave immediately, 19% said after the iraqi government was in place, 16% said when iraqi security forces could work alone, and 31% said until security is restored. (Remember that the 31% is less than the 44% that the year before who thought it was insurgents attacking the iraqi police instead of US-supported forces doing so.)
In this poll Kurds were fully represented but 6% of other iraqis (far south, shia) were excluded and anbar province was “slightly” overrepresented to get their part more accurate.
“The majority of polled iraqis say they’re justified to shoot at us.”
….
47% not being a majority, I’m wondering again which poll you are citing.
2004 poll, it was 52% then. That poll included only 13% kurds, and if your poll included 20% kurds that would be more than enough to account for 5% difference.
“But if they had a truly representative government, that government would have told us to go away at least a year ago.”
Moktada al-Sadr controls the largest bloc in the government, and he disagrees with you.
Perhaps Sadr and other iraqis have learned to be more realistic in the last few years. A majority of americans say they want us out of iraq but somehow when it comes down to legislation the argument is whether to announce a nonbinding withdrawal schedule as a goal. Sadr isn’t just concerned about losing influence, he’s gambling his life. It makes a kind of sense politically never to ask for more than you can reasonably hope to get.
Charles:
Yingling’s analysis is off base in one very serious aspect. He is wrongly blaming the military for failures that stemmed primarily from bad political decisions made by their civilian masters.
The primary failing in Viet Nam was not so much poor military doctrine in response to unconventional warfare, though the army clearly struggled with it (understandably so given the newness of the problem). A bigger failing was a poor political response to the demands of such warfare. The primary cause for failure in Viet Nam was the lack of popular support by the Vietnamese of the government in South Viet Nam — not an inadequate military response to guerrilla warfare. Addressing that issue is not something tasked primarily to the military (though their efforts should clearly be coordinated with it), and the military cannot be expected to criticize publicly its civilian masters if they are bungling the political war.
He repeats the same mistake in talking about the Iraq war:
The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population.
Military voices expressed their opinion on this subject, and were told to shut up by their civilian masters in the Bush administration. Shutting up is what they were supposed to do, even if the civilian masters were wrong.
The primary failing in the Iraq war has been a political one — by the Republicans who fashioned war policy and by Republican Party supporters who continue to stand by its incompetent and corrupt policy makers. This point cannot be stressed strongly enough. It is why there is no good reason to expect efforts in this fifth year of war (the surge or whatever) to reverse the past four years of failure.
Bush has followed a sort of reverse Lincoln policy — firing competent generals in favor of those yes-men who will continue to implement a flawed vision of what should be done. Petreaus is sort of an exception in that he has openly said that the ongoing military effort has a low probability of success and that it will depend more on political efforts than military ones. But he still is willing to serve a losing strategy because his civilian boss has told him to. Petraeus is powerless to implement the political strategy as an adjunct to his military activity, and it is the key aspect of the plan that is clearly failing, which makes the military action pointless.
It is worth noting that what Yingling cites as the “most fundamental military miscalculation” was something publicly known and openly discussed in 2003 (including on blogs in which you were a participant — what was your position?). At that time, Republicans stood by the political decision of the Bush administration to underman this war, with full knowledge that military voices had spoken up about the error of this decision.
As a footnote to this point, I would point out that Andrew Olmstead was specifically told by military superiors to cease blogging once he became assigned to the war effort. The military is very strict about not allowing its personnel to express opinions in political forums for purposes of influencing the political debate about what should be done.
Got back from the overnighter late yesterday, and I only have a little time for comment.
Charles, you’ve been assuring us for years that the new strategy would work. Then it doesn’t.
Bruce, it only started in early February. It hasn’t been given a chance to work, and manpower won’t be at full strength until June. I do share some of your concerns from your 4:23 post, especially our lack of linguistics training.
Charles, let’s face it — you’ve been assuring us that “this time it’s different” about every six months for the last three or four years.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Morat.
Re : the General’s complicity in the Iraq failure. What about Rumsfeld?
I’ve taken plenty of shots at Rumsfeld in past posts, heet, and decided to keep my powder dry on this one. I found the Vanity Fair article re the six generals highly disturbing. I agree with Yingling that we would’ve been better off had they put their careers on the line and confronted the SecDef when they were still on active duty.
Rumsfeld’s transformation strategy might work in general, but it was a complete failure when it came to Iraq, and part of that failure was the small footprint tactic of putting large numbers of troops in FOBs, that and his poor strategizing and low-balling our troop strength. Fallujah (finally) is an example of how putting more troops on the ground could work. We went in, cleared it out and created MiTTs (military transition teams) to hold and build the city and train up local forces. There are still dangers there, but our presence in Fallujah is small (embeds and advisors), the environment is much safer and more stable.
On this claim, you provide only a single random anecdote as visible support; needless to say, a single NPR story, assuming arguendo that you’ve relayed it accurately and fully, proves nothing whatever about the entire “media.”
I think there’s been a consistent storyline in the MSM about the violence in Iraq, Gary, and it’s my opinion that the storyline is outdated. Over at RS, haystack got an interesting e-mail from a soldier in Ramadi. I know it may be just another anecdote, but I believe there’s a pattern. Engram at Back Talk has been covering this trend much more fully.
As for the use of “militant Islamism”, I’m trying to differentiate between the religion (Islam) and the ideology that breeds terrorists (Islamism). I added the term “militant” because if Islamists sought advancement of their agenda through peaceful means, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Hizb ut-Tahrir is about as Islamist as they come, but their philosophy is to advance their cause peacefully and by using the democratic process to bring society to a sharia state. We may repulsed by their points of view, but they not the people we should be focusing on.
As for the idea of global insurgency, I’m a fan of Kilcullen and the folks at SWJ.
You have to ask why al-Qaeda has assumed a higher profile of late, claiming responsibility for more attacks, even making the (preposterous in my eyes) claim that bin Laden was personally involved in the Afghanistan attack during Cheney’s visit.
Al-Qaeda surely knows that momentum is building for a U.S. withdrawal. If they really wanted us out of Iraq, all they have to do is lay low, but instead they’re going out of their way to remind us of their presence.
It seems likely to me that al-Qaeda does not want us to leave Iraq. They want American soldiers there as targets, they want us to keep bleeding billions of dollars into this war, the same way they made the Soviets bleed in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda will surely try to spin our withdrawal as a win for themselves, but the fact is that if they really considered that their objective, they’d be keeping a much lower profile right now.
Steve, I agree: It seems obvious to me that Al Qaeda’s interests are served best by our continuing presence. When we go, they will be the leading source of disruptive outsiders.
As for sectarian violence, Gary, al Qaeda is just as ready to kill fellow Sunnis who go against them as Shiites. You may disagree, but in either case, the nature of what al Qaeda is doing differs from the acts of the hardline paramilitant Sunni and Shiite groups. I think it’s important that the people know these distinctions and are aware of the different facets.
Petraeus doesn’t believe the war in Iraq can be won militarily. Why do you seem to?
I agree that we can’t win using military means alone. Vietnam could not have been won unless it had a government the people thought would be worth fighting for, and even then…
Sadly, the government was sh*tty and corrupt from beginning to end.
I know that the Iraqi government is pretty shaky (and Petraeus acknowledges that). You believe fatally so, but I’m not there. It may be true that the fledgling government won’t move fast enough or effectively enough to turn the situation around, and that is one reason why I go from mildly pessimistic to mildly optimistic. Al Maliki is in a sticky situation, to put it mildly. The problem from the get-go has been the lack of security in Iraq. But I don’t see how you can even start to make significant political strides until you can get to an environment that is reasonably secure. The U.S.-Iraqi forces can make some progress in that department, but ultimately it depends on political solutions and getting most of the warring parties to some kind of agreement.
He outlined failures of the generals; he didn’t at all make the case that absent them, we wouldn’t fail in either place…
Hmm. Perhaps I could have it phrased it that it was the failed choices of which generals to lead the respective conflicts.
In any case, all Reid said was what Petraeus has said…
Reid went far beyond that, Gary. He said the war was already lost. Petraeus made no such assertion.
Because you change your mind as the wind blows. How long ago was it that you told us to get out in six months?
Sheesh. Carlton, I was talking about Fallujah, not Iraq. The only U.S. forces in Fallujah right now are MiTTs.
I mean, you’ve bought into the Petraeus plan- but only after Bush decided to go that way.
Pure bullsh*t. You’re just flat wrong. Ignorantly wrong. I’ve supported the use of a proper COIN strategy since April 2004.
That’s right, it’s better to crap on our soldiers than to admit that the war was a mistake.
No, it’s better to take task the generals, the ones who put our soldiers in harm’s way.
And with that, I’m done with you. Please. Go point your bile at someone else.
Charles: tell me why this isn’t what’s going to happen. And tell me why trying our best to stop it constitutes “turning our backs on the troops”.
It could happen, Hil. Like I’ve said before, the current plan is our last chance. I think it’s worth a try because we’ve stumbled onto the right plan, and I think Petraeus has earned enough stripes to deserve a shot at it. Plan B, to me, is an orderly phased withdrawal, with Special Forces and advisors (perhaps) to remain.
I was specific about my “turning their backs” comment. For those soldiers on the ground who believe in their mission and its eventual success, Reid, Pelosi & Co. have turned their backs on them, in effect expressing no confidence that their efforts will succeed.
…including on blogs in which you were a participant — what was your position?).
In 2003, dm, I didn’t know if we were undermanned or not. By 2004, I was coming around to the idea that we were undermanned. By 2005, I was convinced. It took awhile, but I got there.
I was specific about my “turning their backs” comment. For those soldiers on the ground who believe in their mission and its eventual success, Reid, Pelosi & Co. have turned their backs on them, in effect expressing no confidence that their efforts will succeed.
And what’s wrong with that? If their efforts are completely misguided, then it is ethically correct to “turn our backs on the troops”. A responsible government should have no qualms whatsoever about hurting the troops’ feelings by pulling them out. There are much bigger things at stake.
“Charles: tell me why this isn’t what’s going to happen. And tell me why trying our best to stop it constitutes “turning our backs on the troops”.
It could happen, Hil. Like I’ve said before, the current plan is our last chance. I think it’s worth a try because we’ve stumbled onto the right plan, and I think Petraeus has earned enough stripes to deserve a shot at it. Plan B, to me, is an orderly phased withdrawal, with Special Forces and advisors (perhaps) to remain.
I was specific about my “turning their backs” comment. For those soldiers on the ground who believe in their mission and its eventual success, Reid, Pelosi & Co. have turned their backs on them, in effect expressing no confidence that their efforts will succeed.”
And when you come to the conclusion that the current plan has failed, and you go to your Plan B described above, and a different plan is proposed which some feel has a shot of working, and the proponents of such plan call you a defeatist who turns your back on the soldiers in the field for advocating withdrawal, you may get a sense of why such rhetoric generates far more heat than light.
Charles:
I have to jump into the criticism of your obnoxious use of the phrase “turning our backs on the troops” even as redefined by you in response to hilzoy.
Why obnoxious? Well, expand your mind to consider this — for those troops who do not believe in the mission and are therefore dying needlessly, does that mean that George Bush and Charles Bird are “treating them like cannon fodder?”
If such perjorative rhetoric is appropriate, then I expect that you will not just join the “defeatist” position when you finally realize that the surge is a failure (just don’t take 2+ years in realizing it as you did with the troop strength issue) — you will admit that you treated the troops like cannon fodder.
I think it’s worth a try because we’ve stumbled onto the right plan, and I think Petraeus has earned enough stripes to deserve a shot at it.
The sheer hubris, not to mention inhumanity, of this sentence leaves me breathless.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Morat.
It’s not very flattering to you, but yes — I do.
Six months from now, you’ll be supporting the next plan as the “Best hope”, calling everyone else loser-defeatists, and stating that’ll you give this plan six months because they’re “finally serious” and “this actually has a chance of working”.
I fondly recall your “Will to Victory” sloganeering, and of course your use of the term loser-defeatist is a true work of art. You’re an excellent example of someone with no ability to seperately analyze events, just repeat propaganda.
It’s over. It’s been over for a number of years now. All you’re doing, Charles, is spending American blood and money to avoid facing reality.
I have no sympathy for your position. None at all. Too many people are paying the price so that you can wallow in the mistaken — although ego-gratifying, I’m sure — position that somehow, magically, it can still work.
I have a point to add on the notion that defeatism constitutes some sort of betrayal of the troops.
In early 1943, Field Marshal von Paulus leading the Sixth Army in Stalingrad surrendered. His position was hopeless and he felt it his duty to the troops to surrender so that they might live.
In early 1945, Field Marshal Model surrendered his Army in the Ruhr pocket to the Allied armies. He had concluded that further resistance could achieve nothing militarily useful, and therefore felt it his duty to surrender his troops to save further bloodshed.
In December 1944, the American Army commanders leading several regiments of an Army division surrounded southeast of St. Vith surrendered to the German Army. It was the largest mass surrender of American troops in history. The Army commanders had suffered light casualties but they concluded that they could offer no militarily useful resistance and so considered it their duty to save the lives of their troops by surrendering.
It is considered to be a leader’s duty to surrender when it is no longer possible to accomplish anything useful with his troops. Hanging on until the bitter end when there is no hope of success is considered dishonorable.
I submit that there is no hope of achieving our political goals in Iraq, and therefore surrender is the only honorable course of action.
Mr. Morat, could you document your reference to Mr. Bird’s use of the term “Will to Victory” and his use of the term “loser-defeatist”?
Because you change your mind as the wind blows. How long ago was it that you told us to get out in six months?
Sheesh. Carlton, I was talking about Fallujah, not Iraq. The only U.S. forces in Fallujah right now are MiTTs.
Re-read your post.
1)There, you said A valid reason for troop reductions is that there are enough Iraqi forces sufficiently trained to do the job in the stead of coalition forces. There will be troop reductions in 2006, and why not. By August of next year, there will be 270,000 trained Iraqis to do it. There are/were 270,000 trained Iraqis to police *Fallujah*? Or are you talking about *Iraq*?
2)AFAICT every single commenter makes the same assumption, some defending the position, some attacking it.
3)Presumably we’d react to the situation in Fallujah as it developed, not make plans six months in the future. I don’t see how it would make sense to suggest such a future course of action. It might make sense to say ‘we should leave Fallujah when it’s completely pacified’- but IMO talking that far in the future is talking about grand strategy, not tactics. Which is typically done at a scale of theaters.
One plans six months ahead to remove troops from a theater bc it takes a lot of planning. It doesn’t take nearly as much planning to withdraw from a city, so there’s no reason to get so far ahead of events.
4)You speak of of troops “withdraw[ing]”. You speak of “troop reductions”. This clearly isn’t referencing a tactical maneuver either.
Ok, maybe you phrased your post very badly, mixed discussion of what to do in Iraq and what to do in Fallujah without any delineation, and made a proposal that frankly doesn’t make any sense (ie to fix a withdrawal date from Fallujah half-a-year ahead of time). And didn’t bother to correct the widespread impression that you were discussing a withdrawal from Iraq, not Fallujah.
I mean, you’ve bought into the Petraeus plan- but only after Bush decided to go that way.
Pure bullsh*t. You’re just flat wrong. Ignorantly wrong. I’ve supported the use of a proper COIN strategy since April 2004.
Yeah. COIN= counterinsurgency ops. I guess everyone who’s been advocating for the war has been advocating *some kind* of counterinsurgency plan to, you know, *counter* the *insurgency*. Congrats on having the foresight of cheez whiz.
Back in reality-land, you spent 2005 praising elections, and 2006 talking up details of how Iraqi soldiers were being trained and would be ready to take over soon enough. You did *not* spend those years saying that the current plan had no hope of success. *Now* you tell us that things are different because, prior to this year, our strategy was doomed to failure.
If you weren’t a tool (ie you arrived at your own conclusions) you would’ve been emphasizing this *necessary* component prior to the administration shifting positions. I mean, whatever happened to your post after post about the readiness of the Iraqi soldier?
Six months from now you’ll be praising the virtues of Carpet Bombing To Peace, or Declare Victory and Withdraw, or Attack Iran to Save Iraq. Or the Stab In The Back (presaged by all of the discussion of the Will to Victory lacked by Democrats). *You* don’t even know what position you’ll be taking.
I think there’s been a consistent storyline in the MSM about the violence in Iraq, Gary, and it’s my opinion that the storyline is outdated. Over at RS, haystack got an interesting e-mail from a soldier in Ramadi. I know it may be just another anecdote, but I believe there’s a [pony].
’nuff said.
Erasmussino,
Try here and here for a start.
Mr. Morat, could you document your reference to Mr. Bird’s use of the term “Will to Victory” and his use of the term “loser-defeatist”?
Here’s a classic, where CB calls out a decorated Marine & Vietnam vet for ‘betraying American soldiers’ (while simultaneously claiming not to question his patriotism).
It’s also a good example of his “will to victory” rhetoric.
If you’re looking for more, try google on
“Charles Bird” defeatist site:obsidianwings.blogs.com
And specifically, Charles comment here almost by itself refutes everything he is saying above about the evolution of his views.
Wow. Thanks for the links, fellows. You’re quite right. Mr. Bird strikes me as a thoughtful but uncompromising supporter of the war who frequently shifts his analysis to conform to the latest developments. He seems never to have analyzed the situation from the highest level. And while I am uncomfortable with the venomous wordings you use, I must admit that Mr. Bird has used pejorative language himself in reference to prominent opponents of the war.
Nevertheless, I think it important that we continue to engage supporters of the war so that, at the very least, we can understand the thinking going on. I therefore request that we refrain from the personal attacks. Remember how nasty right-wing blogs are to those who disagree with the majority. Do we really want to look like that?
Do we really want to look like that?
No…..but it always feels like you’re bringing a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette to a knife fight.
Do we really want to look like that?
Hmm. Let’s see — thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, billions of wasted dollars that could probably have been used on something slightly more useful….
I think arguing if we’re being properly civil is immaterial. Sometimes things are simply bad enough that screaming about it at the top of your lungs is the proper thing to do. The responsible thing to do.
Charles’ constant repitition of propaganda, in the face of all available evidence — up to and including his own words not six months ago — warrants a bit more of an extreme response. Politely pointing out contradiction doesn’t seem to work. Calm, logical reasoning doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps rough, uncivil and horribly brutal honesty might.
People build shells around their world view, shells that are occasionally impervious to facts, reason, logic, or a civil tone of voice. We can either leave them to rot in their shells — as I would be content to with Charles, if he wasn’t a front-pager, or we can start chucking metaphorical rocks in the fond hopes we’ll crack it enough to let reality in.
We’re at the rock throwing stage with Charles here — we have been ever since his “Will to Victory” shenanigans. Frankly, I don’t think anyone here can throw a rock hard enough to crack his shell — but the rocks we throw here will always be fairly tame.
I mean, we get sarcastic and use quotes to demonstrate things. We rarely actually call you nasty names, threaten you with death, or call you a traitor — or a loser-defeatist.
(See how I did that? I turned Charles’ own words there against the whole thing, implying that Charles there is far more likely to whip out the proverbially can of uncivility. That’s a huge rock for Obsidian Wings…..)
Six months from now you’ll be praising the virtues of Carpet Bombing To Peace
How about CB’s latest at Bizarro World, “About those Gated Ghettoes in Baghdad“, a post that points to another blog post by one David Kilcullen – Senior Counter-Insurgency Advisor, Multi-National Force — Iraq – who informs us the security walls enjoy “great support” from the local populace. He knows this because “several locals thanked him”. We are also informed that all public protests against the walls were organized by al-Qaida through public flyers and text messages, and he provides a copious amount of evidence to back that claim up, if by “copious” you mean “nothing”.
Of note, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of Kilcullen’s post: “These are his personal opinions, have not been vetted or screened, and do not represent the views of any government or organization.” Which means his blog may not be subject to the same rules and laws that govern the conduct of official military spokesmen. Compare with the comment above that mentioned Andrew Olmsted being told not to blog any longer.
That RS post is just weird- it’s almost like a radical feminist “false consciousness” position. The Iraqis are protesting the ‘ghettos’, but they actually like them. They were all fooled by that crafty Snowball- uh- Al Qaeda.
Likewise al Maliki, who despite being a Shi’a is apparently vulnerable to pressure from the virulently Sunni AQ (or is easily fooled by text messages and fliers, like all Iraqis).
Shi’a #1: So Habib, what do you think of the wall?
Shi’a #2: Well, I was quite in favor of it because of the security it provides our people. But then I saw this flier distributed by people who want to torture me with electric drills. It’s quite compelling! (hands flier to Shi’a #1)
Shi’a #1: Let’s see here, ‘Americans to use security wall to kill babies, profane Allah’. Wait, I am receiving a text message from Mohammad R.
Shi’a #1: Who’s he?
Shi’a #2: You know, the guy who beheaded your cousin last month.
Shi’a #1: Oh, *him*. What’s he got to say?
Shi’a #2: He says that the new wall, it will be constructed of asbestos, dioxin, and pork!
Shi’a #1: You are right effendi, this wall must go!
And what’s wrong with that? If their efforts are completely misguided, then it is ethically correct to “turn our backs on the troops”.
Then your argument isn’t with me, Ari. I used the phrase accurately, and Hil objected.
Or are you talking about *Iraq*?
Again, Carlton, the reference to six months pertained to Fallujuah, not the country as a whole. My November 2005 post was three months before a sectarian war erupted, so obviously the security situation degraded precipitously. Worse, the Bush administration failed to respond quickly enough or adequately enough to the changed situation, which has been par for the course for the leadership.
You did *not* spend those years saying that the current plan had no hope of success. *Now* you tell us that things are different because, prior to this year, our strategy was doomed to failure.
Way to move the goalposts, Wu. I wrote about the strategy here. Had Bush actually followed up and made the systematic employment of the plan happen, the situation today would likely have looked different. But it didn’t happen. I also wrote about it here. The Road to Haditha post also touched on the issue. If I’m advocating major changes to a strategy, then it stands to reason there’s a good rationale for it, and the logical inference is that the current strategy isn’t working. If it’s not working and major changes aren’t made, then the current plan could very well fail. Apparently, that went right past you.
Anyway, it’s clear to me from this thread and the Chavez that you’re more interested in vilification of the poster for it’s own sake than any sort of civil discussion, so have a nice life, fella.
Six months from now, you’ll be supporting the next plan as the “Best hope”.
Great, Morat, I hope you can make a few sheckels with your future-telling. Anyway, done with you, too.
Erasmussimo,
A couple of points of clarification. I did use the term “betrayed the troops who are there” as it pertained to Murtha. In retrospect, that was too harsh, so I’ve since softened my language to “turned their backs”.
Re “loser-defeatist”, Gary convinced me that “loser” was too redundant and too polarizing. I’m sticking with defeatist, for the reasons stated.
I’m not positive, but I don’t believe that Andrew was told he couldn’t blog, it was his own decision. In fact, I think he said he was going to write a column for a local newspaper, which was one of the reasons why he was going to not blog, because blogging is far more time consuming.
btw, if he has written a column and someone on the list had a link to it, it would be nice to put it up in the comments.
LJ,
This is from the Feb 21 entry on Andrew’s blog: As I noted yesterday, it turns out that I have been blogging in violation of a Department of Defense directive that restricts how much political activity soldiers may be involved with. The same entry mentions writing an article for the Rocky Mountain News. I suppose it depends on what the subject of the article was to be. I couldn’t find one on the RMN website.
I found the Vanity Fair article re the six generals highly disturbing. I agree with Yingling that we would’ve been better off had they put their careers on the line and confronted the SecDef when they were still on active duty.
Yeah, challenging the White House has worked out pretty well for everyone else who ever wants to have a career.
LJ & spartikus: Based on this, I don’t think the RMN column/blog will be happening, either (if I’m interpreting Andrew’s comments correctly).
Mr. Morat, I realize that I am re-hashing ancient material that you have likely seen all too many times before, but I’ll take a slightly different tack in the hope that my words might not be overly boring.
Sometimes things are simply bad enough that screaming about it at the top of your lungs is the proper thing to do. The responsible thing to do.
“thing to do”? that’s ambiguous, don’t you think? I’ll happily concede that it is the proper emotional reaction for many people. But is it the most responsible way to convince somebody else to change their mind? Your emotional response to a situation and your attempt to alter it are two very different things.
Politely pointing out contradiction doesn’t seem to work. Calm, logical reasoning doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps rough, uncivil and horribly brutal honesty might.
Has it worked? Mr. Bird, would you advise us on the efficacy of Mr. Morat’s approach? Does his anger dispose you to reconsider your position?
Let’s consider the psychology of this. How often have you seen violence justified with the old saw, “We have to talk to them in a language they understand”? In fact, Mr. Morat, cannot your justification of verbal violence be used just as appropriately to justify the exercise of physical violence?
People build shells around their world view, shells that are occasionally impervious to facts, reason, logic, or a civil tone of voice. …we can start chucking metaphorical rocks in the fond hopes we’ll crack it enough to let reality in.
You “hope” that you’ll succeed? You don’t really know that you’ll succeed, but you hope that you’ll succeed? What evidence have you to lead you to believe that you have a chance of succeeding? Has it been your experience that people change their minds when you scream at them? That certainly hasn’t been my experience.
I suggest that you are allowing your anger to overcome your reason. This is the same mistake that America made in response to 9/11. Instead of calmly assessing the situation and taking careful countermeasures, we ran off half-cocked and passed the Patriot Act, invaded Afghanistan, tortured people, and invaded Iraq — all because we were angry. Not because we had determined that any of these actions would accomplish anything useful. It felt good for a while. But now look where it got us.
if I’m interpreting Andrew’s comments correctly
It fits with my understanding on the restrictions on uniformed military blogging.
David Kilcullen is a contractor. He’s under no legal obligation to tell the truth, or some form of it. In fact it’s not beyond the realm of possibilities that the “Small Wars Journal” is component of the Information Warfare CB is a fan of.
Or are you talking about *Iraq*?
Again, Carlton, the reference to six months pertained to Fallujuah, not the country as a whole.
The points against:
1)Everyone commenting on the thread thought you meant withdrawal from the country. I dont see any examples to the contrary. So either everyone else (including noble hilzoy) is rock-stupid, or your post was very poorly phrased, or you’re not honest.
2)you don’t need to plan ahead six months to withdraw from a city
3)”Troop reductions” is not the phrase one would use to describe troops moving from Fallujah to, say, Baghdad.
4)The “270,000 Iraqi troops” who were going to “do it” clearly weren’t all going to take care of Fallujah. You were talking about all of Iraq, at least at that point in the post. When(if) you transitioned from talking about Fallujah to talking about all of Iraq is completely unclear.
The point for:
You claim you were misunderstood a long time ago, and having let it stand for years would now like to straighten out the record.
You did *not* spend those years saying that the current plan had no hope of success. *Now* you tell us that things are different because, prior to this year, our strategy was doomed to failure.
Way to move the goalposts, Wu.
Simple words: For years you’ve talked about Iraq. You’ve proclaimed victory after victory, milestone after milestone. You’ve lauded plan after plan. Painted school after painted school. Anecdote after anecdote.
And yet, things there are clearly bad. Now, you tell us of another plan- this plan is so good we must back it, give it a chance.
“But”, we ask “what of all those other plans? What happened to They Stand Up We Stand Down? What happened to the Purple Finger Revolution?”
And you tell us that previous plans were doomed to failure. No plan prior to this plan could’ve worked. You know this, somehow. (Honestly, Im still astounded to re-read that line of yours, it’s like a tiny case study in cognative disonance).
Well, bless me, but either
1)You knew that the earlier plans were doomed at the time, and ought to have said something OR
2)You thought those other plans were also great at the time, and ought to start displaying *some* of the doubt towards your own judgement that so many of us here have in spades.
And yet, despite #2 (let’s face it, you didn’t know in advance), your certainty remains. A certainty that would say a decorated combat veteran is ‘betraying our troops’ for disagreeing with it.
How can you be so certain? I *wish* I knew what to do about Iraq; my guess now is leaving is better than staying, but I have no certainty whatsoever about that. I certainly don’t have the kind of certainty that would let me call someone else a traitor for disagreeing with it.
But you do. Despite the milestones you’ve celebrated that led us nowhere, despite the obvious failures to this point, you somehow maintain your certainty that you are always correct.
I wrote about the strategy here.
Uh, that’s you writing about Them Standing Up while We Stand Down. That is sooooo 2006.
Nothing there about counterinsurgency, except insofar as the Iraqis were going to be the ones to fight it.
Like I said (search for “cheez whiz”), everyone knows that fighting in Iraq involves counterinsurgency. If you’re citing that to point out that you understood that years ago, well- gold star for you young man.
If it’s not working and major changes aren’t made, then the current plan could very well fail. Apparently, that went right past you.
Yes, that’s the administration spin, which you’ve suddenly decided is the Truth. My point isn’t that any particular position of yours was stupid (nb not saying they weren’t), just that they’ve been in lockstep with the administration’s BS. When they touted the elections, you touted the elections. When they touted the new Iraqi security forces, you did too. When they point the finger at AQ for sectarian problems you’re right there with them.
And when they go with a “new” plan and a “surge”, you’re right there as well.
You could save time just cutting and pasting press releases.
But the ugliest part is watching you turn on everyone else (eg more generals should’ve tossed away their careers in futile calls for more troops, so it’s not your fault for not criticizing troops levels until too late).
Anyway, it’s clear to me from this thread and the Chavez that you’re more interested in vilification of the poster for it’s own sake than any sort of civil discussion, so have a nice life, fella.
So far, so good.
Im not actually here to have a civil discussion with you in that sense. This is a public forum. Public fora benefit from having nonsense debunked. Im not trying to convince you; IMO that would be completely futile. Im demonstrating to others that your opinions are expressed as truths, but they change with the political wind. Your ‘certainty’ of the way forward is an illusion, and when it collapses you will blame others and acquire a new certainty.
It would appear I need to set the record straight.
1) I was never told not to blog on my personal site. A PAO took a look at the site and advised me that it could potentially get me in trouble and so it would be wise for me to reduce my risk. I made the decision to simply shut down the blog rather than get myself in trouble. If I chose to do so, I could begin blogging again.
2) Unless my chain of command changes their minds, there will be no RMN blogging.
3) It’s Olmsted.
Erasmussimo: Carleton and I have argued before (and will again!), but when it comes to Charles’ history and responses to it, I’m right with him. Charles shows very little interest in correcting mistakes. Actually, I’ll qualify that. He will fix mistakes like someone’s name, or the population of a city, or something like that; he’ll tend to talk around any larger or structural problem in his data and analysis, and if someone prepares a long response addressing many failures, he’ll cherrypick one or a few points (usually minutiae), deal with those, and completely ignore the rest. His posts convey a very great sense of certainty almost all the time, and very little sense of hesitancy or regret about changed perspecties ever.
(I originally wrote “He” in that last sentence but changed it to “His posts”, because after all, I don’t know him, and posts ought not be taken as the pure last word in anyone’s thinking. I’ve got the texts, and can deal with them; I don’t have his soul, and am not qualified to speak to its condition.)
And some of us have been trying to deal with this ever since the war began. So you’re coming in on cumulative frustrations as well as the posts of the day.
Thanks Andrew, and hope you are doing well.
Sorry for misspelling your name and if I misrepresented your situation. Both were unintentional.
lj,
Thanks. Things are as well as can be expected. 😉
spartikus,
I don’t think anyone intentionally misrepresented anything; I was only concerned that I hadn’t been clear enough in explaining the situation, so I wanted to try to be clearer. Absolutely no offense was taken and no apologies were or are necessary.
Andrew, continued best wishes for your well-being, safety, and accomplishment of mission, and the same for all the men and women who’ll be around you. A couple elections back, there was some fringe group outside both major parties’ conventions with signs saying MORE GOOD! LESS EVIL! Here’s hoping.
Most of the substantive points I’d care to make have been made, better than I’d make them. So, just a couple of things.
First, I think the idea of blaming our manifest failure in Iraq on “the generals” is unfair to the point of being weasely. As far as I can tell, Bush and Rumsfeld got pretty good advice, they simply ignored the stuff they didn’t want to hear.
Second, if I hear the word “defeatist” one more time, I’m going to puke. Nobody wants, advocates, or welcomes defeat or failure, in Iraq or elsewhere. People who talk about the failure of our adventure in Iraq are doing nothing more or less than discussing the facts on the ground.
The blame for that, in turn, in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, belongs to George W Bush and those of his advisors who made the decision to invade, and who set the policies that have governed our actions there. Noone else.
Bush is a stubborn, vainly proud, willfully ignorant man, lacking the strength of character or capacity for insight that would let him hear or reflect on sound counsel. The responsibility for our problems in Iraq belongs to him.
I’m quite sure that if things were going well, folks would not be rushing to give all the credit to the generals.
Maybe Petraeus will pull a rabbit out of his hat. That would be great. Good luck.
My party paid for Bush’s incompetence last November.
You got off cheap. Compared to what others have paid, and will pay, immeasurably so.
Thanks –
Mr. Bird, would you advise us on the efficacy of Mr. Morat’s approach?
You could look at the thread, Erasmussimo, and gauge for yourself the efficacy of the approaches. Civility always works best for me, if someone wants to persuade me to another point of view. Those who think bashing or vilifying as the best approach are mistaken. Anyway, I appreciate your levelheadedness and I’m glad you’re here. The blog could use more commenters with your temperament.
Andrew,
I’m glad you’re safe and it’s great to hear from you. I wish we could read about your experiences somewhere somehow, but alas. Be well.
Erasmussino: no one here is trying to convince Charles, any more than Maxton thought that calling the Tories `murderers’ would convert them to ILPism.
We are talking to the lurkers, to the people sitting in the Public Gallery.
Therefore, what Charles thinks is irrelevant.
Eras: In fact, Mr. Morat, cannot your justification of verbal violence be used just as appropriately to justify the exercise of physical violence?
No, that’s complete nonsense.
Charles has been around on this blog for quite some time, and for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, he and I now refrain from commenting on what the other person says.
However, to the best of my knowledge and belief, no regular on ObWing has ever threatened Bird with violence because of his opinions, nor would such behavior be tolerated by any regular here. To equate verbal exasperation with physical violence or even the threat of physical violence, downgrades the very real threats of violence that have been used to silence some bloggers.
(By the way, am I the only one who finds the tic of adding “Mr” – or “Ms”, though I haven’t seen that used as often – to a blog handle exasperating?)
(By the way, am I the only one who finds the tic of adding “Mr” – or “Ms”, though I haven’t seen that used as often – to a blog handle exasperating?)
Don’t you know that it is one of the more polite forms of insult? It becomes critical once a “honorable” is added too (provided of course that is not part of an official titulature).
One is tempted here to link to various blogospheric discussions over the past year on the differences between civility and decency, but I suspect all the wrong people would click through, and none of the people who really need to.
Those who think bashing or vilifying as the best approach are mistaken.
From the man who coined “loser-defeatist,” ladies and gentlemen.
Hartmut: Don’t you know that it is one of the more polite forms of insult?
Yes. But it only works – in my view – in a setting where full names are appropriate. To attach “Mr” to bynames, nicknames, or handles, just doesn’t work.
By the way, am I the only one who finds the tic of adding “Mr” – or “Ms”, though I haven’t seen that used as often – to a blog handle exasperating?
Totally off topic, but: back in the good old heyday of punk rock, I used to get a kick out of reading reviews of punk recordings and performances in the NYT because they would invariably maintain their style guide policy of using the Mr or Ms honorific.
“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Mr. Rotten, Mr. Vicious, Mr. Biafra, and Mr. Scabies”.
Good fun.
Thanks –
russell,
My favorite was their review of a concert given by Mr. Loaf.
Mr. Keir suggests that the nasty verbiage directed at Mr. Bird is done for the benefit of the audience, not the detriment of Mr. Bird. I suggest that mudslinging never impresses onlookers.
Jesurgislac, I believe you miss the point I was making regarding the justification of verbal violence. You observe that the verbal violence on this site has never been accompanied by physical violence or the threat thereof. That does not answer my question. My question was:
In fact, Mr. Morat, cannot your justification of verbal violence be used just as appropriately to justify the exercise of physical violence?
Allow me to present my point in greater detail: Mr. Morat justifies verbal violence as a tactic for convincing those who refuse to listen to logical argument. Could not another person just as reasonably justify physical violence as a tactic for convincing those who refuse to listen to logical argument? If insulting somebody is a proper means of changing their mind, then why isn’t hitting them a proper means of changing their mind?
You point out my near-affectation of using “Mr” and “Ms” wherever possible. I do this not as any kind of insult, but as a means of underlining the civility with which I prefer to carry out discussions. Some people bristle at failures to apply the proper honorific (“that’s PRESIDENT Bush!”) I therefore apply one standard term at all times. Yes, it doesn’t quite work in cases of obviously fictitious handles (“Mr. Vicious” is a perfect example), nor does it work with first name handles. Nevertheless, there is a very real social dynamic at work here. Countless societies have linguistic patterns by which superiors refer to inferiors with familiar terms, while inferiors refer to superiors in formal terms.
Erasmussimo: You point out my near-affectation of using “Mr” and “Ms” wherever possible. I do this not as any kind of insult, but as a means of underlining the civility with which I prefer to carry out discussions.
Ah well, I’m afraid that given the near-universality of using that form of address as an insult, if you genuinely want to carry out discussions in a civil manner, you will need to quit using that form of address. If you continue to use that form of address knowing it will be assumed to be insulting, I don’t think that anyone will think you’re doing it because you prefer to be civil.
If insulting somebody is a proper means of changing their mind, then why isn’t hitting them a proper means of changing their mind?
I think you must be very confused.
Civilised people agree that, however ferocious the debate, and whatever form of insult is permitted, using violence is out of the question. To argue that if it’s okay to insult people, it’s okay to hit them, is utter
Jesurgislac, you must come from a different linguistic community than I any I am familiar with. I will check with a variety of sources on this point, but in the meantime, I’d be curious to learn from readers here how they interpret the use of the honorifics “Mr” or “Ms”.
And truly civilized people don’t use verbal violence in the first place. Yes, there are partly civilized people who use verbal violence but abhor physical violence, but should we not all aspire to being fully civilized?
but in the meantime, I’d be curious to learn from readers here how they interpret the use of the honorifics “Mr” or “Ms”.
So would I, actually. So far we have Hartmut and myself who assume that it’s meant to be insulting, but we’re both Europeans, and may be operating on a different linguistic tradition of insult.
And truly civilized people don’t use verbal violence in the first place.
*g* Then I fear no one that I have ever met, in real life or online, is “truly civilised”. I have never met anyone who would or could refrain from insult under all circumstances. It’s worthwhile noting the difference between degrees of insult, but to attempt to blur the distinction between insult and violence/the threat of violence – that, is truly uncivilised. And that is what you are doing.
Jes, I tend to agree with Erasmussino on this point, concerning the use of Mr. or Ms. When it is used consistently, no matter whom the speaker or writer is addressing, then I think it could be interpreted as common courtesy. However, when used only toward people with whom the speaker or writer disagrees and not toward others, then it is, IMO, probably meant to used as sarcasm.
AFAICT, Erasmussino tends to be pretty consistent in his usage when he has the last names available to him (her?).
Indeed, we are all barbarians at times; absolutely civilized persons are few and far between. Is this sad observation a defense of uncivil behavior?
Yes, there is a distinction between verbal violence and physical violence: one is bad, the other is worse. The fact that verbal violence is less bad than physical violence does not make it good. Neither form is used by civil people.
Conversely I have never met anyone who uses Mr., Mrs, or Ms. in everyday speech without it being some form of put-down and/or indicator of anger. This type of formal address has long been discarded (in North American society, anyway) and tends to make people uncomfortable when used in most contexts. Why should blog commentary be different?
Just my 2 cents.
Erasmussimo, several points.
1. Gendered titles like Mr. and Ms. are likely to go awry in an environment full of non-gender-specific handles and no external cues. I don’t know, for instance, that Morat is male. I do know from declarations like ones being made here that not everyone favors being addressed by such terms. If you feel more comfortable with some sort of title, why not ask people what they’d like?
2. It seems like you’re still not getting the dynamic as various of us see it. Charles insists he’s a champion of politeness, but has (many of us think) been the lead in rushing to terms of abuse and insult like his famous “loser-defeatist” label for everyone less enthusiastic for war than him. Many of us also see a persistent refusal to engage with the substance of major criticisms or acknowledge changed views, reinterpretations, and the like as forms of abuse to the viability of discourse. It’s hard to summarize this stuff; someone’s already pointed out how to use Google to get Charles’ posts over time, and I highly recommend the exercise.
3. As a general thing in every discussion venue I know of, newcomers who proceed too earnestly to lecture the regulars without first showing sign of knowing the local history make a poor impression. Going a little slower at the outset might help you win more hearts and minds.
Erasmussimo: Yes, there is a distinction between verbal violence and physical violence: one is bad, the other is worse.
So why are you trying to blur the two together and pretend they’re the same, again?
No, never mind. This has been a digression, and I declare it at an end.
Indeed, we are all barbarians at times
Indeed.
IMO, IME, using “Mr.” varies. Sometimes it’s only a little stuffy. Sometimes it’s the smarmy sort of insult that you can’t point out without appearing over-sensitive.
And if you *do* point it out, then they can reverse course. “Well, Bob, let’s get back to the actual topic, Bob. Since all civilised people — and this of course should include you, Bob — would agree that I’m right, while you Bob disagree with the rest of us, surely you can see that puts you in something of an untenable position now doesn’t it, Bob?”
But then, I guess I’m used to places where it’s acceptable to insult people if you don’t mind that they’ll probably stay offended at you even if you later feel like you need them for something.
I love how ObWi is capable of going so passionately meta at a moment’s notice.
For my part, I don’t see anything “polite” about sticking Mr. or Mrs. on the front of a first name, a blog handle, or anything else besides a surname. If we were all going by our surnames here, maybe we could have a debate, but it’s hard to see how “Ms. Jesurgislac,” for example, could come across as anything but mockery.
but it’s hard to see how “Ms. Jesurgislac,” for example, could come across as anything but mockery.
Why, Mister Steve! *gestures with imaginary fan*
I love how ObWi is capable of going so passionately meta at a moment’s notice.
Me too, actually. I must make myself a button: Passionately Meta.
Lectures on civility are generally uncivil. That’s rule number one. I’ve violated myself on occasion. I’m violating it now. But me and Conan have a lot in common.
Verbal fisticuffs are things I generally avoid, but lectures on civility are even worse. And besides, the whole premise is wrong. I don’t admire people who can engage in civil discourse on literally any subject. Resolved–slavery is the only way to uplift certain classes of people. Remember folks, be civil. I associate civility in some circumstances with a sense that one is above it all. You can discuss a subject with civility if it doesn’t have any emotional impact on you personally. I have no aspirations to be civilized in this sense.
Luther is in some ways preferable to Erasmus.
I use the term defeatist purposely, by the very definition of the word.
You are either naive or coy.
The word “defeatist” was probably coined by Lenin before WWI, to describe a strategy of working for the defeat of one’s own (imperialist, capitalist) country in war, the better to foment revolution.
The word was later applied by all sides in WWI to refer to anyone who advocated reading the handwriting — i.e. the blood of millions — on the wall. For instance, Ludendorff used it when he purged the German leadership.
In retrospect, it is brutally clear that the “defeatists” of WWI were correct, and the “anti-defeatists” are to blame for the fact that by the time the war had ended *everyone* in Europe had lost — except Lenin.
I suspect some of the differences here are generational. I was as foul-mouthed as any young male when I was that age. Over the years, I have seen so much energy wasted on emotionalism that I have worked hard to discipline myself. One of the rules I live by is ‘attack the sin, not the sinner’ — as evidenced by the link provided at 12:22.
This suggests to me an even more abstract solution to the problem: instead of referring to individuals by handle, surname, or honorific, why not completely ignore individuals? I shall henceforth experiment with a rhetorical style in which I ignore the people and discuss only the ideas. Although it’s a little clumsier, it certainly avoids some of the silly personality clashes that so taint discussions such as this. I don’t know if this really can be workable, but I’m going to give it a try.
As to the notion that Luther is in some ways preferable to Erasmus, well, I observe that Luther’s antagonistic approach was a contributing factor to the Thirty Years’ War, while Erasmus’ irenic approach would have avoided such bloodshed. Erasmus, not Luther, wrote Querula Pacis, and Luther could never have penned such a work.
And truly civilized people don’t use verbal violence in the first place. Yes, there are partly civilized people who use verbal violence but abhor physical violence, but should we not all aspire to being fully civilized?
One of the things I found particularly refreshing about the nazis was their belief in sheer power. If you tried to argue with a bunch of nazis they didn’t use sophistry to try to out-argue you, they just beat you up — because they could. There was a sort of fundamental honesty there which has been largely missing since they were destroyed.
When Bush came into power there was a lot of talk about the permanent republican majority. They were going to transform the whole society, and people like me were going to be outcasts, discredited forever, maybe unemployable, etc. You may not remember this, but it was kind of vivid for me.
I look back at the honest republicans who opposed them. They are my friends. The rest of the GOP deserves no particular respect or courtesy from anyone.
These people are still trying to destroy my country, and they want me to be polite about it? I tell you what. If at some point Cheney, Rove etc get convicted of treason and put in gitmo, and if I wind up working as a civilian guard there, I will treat them more politely than they deserve. I believe in being polite to the weak and harmless. But in this case, only after they are defanged.
I don’t want to debate Bushies. I want to humiliate them. If they don’t notice they’re mentally bankrupt I want everybody in the world but them to notice it. I want them to take their money and emigrate from my country, and if we can get the money away from them while they’re leaving that’s even better. Ideally no other nation would take them except cuba, or perhaps the russians would let them help settle siberia.
These people don’t deserve civility. They deserve a fate that will convince everybody in the world not to follow their example for at least the next 500 years.
If the american communist party can be made illegal, maybe the GOP could be illegal too? Just saying.
Right on, J. Civility in form is meaningless when the content is vile, and the Republican Party’s official content on all fronts is vile, whether it’s defending unjustified war and unjust occupation abroad or the destruction of rights, safety, and opportunity for any but the richest at home. Yes, it’s good to start off with courtesy, but thee comes a point when it’s more important to keep honest than to keep nice. The unreal civility of establishment discourse helped make our current atrocities possible; healing the damage must include dealing with the causes, including dishonest and deceptive language.
I should also note that I do believe in the Golden Rule, and if someone felt I were on a monstrous course and wanted to tell me so, I would not object to having my kind of language used to and about me.
Not that it matters, but I’m 41.
One of the rules I live by is ‘attack the sin, not the sinner’ — as evidenced by the link provided at 12:22.
I’ve never bought into that way of thinking. Quite a few sinners don’t think they are, and/or have difficulty separating the “sin” from themselves. It’s fair to say Jim Lindgren doesn’t think his post was “puerile crap” (and just to be clear, I agree with your characterization). And while I can’t get into his mind, I don’t think it would be a stretch that he would feel that you were, by means of attacking his work, labeling him puerile. It’s simply human nature to view one’s work and ideas as an extension of yourself.
Erasmus, not Luther, wrote Querula Pacis, and Luther could never have penned such a work.
Whereas Luther wrote “Against the Murdering and Thieving Hordes of Peasants”, wherein he advocated mercilessly killing of the peasants who had mistaken his writings as having something to do with how the world ought to work, rather than just philosophical concepts (eg ‘is jesus all the way into the wine, or just halfway?’).
These people don’t deserve civility.
Do we do the right thing because other people earn the right thing, or do we do the right thing because we are civilized? Do terrorists forfeit the right to being treated humanely because of the crimes they have committed? What are the merits of an ethical system based on “tit for tat”?
The unreal civility of establishment discourse helped make our current atrocities possible
I believe that the current atrocities were caused by anger over 9/11. Should we unleash our own anger in response to the current atrocities?
It’s simply human nature to view one’s work and ideas as an extension of yourself.
Yes, it is, but attacking the sinner will always have worse repercussions than attacking the sin. If you can’t get anywhere by criticizing bad actions, you certainly won’t get there by criticizing the actor.
Do terrorists forfeit the right to being treated humanely because of the crimes they have committed?
For the twelfth time, no one is buying your attempt to equate verbal nastiness with physical violence. In fact, sometimes harsh words provide a useful outlet for anger that would otherwise remain bottled up to no good end.
no one is buying your attempt to equate verbal nastiness with physical violence.
Indeed, nobody should equate verbal nastiness with physical violence. Physical violence is a more extreme expression of anger than verbal violence. They are both expressions of anger with intent to hurt. One is bad; the other is worse.
If you can’t get anywhere by criticizing bad actions, you certainly won’t get there by criticizing the actor.
This reads as anything other than agreement is futile, which I don’t think was your intent, but that’s how it reads. If that’s the case you’re past having a meeting of the minds.
Sometimes it really is time to man the barricades.
Indeed, sometimes a meeting of minds just isn’t in the cards. I’ve been trying to meet conservative minds for years, and never seem to be able to get through.
That’s what democracy is for. Sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders, say, “I’ll see you at the ballot box”, and take it from there. In such cases, your best hope is to convince the bystanders that the other guy is irrational and that you represent the voice of sweet reason. When you sling mud back at the other guy, the bystander writes you both off as nut cases.
Charles: “As for sectarian violence, Gary, al Qaeda is just as ready to kill fellow Sunnis who go against them as Shiites. You may disagree….”
Why would I disagree, unless I were blind, or an idiot, or something, with such an obvious fact, which so far as I know no one anywhere, ever, has ever ever ever contested?
One would have to know nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about their consistent willingness to blow up Sunnis along with anyone else, nothing about the existence of the Northern Front, the role of the Tajiks in it, never have heard of Ahmad Shah Massoud, and in general know nothing whatever of events regarding Al Qaeda since at least 1993.
Why you think it’s likely that this describes me, I don’t know.
“You may disagree, but in either case, the nature of what al Qaeda is doing differs from the acts of the hardline paramilitant Sunni and Shiite groups.”
Yes, it does. No one is arguing that, are they?
But your final sentence in response is “I think it’s important that the people know these distinctions and are aware of the different facets.”
Which is very nice, and anodyne, and who would argue, and is utterly unresponsive to what you are responding to, which was this:
Would you care to take a second try at defending your point that “When al Qaeda hits, it’s an enemy attack, not a sectarian attack”?
Although I’m not sure of the meaning of your trailed off sentence (if it were meant as a connected thought to the next sentence, obviously you wouldn’t have made it into a separate sentence, and an entirely separate paragraph, which is how one indicates that thoughts are not directly connected — this is further muddied by your use of an ellipsis without an additional period to mark the end of the sentence [thus why correct use of ellipses can be crucial to meaning, a point many people fail to grasp), but making the guess that you perhaps meant to connect the two thoughts anyway, then if your new paragraph is still about the old South Vietnamese government, I’m relieved that you would acknowledge that crucial point, since I don’t recall seeing you do so before, and, indeed, it couldn’t be a more crucial point to understanding our history, and what is and is not sane foreign policy. (Of course, it’s not sufficient alone to understand that, but it’s necessary.)
“I know that the Iraqi government is pretty shaky (and Petraeus acknowledges that). You believe fatally so, but I’m not there.”
That’s a fair argument, but you need to have factual support for it. In January, President Bush laid out benchmarks for the Iraqi government; how has the Iraqi government done on them?
“The problem from the get-go has been the lack of security in Iraq.”
Lack of security has been a crippling environment, but “the problem from the get-go,” I’d say, is that we had no plan or way to establish a popular democratic government after we removed Saddam.
Even if we’d had 10,000,000 American soldiers establishing order and security in Iraq from Day One, what good would that have done towards the goal of establishing democratic popular government, when one didn’t exist?
By definition, you can’t install exiles, and call that a democratic government. Neither can you install a strong-man and do the same.
Neither can you just hold elections amongst a population with little knowledge of democracy, no existing political parties, or political figures, or civil society.
The explanations for how it might have worked turned out to be, in the end, “magic.” Or underpants gnomes.
(And let me acknowledge that I wasn’t writing posts warning about this before the war, myself.)
But if you disagree, and feel that this was not the root problem, but that it was simply a matter of security, please outline your alternative history in which we could have established a popular democratic government, and thus forestalled a significant (not a trivial; a trivial insurgency wouldn’t matter) insurgency, maintained the popularity of America in Iraq (to a reasonable degree), and therefore wound up without significant sectarian violence and struggle that would cause the incipient state to be dysfunctional?
“The U.S.-Iraqi forces can make some progress in that department, but ultimately it depends on political solutions and getting most of the warring parties to some kind of agreement.”
So how are we doing on that, and what progress can you point to in, say, the last six months?
“Reid went far beyond that, Gary. He said the war was already lost. Petraeus made no such assertion.”
Here is the relevant portion of what Reid said on the floor of the Senate on April 20th:
Here is what he said on the 19th, which is the source of your semi-quote, so far as I know:
Do please explain, now that we’re not taking three or four words out of contest, what’s objectionable and beyond-the-pale in what Reid said.
Your own characterization is: “For those soldiers on the ground who believe in their mission and its eventual success, Reid, Pelosi & Co. have turned their backs on them, in effect expressing no confidence that their efforts will succeed.”
Except that by not noting that Reid, Pelosi, and company, say the crucial words “as long as we follow the President’s path in Iraq,” you’re not honestly or correctly relaying what they said, and what their view is.
Now, their view is a perfectly arguable sentiment, and you are perfectly entitled to disagree with it, but to be honest, you must admit and argue against this premise. The one whose crucial words are “as long as we follow the President’s path in Iraq.”
Arguing against some imaginary, or deliberately false, version in which that’s not what they say isn’t a substantive, honest, response to their views.
I’m giving up on this. I don’t think Erasmussimo is reading very honestly or fairly – at least, it looks like a lot of straw men, slippery slopes, and excluded middles from here. To wrap up, however:
Yes, I believe that honest anger expressed openly is an important part of healthy politics, and that a false veneer of calm is a dangerous ally of dark movements that thrive underground. I don’t think it’s good to keep being angry all the time, but when something offends my sense of basic morality, it’s worth saying so. The Democratic Party has its 2006 successes largely because a lot of other people did the same thing – they got mad, and acted to start fixing the problems.
Anger is also appropriate in the face of continued failure at efforts to speak as equals – by which I mean actual exchange of views, responding to the substance of others’ points, revising one’s own stance, and so on. Anger is a useful signal that I believe the exchange has stopped and giving up on the pretense of equality, and turning my efforts in other directions.
I think anger is sometimes moral. Indeed, sometimes the only moral response.
The suggestion that “anger is sometimes moral” reminds me of another quote:
“Greed is good” by Gordon Gecko.
“Greed is good” by Gordon Gecko.
So is ice cream. Yum!
For the record — I find “Mr. Morat” to highly irritating at best. While not my actual name (I’d probably curse my parents for it!), I think of it — as I do almost all internet names — as a first name, not a last.
Secondly, the most “Verbal violence” I directed at Charles as merely referring in referencing his prior statements.
Throwing his own words in his face is hardly the height of verbal violence — it is not my fault that his past statements are either widely condemned as shameful (his use of ‘defeatist’ and ‘loser-deafitist) or make him look horribly bad in retrospect (“Will to Victory” and about eight million repeats of “It’s Getting Better!”).
I didn’t force him to make front page posts that, were here more honest with himself, he’d feel horribly ashamed about.
However, I feel absolutely no desire to refrain from rubbing his nose in it.
That is the “verbal rock chucking” to which I was referring. I have yet to insult him, call him names, demean his mother, or even smear him with anything half as insulting as the loser-defeatist titles he threw around so easily.
Everyone makes mistakes. A lot of times, they don’t get acknowledged but the person who made them refrains from committing the same mistake again. It’s common courtesy, at that point, to refrain from pointing out the error. Why rub his nose in his errors?
However, if the person repeatedly makes the same error, is in total denial over the error, and in fact gets upset and starts insulting the motives of those pointing out the error (“loser-defeatist” again) — then comes the time for nose-rubbing.
Because that is all that is left. Charles needs his nose rubbed in his mistakes, so I plan to keep throwing them in his face.
Not that I think he’ll learn — I do it because he’s a front pager, and I want those who might be new here to realize that Charles’ track record on Iraq predictions is horrible. He has, in fact, never gotten anything right. He has been actively wrong, frequently insulting those who disagree with him, implying that only those with nefarious ulterior motives (‘defeatists’) would disagree with him. He does not even deign to assume his opponents are arguing in good faith, and has not done so on the topic of Iraq for as long as I’ve read his posts.
So I will continue to chuck my rocks. I will bring up his use of ‘defeatist’. I will throw in his face each and every time he predicted a turned corner.
And if you think that is uncivil — I suggest disconnecting your modem and staying away from the internet, because frankly that’s about the most civil a response to years worth of Charles’ Iraq blather and repetitive insults to my motiviation as you’re going to find.
Totally off topic:
“Greed is good” by Gordon Gecko.
So is ice cream. Yum!
Do you ever experience moments when something hits you just the right way when you’re not expecting it, causing you to laugh like a simpleton? Such moments almost never happen for me while reading blog comments, but one did just now. Thanks, spartikus. Now I look like an idiot.
“If such perjorative rhetoric”
Pejorative.
JThomas:
You write a bunch more, but I’ll take this as implicitly acknowledging that when discussing current opinion somewhere, recent polls are relevant, and polls from three years or so ago are irrelevant.
Spartikus: “No…..but it always feels like you’re bringing a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette to a knife fight.”
Except that in fact, this is a blog comment thread, with no participants who have significant influence on the war or U.S. policy, and in which no one is apt to get even a paper-cut, let alone a physical bruise, let alone stabbed with a knife.
Confusing metaphors with reality: bad idea.
Confusing metaphors with reality, and using that to justify verbal abuse (yes, written words are verbal; they’re just not oral): insupportable bad idea.
“Politely pointing out contradiction doesn’t seem to work. Calm, logical reasoning doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps rough, uncivil and horribly brutal honesty might.”
Perhaps, perhaps not, but this isn’t the blog for it. I don’t say that as a blog-owner, of course, or in any way speaking for the blog, but as an observer of the point of Obsidian Wings since not long after its beginning. If you feel unable to comply with the requirement to be civil in discussion, which is laid down in the posting rules, perhaps you might prefer denouncing Charles as uncivilly as you like somewhere where that’s not against the rules and intent of the blog.
“a post that points to another blog post by one David Kilcullen”
Spartikus, do you not know who Kilcullen is? If so, this doesn’t speak well of your knowledge of Iraq, given his prominence, and not to mention the previous discussion of him in this thread. (I’d be equally startled by such phrasing about “one Raymond T. Odierno” or “one Admiral Fallon,” or “one Peter W. Chiarelli,” “one Frederick Kagan,” “one General Jack Keane,” or any other of the most relevant figures in Iraq.)
Not to pick on you, but such knowledge is more than relevant to making accurate criticism on the topic.
Back to Charles:
Charles, I pointed out here:
I pointed this out, because it’s a common beginning writer’s error to use a metaphor as if it were concrete, and it’s an error you are constantly prone to, and constantly getting into trouble for.
Here is just another case. I gave you an open opportunity to clarify this pothole-waiting-to-be-stumbled-into, and you passed it by. Now you are claiming that you “used the phrase accurately”; here’s the thing, Charles: you cannot use a metaphor you made up accurately. That’s because it is a metaphor and has no “accurate” meaning.
A metaphor only has the meaning in your head, and that it conjures up in the heads of your readers. This is what makes it different from a fact. Facts can be accurate or inaccurate. They are concrete. Metaphors: not concrete. Not citable in other than opinion as “accurate” or not.
This is, in short, a major category error, and it’s one you make a lot in your writing: referring to metaphors and anecdotes as if they were equal to facts.
In this specific case, no one but you knows what “turning their backs on those American soldiers in Iraq who believe in their mission” means. Could you try translating it into non-metaphoric English, please? Thanks. Then we can argue meaningfully whether you are being “accurate” or not.
“My November 2005 post was three months before a sectarian war erupted”
There’s another argument waiting to happen. Acknowledging something isn’t the same as it “erupting,” but I’ll leave that there for the time being.
You wrote, by the way, here on November 16, 2005:
Do you still believe that? Because this has always been another complete hole — piece of absolute nonsense, in fact — in your arguments. The notion that America can accomplish anything it likes in the world if only we have enough “will to prevail” is an ancient fallacy, but we still see it endemic on the right today (again, logically if that were true domestically, all liberal programs will succeed, if only we try hard enough: so much for conservative philosophy), no matter that it’s complete lunacy. (Matt Yglesias, of course, successfully dubbed this the “Green Lantern theory of geopolitics.”)
Another logical trope you constantly engage in is the false dichotomy; we’ve already unsuccessfully argued in this thread in response to your “When al Qaeda hits, it’s an enemy attack, not a sectarian attack” and “I submit that al Qaeda is conducting terrorist and guerilla violence, not sectarian violence per se,” that, you know, there’s no contradiction at all between guerrilla and terrorist violence being sectarian. You posit a contradiction that is non-existent.
In your RedState post, there you go again: “Thus this project does not represent oppression of the population, but rather protects them from insurgent intimidation.”
Why something can’t do both is an utter mystery, because, you know, of course it can be both. All sorts of effective counter-insurgent techniques are repressive and oppressive upon the general population, as anyone with a dew-drop’s worth of knowledge about COIN knows.
“Re ‘loser-defeatist’, Gary convinced me that ‘loser’ was too redundant and too polarizing.”
Thank you for that. Let me grant, Charles, that you tend not to give me a lack of points to argue about.
🙂
Spartikus, do you not know who Kilcullen is?
Yes yes, I’m massively uninformed, expecially when compared with the Encyclopedia Farbericus. Are you disputing my point, though? Does a certain David Kilcullen – heh – operate under the same requirements in terms of presenting information to the American public as uniformed military? I think he isn’t. But I could be wrong, and undoubtedly you will correct me….I mean that sincerely.
And no Gary, I don’t actually believe we’re engaging in a real knife-fight. Hence “feels”. It was supposed to be a bit of a joke. Ha ha.
Bruce Baugh: “A couple elections back, there was some fringe group outside both major parties’ conventions with signs saying MORE GOOD! LESS EVIL! Here’s hoping.”
Were there? That was close to our (as-close-to-as-it-got) official slogan for Iquanacon, the 1978 World SF Convention, which had a lot of controversy strewn about it, although our motto had a third phrase: “Do good; avoid evil; throw a room party.”
“Erasmussino: no one here is trying to convince Charles,”
This turns out to be a false statement.
dantheman: “My favorite was their review of a concert given by Mr. Loaf.”
That was a deliberate joke, in fact, which has long been taken out of context, and cited as something it was not:
The truth will never catch up on this one, as in so many things.
“I suggest that mudslinging never impresses onlookers.”
I suggest that’s also untrue; context, audience, accuracy, wit, and cleverness are just a few of the aspects that would affect whether or not the observation was largely true or not in a specific example. This is a sweeping generalization that, as stated, is false. Bad argument therefore.
“I will check with a variety of sources on this point, but in the meantime, I’d be curious to learn from readers here how they interpret the use of the honorifics ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’.”
Depends on context. In your case, I largely reserved judgment, though if you want my knee-jerk immediate feeling, it was that it seemed affected and a bit silly, though possibly simply old-fashioned. But the point that it doesn’t mesh well with the fact that most commenters use pseudononymous identifiers, which are not in the form of a standard name, is well-taken.
I’m not offended by the usage, but it’s not a particularly sensible or compatible approach to pseudonyms.
On the other hand: “Conversely I have never met anyone who uses Mr., Mrs, or Ms. in everyday speech without it being some form of put-down and/or indicator of anger. This type of formal address has long been discarded (in North American society, anyway)….”
I have to disagree with that, too. I do agree that “Mr.” and “Ms.” have dramatically become less frequently heard in recent decades, but they hardly seem entirely “discarded,” and all I can say about the first sentence is that my experience is completely different.
Frankly, I get a little bothered at times when some 20-year-old kid who is a perfect stranger addresses me (in person; in writing I’m fine with informality in any case where I’ve had a previous friendly exchange with someone) by first name, rather than as “Mr. Farber.” It’s impolite, and while I don’t hold myself out as entitled to a lot of respect, the absolute minimum of not being called by my first name by a stranger (in person) doesn’t seem to be asking for a lot.
This is very possibly age-related (as many here know, I’m 48); it’s, of course, purely cultural. And as such, it’s always unwise to issue mind-reading-dependent ukases about how everyone else thinks and feels. (It’s also kinda thoughtless, since all it takes is a single person to render it untrue, and a moment’s thought should indicate that it can’t possibly be true that no one disagrees.)
Bruce makes another crucial point: “Gendered titles like Mr. and Ms. are likely to go awry in an environment full of non-gender-specific handles and no external cues.”
Unless the game is to see how long one can go before guessing wrong, this is a practice waiting for a mistake and a possible irritation to happen. (I once hastily, accidentally, and in complete contradiction to my standard practice, referred to publius as “he,” which I regretted the moment my finger clicked “post,” because I, in fact, have no idea whatever what gender publius is.)
Steve: “I love how ObWi is capable of going so passionately meta at a moment’s notice.”
That’s going meta about being meta, you know.
“You can discuss a subject with civility if it doesn’t have any emotional impact on you personally.”
Or have any formal debate practice. But, really, this is extremely insufficient, Donald. One can have any amount of emotional impact from an issue: how one responds to one’s emotions is a choice, of course.
“I have no aspirations to be civilized in this sense.”
I have no aspirations to be a robot, with no empathy or compassion, but I think examining how nasty, rude, or uncivil, one is in verbal discussion is not a remotely sensible way of judging someone’s empathy, compassion, passion, or anything else desirable.
Passion, after all, isn’t the measure of morality. (Tangentially, I’ll note the Sidney Hook quote on the sidebar of my blog: “Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.”)
Anyway, the best answer I’m aware of as to how civil or uncivil one should be in a given circumstance is neither that one should always be civil at all costs, or that civility is irrelevant, but that one should make the choice most appropriate to the circumstance.
“Appropriate” is a very useful word.
Spartikus: “It’s simply human nature to view one’s work and ideas as an extension of yourself.”
True, but part of being civilized and intelligent is also making appropriate distinctions. The distinction between who one is, and an act one has committed, is positively existential, and is basic.
It’s also essential to understanding, as well as extremely practically counter-productive to not realize. Almost everyone, not being god-like, has had, at one moment or another in their life, if not more, a sexist thought, a racist thought, a bigoted thought. It’s far more accurate to label those thoughts, than to declare that the single thought makes someone as a person a “racist” in the identical way David Duke is.
Yes, if one observes that a particular statement is racist, it’s inflamnatory. But if someone interprets that observation as equally inflamnatory as calling the person a “racist,” that someone isn’t noting a crucial distinction. That’s their fault and problem, not that of the person who made the less inflamnatory (presuming it’s accurate) observation.
Naturally, though, of course, if one is discussing a David Duke, calling him a “racist” is accurate. But that hardly makes the distinction go away, or become any less important to communicating well.
Erasmussimo: “Do we do the right thing because other people earn the right thing, or do we do the right thing because we are civilized?”
A point I was also thinking.
“Yes, it is, but attacking the sinner will always have worse repercussions than attacking the sin. If you can’t get anywhere by criticizing bad actions, you certainly won’t get there by criticizing the actor.”
Another way of stating what I just wrote.
“For the twelfth time, no one is buying your attempt to equate verbal nastiness with physical violence.”
I’m impressed by your ability to read the mind of every reader.
I’d also have to agree that both Jesurgislac and you have misread what Erasmussimo wrote on that; it wasn’t an equation; it was a point that could be taken too far, but wasn’t, as phrased, if you don’t misinterpret the words into some other meaning, as Jes did. It would be pointless to rehash now, but it wasn’t an equation.
“This reads as anything other than agreement is futile, which I don’t think was your intent, but that’s how it reads.”
Not to me. There are a wide variety of ways to disagree, and I’m hardly the best one to point them out, but noting that there are widely ranging choices of effectiveness of ways to disagree isn’t in the least a statement that it’s impossible to disagree; frankly, I don’t even know how you come up with that reading.
“Sometimes it really is time to man the barricades.”
That’s usefully aggressive metaphorizing, but, like the “war on terror,” perhaps not the best paradigm when one is talking about, you know, comments on a blog thread.
Some might say that it was the same sort of pompous, inflationary, rhetoric about victory, and fighting unto death, and all-it-takes-is-will, and the like, that they decry in those they call the “101st Fighting Keyboarders.”
Myself, who is all I can speak for, unlike the many folks in this thread who are qualified to speak for what everyone else, and no one, thinks, I tend to view with great skepticism use of metaphors of the military, of death, of killing, of revolution, from people not actively involved in violent or military activity. I think it’s a dreadfully misleading and damaging way to think, absent literal intent to literally engage in these acts in the extremely short-term future, and I mean “damaging” both to one’s own thinking and analysis, and to the discourse these metaphors are used in.
But that’s just me. Now let’s storm the battlements of all those who disagree, and let no cries for mercy stem our slaughter of their children!
I want to take a second stab at this, because this seems to be an extremely clear misreading here: “If you can’t get anywhere by criticizing bad actions” is subjunctive, it is conditional.
Since Erasmussimo is favoring criticizing bad actions, reading it as the reverse is a clear error. Favoring criticism is favoring criticism; it is not favoring disallowing criticism; I don’t know how to put this more clearly.
This is a tad ambiguous, but my tentative first read is that the latter quote is one many or most people would tend to disagree with, and that you are juxtaposing the two to ridicule Bruce’s statement that “anger is sometimes moral.”
That may be an incorrect reading, but if it isn’t, I don’t at all agree with ridiculing the statement of Bruce’s, and neither do I disagree with Bruce.
The question isn’t whether anger is, per se, moral or immoral, and indeed, the question seems a bit silly to me, unless one is a Vulcan.
If one is angry at, say, the events in Sudan, or the Holocaust, or the use of child soldiers to cut off the limbs of civilians, or a thousand other barbarities in the world, one is apt to, in my view, be having a perfectly moral feeling.
The important question is what actions we take after we’ve felt our feelings.
Anger doesn’t justify any and all responses, however justified it may be. But anger itself isn’t inherently immoral. Bruce is perfectly correct about that.
No, you’re not.
No, I was baffled as to why you were referring to “one David Kilcullen,” since I don’t know how to interpret that phrasing as meaning other than that you were unfamiliar with him. If it was just hasty writing, fine. I do hope you wouldn’t take personally my reading what you wrote, and asking about it, since I can’t know what it was you meant, otherwise. (I write blog comments with great speed, and generally very sloppily, myself.)
Gary, thanks for flagging something I’d intended to comment on but forgot to in the heat of the moment: metaphors of violence, comparisons of speech to violence, and the like, go wrong very easily, and it’s smart to be slow to use them, quick to search for alternatives, and quick to set them aside when better comparisons come along. Real violence is serious and should be taken seriously. I notice that among my friends, those like soldiers, cops, and rape victims, the ones who’ve dealt or received serious violence, tend to be slow in using it metaphorically for anything else. I figured (and figure) that they know something I can learn by example.
To steal a page from The Editors:
No.
This has been another edition of “Simple Answers to Stupid Questions.”
By the way, this formulation:
Where, rather than debating the merits of the former statement, you simply juxtapose it with something not only not parallel, but not even remotely related, but which is nonetheless disagreeable, in an attempt to make the former look bad by implication, is rarely convincing. And by “rarely,” I mean “never.” For instance:
The suggestion that “anger is sometimes moral” reminds me of another quote:
“Hit the road, Jack” by Ray Charles.
The suggestion that “anger is sometimes moral” reminds me of another quote:
“it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” by Jesus Christ.
The suggestion that “anger is sometimes moral” reminds me of another quote:
“I gotta pee” by Forrest Gump.
All equally unconvincing, all equally meaningless.
Finally, if you are not made angry by many recent events in history, you simply aren’t paying attention.
(Matt Yglesias, of course, successfully dubbed this the “Green Lantern theory of geopolitics.”)
The problem is that the “Green Lantern theory” still plays into the framing of this morass as a comic book story. The reality comes with a bodycount. If we must analogize, the proponents of this lunacy aren’t Hal Jordan, they’re Haig at the Somme. And I don’t think it’s coincidence that to this meatgrinder comes the echo of WWI propaganda — Charles’ love-affair with “defeatist”, the rekindling of the Dolchstosslegende, the erstwhile cries of “Objectively Pro-Saddam” (which is nothing but “useful idiot” for the modern age), etc. — and a neo-imperialism that could’ve been ripped from any European newspaper in 1912. Everything old is new again.
Which, on the occasions I allow myself to think that far ahead, makes me gibber with terror at what might happen 20 years from now…
However, Phil, this turns out not to be true.
I’ll demonstrate:
— Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, Mao Zedong.
Claiming that physical violence is necessary to respond to those who refuse to listen to logical argument is perfectly common throughout history, and is the argument behind pretty much every revolution.
The word “could” here is crucial; I don’t know why this point would be controversial, save that Erasmussino is relatively new around here, and may not be being given as much consideration as some regulars sometimes are in some cases.
In this specific case, the burden would be on people to prove that it could not be the case that anyone, anywhere, ever has or could use such an argument — and since that argument, that violence is justified against “those who refuse to listen to logical argument,” is made all the time by those engaged in attempted revolution, that argument couldn’t possibly be correct.
One has a dizzying choice of revolutionaries, both historic and current, to quote on this, but how anyone can know anything at all about, say, the French Revolution, or Lenin, and say it’s not possible for anyone to make an argument for necessary violence because of the existence of those who refuse to listen to logical argument, I have no idea.
Let me reemphasize the obvious one last time: “could” does not mean “must.”
I don’t think you answered the question you’ve claimed to have answered, Gary. The specific (rhetorical?) construct was:
Could not another person just as reasonably justify physical violence as a tactic for convincing those who refuse to listen to logical argument?
To name but one, I don’t recall Mao ever talking about convincing the KMT that Communism was correct; his aim was overthrowing the KMT by convincing others of the correctness of his position. Ditto for dang near every other revolutionary I can think of: almost by definition, such people don’t try to convince “those who refuse to listen”, by violence or otherwise, as it’s precisely their conviction that such is impossible that made them revolutionaries in the first place.
[In addition, I think you’re ignoring the rather blatant weasel-phrase “reasonably justify” which puts all kinds of unfortunate spin on this set-up.]
All of which is peripheral to the main issue, of course, which is that Erasmussino is wrong and that Morat never said anything of the sort, but it’s an amusing digression nonetheless.
I should add that I’m speaking broadly here but since only broad points were being made I feel that suffices. More finely-textured wittering on request.
And while I’m in this damn thread:
Charles Bird: Pure bullsh*t. You’re just flat wrong. Ignorantly wrong. I’ve supported the use of a proper COIN strategy since April 2004.
Since this puts you approximately eights months slower than the Pentagon and two years behind the rest of the planet, I’d be reluctant to say that with any pride.
J Thomas:
I’m not clear which “we” you are referring to, but the most recent PIPA poll of Iraq says a bit differently:
I guess I was a little bit misleading there. I was referring first to a 2004 poll.
You write a bunch more, but I’ll take this as implicitly acknowledging that when discussing current opinion somewhere, recent polls are relevant, and polls from three years or so ago are irrelevant.
Absolutely wrong. No. You’re wrong about both what I acknowledge and wrong to claim that recent history is irrelevant.
The 2004 poll under-represented kurds. But then, kurdistan is for most purposes a different country anyway. Consider them separately, and it looks much worse.
Your January 2006 poll gave very little information about their methods. They replaced 5 out of 116 sampling points “for security reasons”. Could that have distorted their result by 3%? Probably not if those were sunni areas since the sunnis they did sample were 88% in favor of attacking US troops. If it was 100% in favor in the places they chose not to sample, that wouldn’t make much difference. But if it was mixed or primarily shia areas they were afraid to go, it could make much more difference.
They “adjusted” their data to fit an assumption that the population as a whole is 55% shia, 22% sunni, 18% kurd, and 5% other. This is somewhat arbitrary, we don’t know how many of each group have emigrated or been killed. It was probably the best estimate they had, though.
Their result was on the edge of significantly different from 50%. They got a 74% completion rate, would the noncompletion be biased? I tend to think these polls will tend to be biased in favor of the USA because insurgents will tend not to participate in polls.
It isn’t far from a majority approving of attacks on US forces even if we accept this particular poll, and even when we include the kurds. So look at the data they released. The kurds are our friends. 63% of their sample strongly disapproved of attacks on us. The sunnis are our enemies. 77% of them strongly approved. The shias are mostly neutral, 73% of them approve somewhat or disapprove somewhat, but they tend to disapprove of attacks on us somewhat more than they approve.
Also, PIPA did a study at the end of september 2006 — about 10 months later than your study — in which 60% approved attacks on US forces.
—-
More interesting things from the poll you quote —
Question 15: 80% of sampled (renormed) iraqis believed the USA intends to have permanent bases in iraq.
Question 9: 76% believed the USA would not withdraw our forces if the iraqi government told us to.
Question 6: 70% wanted their government to tell us to leave anyway.
And question 8: 61% thought (15 months ago) that the newly-elected government *would* ask the americans to leave on some timeline.
Also question 2a: 94% of polled sunnis (and 51% of “other”) thought the elections were not free nor fair. Not a great basis for getting them to accept that government’s rule.
PIPA has done a new study
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/346.php?nid=&id=&pnt=346&lb=hmpg2
in egypt, morocco, pakistan, and indonesia. Solid majorities in all these countries support the goal of getting the USA to remove forces from islamic nations. Majorities in egypt and morocco support attacks on US troops anywhere in the region, while only a minority approve in indonesia and many in pakistan refuse to say.
The bottom line is, we are heavily dependent on superior firepower to accomplish our foreign policy goals in the middle east.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that my judgment of Erasmussino is less charitable than it might be because of the recent thread on voting machines and election fraud, where I saw Erasmussino demonstrate thorough ignorance of the field, disinterest in learning much to fix that, and condescension toward those providing information. A lecture on manners coming after that goes down worse than it would from someone else.
Gary — I suspect we’re talking two different types of “verbal violence” here. I was using the term in the Obi-Wings context. (Everywhere else, it’d be called ‘restrained politeness).
My idea of verbal violence towards Charles — the verbal rock throwing I alluded to — is simply not cutting him any slack. Period.
Civility — letting small mistakes slide, allowing people to make a perhaps untrue but probably not important boast — is a generally positive social lubricant.
At times, however, it becomes an impediment. If you, for instance, absolutely reek of garbage — I should probably tell you. And if polite hints towards “I think you might stepped in something — you might want to check your shoes” fails to work, blunt honesty is called for: “Man, you reek. You stepped in garbage, or fell into a garbage truck — or something. Feel free to borrow my shower. I’ll find you something to wear. Because, god — that’s awful”.
With Charles — because of his posting history and his front-page status — when hints fail to work, I cannot simply let them slide with a “Oh, that crazy Charles — he’s such a character!”. No — it’s rather important, all things considered, to let him no in no uncertain terms that his posting history didn’t disappear down the Rabbit Hole.
Polite hints weren’t working. Brutal truths — brutal as in “not sugarcoated” and “completely honest” — are called for.
I find it rather awe-inspiring how quickly the “It’s a short jump from what you’re stating to REAL violence” started up.
No, it’s not. It is, in fact, a REALLY LONG WAY. In fact, you can’t even see a good internet flame from where I’m standing.
Frankly, I’m not sure where Errasimo got the idea — but he harped on it enough, and the thread is long enough, that apparently it became true by sheer dint of will.
My original post — fraught with violence and insult, apparently, can be found here.
Key quote: ” Perhaps rough, uncivil and horribly brutal honesty might.”.
Uncivil in that it is not padded with niceties. That it is not sugarcoated. That it is what it is — a rather stunning indictment of Charles’ poor judgement.
That is what I meant by throwing verbal rocks. By flat out stating, with utter honesty and no attempt to spare Charles’ feelings, how utterly and totally wrong he is and that yes, indeed, pretty much everyone here sees the same thing — a man unwilling to assess his own judgement, who has resorted to namecalling and slurs in support of positions in which he was, in fact, horribly wrong and who has yet to even acknowledge prior errors in judgement, much less attempt to make better judgements in the future.
They thought it quite rude, I’m sure, when the little boy pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes. It was uncivil of him. It was also true.
Still, Gary — if you feel I’ve been so incivil (you mentioned the OW posting rules) — perhaps you could find something in this comment threat where I treaded a little close to the edge. Some example of incivility, that — according to Errassimo — seems so rude as to bring up my potential capacity for physical violence.
You might find something — good lord, I do write enough — but I doubt it’ll even show up against the stunning insult that was ‘loser defeatist’.
I am much impressed by the rigorous logic recently brought to bear upon some of the questions debated here, and I must needs address a fair criticism of my rather flip comparison of the claim that anger is sometimes moral with Gordon Gecko’s infamous line.
Yep, that was flippant. So let me get down to the business of making my case more solidly. First off, I agree completely with the assertion that anger in itself is neither good nor bad; it’s a human emotion and that’s that. My opposition has been to venting one’s anger on another person. I believe this was implicit in my overall stance but I’ll make it explicit here. Yes, anger is a normal response to all manner of outrages, and I fault nobody for it. But I do draw a line at allowing that anger to distort one’s judgement. In particular, I draw a line at expressing anger at an interlocutor. It doesn’t matter how mad you are, expressing that anger will ALWAYS make matters worse. Angry expressions directed at a person never convince that person. Angry expressions are a form of dominance behavior, not a rational act. An angry expression is more akin to two bighorn sheep bashing heads than to any form of reasoned discussion.
The point was made that mudslinging can sometimes be effective. Well, yes, it can. For example, the slime job done on Mr. Kerry by the Swift Boat people was effective in reducing the vote count for Mr. Kerry. But, while mudslinging can in fact be effective, is it desirable?
I can recall just a few cases where something like mudslinging was effective. The best case I can recall is the famous retort to Mr. Quayle in the Vice Presidential debates (“You are no Jack Kennedy.”) But even that was very gentle as mudslinging goes. Had the wording been any harsher, it might well have failed.
On the gender of publius: tut, tut, it’s obviously male. If the person in question were female, the handle would be publia. 😉
“Your January 2006 poll gave very little information about their methods.”
Except for the prominent link at the top labeled “Questionnaire/Methodology,” as per standard for all PIPA polls.
If you wish to argue that CNN had better, and more accurate, polling in Iraq than PIPA, you’re welcome to (feel free to link to the more definitive CNN methodology data). This isn’t consistent with then pulling points from PIPA that you like, but whatever. (Thanks for crediting it as “my” study, though; most generous.)
“Also, PIPA did a study at the end of september 2006 — about 10 months later than your study….”
I had no idea.
The rest of your points, other than the following, seem to deal with some argument with someone other than me, so I’ve no comment any more now than before.
“You’re wrong about both what I acknowledge and wrong to claim that recent history is irrelevant.”
If you will charitably allow me to revise “irrelevant” to “less relevant,” I’ll charitably interpret this as misunderstanding my point.
I responded to this from you:
The context here was clearly to offer information on contemporary Iraqi opinion. The context is discussion of the current situation, and what should best be done now.
It should go without saying that when discussing current opinion of something, the actual current opinion, or as close as we can get to it, is more relevant than three-year-old opinion. This doesn’t make the info about several years ago irrelevant, it makes it less relevant.
When discussing policy recommendations, on any topic, for data from 2004 to supersede data from 2007 would only be more useful if we had time travel, so we could go back to 2004-5 to respond to conditions then, rather than more recent conditions. Can we agree on that, or not?
“I find it rather awe-inspiring how quickly the ‘It’s a short jump from what you’re stating to REAL violence’ started up.”
This is an example of how paraphrasing can be a terrible idea.
I have no doubt that you and others may perceive this as having been said, but it actually never was.
Best to respond only to actual words written by others, rather than our rephrasing in our head.
Particularly on blog threads, where interpretations tend to rapidly spiral away from actual words as conversation goes on, and people’s tendency to talk past, and misunderstand, each other, as perceived differences become exaggerated, grows quickly.
Otherwise, no disagreement, Morat.
“if you feel I’ve been so incivil”
I don’t know what makes you say that; I referred to the “requirement to be civil in discussion, which is laid down in the posting rules”; there’s nothing there whatever accusing you of violating the posting rules.
As well, my sentence began with the conditional: “If you feel….” (And also didn’t even carry a name as to who I was responding to there.)
People on ObWi seem to be having a lot of trouble with the notion of the conditional of late.
Erasmussimo: “In particular, I draw a line at expressing anger at an interlocutor.”
An unnecessary lack of clarity is problematic here, in that this is perfectly reasonable as a statement of personal practice, intent, and preference, but you’re not clearly stating it as such.
Instead, you seem to be implying that it should be universal behavior amongst all peoples at all times.
I suspect you don’t intend to be quite so universal in your prescription, so perhaps clarifying how prescriptive you’re being might be helpful.
To be a bit more specific about the discussion at hand, the theory and practice of ObWi do call for a certain minimal level of civility, but on the other hand, doesn’t prescribe or mandate a higher level of civility, such as you seem to be prescribing. This, I think, accounts for some of the friction about this at the moment.
And, as Bruce and others mention, many of us have been debating with Charles for about three years now, so the instructional aspects of what you’ve been saying as to how we should interact with Charles do tend to enter the category where eggs and grandmas lurk.
Yes, my statement In particular, I draw a line at expressing anger at an interlocutor. was meant to be confined to the context of blog discussions. I’m happy to make that explicit.
Since Erasmussimo is favoring criticizing bad actions, reading it as the reverse is a clear error.
Fair enough.
That’s usefully aggressive metaphorizing, but, like the “war on terror,” perhaps not the best paradigm when one is talking about, you know, comments on a blog thread.
After reading this, and to the infinite relief of the people on my block, I’ve ceased building the giant “tank trap” at the end of the street.
I do hope you wouldn’t take personally my reading what you wrote, and asking about it, since I can’t know what it was you meant, otherwise. (I write blog comments with great speed, and generally very sloppily, myself.)
I don’t even know what day it is.
“I’m happy to make that explicit.”
Let me try again: are you describing your personal goals and practices, or insisting everyone else should follow your rhetorical prescription?
Because I think it’s peachy-keen delicious for you to express that as your personal ideal and practice; on the other hand, there are no such house rules here, or on blogs in general, and while we can debate if either this blog or others would be improved or not were that otherwise (or not debate, and be uninterested), as we like, I know of no other previously-agreed-upon grounds for making assertions about how everyone should behave, beyond the minimal civility of the rules.
There’s a difference between saying something along the lines of “these are my ideas as to the best kind of interaction and communication, what do you think?” and “this is how you should all behave, because I think so.”
Despite my admonition about the dangers of paraphrasing, I wasn’t proposing eliminating it completely from discourse, and I have to say that you certainly haven’t made clear to me, at least, that you’re not asserting something along the lines of the latter.
“After reading this, and to the infinite relief of the people on my block, I’ve ceased building the giant ‘tank trap’ at the end of the street.”
That’s a shame. It’s best to be prepared. And the thing could, properly dressed, double for quite some time as an art installation.
Special Bonus Farber Trivia!: not everyone realizes that when the Bastille was famously stormed, it had only seven prisoners.
Erasamussino–I actually tend to agree with you about Luther vs. Erasmus overall. But Erasmus could be calm about the theological discussion because he didn’t think it was a matter of damnation vs. salvation–he just wanted everyone to get along. Luther thought otherwise. Which was my point, even if I’m closer to Erasmus’s way of thinking on the theological issues of the time. (I certainly don’t have much sympathy for the people responsible for the 16th-17th century religious wars).
But your civility lectures are themselves uncivil. But hey, I can’t complain about that.
Probably this has been hashed to death since I last looked at this thread many hours ago. I haven’t had the time to go through all that’s been written since.
I am surely not attempting to impose rules upon others, nor am I attempting to assert the moral fiber of the universe. I am describing certain cause-and-effect relationships: when a certain course of action is taken, results counter to those desired often ensue. To put it more directly, if you express your anger at others, they just get mad at you. If there are people here who like playing anger magnification games, that’s surely no skin off my nose.
Sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders, say, “I’ll see you at the ballot box”, and take it from there. In such cases, your best hope is to convince the bystanders that the other guy is irrational and that you represent the voice of sweet reason. When you sling mud back at the other guy, the bystander writes you both off as nut cases.
Erasmussimo, it can go that way. On the other hand, if you engage in civil debate with a liar who says whatever he thinks will help his cause, then bystanders are likely to think that his stand is as good as yours and that there’s simply a civil disagreement.
It’s sad when the outcome depends on the people who simply don’t care to look at the details, who base things on general impressions. But it seems to work out that way, they are the majority.
Again, if you debate someone who lies consistently, who says whatever sounds like it supports his position, and you act like you take his positions seriously then you are legitimising him. You are giving the false impression that he is your equal, that his position is legitimate, that he is not simply a scoundrel.
And people who realise that he is a scoundrel will tend to think you are one too.
When you sling mud back at the other guy, the bystander writes you both off as nut cases.
It depends.
I have poor opinions of a variety of aspects of Charles’ writing, on matters both large and small, and I agree that he posts many things that aren’t so, but, then, I find that many people, for one reason or another (most often sloppy thinking or writing and poor writing and reading skills), casually make assertions that aren’t so.
It’s completely a subjective opinion, but despite my many many differences with Charles, and criticisms of Charles, and the fact that at times he makes me very angry, as well, I — and others are perfectly entitled to disagree — don’t believe Charles consciously or intentionally lies.
To be sure, I think that a lot of people who are far more egregious asserters-of-untruth don’t generally consciously lie.
Some do, but I think — and this is a subjective opinion, as well — that people generally underestimate just how frequently and easily many people are willing to rationalize what they choose to believe, in accord with their preferences, and then proceed from there. I think that’s the case in a a significant proportion, if not possibly the majority, of cases where people are accused of intentional lying.
Inside other people’s heads is often an alien place, and I think that’s sometimes under-estimated.
It’s a lot easier, in most cases, I think, for people to rationalize even the looniest opinion than it is — with some exceptions, including sociopaths — for most people to rationalize “oh, I’ll just make something up and lie.”
And a perfectly common habit is, hey, this quote I’ve had from Desiderius Erasmus on my blog sidebar for several years (which I’ve quoted here before, but not in quite a while):
“Your January 2006 poll gave very little information about their methods.”
Except for the prominent link at the top labeled “Questionnaire/Methodology,” as per standard for all PIPA polls.
That’s where the very little information was.
If you wish to argue that CNN had better, and more accurate, polling in Iraq than PIPA, you’re welcome to (feel free to link to the more definitive CNN methodology data).
No, I twice pointed out a serious flaw in the CNN methodology.
My point is that this is nothing new. A lot of iraqis, a majority of sunnis and shias combined, have been in favor of attacking US troops for years now. This isn’t something new. You quoted an outlier study that didn’t put it in the majority, that put it at only 47% using some questionable assumptions. You knew about a more recent study that put it above 60% and you didn’t quote that one.
I responded to this from you:
We did polling that showed the majority of polled iraqis wanted us out within a year. A majority of polled iraqis thought we started more violence than we prevented. And our polling methods tended to choose iraqis who looked prosperous and nonthreatening.
The context here was clearly to offer information on contemporary Iraqi opinion. The context is discussion of the current situation, and what should best be done now.
It should go without saying that when discussing current opinion of something, the actual current opinion, or as close as we can get to it, is more relevant than three-year-old opinion. This doesn’t make the info about several years ago irrelevant, it makes it less relevant.
I’m saying that this is nothing new. They thought it 3 years ago. You quote an outlier from 16 months ago. The one from 7 months ago — which you blogged about — is like the one 3 years ago. I’m baffled what you’re going on about.
When discussing policy recommendations, on any topic, for data from 2004 to supersede data from 2007 would only be more useful if we had time travel, so we could go back to 2004-5 to respond to conditions then, rather than more recent conditions. Can we agree on that, or not?
Look — in 2004 a majority of polled iraqis were willing to tell pollsters — strangers they didn’t know at all — that they thought the violence against iraqi police was arranged by the US military in order to persuade people that they needed the US military to stay in iraq and stop the violence.
And it could be true. When we catch iraqis doing violence very often they say “I’m only doing it because I got offered money to do it. I have no other way to feed my family.” Is it al qaeda handing out the money or is it agents of the US government? We won’t know until we catch them, now will we?
But think about that. In 2004 somewhere between 48% and 54% of iraqis thought the US government was trying to cause chaos in iraq to justify continuing the occupation, and they were willing to tell that to strangers. What kind of support could we have 3 years later?
Some polls have had some questions with answers that tend to show up paranoids. Iraqis lived a long time with secret police who would torture them for expressing the wrong political opinions. They started saying all sorts of things after we took over because they believed we liked free speech. But how many of them believed that enough to stake their lives on it? Lots. Still, when there’s a question that goes “How long should the american soldiers stay in iraq?” and one of the answers is “As long as they want to” and that answer gets 10%, that’s an indication that something like 10% of the people polled were answering the old way, saying whatever they thought we wanted to hear. And I’d expect that proportion to grow instead of shrink as they get more experience with us.
So anyway, I’m not saying to let old data supercede new data. I’m saying to look at the trend, don’t try to take the newest data in isolation.
When I started I just mentioned the conclusions, and you said they were wrong. You quoted old data that said they were wrong. Do you have something since the end of September 2006 that’s changed it back again to make you right? And how important is 51% versus 47% to you? Why are you belaboring these factoids anyway?
Far more common than conscious lying, I think, is what I once saw called “reckless belief” – those times when your desire for something leads you to downplay, dismiss, or reinterpret all obstacles to it. It’s not always a bad thing! The belief of my family and friends in my potential kept me going during very hard years of trying to make a living at writing, at times when the rational assessment looked to me like I should give up and sink back down into disabled dependency. But I wanted something else to be true of me, and they wanted it for me, and kept working with me on the problems until anything else could in fact be true of what I could achieve. Love and friendship very often involve believing more is possible of the beloved than seems available at the moment.
It becomes a problem when the refusal to accept limits ends up imposing hurt and loss on others. This is, of course, one of the ur-arguments for democracy and limited government, to constrain the ease with which and the ends to which we can commit other people and their stuff.
“You quoted an outlier study that didn’t put it in the majority, that put it at only 47% using some questionable assumptions. You knew about a more recent study that put it above 60% and you didn’t quote that one.”
You seem to be imagining that I was making some kind of argument about something with you. Hint: I wasn’t.
“You quoted an outlier study that didn’t put it in the majority, that put it at only 47% using some questionable assumptions. You knew about a more recent study that put it above 60% and you didn’t quote that one.”
You seem to be imagining that I was making some kind of argument about something with you. Hint: I wasn’t.
OK.
Ah, what *were* you doing?
On this factual point, though: “And how important is 51% versus 47% to you?”
It’s the distinction between a majority and a minority, of course. For instance, in an election, that would be “important” enough to determine the “winner” and the “loser.”
Why, even the difference between 49.9% and 50.1% percent of opinion can turn out to be very important.
Since you ask.
“Why are you belaboring these factoids anyway?”
Whether the most recent poll said something was a minority opinion or a majority opinion would be a “fact,” not a “factoid,” and when I see someone claim a majority believes something, when the most recent most credible information contradicts that, I’ll question it.
I had no other argument, which you have consistently failed to notice in favor of your imagination, as demonstrated by your continued arguing with… I have no idea who or what.
As anyone here who knows me can tell you, someone asserting that a minority is a majority, and then citing three-year-old information to back up their claim, is quite enough to get me to ask a question about it, if I notice. No larger point necessary, and no larger point existing, which can be deduced by my not having made any other argument.
You are either naive or coy.
I provided the link to the term, Doctor, because that is definition intended. I didn’t factor in the origins of the word or its history 60-plus years and more ago. Had I intended so, I would have linked it.
…your whole argument here seems to be reasonably classifiable as propaganda your POV, supporting no change in the military approach to Iraq.
I don’t see how you can come to that, Gary. The point I was trying to make is that the nature of al Qaeda differs from the other paramilitant groups, and it’s important to make distinctions between attacks by al Qaeda and attacks by others. The Shiite and Sunni militias aren’t transnational (well, maybe a Shiite group or two is) and they don’t have agendas that go beyond Iraq’s borders.
As for Vietnam, I have been reading more on the subject and my thinking has changed some. I used the ellipsis, probably wrongly, as a drop-off point, that even if it did have a government the people wanted, it may have fallen anyway considering the way the war was fought. I’m not as certain as you that we should never have gone there in the first place.
In January, President Bush laid out benchmarks for the Iraqi government; how has the Iraqi government done on them?
The only major legislative advance I’ve seen is the oil legislation. The Anbar Awakening party’s joining the Iraqi government is perhaps another.
As for my security comment (or lack of security comment), I was trying to get across that our undermanning post-war Iraq led to chaos and it opened the door to a growing insurgency/terrorist movement, leading to an environment where personal safety was a top concern. It hampered rebuilding efforts, such as they were, and we’re still dealing with it. I’m not saying that lack of security was the only problem.
As for Reid, your excerpt shows Reid’s eminent confusion. He agrees with what Petraeus said and he opposes the president’s plan, yet the president’s plan is the Petraeus plan. As I understand the COIN strategy, it covers diplomatic, political and economic aspects in addition to military ops.
Here’s a damn good point:
Again, if you debate someone who lies consistently, who says whatever sounds like it supports his position, and you act like you take his positions seriously then you are legitimising him. You are giving the false impression that he is your equal, that his position is legitimate, that he is not simply a scoundrel.
Yep, that’s one of the sadder aspects of the world. What can we do about it? My own particular experience of this is in dealing with people who deny the realities of climate change. Many of these people just twist the science in the most deceptive fashion. And yes, that really frustrates me. At times my discipline has slipped. I regret those times. But I know that the only way I can make progress is to keep my anger in check, stick to the facts, and make my case as clearly as I can. With some people, it just doesn’t work. But there simply isn’t any better way.
I note in passing the delicious irony of insinuations that I am intolerant because I condemn intolerance.
Lastly, I want to express my appreciation of the Erasmus quote. He’s got a lot of great quotes. Sadly, Erasmus wasn’t perfect — he was rather thin-skinned and would often respond to some of the truly vicious things said about him in less than truly Christian spirit. But those were more barbaric times and he certainly strived to be better.
“I provided the link to the term, Doctor, because that is definition intended.”
Perhaps you didn’t read all of what you linked:
There’s more.
The problem with dictionary definitions — I say this as a guy who used to make his living by his professional judgment on which were and weren’t appropriate resources in a given text — is that their primary limit is that they generally eludidate denotation, not connotation.
You’ll note that the link you provided goes on to cite Lenin, etc., so perhaps it’s not the best response to again point to it as contradicting that which it affirms.
“I didn’t factor in the origins of the word or its history 60-plus years and more ago. Had I intended so, I would have linked it.”
Oopsie.
Cuz why?
So? So what? Does that make the Shi’ite dominance of the government, and the strong tendency so far of the government to do little to politically advance Iraq, or the Shi’ite-Sunni killing unimportant? What point are you going for here?
That’s very good, Charles. I’m impressed, as I indicated earlier.
And, hey, it seems to be a bit of evidence that talking to you isn’t like talking to a brick wall, after all. 🙂
(But, as I previously indicated, I’ve never held that that’s the case; it only feels that way sometimes. 😉 😉 ;-))
“I’m not as certain as you that we should never have gone there in the first place.”
One of the most crucial points I’ve always tried to get across in discussions in Vietnam, and probably have not emphasized enough here, is that — this is not original to me — it was a different war every year. Every year, from 1945 to 1975. Every year, the problems were different, the best hope (in retrospect) would have been different (after 1956, at least; prior to that it was largely a French problem).
So I’m perfectly willing to take discussing what should and shouldn’t have been perceived, and what would and would, in retrospect, have been best policy, in each or any given year you wish to suggest constitutes “in the first place” on its own, because whatever the right answer is for that year, I contend that it would have been a different set of answers in 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, and so on.
Anyway, I take this as a step forward for you, so kudos, and a tasty favorite cookie.
“I’m not saying that lack of security was the only problem.”
Fine, but you don’t discuss how crucial, how basic, how much of a root problem, is the Iraqi government. You thus imply that it’s far less important a problem than military and “other” problems.
Perhaps it’s just me who gets the impression that, therefore, that’s what you believe.
Please, correct me by writing posts which explain that this isn’t what you believe.
Because while I’m willing to agree that it’s not provable in an absolute way that somehow matters couldn’t dramatically improve in Iraq in the next year, and keep dramatically improving in future years — I think it’s highly unlikely, but not objectively provable to a certainty, and my opinion could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time) — I’ll ask you to, if you believe that Vietnam and Iraq are not alike in being pretty much doomed-to-failure projects, to explain what exactly about the Iraqi government you see as more inspiring of optimism than was the case with the South Vietnamese governments of the Sixties and Seventies.
Thanks.
Erasmussimo: “Yep, that’s one of the sadder aspects of the world. What can we do about it?”
There are a great many people not worth arguing with. (For a variety of reasons, actually.)
“But those were more barbaric times and he certainly strived to be better.”
That’s my semi-informed impression. If we’re picking favored champions, him versus Martin Luther, I guess I’d have to pick Desiderius Erasmus, though in truth: a) I’ve read very little of Luther’s own work; and b) as some great philosophers once said, “tis a silly game.”
Okay, they said “place,” and it was about Camelot, but it was still wise.
My own take, and this is no more than the view of someone with a sustained amateur interest in the Reformation and its context, is that Erasmus had ideas that I find much more congenial, but that they would never have become society-changing, and the society needed changing. Luther roused masses, and although the movements he and his peers set off led to a lot of monstrous suffering, I also think they set the scene for later developments i like. I can wish, of course, for somoene with temperate views and a gift for sparking a passion for self-determination in the masses, but it’s a tricky act, to put it mildly.
Charles: “As for Reid, your excerpt shows Reid’s eminent confusion. He agrees with what Petraeus said and he opposes the president’s plan, yet the president’s plan is the Petraeus plan.”
Let me not neglect to ask you to clarify: do you now agree or disagree that “Harry Reid said the war was already lost,” absent more context, is not a fair summary?
And I’m still in suspense as to what “…they [Reid and Pelosi] are turning their backs on those American soldiers in Iraq who believe in their mission” means in concrete terms.
One shouldn’t neglect defeat-o-crat Chuck Hagel, by the way:
It was just one of those unreliable lib’rul reporters, though: Robert Novak.
Something else that is in the back of my head is that you’ve said that “The best way to fight al Qaeda is the new strategy we’re putting into place, in my opinion” and that “General Petraeus also pointed out the difficulties.”
But while I’ve already mentioned your neglect of the primary problem, the Iraqi government, I’ve not particularly pointed out to you that if there is a case to be made for Continuing The Effort To Win The War, it’s not remotely credible to maintain that it can be done in one year, or two years, or three, or four.
If you are citing General Petraeus, and the COIN manual, you are saying that we need more than three times the current number of American soldiers, and we’ll need them there for at least five to ten years, taking proportionate (at least) casualties for most or all of that time.
And that also means either a draft, or some other dramatic enlarging of the Army, which means even less popular acceptance of the American casualties by the American public.
Now, even if one stipulates — arguendo, that word I love to use — that we could “succeed” on that basis in Iraq in 8-10 years — my question is: do you really think that the American public is going to support that project for another 8-10 years (or maybe even longer! Maybe 12-15 years! Who knows? But can you argue that COIN theory says it will be shorter? If so, please give cites)?
Setting aside debate, for the moment, about the morality of this policy, or its proability of success: does it seem likely the American public will stand for it?
Will patriotic speeches do the trick? Or what?
Because I don’t see it happening, myself. We’re a democracy. This administration has never made the case that Iraq is an existential war, and thus drafted a large army to engage in it, or put off tax cuts to support it (find me an economist who said LBJ had the right idea by trying to fund both the Vietnam War, and the Great Society, without raising taxes, please); I don’t see, based on either history, or contemporary and recent public opinion, the American public going along through 2008 and 2010 and 2012 and 2014 and 2016 and 2018, with leaders, whether legislative or elected, that insist on that policy of continuing the war.
Do you?
Since you’ve now seen some light on Vietnam, apparently, let me note that Richard Nixon wasn’t elected in 1972 as the “I will bring victory” guy; he won election as the “I’m withdrawing from Vietnam as fast as I can!” guy.
Anyway, to be pre-emptive, if you do want to argue that an 8-or-10-year-more war in Iraq is an idea that will politically fly in America, I’ll note that Mr. Will and Mr. Buckley, at least, see things differently.
G’night!
My contribution to felonious topic drift is this followup on the question of whether Luther was necessary to fix the huge problems in the Church. There really is an important principle here: the well-intentioned reformer often creates the conditions under which the outright revolutionary succeeds. We’ve seen this over and over throughout history: Kerensky paved the way for Lenin, Gorbachev paved the way for the coup plotters, the Estates General paved the way for the Committee of Public Safety — and Erasmus paved the way for Luther. Were Lenin, the coup plotters, the Committee of Public Safety, and Luther necessary to effect the changes so desperately needed? Could Kerensky, Gorbachev, the Estates General, and Erasmus have guided their worlds to a better place without the violence?
In general, I think not. No entrenched aristocracy ever surrenders power willingly. The reformers were right about the horrors that the revolutionaries would bring down upon society. People power is very difficult to use; all too often, the people are either a flock of sheep or a pack of wolves. That’s one thing that makes the American Revolution so striking — they managed to fire their courage without inflaming their barbarity.
What does any of this have to do with the merits of retaining a civil tongue in discussions with those who disagree? Well, I suppose this: if the situation really does call for a genuine revolution, if it really is time to unleash the dogs of war, then yes, go for it. Realize that there will be a lot of bloodshed and many innocents will die. If you’re not prepared to go all the way with an outright revolution, then you’re better off emulating Erasmus than Luther.
E: If there are people here who like playing anger magnification games, that’s surely no skin off my nose.
And yet, when you have been repeatedly told that your sanctimonious lectures on correct behavior (to a group where you are a newcomer) are extremely irksome, you continue to make them. Nor have you given any apology other than the misdirection that you’re not moralizing, only commenting scientifically on behavioral questions. (Which is, by the way, nonsense: “It doesn’t matter how mad you are, expressing that anger will ALWAYS make matters worse” is a generalization and a personal opinion, not a scientific observation. Most of us can think readily of situations in which expressing anger did NOT make matters worse, and I am frankly amazed that you cannot.)
You clearly have no objection to magnifying the anger of others; in fact, you appear to relish it. (In some Asian societies this is a prime debating tactic – to force your opponent to lose his temper, and therefore lose face, before you do.) You may find this enjoyable, but it is far from “civil” in any meaningful sense of that word.
I left the church forty years ago in part because I didn’t like being preached at. What on earth leads you to suppose that I – or anyone else at ObWi – would enjoy it here and now, from a sanctimonious stranger?
A Poison Tree
by William Blake
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunnèd it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.
Improvements to our strategy and tactics can surely be made, but success ultimately depends on our will to prevail, nothing more.
In looking back on that statement, Gary, part of me still agrees with it and part of me doesn’t. Had the political will existed, we would have been more accepting of the mistakes. God knows we made plenty in WWII and the casualties were catastrophic in comparison to Iraq. But at some point, the mistakes and the setbacks become so glaring that it saps political will–and it surely has in this situation–particularly if there’s a large percentage of the electorate adamantly opposed to going into Iraq in the first place and have been constant critics since.
On defeatism, ah crap. I forgot about that stupid wikipedia reference. I fundamentally disagree with their equating defeatism to treason, so I’ve inserted an update to closer match what I intended to convey.
As for Reid, I’m not convinced that it’s relevant to add “under the president’s plan” because the president has adopted the Petraeus plan. Reid has locked himself in a logical straitjacket. He can’t rationally agree with Petraeus’ plans and then take issue with the president’s plan because they’re the same thing. Reid might’ve had a point before 2007. To me, it looks like he’s trying to have it both ways, and is once again an example of him playing the partisan Washington game first and using his brain second. Not that he’s the only who has fallen to that malady. In subsequent interviews to his “we’ve already lost” speech, he sidestepped further questioning by repeatedly referring to Petraeus’ statements that we cannot win by military means alone. It’s a classic non-answer. Petraeus never said that we’ve already lost, yet Reid glossed over that part every single time.
On the “turning their backs” issue, yes it was metaphorical, but I think it’s an accurate description of what they’re doing. Following the Reid “logic”, they’re opposing the president’s plan, but the president has changed tack (finally) and is going with the Petraeus plan. Those soldiers who believe in that plan and its eventual success are directly at odds with Reid, Pelosi & Co., who have expressed no confidence that those soldiers will succeed in their mission. So yes, I think it’s fair to say that backs have been turned.
Does that make the Shi’ite dominance of the government, and the strong tendency so far of the government to do little to politically advance Iraq, or the Shi’ite-Sunni killing unimportant?
None of those are unimportant, Gary, but when the U.S. commander calls al Qaeda public enemy #1, I’m seeing a disconnect in how the media is portraying the situation and I’m seeing a disconnect in how the Democrats are describing Iraq, as if it’s just one big civil war and we should let them sort it out for themselves. It’s much more than a civil war (if there even is one right now), especially with Kurdistan the way it is and considering the Syrian-Iranian influence, and the tribal fisticuffs in the Shiite south, just to mention a few mentionables.
Since this puts you approximately eights months slower than the Pentagon and two years behind the rest of the planet, I’d be reluctant to say that with any pride.
Anarch, your comment makes no sense to me. As far as I know, Gen. Casey didn’t even devise a coherent counterinsurgency plan until Dec-2004, eight months after my first entry on the subject, and it wasn’t much of a plan at that. Before then, the Marines (and maybe Petraeus in Mosul) employed COIN tactics here and there but independent of the higher command. As for the “two years behind the rest of the planet”, that would be April 2002, eleven months prior to the invasion of Iraq. That one has me really baffled.
Eras*,
I apologize for welcoming you here and for agreeing with you. Because it was me who said it, it seems that some others might have raked you over a little harsher than need be. Sorry, man.
* I shorten almost everyones’ names because we’re having casual conversations in these threads. Formalities don’t seem to fit, at least for me, so I hope you don’t mind.
And, almost finally, Morat still doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it doesn’t matter. As I see it, like with Carlton, vilification is the higher priority than engagement. Personally, I’d rather not see the commentariat go in that direction, but hey, that’s just me, one of the moderators.
Anyway, the posting rules are still relevant to me, and I re-learned that lesson in this thread. The back-and-forth doesn’t put me in a good light because I was the uncivil knuckle-dragger in the thread, until I caught myself. And why did I catch myself? Because Libby handled the confrontation civilly, thus appealing to the “good Charles”, who is also that person who will listen and consider other points of view. And since I’m in meta mode, also relevant to me is this excerpt:
By that standard, this site failed a long time ago. Regretfully, I think it’s further from that standard than ever before.
On this factual point, though: “And how important is 51% versus 47% to you?”
It’s the distinction between a majority and a minority, of course. For instance, in an election, that would be “important” enough to determine the “winner” and the “loser.”
Sure, but they aren’t having an election to decide whether to attack americans or not. Every individual gets to decide for himself whether to join in. By that standard 47% versus 51% is not much. And the latest poll I’ve seen put it above 60%.
“Why are you belaboring these factoids anyway?”
Whether the most recent poll said something was a minority opinion or a majority opinion would be a “fact,” not a “factoid,” and when I see someone claim a majority believes something, when the most recent most credible information contradicts that, I’ll question it.
Do you have recent credible information that contradicts it? You haven’t presented any. You keep talking like I’m wrong about this, for no obvious reason.
Why do you keep belaboring your false claim?
However, Phil, this turns out not to be true.
I’ll demonstrate:
I’m fairly certain that the original question included the word “reasonably”: “Could not another person just as reasonably justify physical violence as a tactic for convincing those who refuse to listen to logical argument?”
You may have a different definition of “reasonably” than I do, and apparently you do. Super. I don’t intend to waste more words on this distraction, but feel free.
I personally respect Erasmus and know very well the flaws of Luther but I feel myself nearer to the latter. For his day his approach was imo the necessary. Of course he was, from today’s point of view, a fundamentalist (Erasmus clearly was not) and I make no excuse for his anti-Judaism (it’s explainable but unexcusable). I do not think he saw himself as a revolutionary (and definitely not a political one) and, if seen in context, even his most violent writings can be seen as actually defensive. His “uncivility” is far from atypical for his time. I think the “religious” wars that came later were so only on the surface and raw politics played a far larger role for the actual movers and shakers.
Calvin did far more damage long term, at least that is my opinion. He was a true theocrat, Luther was not.
Charles, you say that Reid is caught up in a logical starit-jacket. Please can you point out how in terms of what he said?
To repeat the quote that Gary posted, “These groups know there is no military solution in Iraq. General Petraeus, the commander on the ground, has said so himself. Twenty percent can be won militarily and 80 percent has to be won through our diplomatic efforts, politics and economics. I repeat: The only way to succeed lies through a comprehensive political, diplomatic and economic strategy. So says the commander on the ground there, General Petraeus. Unfortunately, the only one to whom this is not obvious is our President.”
To say he agrees with Petraeus’ assessment does not mean he agrees with the General’s current military strategy. Also Petraeus talked about a lot more than military strategy needing to take place, and Reid is pointing out that the President, who is responsible for developing plans beyond the military aspect, does not appear to realize this.
There is no logical inconsistency here.
And again, will you respond to Gary’s request for a clarification of your statement about Reid saying “the war is lost” without putting it in context.
Late to the fray on anger. Gary hit the nail on the head earlier, and there was little response to it. Anger is not a problem. In fact, anger can be a very positive emotion. What matters is what one does with that anger. Anger can be expressed civilly, keeping to the matters and points on hand, or anger can be expressed in a destructive way.
Many times I have read things here that I have reacted emotionally to with anger. Sometimes I have decided to avoid commenting right away as I know that my anger would prevent me from responding in any form of coherent way. (Unfortunately, that has not always been the case.)
And yes, Gary is again right in that anger can be a moral response to a situation.
In terms of lieing. Like Gary, I don’t see CB as deliberately lieing about anything. I think he is very sincere and strongly believes in what he says. A lie is different from an untruth. People accuse Bush of lieing about WMD’s. I don’t go that far because I don’t know if he really believed what he was saying (which woudl have represented an untruth) or knew what he was saying was an untruth (which would then be a lie.)
What wikipedia reference? None has been cited in this thread re: Defeatism. Whom do you mean by “they”? Anyone who says that “defeatism is often equated with treason” is stating a fact of English usage. For you to declare that the meaning and implication of “defeatism” *ought* to match a simplified dictionary definition makes you naive and Humpty-Dumpty-like.
I will assume, Charles, that the word you’re really looking for is “pessimism”, which can cover anything from a basically gloomy-Eeyore attitude to a realistic assessment that things are going badly.
Rhetorically, it’s particularly important not to use the word “defeatism” when you’re talking about needing “will” to win a war, because WWI Generals & propagandists did it a *lot*. You really don’t want to sound like a WWI General: callous, bloodthirsty, stupid, and incompetent. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer is an excellent rollerskate tour; Paul Fussell’s The Great War in Modern Memory and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle will give you as much of a gut feeling for the topic as you can stomach.
I’d like to blur the distinction between lying and telling an untruth. While it is possible to tell an untruth with total integrity, it is also possible to tell an untruth through willful rejection of integrity. We can see this in the Bush administration’s handling of the question of Iraqi WMDs. They were selective in their handling of the available information. They completely rejected the best available information, that provided by Mr. Blix, and they gave much weight to information supporting their hypothesis. On several occasions they intruded into the information-analysis process, distorting it so as to obtain the results they desired. Whether we call the end result ‘lying’ or ‘speaking an untruth’, the failure of integrity was no different from that of deliberately lying.
john miller: To say he agrees with Petraeus’ assessment does not mean he agrees with the General’s current military strategy.
…
There is no logical inconsistency here.
Wow did this one get long. Not having read through this whole thing, I’d tend to agree that the right wing took his “war is lost” remark out of context – to some extent. On the other hand Petraeus said that winning the war would require more than just a military solution, Reed said it is (already) lost. I think that is a big difference. And Reed continues to say essentially the war is lost because the generals say it will take more than a military solution to win the war.
More damning though IMO is Reed’s reliance on and strenuous agreement with Petraeus’s assessment on that topic, but then (in the same interview) turning around and saying that he won’t believe him if Petraeus tells him that the surge is working and there is progress. Listen to the generals, he is the man on the ground, I agree with his assessment – as long as it is what I want to hear…
REID: General Petraeus has said that only 20 percent of the war can be won militarily. He’s the man on the ground there now. He said 80 percent of the war has to be won diplomatically, economically and politically. I agree with General Petraeus.
Now, that is clear and I certainly believe that.
BASH: But, sir, General Petraeus has not said the war is lost.
I just want to ask you again…
REID: General — General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily. He said that. And President Bush is doing nothing economically. He is doing nothing diplomatically. He is not doing even the minimal requested by the Iraq Study Group.
So I — I stick with General Petraeus. I have no doubt that the war cannot be won militarily, and that’s what I said last Thursday and I stick with that.
BASH: Arlen Specter, a Republican, but somebody who, in many ways, is like you, a critic of the president’s Iraq policy. He said this. He said: “For men and women who are over in Iraq to have somebody of Senator Reid’s stature say that the war is lost, it is just very, very demoralizing and not necessary.”
Is there something to that, an 18- and 19-year-old person in the service in Iraq who is serving, risking their lives, in some cases losing their life, hearing somebody like you back in Washington saying that they’re fighting for a lost cause?
REID: General Petraeus has told them that.
BASH: How has he said that?
REID: He said the war can’t be won militarily. He said that. I mean he said it. He’s the commander on the ground there.
BASH: But, sir, there’s a difference…
REID: Are they critical of him?
BASH: … between that and saying the war is lost, don’t you think?
REID: Well, I — as I said, maybe it’s a choice of words. I mean General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily.
Doesn’t every soldier going there know that he’s said that?
I think so.
BASH: You talked several times about General Petraeus. You know that he is here in town. He was at the White House today, sitting with the president in the Oval Office and the president said that he wants to make it clear that Washington should not be telling him, General Petraeus, a commander on the ground in Iraq, what to do, particularly, the president was talking about Democrats in Congress.
He also said that General Petraeus is going to come to the Hill and make it clear to you that there is progress going on in Iraq, that the so-called surge is working. Will you believe him when he says that?
REID: No, I don’t believe him, because it’s not happening. All you have to do is look at the facts.
Now – I gave up on the surge so that puts me in Reed’s camp on this. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking he is a weasel here.
Let me try that again – sorry for the double post.
Wow did this one get long. Not having read through this whole thing, I’d tend to agree that the right wing took his “war is lost” remark out of context – to some extent. On the other hand Petraeus said that winning the war would require more than just a military solution, Reed said it is (already) lost. I think that is a big difference. And Reed continues to say essentially the war is lost because the generals say it will take more than a military solution to win the war.
More damning though IMO is Reed’s reliance on and strenuous agreement with Petraeus’s assessment on that topic, but then (in the same interview) turning around and saying that he won’t believe him if Petraeus tells him that the surge is working and there is progress. Listen to the generals, he is the man on the ground, I agree with his assessment – as long as it is what I want to hear…
REID: General Petraeus has said that only 20 percent of the war can be won militarily. He’s the man on the ground there now. He said 80 percent of the war has to be won diplomatically, economically and politically. I agree with General Petraeus.
Now, that is clear and I certainly believe that.
BASH: But, sir, General Petraeus has not said the war is lost.
I just want to ask you again…
REID: General — General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily. He said that. And President Bush is doing nothing economically. He is doing nothing diplomatically. He is not doing even the minimal requested by the Iraq Study Group.
So I — I stick with General Petraeus. I have no doubt that the war cannot be won militarily, and that’s what I said last Thursday and I stick with that.
BASH: Arlen Specter, a Republican, but somebody who, in many ways, is like you, a critic of the president’s Iraq policy. He said this. He said: “For men and women who are over in Iraq to have somebody of Senator Reid’s stature say that the war is lost, it is just very, very demoralizing and not necessary.”
Is there something to that, an 18- and 19-year-old person in the service in Iraq who is serving, risking their lives, in some cases losing their life, hearing somebody like you back in Washington saying that they’re fighting for a lost cause?
REID: General Petraeus has told them that.
BASH: How has he said that?
REID: He said the war can’t be won militarily. He said that. I mean he said it. He’s the commander on the ground there.
BASH: But, sir, there’s a difference…
REID: Are they critical of him?
BASH: … between that and saying the war is lost, don’t you think?
REID: Well, I — as I said, maybe it’s a choice of words. I mean General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily.
Doesn’t every soldier going there know that he’s said that?
I think so.
BASH: You talked several times about General Petraeus. You know that he is here in town. He was at the White House today, sitting with the president in the Oval Office and the president said that he wants to make it clear that Washington should not be telling him, General Petraeus, a commander on the ground in Iraq, what to do, particularly, the president was talking about Democrats in Congress.
He also said that General Petraeus is going to come to the Hill and make it clear to you that there is progress going on in Iraq, that the so-called surge is working. Will you believe him when he says that?
REID: No, I don’t believe him, because it’s not happening. All you have to do is look at the facts.
Now – I gave up on the surge so that puts me in Reed’s camp on this. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking he is a weasel here.
Jeese I still have a tag screwed up – bold off.
Anyway I had all the “I believe him” statements bolded along with the “I don’t believe him. But I give up and won’t try it a third time.
OCSteve, again you have to look at the full statement wherein the words”the war is lost” occur.
“And as long as we follow the President’s path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course – and we must change course.”
And he is not just talking from a military standpoint, but politically, diplomatically and economically.
And personally, as much as I respect Petraeus, if he came today and said the surge is working, I would be very skeptical without his presenting hard facts.
“What wikipedia reference?
The one at Charles’ “very definition.”
“None has been cited in this thread re: Defeatism.”
Except for the one Charles linked to. As I discussed here. I take it some people don’t actually read more than the first few lines of text from a link, judging from this, and Charles’ initial link.
“I’d like to blur the distinction between….”
Count me as never agreeing to a sentence that begins that way, I suspect.
Now, if you said you wanted to clarify the ways people can lie by omission, say, I’d be right with you. But I see no good ever coming from blurring distinctions, which makes people stupider.
OCSteve: “On the other hand Petraeus said that winning the war would require more than just a military solution, Reed said it is (already) lost.”
Reid.
No. He used the conditional.
This is not a statement that the war is lost. That’s not how English works.
If I say “the bread is on the table,” I have stated that the bread is on the table.
If I say “if I eat the bread, it will no longer be on the table,” I have not stated that “the bread is no longer on the table.”
I don’t understand why so many people are having so much difficulty following an “if… then” conditional, and seem to only read “then.”
When you say “if” something happens, you have not said that it has happened.
As long as we follow the path of people reading as badly as this, all may be lost.
No. He used the conditional.
the coverage of this has uniformly omitted that very important fact. every bit of reporting i’ve heard or read on it has failed to include that condition and has focused on the final four words. it’s almost enough to make me wonder if Reid said “The war is lost.” (no conditional) in some other situation recently, and reporters are talking about that instead.
this country is ill-served by our press corps.
john miller: again you have to look at the full statement wherein the words”the war is lost” occur.
I’m looking at a different quote.
Gary: As long as we follow the path of people reading as badly as this, all may be lost.
… Ah, nevermind.
Cleek: it’s almost enough to make me wonder if Reid said “The war is lost.” (no conditional) in some other situation recently
Bingo!
This is the quote I have seen most:
“I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” said Reid.
Two quotes – one conditional, one not. That explains a lot. I myself missed the “this war is lost” vs. “the war is lost”.
That explains a lot.
ah. it sure does.
I don’t know what makes you say that; I referred to the “requirement to be civil in discussion, which is laid down in the posting rules”; there’s nothing there whatever accusing you of violating the posting rules.
gary
For most of us, when we say something, we have a *point*. “I’m here to collect my money and I have a gun” may grammatically appear to be two independent thoughts, but when stated together people naturally assume a threat of force. Or, consider walking into a co-worker’s office and saying “Frank, we have a strict policy against sexual harassment in this company!”- Frank will assume that you’re telling him that for a *reason*, not just mentioning it offhand for kicks.
It’s the distinction between a majority and a minority, of course. For instance, in an election, that would be “important” enough to determine the “winner” and the “loser.”
gary
Of course, polls aren’t a measure of every object in the statistical universe (unlike an election), so a difference of 4% is likely within the overlapping margin of error. 51% in a poll does not make a ‘fact’ that a majority supports something, just a probability.
And *one* vote can make the difference in an election, but that does not mean that the difference between 49.03% and 49.04% is significant in terms of how much support exists for something in a population.
I take it some people don’t actually read more than the first few lines of text from a link, judging from this, and Charles’ initial link.
Well, yeah. This is the Internet, and the default value of “read” is “skim”. Especially when someone says, “I’m using the dictionary definition,” and a dictionary definition appears in the first screen of the link, we kind of assume that that’s the dictionary definition they mean. In this case:
Acceptance of or resignation to the prospect of defeat.
— which is not an accurate description of how the term is currently, much less historically, used in English, but which *is* a fair approximation of what Charles intended to convey. If he didn’t actually mean treason, mutiny, undermining the war effort, undermining or turning one’s back on the troops, subversion, plotting revolution, etc., that is.
“This is the quote I have seen most”
Fine, the press conference:
Oh, eff me!
Splitting the message; it’s getting hard and harder to justify making the effort to post a comment to Typepad when it requires endless multiple reposts and edits (not to mention having to post every comment 6-10 times to get past the sight test).
Continued in next comment.
Pt. 2:
Reuters, via Breitbart:
So, we have some words at a press conference taken out of context, with his words giving context not included in most news stories — let’s be clear here, at that press conference, Reid discussed how the war can be “won” — but some use this press conference to claim Reid only said “is lost” (this is honest interpretation or reporting?); Reid then issued his formal statement, saying the same thing, as I quoted. Then Reid said it again on April 20th, as I previously quoted.
Now, you can either ignore all that, and cherry-pick a couple of words, out of context, while ignoring what Reid said before that conference, during that press conference, later that day after that press conference, and the next day, all of which contradict any claim that he was saying, or believes, that “the war is lost,” if you like.
But that’s not looking at what someone says and urges and believes; that’s cherry-picking completely out of context to play “gotcha.”
That’s not an honest game.
(I don’t think OCSteve is being at all dishonest; I think he’s honestly confused by bad reporting, and I suspect he may not come to news reports with as skeptical an eye as warranted when it comes to the possibility that they may be unfairly reporting about a Democrat.)
(On that last, please read the full list of which stories included and excluded which quotes.)
Who are the other people you are speaking for?
“But that’s not looking at what someone says and urges and believes; that’s cherry-picking completely out of context to play “gotcha.”
Is that not SOP at Obsidian Wings?
I guess its okay when done to the Bush Administration or Republicans, but wrong when done to the Dem’s.
I’d cite examples, but years of that behavior being acceptbable when directed towards the Bush administration is really just more effort than I would like to put forth.
Just a few…
“imminent threat”
“greeted as heroes”
“Mission Accomplished”
“fixed”
I could go on for days. Nothing but trying to play “gotha”. It’s why ObWi exists.
bril: “trying to play “gotha”. It’s why ObWi exists.”
No — we exist to play Saxe-Coburg.
Or were you referring to Marx’s Critique?
By “we” I mean Joe user. And me.
I see bril has done of his/her standard throw something out without any actual evidence to back up his/her claim.
Please give cites where any of the above were taken out of context by ObWi.
“Is that not SOP at Obsidian Wings?”
It may have escaped your attention that their are multiple bloggers at ObWi, and multiple commenters. Each has their own politics, and commenters.
ObWi, per se, is otherwise only a blog, an inanimate concept, and has no intentions or motivations. Only individuals have those.
But I’m sure that Charles, Von, and Sebastian, will particularly appreciate your characterization.
HTH. HAND.
bril: Nothing but trying to play “gotha”. It’s why ObWi exists.
ObWi: the Goth Blog!
Yes: we all dress in black, paint our faces white, and play madly depressing music. All The Time.
“By ‘we’ I mean Joe user. And me.”
We disagree.
“Or were you referring to Marx’s Critique?”
Bril meant that ObWi is “nothing but trying to play ‘goth.'”
I do my part by being seriously depressed.
No — we exist to play Saxe-Coburg.
yow. that’s some high-quality arcana.
Gary: I suspect he may not come to news reports with as skeptical an eye as warranted when it comes to the possibility that they may be unfairly reporting about a Democrat
That would certainly be true when the source is CBS 😉
Fair enough. Every presser is about sound bites though, surely Reed knows that. He gave up a golden sound bite (for the GOP).
In truth I had not noticed that there were 2 similar but different quotes. Given your links I’ll accept that the context matters and the remark was taken more out of context than I had thought. But I was also sticking with “this war is lost” because he really did not defend the context well on the follow up Sunday talk show.
The reporter repeatedly pushes him on the “lost” remark; he repeatedly responds “General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily”. The reporter says, “General Petraeus has not said the war is lost” – he responds, “General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily”.
This is the iffiest exchange IMO (transcript I linked above):
BASH: … Is there something to that, an 18- and 19-year-old person in the service in Iraq who is serving, risking their lives, in some cases losing their life, hearing somebody like you back in Washington saying that they’re fighting for a lost cause?
REID: General Petraeus has told them that.
BASH: How has he said that?
REID: He said the war can’t be won militarily.
This would have been his perfect opportunity to really clarify, but instead he explicitly equates “lost cause” with Petraeus’ remarks that more than the military effort is required to win. He did not refute that someone like him back in DC was saying they were fighting for a lost cause. He laid it off as, “Well, Petraeus already told them that.” This was not a presser with a single sound bite take away – this is a transcript.
On the other point, I still say he was a weasel to point to Petraeus as the source of truth while discussing all of that, but then to flat out say he would not believe him concerning any progress.
No — we exist to play Saxe-Coburg.
And we have a Windsor!
“And we have a Windsor!”
— I doff my hat to you, sir.
Gary, I’d love to play another couple rounds of tennis with you, but I seem to have lost track of your point.
Mine is that the “strict dictionary definition” of “defeatism”, which Charles says is the one he intends, does not accurately describe how the term is used and is likely to be perceived.
“He gave up a golden sound bite (for the GOP).”
Perfectly true. But anyone can be made to seem foolish by quoting a dozen or two words out of context. (Which is not, needless to say, the case with “Mission Accomplished” — indeed, that only has bite in context.)
“On the other point, I still say he was a weasel to point to Petraeus as the source of truth while discussing all of that, but then to flat out say he would not believe him concerning any progress.”
You’re entitled to your opinion there.
I don’t see anything wrong with that, myself.
“This would have been his perfect opportunity to really clarify,”
I don’t entirely disagree, but I’ve already outlined the sequence in which he made things clear at the press conference, after the news conference, during that day on the Senate floor, the next day on the Senate floor, etc; the only reason he’d need to “clarify” anything after that is in response to the typical massive barrage of GOP/press distortion of what he said.
That was on Thursday the 19th and Friday the 20th; by Sunday, the 22nd, I suspect he felt that if he said “but I said ‘the war is lost’ if we keep to the President’s course,” he’d be treated by the GOP and the press as being a weasel.
After all, the press reported that he said “the war is lost.” Denying it would be weaselly, wouldn’t it? (That’s sarcasm.)
Counter-attacking the press, though, tends to be a losing proposition unless you want your coverage to get far more hostile.
I suspect he felt that when attacked with a soundbite, one has to give back only a soundbite. But I’m only guessing, and I’m not sure what the best response always is when one is fighting a press herd that’s still as servile and with such a pack mentality, as continues.
The bottom line is that going around claiming that Harry Reid says the war is lost, period, isn’t honest.
And if anyone would like to point to examples of what they believe areme having quoted G. W. Bush out of context, by all means, let us know; there’s no shortage of text I’ve produced on Mr. Bush, so if I’ve ever done it, let’s see the evidence.
I made my point here. I thought it was clear, but perhaps you only skimmed the first few words. I’m tempted to quote it all over again, and then again provide the link Charles gave, and then quote the whole entry, since somehow my point wasn’t clear, but that would be obnoxious, so I won’t.
Otherwise, I tend to look askance when people suddenly present themselves as plural, but I think we’re done there.
As I see it, like with Carlton, vilification is the higher priority than engagement.
CB
Since I’ve been visiting here, you’ve crapped on a guy with Parkinsons bc he crossed your political leaders. You’ve repeated asserted that people who don’t agree with your assessment of Iraq want to lose (and are, in fact, losers). You’ve consistently misrepresented what those political opponents say. You’ve said that your political opponents care more about partisan politics than they do about the country’s course.
In this post, you accuse a news blurb of being “misleading” because they don’t mention every piece of information you want them to mention. Because they don’t both have your opinion about Iraq and don’t pointedly attempt to cram that worldview down their listener’s throats.
You’ve moderated your rhetoric- for which I give you some credit- but you still insist on dragging the soldiers into the debate, claiming that those you disagree with on policy decisions are “turning their backs” on our troops.
When engaged with substantive criticism you either (as pointed out above) quibble about some detail or start arguing about semantics, rather than engaging the larger point (see, for example here, where you raised some interesting but confused points about Iran, but rather than debating them you chose to spend the thread debating the meaning of the word “Marxist”- despite the large number of reasonable comments raising questions about your theories (eg Iran giving nukes to Venezuela?).
(I bring that one up bc that was one of my earlier experiences with the Bird style, one where I attempted a substantive critique rather than the more instinctive ‘anyone who thinks Iran is likely to give nukes to Venezuela is off their meds’, and never saw a reply; at some point, it seemed to me that substantively engaging someone who has unreasonable views & who won’t engage only provides legitimacy; it never makes progress).
I don’t think you’re actually *interested* in substantive engagement. Im actually glad bril just posted(!), because that’s basically how I see you- posting what appear to be intellectual inquiries, but actually just trolling. You can’t tell that bril is trolling from his post, which seems to ask a legitimate question. You know that he’s trolling because you’ve seen him do it before.
I would’ve loved to have seen a post that honestly analyzed the situation in Iraq from a conservative prospective. Something like ‘I was overoptimistic about the Purple Finger Revolution for these reasons, but now I think the surge has a chance of creating the opportunity for political stability for these other reasons.’
Instead, this is one more in a long line of Bird posts about how everything is going great in Iraq- yes, it could use some tweaking, but we’re headed in the right direction. Previous plans could not have worked, but this shiny new plan could. And anyone who disagrees with the new direction is helping Al Qaeda and turning their backs on our troops.
And you get what you want- what every troll wants- a non-substantive debate. What did Reid really say & really mean? What does “turning one’s back” mean? Is the MSM really biased? What did I mean by my earlier comment?
Thanks to bril, the world is now aware of the collective’s secret nefarious desire to form a 69 Eyes cover band.
To expand on what I said above:
Charles: Anarch, your comment makes no sense to me.
Here’s the exchange in full:
Notice what you said: “a proper COIN strategy”. Not “the proper COIN strategy” — which would be unlikely given that you explicitly disavow such belief in this at the end of your post — but “a proper COIN strategy”. The bar here, she is very low. Abizaid called the Iraq debacle a guerrilla war back in July 2003, which (unless you believe the Pentagon to be completely retarded) means that at least a minimal COIN strategy would have been woodshedded by August 2003. And that’s assuming massive bureaucratic inertia at the upper echelons of the Pentagon and in the White House. It’s true that such wasn’t officially adopted until late 2004 (although it had been officially adopted by the Brits in 2003, IIRC, and unofficially adopted in various locales by some American units in a similar time-frame) but so what? All that proves is that the White House had no f***ing clue what they were doing, which isn’t really much of a revelation.
Outside the parochialism of the US — and to be fair, throughout the reality-based community here as well — pretty much everyone else in the world had figured out (as far back as 2002!) that were an invasion of Iraq to be greenlit, a proper COIN strategy would be a necessity. Declaring that you’ve “supported the use of a proper COIN strategy since April 2004” is thus tantamount to an admission that you had no clue what we were getting into in Iraq and that furthermore you still had no clue what was going on until we were a year into the occupation. You were quicker on the uptake than Bush, I’ll grant you, but that’s somewhat like saying that you’re smart enough not to ride the short bus to foreign policy disaster school. Like I said, were I you I’d be reluctant to broadcast my failings quite so proudly.
But it doesn’t matter. As I see it, like with Carlton, vilification is the higher priority than engagement…. The back-and-forth doesn’t put me in a good light because I was the uncivil knuckle-dragger in the thread, until I caught myself. And why did I catch myself? Because Libby handled the confrontation civilly, thus appealing to the “good Charles”, who is also that person who will listen and consider other points of view.
I’m sure that’s a comforting story to tell yourself, but it’s false; or at best it’s a lie by omission. The entire reason that you’re on the receiving end of such “vilification”, as you call it, is that your contributions here are frequently, and fundamentally, dishonest. Not about your state of mind — I don’t know enough to say for sure, although I tend to believe that you portray your inner feelings accurately — but in the sense that you fundamentally reject correction on matters of fact and refuse to engage the actual substantive debate offered in return. [Added in proof: dangit, Carleton beat me to it.] Time and time again, people point out your errors; and on those rare occasions you deign to acknowledge the response at all, it’s almost invariably to nitpick some minor point or simply deny a point whose proof is irrefutable. The actual “debate” portion of the debate never appears.
That’s not the galling thing, though. What’s galling — infuriating — fundamentally dishonest — is that, even after having been corrected, you continue to post on the same topics as if your original points remained unrefuted. The metaphorical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “lalalala”. So those of us who correct you are forced to re-enact the entire farce once more: dredging up the same facts, raising the same objections, getting ignored, rinse, lather, repeat. The upshot is that when you continue to post in this vein, yes, people are going to get annoyed with you — not because they’re vilifying you for vilification’s sake, but because you don’t listen and you refuse to accept that you’re wrong. You’re not engaging in stubborn truthfulness nor speaking truth to power — Good Charles or no — you’re engaging in wilful blindness towards facts that might disrupt the cozy narrative and “inadvertently” insulting rhetoric you seem to embrace.*
[Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons that you’re so proud of the fact that Gary convinced you to strike “loser” from “loser-defeatist” is that it’s one of the rare times anyone’s managed to get through to you. The figleaf of intellectual honesty you can use to justify your general indifference to critique. And your Karnak can blow me.**]
Our pique has nothing to do with vilification, Charles, it has to do with trying to get you to debate honestly. If, like Morat, someone gives up on trying to convince you of anything save the storyline you’ve got wedged in your head, you’ve only yourself to blame. Attend to the beam in your eye and we’ll attend to the motes in ours.
Oh, and while I’m at it: stop hiding behind the word “uncivil”. Coupled with your refusal to honestly engage in debate, it makes you look like a coward. Man up, engage, and you’ll find the “incivility” reduces considerably — and that you’ll have a surprising number of defenders should such rear its ugly head thereafter.
* One thing that would help your cause immeasurably is to pay a hell of a lot more attention to the vocabulary you use and its connotations beyond your immediate circle of friends. It’s bad enough that you cast the first stone, it’s worse that you then deny it was a stone at all. Well, tough. You’re not Humpty Dumpty. This is not the Looking Glass. Words have meaning beyond the artificial limits you circumscribe around them. If that means you lose the snappy vocabulary of which you’re so enamored, so be it.
** Oooooh! I’ve been uncivil. You can now respond to this one single sentence and disregard the rest of my post. r0x!
“One thing that would help your cause immeasurably is to pay a hell of a lot more attention to the vocabulary you use and its connotations beyond your immediate circle of friends.”
I hesitate to offer much personal advice to Charles in this venue, because that’s not precisely what he’s here for, and to a large degree I think it’s unhelpful for these discussions to turn too far towards the personal.
Having said that, Charles has said here that one reason he took a break was because he’s writing a novel. I take from that the notion that he, presumably, seeks to learn to write as well as possible, with as much control of technique as possible.
Based on that, I’d reiterate to Charles some points I’ve dropped in the past: Charles has a distinct tendency towards unique coinages of his own creation, as well as phrases he’s coined — was it “democranami”?
As part of this, Charles has a strong tendency to make up his own metaphors, and then use them as if they both had concrete meaning, and as if other people knew what they meant in his head.
You can get away with this if you are a skilled writer, who coins apt metaphors, that convey clear meaning to others. Charles, unfortunately, tends to fail at that, and we get results like “turned their back on our soldiers,” leaving many other folks standing around saying “What? WTF does ‘turned their back’ mean? Gives them the shoulder? They have back problems? They’re ignoring something about the soldiers? Their posture is bad?”
And so on.
This is therefore to emphasize Anarch’s point:
This would indeed be extremely helpful in improving your writing, Charles.
(This is not to neglect the point about Charles’ lack of awareness of the connotations of many of his word choices, which is also crucial to the way he screws up at times in communicating; denotation is not all there is! But it’s also a problem when all you know about a concept is an article you just hastily read.)
And please: WTF does “turn their backs on the soldiers” mean? Is it as bad as giving a soldier a disdainful look? Better than giving the finger? Does it mean they are indifferent to the lives of the soldiers?
I’m not making it up when I say I don’t know what you mean, and thus can’t even tell if I think it’s a fair remark or not, because it’s incomprehensible to me as to what you mean.
I’m hoping I won’t have to ask a — what, sixth? — time, to get an answer.
Concerning Gotha: Google (pictures too) gotha and plane. The reference is obviously to the WW1 bombers and WW2 wing only jet planes like this.
Gary asked:
WTF does “turn their backs on the soldiers” mean?
I am not Charles nor do I play him on TV, but I think I can make a pretty good guess here — with the caveat that, as you rightly point out, CB has the habit of using language rather loosely &/or idiosyncratically.
He means “make the soldiers feel abandoned, put upon, and dishonored.”
Soldiers in a war zone are in an ethically and psychologically precarious position. They may be ordered to do things that, when they were outside the war zone, they considered evil — e.g. kill people, burn houses, throw bombs. As a rule soldiers deal with this moral disconnect by investing their moral sense in their leader or cause and trying to ignore the morality in their individual actions.
If you say to these soldiers, “the war you’re fighting for is wrong” or “you’ve already lost”, you open up the possibility that they will be judged for their actions as individuals instead of loyal soldiers. Naturally, this is extremely threatening.
In other words, the social & moral contract between the government (& society) and the military absolutely requires the former — the President, the Administration, Congress, and the voters — to be willing to take over the moral burden of war from the military. If the leadership says, “we shouldn’t be fighting” many people in the military *will* feel as though they are holding up their end of the burden (which is to be willing to do unethical things), but that the leadership and the civilians are shirking *their* burden.
The illogic CB does not see is that soldiers almost always want to be told that what they’re doing is right. Anytime they *don’t* want to be validated or encouraged, they’re on the verge of mutiny — see, e.g., the French Army mutinies of 1917.
You can’t judge whether a war or an action is right, or even whether it’s succeeding, based on the opinions of the guys in the field. In the fall of 1918 the German Army mostly still thought they were winning, or that victory was within their grasp — hence the popularity of the “Stab in the Back” theory with front-line soldiers like Adolf Hitler.
Given a choice between believing that things will be better any minute, and realizing that you’ve done horrible things to no good purpose, human beings will choose “just around the corner” any time.
Even setting aside the extraordinary, and pioneering, rocket programs, I have to say that Germany had some damn good engineers during WWII (and before and since, of course).
The Me 262 is also a fine piece of work.
speaking of defeatism.
IOKIYAR ?
Maybe bril meant that we like to play Goethe? I myself like to stage a delightful production of Faust whenever I can.
But that’s not looking at what someone says and urges and believes; that’s cherry-picking completely out of context to play “gotcha.”
Who’s really doing the cherry-picking here, Gary? Reid approvingly quotes Petraeus that the war cannot be won militarily, that ultimately the solution must come via diplomatic, political and economic advancements, but then in his official press release, Reid tells the president that he rejects the Petraeus plan. In the run-up to Petraeus’ briefing in DC, Reid said he wasn’t going to believe Petraeus unless he told Reid what he wanted to hear. He quotes the general when he hears something he likes, then ignores or devalues all else. If that isn’t cherry-picking, I don’t know what is.
Reid’s actual words in his press release was for the president to change course, but the president is going with the Petraeus plan, so Reid is in effect rejecting Petraeus, sending the message to the general that his plan is a failure and that it needs to be changed, even though the plan had only been in effect for about nine weeks and won’t be at full strength for another coupla months.
So on the one hand, he’s quoting Petraeus as if he’s supporting the general, then he’s telling the president that if we stick to the course outlined by Petraeus, the war is lost. Reid is sending the clear message to the general and the rest of us that not only is the COIN plan doomed to failure, but that the good Senator has the better solution. Reid doesn’t even raise the issue that the COIN doctrine already incorporates diplomatic, political and economic means to quash the various insurgent groups. He acknowledges none of that, nor that al Qaeda has been the primary actor in the spectacular attacks. Nope, to Reid, it’s get out of Dodge on his timetable and that’s it.
Also, what OCSteve excerpted. I saw the Bash-Reid interview and it was pathetic. So to summarize it, was Reid taken out of context? OK, probably so. But at the same time, Reid isn’t an innocent party. He was doing plenty of distorting and obfuscating. He is a hardline partisan whose agenda is troublingly opportunistic.
I’m really tired of all this hiding behind the troops. “How dare you disagree with Bush’s plan, that’s actually the GENERAL’S plan.” “If you don’t support the mission, you’re turning your back on the troops.” As Jim Webb said, the idea that we need to fight the war on behalf of the troops is inverted logic.
Remember, Charles, back when the military was pursuing a misguided strategy from your point of view, all these arguments about why it was wrong to call a spade a spade were equally applicable, and were in fact routinely deployed against those on the Democratic side of the aisle. All of your arguments about “turning their backs on the troops” and such would be just as applicable even if Petraeus’ strategy were 100% wrong. Which is to say, they’re not arguments at all, but rather ways of avoiding arguments.
About those gated “ghettoes” in Baghdad: 76% of Iraqis reject “establishing isolation walls…to reduce sectarian violence
He was doing plenty of distorting and obfuscating.
Usually this sort of accusation is followed by supporting examples.
Charles,
It is possible for Reid to agree with Petraeus’s diagnosis (ie that ‘winning’ at this point is mostly about diplomacy, politics, and reconstruction, not military action) but disagree with his suggested treatment (aka ‘the Petraeus plan’).
That wouldn’t be dishonest.
That’s pretty straightforward. In fact, someone (John M?) mentioned it above already.
It’s also possible for Reid to think that the Petraeus plan might work if the Bush administration wasn’t profoundly incompetent and incapable of learning from experience- but is doomed to failure for those reasons.
In the run-up to Petraeus’ briefing in DC, Reid said he wasn’t going to believe Petraeus unless he told Reid what he wanted to hear. He quotes the general when he hears something he likes, then ignores or devalues all else. If that isn’t cherry-picking, I don’t know what is.
Agreeing with someone when they say one thing and then disagreeing with them when they say something else is neither ‘cherry-picking’ nor ‘dishonest’.
Not believing someone unless they tell you what you what you believe to be true is a common situation for people who have already formed an opinion based on prior information.
You make it sound slimy, but let’s face it- you’d agree with Pelosi if she said Bush was right to back the surge, but not if she said Bush was wrong to back the surge. Correct?
So on the one hand, he’s quoting Petraeus as if he’s supporting the general…
He’s quoting Petraeus as if he agreed with the one thing he’s quoting that Petraeus said. Manufacturing some sort of trusted relationship between them based on this is fraudulent.
The only semblance of a point you might have is that Reid is perhaps relying on the argument from authority (using Petraeus as an authority) in one case, but not accepting him as an authority in a another case.
I just don’t think that this is much of a case to build a claim of ‘dishonesty’. Reid might think that Petraeus is politically constrained to say that the surge is working well. Reid could think that Petraeus is unlikely to say bad things about his own pet project so early. Reid could think that Petraeus’s first statement is more ‘against interest’ and therefore more likely to be true (eg if P said that the chances of victory were 50-50, it’s easy to think that they probably aren’t much higher than that- but could easily be lower).
was Reid taken out of context? OK, probably so. But at the same time Reid isn’t an innocent party[,he’s a Democrat, so Im basically in the right to misquote him.]
Why we all love to HOCB.
“Who’s really doing the cherry-picking here, Gary?”
Um, you, since you’re changing the meaning of “cherry-picking.”
It does not mean “I agree with some things a person says and disagree with others.”
As it happens, there’s nothing wrong with that. Whether it’s you doing it, or Harry Reid, or anyone else.
The “cherry-picking” I described is taking phrases out of context and ignoring everything else someone has said about a topic, for purposes of “proving” they are advocating something they do not.
“Reid approvingly quotes Petraeus that the war cannot be won militarily, that ultimately the solution must come via diplomatic, political and economic advancements, but then in his official press release, Reid tells the president that he rejects the Petraeus plan.”
Back on Planet Earth, there is nothing wrong with this, Charles.
Slow down and consider, for a moment: you’re claiming there is something nefarious about not agreeing with every single opinion of another person. Heavens, Harry Reid has both agreements and disagreements with things Petraeus has said! Shocking! Terrible! Irresponsible!
Say WTF?
Y’know, it’s actually okay if you both agree with something someone says — me, say — and disagree with other things that person says. It turns out to not be shocking at all.
Really.
“Reid’s actual words in his press release was for the president to change course, but the president is going with the Petraeus plan, so Reid is in effect rejecting Petraeus,”
Yes. He is saying that he doesn’t believe Petraeus’ plan will work (but that Petraeus’s observation that there’s no military solution to be found in Iraq is correct). Whoopie-tee-do.
So he has a different opinion: so damn what?
You are utterly free to disagree with Reid, but why you expect anyone to be shocked or bothered that Reid doesn’t have faith in The Petraeus Plan, I have no idea. Is it required by law to Support The President, or what’s your point?
“So to summarize it, was Reid taken out of context? OK, probably so.”
Hard enough to get that out of you, and it’s unsurprising that the only way you can manage it is by surrounding it with a delightful amount of surrounding verbiage accusing Reid of… it’s never quite clear what, beyond the crime of Disagreeing With The President (who sets the policy, not the great General Petraeus).
But, hey, at least you said that, so good for you. No cookie, though.
“He is a hardline partisan whose agenda is troublingly opportunistic.”
Well, and this makes him so unlike the White House. G. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and all their friends are, in comparison, models of bipartisan idealism.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
You funny.
I left out this one: “Reid is sending the clear message to the general and the rest of us that not only is the COIN plan doomed to failure, but that the good Senator has the better solution.”
Yes, that’s what he thinks. That’s what most people not still clinging to Bush think, so far as I can tell. That’s what most of the people here who think a withdrawal plan, and not a longterm one, is in order, think.
That’s what most Democrats think.
I don’t mean to shock you with this news, though. What’s baffling is why you expect anyone who isn’t a Redstate regular to bolt upright at this stunning development, slap themselves on the head, and declare that they were completely wrong, it’s just wrong to disagree with President Bush (whom you keep calling “General Petraeus,” since his popularity ratings are a tad higher than President 28%).
To be sure, you are in this a typical Bush voter.
No, you’re not satisfied with the Bush presidency. But you’re satisfied with supporting the Bush Iraq plan. Still.
Digressing, some of those Bush voters? Not so bright. Yes, yes, plenty of Democratic voters aren’t bright, plenty of people aren’t bright — but here’s my illustrative example:
That isn’t bright.
Meanwhile, most Americans don’t support Bush:
You’re in that Republican minority. Hardly surprising, but when you’re indicting Harry Reid for daring to not Support The President, you’re indicting 59% of the country.
Thanks to the front-pager who fixed my tag mess!
Gary: You’re entitled to your opinion there.
I’m interested in your difference of opinion on that point. That is, from a logical consistency viewpoint, how am I off? You are a stickler for this kind of thing so my instinct is, if I was way off you would detail in what way. So I am curious (and willing to learn) how my opinion on this is something you can not agree with.
From my viewpoint:
In discussing whether the war can be won:
-General Petraeus has said…
-He’s the man on the ground there now.
-He said…
-I agree with General Petraeus.
-General Petraeus has said…
-I stick with General Petraeus.
-General Petraeus has told them that.
-He said … He said that. I mean he said it.
-He’s the commander on the ground there.
-Are they critical of him?
-I mean General Petraeus has said…
-Doesn’t every soldier going there know that he’s said that?
In response to the question, “Will you believe him when he says that?” (progress, surge is working).
-No, I don’t believe him, because it’s not happening.
This is one interview, transcribed, nothing out of context. Help me out here – I am willing to learn… (Not sarcastic – genuinely curious).
Kind of off topic, but this thread seems like the best place for it:
Intriguing.
I thought in January or February that Edwards was running the right primary strategy, but Obama was going to come in and run it better. But that hasn’t happened. I can’t imagine Obama saying something like that.
Notice that Carleton and I made virtually identical points to Charles, while posting simultaneously.
This is, I suggest, because the notion that there is something nefarious, and criticizable — and that it’s “cherry-picking” — to agree with one thing a person says, and disagree with something else they say — is positively lunatic.
OCSteve than asks: “I’m interested in your difference of opinion on that point.”
Whether or not someone is a “weasel,” or how much of a comparative weasel they are, is a subjective judgement, not a fact. I don’t know what scale to measure comparative weaselness on, and neither do I have a definitive metric of weaselness, so I decline to express an opinion of Harry Reid’s comparative weaselness.
Of course, that’s arguably kinda weaselly of me.
OC
I think you have to examine why Reid is holding up Petraeus as a good source in one case but perhaps not in another.
As I said, one case is that he’s using the argument from authority. In which case he’s being inconsistent.
But I think that Petraeus is just not in a situation where he could admit that the surge wasn’t working, or that some essential political/diplomatic steps weren’t being taken.
Heck, forget about Reid- that describes *my* opinion right now: Petraeus may have very perceptive things to say about insurgencies in general, but I don’t think he has the latitude to speak his mind about some things. Which is as it should be: generals don’t need to be talking politics or broadcasting realistic assessments of their positions (ie in an alternative reality “we’re writing off the Kurds for now; hopefully they’ll be Ok & in six months or so we can go back there in force” is not the sort of thing a general ought to say, true or not).
So, if P says we need X troops for Y civilians, fine. If he says “the surge is working”, I take it with a salt mine.
Noah Schactman posted this last night, by the way.
Etc.
Gary: Whether or not someone is a “weasel,” or how much of a comparative weasel they are, is a subjective judgement, not a fact.
I hate to go here Gary as you can run circles around me, history, grammar, writing, etc. I have said your knowledge is truly encyclopedia-like, and I mean it. I prefer to “fend you off’ rather than challenge you. So I don’t post this lightly.
You are not very forgiving about “subjective” or “facts”. Rather, you can be ruthless – for days if necessary. Days. So… stepping out on a limb…
Forget “weasel”. My focus over a couple of comments was that in the same interview Reed built Petraeus up as an authority figure to confirm his view on the failure of the war, then in the same interview he reversed himself in answering a direct question about whether he would believe Petraeus if he said things were getting better. I call foul.
Again, In discussing whether the war can be won:
-General Petraeus has said…
-He’s the man on the ground there now.
-He said…
-I agree with General Petraeus.
-General Petraeus has said…
-I stick with General Petraeus.
-General Petraeus has told them that.
-He said … He said that. I mean he said it.
-He’s the commander on the ground there.
-Are they critical of him?
-I mean General Petraeus has said…
-Doesn’t every soldier going there know that he’s said that?
In response to the question, “Will you believe him when he says that?” (progress, surge is working).
-No, I don’t believe him, because it’s not happening.
Again, help me out here. Honestly, I want to know where I have gone wrong here…
In the law, we call it an admission or statement against interest. Basically, I can call someone the biggest liar in the universe, but if he says something that actually hurts his own side, I’m still allowed to use it to my advantage. People don’t normally make statements against self-interest unless they’re true.
You can question Petraeus’ credibility, you can take issue with his attempts to claim progress is being made, and yet still quote him when he actually concedes a point. He has an incentive to shade things towards success; but why would he shade the truth in the opposite direction?
Now you can argue, of course, that Petraeus’ willingness to be candid on certain points is evidence that he’s a credible guy in general. That doesn’t mean Reid is doing something wrong by pointing to the concessions he’s made, though.
Carleton: I think you have to examine why Reid is holding up Petraeus as a good source in one case but perhaps not in another.
As I said, one case is that he’s using the argument from authority. In which case he’s being inconsistent.
That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me. Seriously. I’ll buy you a beer dude.
“My focus over a couple of comments was that in the same interview Reed built Petraeus up as an authority figure to confirm his view on the failure of the war, then in the same interview he reversed himself in answering a direct question about whether he would believe Petraeus if he said things were getting better. I call foul.”
As I said, you’re entitled to your opinion; I already explained quite repetitively, and at some length, to Charles, why and how that doesn’t appear to be accurate to me. I don’t see the “building” you see (at least, in any way that is rhetorically dishonest), or anything disturbing about agreeing with one point (or three or fifty) and disagreeing with another point (or five or one hundred and forty-two) made by someone.
Clearly your mileage varies, although I don’t understand how that works: are you also required to, if you agree with one opinion of Charles’, or mine, or Hilzoy’s, or William Kristol, or John Kerry, or whomever, never therefore ever disagree with anything else they ever say?
Quoting someone a lot where they support you, and then noting you disagree with them on however many things, defines normal behavior for most people, doesn’t it? It’s rhetoric, a form of argument, and while like any technique, it can be done more or less honestly, there’s nothing the least or remotely inherently dishonest — or as you put it, “foul” — about it.
I don’t know what else to say. But, then, I have a more positive opinion of Reid than not.
Steve: Thanks. I can’t claim I understand that or agree with it – but I acknowledge the truth – because 23 other lawyers will jump in here before my morning coffee and smack you around if you are wrong. 🙂
“But, then, I have a more positive opinion of Reid than not.”
And just in case this isn’t ultra-clear: opinions being subjective, and not subject to proof, or necessarily to logical contradiction, I tend to prefer to steer away from arguing them, as largely pointless, and tend to prefer to argue about fact, where, preferably, whether one is correct or incorrect is more easily determinable.
Whereas if I start arguing as to why people should agree with my opinions or feelings, it’s like throwing cotton balls; there’s no way to prove anyone is right or wrong, so it’s pretty much a complete waste of time, at least unless one is talking with someone who really respects one’s opinion.
So when you or Charles throw out your opinions of Harry Reid, I’m inclined to say “you’re entitled to your opinion,” rather than waste time with the cotton. Arguing what Reid said: that’s arguing facts. Conclusions, I’m happy to leave for you to draw on your own, since my getting on a plane and coming to your dwelling with a gun to force you to draw my conclusions would be tiresome, and I’d only get peanuts to eat on the plane, if that.
“People don’t normally make statements against self-interest unless they’re true.”
OCSteve: “I can’t claim I understand that or agree with it….”
What part do you not understand and/or do you disagree with?
I don’t think Reid’s argument here is bad. It’s one I use a lot.
“Say, look at this guy you say is an authority. Look, he agrees with me on this point. See here, he’s your authority, your expert, and he says I’m right. If you don’t believe me you’ll believe him, won’t you?”
“But wait a minute, he disagrees with you about this other thing. Are you admitting you’re wrong about that?”
“No, of course not. He’s your authority, not mine.”
I don’t see anything wrong with this approach.
That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me. Seriously. I’ll buy you a beer dude.
Sorry, Im off my meds. Ill be better tomorrow, promise. 🙂
I can’t claim I understand that or agree with [the idea of statements against interest]…
Think about it this way- one team wins a game after a questionable foul call. Well, the last people you’d think to be reliable sources of opinion about whether it was a good call or not would be the players & coaches involved. But one of the coaches from the team who benefited from the call says “hey, we got away with one”- well, that’s suddenly pretty reliable stuff.
That’s not even quite my position with Petraeus. My position would be that he really can’t, at this point, not express confidence in the operation- regardless of how well it’s proceeding. I wouldn’t want him to, frankly- his position is general, not truth-teller. So we shouldn’t rely on him for public assessments of how things are going.
“My position would be that he really can’t, at this point, not express confidence in the operation- regardless of how well it’s proceeding.”
Just checking: does anyone contest this point?
Would anyone argue that General Petraeus is free to wake up tomorrow morning, and — if this were the case — we call this a “hypothetical” — call a press conference to announce that he thought that, say, his job was basically hopeless, or that there was hope, but everyone should understand it’s going to take ten more years, and ultimately another 60,000 American casualties — if Petraeus were to say something like that, because he believed it to be the case, and kept saying it — will anyone argue that he’d be kept in his job?
Unless you’re prepared to make that argument, and defend it, I would think it obvious that therefore anything positive he said needs to be, as Carleton said, at least taken with a truck of salt, and I’d add, “or completely discounted.”
Not because I think Petraeus is a dishonest man. But the first casualty in war, etc., and bodyguard of lies, etc., and — most of all, and it can’t be over-stated — it’s his job to be optimistic.
The idea that he’d be accurate in preference to optimistic is pretty silly.
Gary’s covered the main points pretty well, but let me add from my own (non-violent) military experience the following supplementary observation.
One characteristic of the US Army Back In The Day (and today, perhaps, even more so) was commitment to the “Can Do” principle. By this, the proper response – whether in these exact words or otherwise – to ANY command from a higher authority is just that: “Can Do!” And then go out and DO it.
You are not expected, encouraged, or in many cases even allowed to suggest that just possibly you might not be able to do it, that the task might be impossible. (“But drill sergeant, we just CAN’T hike twenty miles and put up our tents and be ready for inspection by 1800 hours!”) Doubt is an incorrect, a fundamentally unmilitary, response.
Now being human and all, most of us do, from time to time, Doubt that we will be able to do whatever we are told to do (or want to do, for whatever reason). What I learned in the lower levels of the army was that most of the time lower ranks were allowed to express some skepticism, provided that (1) they did so respectfully and (2) carried on with the [impossible] assignment, at least in the short run. IOW, you didn’t have to pretend you believed.
Officers, OTOH, did have to pretend they believed, and throw themselves into the assigned task with visible enthusiasm, or else risk reprimands and other negative consequences, including the end of the hope of promotion, &c. (Which is one [minor] reason why I never became an officer, as it happens.)
What I don’t know, from my own experience, is whether it is possible to get to a high enough level where you no longer need to Clap Your Hands and proclaim that You Believe [in the mission], but can express reasonable doubt about its potential for success. I suspect that there is. But since you can’t get to those levels without literally decades of shouting “Can Do” convincingly, it’s not surprising that the gift for contradicting a superior’s order is not given to all.
Short dr ngo: Of course General Petraeus says the plan will work. We should expect nothing less . . . and pay no heed to it.
“Officers, OTOH, did have to pretend they believed, and throw themselves into the assigned task with visible enthusiasm, or else risk reprimands and other negative consequences, including the end of the hope of promotion, &c.”
This is, incidentally, not exactly uncommon in large corporations, in my highly limited experience, and to the best of my knowledge.
But in the military, the whole patriotism thing is there, as well, of course, and that should never be underestimated as a potential motivator.
“What I don’t know, from my own experience, is whether it is possible to get to a high enough level where you no longer need to Clap Your Hands and proclaim that You Believe [in the mission], but can express reasonable doubt about its potential for success. I suspect that there is.”
I think the key word there is “express,” as in “express” to who?
To the press? Identifiably? Pretty much never, if it’s criticism that hits home.
Up the chain of command? Well, that certainly — and I’m sure you’ll agree — has historically depended upon the culture of that chain of command, as well as the individuals involved.
Among peers? Also depends, though generally, of course, there tends to be more tolerance there.
Down the chain of command? Again, pretty rarely tolerated in any time or place, and I suppose one would have to say rightly so, insofar as any possible remaining effectiveness is to be left. Besides, what’s the point of going in that direction?
Leaders such as FDR, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Truman were, of course, pretty good about tolerating and listening to different opinions — up until the point they made the final decision — from beneath them in the chain of command.
MacArthur, Westmoreland, Hitler, Czar Nicholas, G. W. Bush, Dan Halutz: not so much.
And I should have included: To Congress? See Shinseki, Eric.
Incidentally, as some of us former New Yorkers know and vividly recall, there are degrees of being a weasel.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I keep trying to go to sleep, and as usual, I keep reading articles.
I asked Charles: “In January, President Bush laid out benchmarks for the Iraqi government; how has the Iraqi government done on them?”
Charles explained: “The only major legislative advance I’ve seen is the oil legislation.”
But, oopsie:
Your serve on that one, again, Charles.
“People don’t normally make statements against self-interest unless they’re true.”
That ignores the possibility of simple stupidity or bad judgement. It’s not that rare that people make false statements to escape one bad situation not realizing that those statements make it even worse for them.
This is a general observation and not to be construed as a condemnation of a certain general 😉
All – thanks for the responses. Conceptually I understand what you are saying. But at a gut level it still feels wrong to me. If I build you up as an expert on Iraq, because you are the guy in charge, because you are the commander on the ground there, I make you the authority when we are discussing how the war is going – then when you want to tell me how the war is going I say I don’t believe you before you even tell me what you have to say…
Maybe I’m just dense. But then I am only on my first cup of coffee.
OCSteve —
The trouble is that on the one hand, to not take the word of the General on the ground will be seen as highly disrespectful. On the other hand, the military cannot be expected to publicly tell the truth about operations on the ground, because it violates security.
OCS, if I tell you that my daughter is beautiful and smart but a little impulsive, you can very reasonably conclude (a) she might well be beautiful and/or smart, although you’d expect me to be biased on both counts, so you maybe want to see for yourself; and (b) she is definitely impulsive, because my bias runs towards minimizing her flaws. (It helps to know that I’m not the kind of person who runs down his kids — knowledge which your have sufficient information to date to develop).
Gary,
“MacArthur, Westmoreland, Hitler, Czar Nicholas, G. W. Bush, Dan Halutz: not so much.”
It would be difficult for you to have less of a clue with respect to who truly catches Bush’s ear. For all you know he could be reading Obsidian Wings.
Bril: For all you know he could be reading Obsidian Wings.
No, we’re too Goth for him.
Dr: Understood, but if it is highly disrespectful to disregard his opinion on the war (bad) why is it not highly disrespectful to disregard his opinion on the war (good)?
CharleyCarp: Also understood. But if I tell someone your daughter is a little impulsive, because you said so and obviously you would know because after all you are her father and who would know better… But then they tell me they heard she is also beautiful and smart, and I flatly say, “No, I don’t believe him”. Not, “I want to see that for myself” or “I’ll hear him out because he is after all her father” or “I’ll talk to other people who have personally met her to see if they agree” – just flat out “No, I don’t believe him”.
OK, I think I’m getting too knit picky here. I’ll give it a rest.
OCSteve, I have never found you to be to Knit Picky. Nitpicky, maybe.
Anyway, I actually do understan your confusion. Reid is actually talking about two different things that Petraeus is saying or may say in the future.
The first is about the overall situation, which is supported by many other “authorities” out there, including other military people, diplomatic people, various commissions, etc. And that is that the war cannot be won soley by the military.
(I still have issues with the term “war”, but that is a different issue entirely.)
The second is about a specific aspect of the situation, the success or non-success of the surge. I am not defending Reid’s terminology, because I don’t think he did a great job of expressing himself, but to my mind, Reid is saying that if Petraeus came to him tomorrow and said the surge was showing progress, he wouldn’t be able to believe him based upon everyhting else he is seeing.
You don’t ask your barber whether you need a haircut.
And if your neurosurgeon tells you that you need brain surgery, you get a second opinion.
Of course we have to depend on professionals to do their professional best. But when you depend on the same professional to diagnose the problem, and fix it, and assess how well he’s doing at fixing it, you’re begging for problems.
Nitpicky, maybe
I really have to turn autocorrect off in Word. That one isn’t too bad but it comes up with some doosies on occasion.
“It would be difficult for you to have less of a clue with respect to who truly catches Bush’s ear.”
Wait, it isn’t Czar Nicholas?
Aw, I bet it’s you, bril, who is the One Person who Truly Catches Bush’s Ear.
When it falls off.
“I really have to turn autocorrect off in Word.”
Spell-checking software is evil; they guarantee errors. I’d sooner chop off my hands than use it.
bril is President Bush! I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.
I thought bril was Dick Cheney, myself; more likely than Laura.
I call dibs on Barney for the “Which member of the Bush family is bril?” pool.
Gary, there’s a new iraqi poll out.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2954716&page=3
This one has support for attacks on US troops down to 51%, from 60+% in the last poll. It claims a 95% confidence interval of about 2.5%.
Why would the numbers change so fast? No two studies have had results within the either of their confidence bounds.
Going from 51% to 47% between 2005 and 2006 is perhaps plausible. 47 to 60 to 51 in 16 months? Whyever would support for attacks on US troops ever go down?
The new poll gives some indication in their methodology section, which is the most extensive I’ve seen so far. There is no official estimate of the numbers of sunnis, shia, and kurds in the country. Often polls accept the unsourced estimate in the CIA World Factbook of 60-65% shia, 15-20% kurds, and 3% nonmuslims. That leaves room for 12-22% sunnis. Exactly where you place the estimates will change how you bias the results.
These statisticians have found that in their samples they find shias in the high 40’s to low 50’s range and sunnis from high 20’s to mid-30’s.
So, say your poll gets a lot of sunnis who almost all say it’s right to attack US troops, and a lot of shias who don’t have strong opinions but more say not to, and not a lot of kurds who mostly say it’s wrong. And the question is, how much should you discount the sunnis because you got too many of them, and increase the shias and kurds because you think you didn’t get enough? How you answer that will decide the result.
Now, this last study got more sunnis and fewer shias than usual. Sample size 2212 and they got 47% shia, 35% sunnis, 15% kurds, and 3% other. They did not weight their results by religion/ethnicity since there’s no good basis for doing so. And they *still* got only 51% supporting attacks on US troops! That has to indicate a shift from the study that got 60% doing that. Maybe it means that fewer shias support attacks on US troops than in September.
But then, 36% of the people they asked refused to do the survey. Maybe people who approve of attacking US troops are less likely to take surveys now than they were last september.
And of course there’s another unknown bias — there hasn’t been a good census done in iraq in the last year. And lots and lots of people have moved, and become internal refugees, or moved out of the country entirely, or even been killed. One seventh of the sample had moved in the last year to avoid violence or religious persecution. The pollsters carefully chose their poll locations based on population and on estimates of the ratio of urban and rural populations etc. All of that could be way off.
The bottom line, though, is that well over half the population approves of shooting at us, except for the kurds who do not. And the overwhelming majority of the iraqi population wants us gone except for the kurds who do not. The large majority of iraqis believe that they will have less violence to deal with when we are gone, that our leaving will not lead to a bloodbath.
america par salana hamle, graph ke zariye