Making Enemies

**astralis** · 30 Jul 06,, 08:50

caveat: i do not necessarily agree with the article in its entirety.

however, i do have one question in particular that i would like to direct at the people Who've Been There: how accurate, in your opinion, are hirsh's/ricks's criticisms of Gen Odierno? what is missing, and what is not?

----
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14046789/site/newsweek/

Making Enemies
Hamas and Hizbullah should not be confused with Al Qaeda. Bush's insistence on doing so shows his failure to understand his foes.

By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 1:52 p.m. PT July 26, 2006

July 26, 2006 - Reading "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks's devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.

As most U.S. military experts now acknowledge, these tactics violated the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, which require winning over the local population, thus depriving the bad guys of a base of support within which to hide. Such rules were apparently unknown to the 4th ID commander, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno. The general is a particular and deserving target of Ricks's book, which is perhaps the most exhaustive account to date of all that went wrong with Iraq. Nonetheless—according to that iron law of the Bush administration under which incompetence is rewarded with promotion, as long as it is accompanied by loyalty—Odierno will soon be returning to Iraq as America's No. 2 commander there, the man who will oversee day-to-day military operations. (Odierno, asked by Ricks to respond to criticism, replied that he had studied the insurgency and "adapted quickly.")

Like Ricks, The Washington Post's first-rate Pentagon correspondent, I don't really fault the soldiers on the ground for the mistakes made. These young men and women were in a hellish situation, and as warriors they performed superbly. But once they began breaking into Iraqi homes, cool and competent GIs turned into Keystone Kops, pressed into a counterinsurgency role they'd never been taught. So the soldiers improvised, often amateurishly, apparently—according to Ricks—directed by Odierno to kick down doors. The American soldiers themselves were aware of how inane many of their night raids were. Back in January 2004, the unit I was with jokingly called their raids "Jerry Springers." Why? Because the intelligence was often based on unreliable sources who had agendas of their own. "Lots of times it turns out to be some guy who wants us to arrest another guy who's interested in the same girl," one soldier told me.

The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.

How does this affect current events in the Mideast? In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel's retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran's influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America's interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush's fierce defense of it: "In the back of everyone's head is Iran looming as a threat over the region," says one Israeli official.

But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel's war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.

And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as the poet Yeats memorably put it.

Our confusion now about the delicate process of winning over populations—in what is in effect a worldwide insurgency of Muslim extremists—is no less than it was back then, when I embedded with the 4th ID in Samarra. During those night actions, one dubious piece of intelligence would lead to a raid on another Iraqi house, based on even flimsier info. They were more wild goose chases than military operations. During one raid someone spotted a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary leader, lying in a pile of paper. "Who is that?" asked Capt. Andy Depanais, a young tank commander who would have been in grade school at the time of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. None of the soldiers seemed to know, but Khomeini did look suspicious to them. Never mind that the insurgency, even then, was mostly Sunni, while the Iranians and Khomeini were Shiite. "I usually just round up all the military-age men," Ben Tomlinson, the lieutenant in command of the platoon, told me. As Ricks writes, this had become doctrine for all of Odierno's 4th ID.

At one point we burst into a small hotel, or hostel, whose guests were said to be Iranian-influenced insurgent sympathizers. Finding none, we moved onto a house supposedly occupied by the Iraqi hostel owner, arresting him and his three sons. One son, I remember, protested that he was a medical student, and the soldiers riffled through what were clearly English-language medical textbooks surrounding his bed. No matter, the youth was shoved to the floor. Another, by appearance the youngest, was hyperventilating and coughing incessantly, obviously feverish and ill with some respiratory ailment. On the floor he went, an American boot to his back. On the ride back to base, I sat next to one detainee in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Blood was oozing from his nose, which appeared to be broken, but he could not wipe it away because his hands were tied. He was whimpering. Many like him ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. And there, even if they weren't insurgents before—most weren't—many became supporters of the insurgency. And Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian nobody at the start of the Iraq war, used this Iraqi anger to hide himself among the population, then rode it all the way to terrorist glory.

Back home meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was still denying there was an insurgency at all. Bush was pretending that angry Iraqis who might be sympathetic to the insurgency were terrorists of the same ilk as Al Qaeda. Odierno, who allowed credit for Saddam's capture to accrue to him though Special Forces had led the operation, was suggesting that he was close to defeating the insurgency. "The former regime elements we've been combating have been brought to their knees,"' Odierno declared two and a half years ago. Today, despite these disastrous misjudgments, not only do all these men still have their jobs, some, like Odierno, are destined to run the future U.S. Army. And as the Sunni-led insurgency rages on, it has led to harsh Shiite reprisals, which in turn has led to renewed support for the insurgency among the Sunnis. This may finally lead to civil war, as a grim Maliki acknowledged this week.

What's sad is that the "war on terror" began as a fairly straightforward affair. Al Qaeda hit us. Then we went after Al Qaeda. The enemy was clear, and the evidence against Al Qaeda was solid: there was a decade's worth of fatwas, of declarations of war, monitored conversations and bin Laden's own monstrous bragging, on videotape, about how the World Trade Center collapse had far exceeded his expectations. We had a lot of support around the world in pursuit of our mission to hunt these men down, kill them or capture them and do with them as we pleased.

But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims like the sons of the hostel owner in Samarra, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.

Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.

Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the "war on terror" has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.

**dalem** · 30 Jul 06,, 10:38

Originally Posted by astralis

But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children,

This statement invalidates the entire article (and the author's credibility) for me, because only someone ignorant of geopolitics and history, or someone with an agenda, could make it.

Errant bombs aren't killing Lebanese children - ON TARGET bombs are killing Lebanese children because Hizbollah are subhuman cockroaches that consistantly base their operations within civilian areas, AND they don't encourage/permit those same civilians to leave the area.

Anyone who fails to acknowledge, understand, or address that primary point is a dangerous fool no matter how many Bad Guys' doors he's kicked in in the service of my country.

It is turbid and muddy thinking, and the rest of the article is no better than recycled lies and hand waving trying to obscure the whole point of the War on Terror.

-dale

**Bill** · 31 Jul 06,, 18:56

Originally Posted by astralis

caveat: i do not necessarily agree with the article in its entirety.

however, i do have one question in particular that i would like to direct at the people Who've Been There: how accurate, in your opinion, are hirsh's/ricks's criticisms of Gen Odierno? what is missing, and what is not?

----
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14046789/site/newsweek/

Making Enemies
Hamas and Hizbullah should not be confused with Al Qaeda. Bush's insistence on doing so shows his failure to understand his foes.

By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 1:52 p.m. PT July 26, 2006

July 26, 2006 - Reading "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks's devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.

As most U.S. military experts now acknowledge, these tactics violated the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, which require winning over the local population, thus depriving the bad guys of a base of support within which to hide. Such rules were apparently unknown to the 4th ID commander, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno. The general is a particular and deserving target of Ricks's book, which is perhaps the most exhaustive account to date of all that went wrong with Iraq. Nonetheless—according to that iron law of the Bush administration under which incompetence is rewarded with promotion, as long as it is accompanied by loyalty—Odierno will soon be returning to Iraq as America's No. 2 commander there, the man who will oversee day-to-day military operations. (Odierno, asked by Ricks to respond to criticism, replied that he had studied the insurgency and "adapted quickly.")

Like Ricks, The Washington Post's first-rate Pentagon correspondent, I don't really fault the soldiers on the ground for the mistakes made. These young men and women were in a hellish situation, and as warriors they performed superbly. But once they began breaking into Iraqi homes, cool and competent GIs turned into Keystone Kops, pressed into a counterinsurgency role they'd never been taught. So the soldiers improvised, often amateurishly, apparently—according to Ricks—directed by Odierno to kick down doors. The American soldiers themselves were aware of how inane many of their night raids were. Back in January 2004, the unit I was with jokingly called their raids "Jerry Springers." Why? Because the intelligence was often based on unreliable sources who had agendas of their own. "Lots of times it turns out to be some guy who wants us to arrest another guy who's interested in the same girl," one soldier told me.

The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.

How does this affect current events in the Mideast? In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel's retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran's influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America's interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush's fierce defense of it: "In the back of everyone's head is Iran looming as a threat over the region," says one Israeli official.

But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel's war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.

And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as the poet Yeats memorably put it.

Our confusion now about the delicate process of winning over populations—in what is in effect a worldwide insurgency of Muslim extremists—is no less than it was back then, when I embedded with the 4th ID in Samarra. During those night actions, one dubious piece of intelligence would lead to a raid on another Iraqi house, based on even flimsier info. They were more wild goose chases than military operations. During one raid someone spotted a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary leader, lying in a pile of paper. "Who is that?" asked Capt. Andy Depanais, a young tank commander who would have been in grade school at the time of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. None of the soldiers seemed to know, but Khomeini did look suspicious to them. Never mind that the insurgency, even then, was mostly Sunni, while the Iranians and Khomeini were Shiite. "I usually just round up all the military-age men," Ben Tomlinson, the lieutenant in command of the platoon, told me. As Ricks writes, this had become doctrine for all of Odierno's 4th ID.

At one point we burst into a small hotel, or hostel, whose guests were said to be Iranian-influenced insurgent sympathizers. Finding none, we moved onto a house supposedly occupied by the Iraqi hostel owner, arresting him and his three sons. One son, I remember, protested that he was a medical student, and the soldiers riffled through what were clearly English-language medical textbooks surrounding his bed. No matter, the youth was shoved to the floor. Another, by appearance the youngest, was hyperventilating and coughing incessantly, obviously feverish and ill with some respiratory ailment. On the floor he went, an American boot to his back. On the ride back to base, I sat next to one detainee in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Blood was oozing from his nose, which appeared to be broken, but he could not wipe it away because his hands were tied. He was whimpering. Many like him ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. And there, even if they weren't insurgents before—most weren't—many became supporters of the insurgency. And Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian nobody at the start of the Iraq war, used this Iraqi anger to hide himself among the population, then rode it all the way to terrorist glory.

Back home meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was still denying there was an insurgency at all. Bush was pretending that angry Iraqis who might be sympathetic to the insurgency were terrorists of the same ilk as Al Qaeda. Odierno, who allowed credit for Saddam's capture to accrue to him though Special Forces had led the operation, was suggesting that he was close to defeating the insurgency. "The former regime elements we've been combating have been brought to their knees,"' Odierno declared two and a half years ago. Today, despite these disastrous misjudgments, not only do all these men still have their jobs, some, like Odierno, are destined to run the future U.S. Army. And as the Sunni-led insurgency rages on, it has led to harsh Shiite reprisals, which in turn has led to renewed support for the insurgency among the Sunnis. This may finally lead to civil war, as a grim Maliki acknowledged this week.

What's sad is that the "war on terror" began as a fairly straightforward affair. Al Qaeda hit us. Then we went after Al Qaeda. The enemy was clear, and the evidence against Al Qaeda was solid: there was a decade's worth of fatwas, of declarations of war, monitored conversations and bin Laden's own monstrous bragging, on videotape, about how the World Trade Center collapse had far exceeded his expectations. We had a lot of support around the world in pursuit of our mission to hunt these men down, kill them or capture them and do with them as we pleased.

But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims like the sons of the hostel owner in Samarra, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.

Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.

Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the "war on terror" has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.

I will sum up my view of the author and his views in one phrase...

Naively short-sighted jackasss.

**gunnut** · 31 Jul 06,, 19:10

It's much easier for these journalists to pick on Bush than to pick on the source of the problem, islamo-nazis.

It's also much easier for the US military to kill entire armies rather than individual terrorists.

**Bill** · 31 Jul 06,, 19:13

Originally Posted by gunnut

It's also much easier for the US military to kill entire armies rather than individual terrorists.

We're gonna be doing plenty of both pretty soon.

Mark my words...

**astralis** · 31 Jul 06,, 20:11

gunnut,

It's much easier for these journalists to pick on Bush than to pick on the source of the problem, islamo-nazis.

certainly. while i don't agree with the article in its entirety, however, i do think there's something to be said for distinguishing thy enemies (which, ironically, the article sometimes does not do). different solutions for different problems. sometimes brute force is needed, and sometimes it isn't.

i wonder where shek went off to; wouldn't mind hearing his views on the article.

**gunnut** · 31 Jul 06,, 21:38

Bush is arrogant if anything. His policies are abrasive, blunt, unilateral in most cases, and definitely piss off the French and their cohorts of internationalists. I think it's a welcome change from the pvssyfooting policies of the Clinton era. We are a superpower. We should act like one. Help those who help us. Piss on those who hate us. Just like the old days.

**dalem** · 31 Jul 06,, 22:21

Originally Posted by gunnut

Bush is arrogant if anything. His policies are abrasive, blunt, unilateral in most cases, and definitely piss off the French and their cohorts of internationalists. I think it's a welcome change from the pvssyfooting policies of the Clinton era. We are a superpower. We should act like one. Help those who help us. Piss on those who hate us. Just like the old days.

I agree. We dealt with 50 years in the crosshairs of thousands of nuclear warheads. While I'm not pretending that was an ideal situation, it certainly impresses me more than what the UNSecGen and his cronies think about my country or our allies.

Eff 'em.

-dale

**astralis** · 01 Aug 06,, 03:55

gunnut,

Bush is arrogant if anything. His policies are abrasive, blunt, unilateral in most cases, and definitely piss off the French and their cohorts of internationalists. I think it's a welcome change from the pvssyfooting policies of the Clinton era. We are a superpower. We should act like one. Help those who help us. Piss on those who hate us. Just like the old days.

that is short-sighted in the extreme, especially considering the nature of the war we're fighting. of course there are benefits to the whole unilateral method: simplicity and directness being the prime ones. if things go well, then yes, all is well...but what happens when things go south?

you then learn the costs of unilateralism: people not only do not care about you, they will seize the chance to jump on you. in short, relationships between nations fall distinctly into relationships of convenience.

from history, we can see examples of this. here's one that may be familiar to you, the peloponnesian war. the athenian empire was largely held together by athenian might. there were some exceptions: those city-democracies that felt an ideological bond to that of athens. when the war came, and athens suffered a major disaster in sicily, guess which allies stayed on board with athens, and which allies immediately jumped ship to the spartan camp?

let us also not forget that american/british/french unilateralism in the past helped spawned our CURRENT troubles in iran and the middle east, circa 1953 and 1917. blowback's a b****.

**gunnut** · 01 Aug 06,, 06:06

Originally Posted by astralis

people not only do not care about you, they will seize the chance to jump on you. in short, relationships between nations fall distinctly into relationships of convenience.

That's different from any other form of diplomacy...how?

Originally Posted by astralis

let us also not forget that american/british/french unilateralism in the past helped spawned our CURRENT troubles in iran and the middle east, circa 1953 and 1917. blowback's a b****.

How did these events lead to islamo-nazis and their suicide bombs?

They will hate us no matter what we do. We are the top dog. It's human nature to challenge the top dog. Look at France. They open their doors to millions of muslims, give them shelter, money, welfare. social services, and what are they repaid with? Riots! What do you think they would do if the French government oppressed them? About the same.

You can appease Hitler all you want. You can wave that piece of paper and say "there will be peace in our time" all you want. The fact is these extremists hate us.

What did Israel get for their Unilateral Disengagement in Gaza? Rockets lobbed over and soldiers kidnapped, maybe some suicide bombs.

What does Israel get for charging in with guns blazing? Rockets lobbed over and soldiers kidnapped or killed, maybe some suicide bombs.

If we're gonna get bombed and shot at, I want them to pay a hefty price for that.

We'll help those who help us along the way.

We'll piss on those who get in our way.

**smilingassassin** · 01 Aug 06,, 06:36

Originally Posted by gunnut

That's different from any other form of diplomacy...how?

How did these events lead to islamo-nazis and their suicide bombs?

They will hate us no matter what we do. We are the top dog. It's human nature to challenge the top dog. Look at France. They open their doors to millions of muslims, give them shelter, money, welfare. social services, and what are they repaid with? Riots! What do you think they would do if the French government oppressed them? About the same.

You can appease Hitler all you want. You can wave that piece of paper and say "there will be peace in our time" all you want. The fact is these extremists hate us.

What did Israel get for their Unilateral Disengagement in Gaza? Rockets lobbed over and soldiers kidnapped, maybe some suicide bombs.

What does Israel get for charging in with guns blazing? Rockets lobbed over and soldiers kidnapped or killed, maybe some suicide bombs.

If we're gonna get bombed and shot at, I want them to pay a hefty price for that.

We'll help those who help us along the way.

We'll piss on those who get in our way.

Amen, brother Gunnut!

**astralis** · 01 Aug 06,, 10:08

gunnut,

That's different from any other form of diplomacy...how?

multilateralism demonstrates to the other side that we show some concern, and at least empathy with their interests. without multilateralism, we would not have a "special relationship" with the UK, nor with canada, nor with japan, for examples. would you consider the US-UK alliance to be one of convenience only?

here's a tricky problem for the unilateralist: how, for example, would we get other nations to cooperate with us fully on the war on terror? unless we are going to get into the business of invading every country in the world with a terrorist group, we rely on the other countries to help us out by extraditing or convicting terrorists on their own soil. we rely on the british, and yes, even the french intelligence services.

one final example, look at the first Gulf War. that war, unlike this current iraq war, really WAS blatantly about oil (not that it's something to be ashamed of: oil is a strategic resource). in the end, the US actually ended up making a small profit on the war, as other nations paid up or committed troops. now, guess who's footing the bill for the war in iraq. not japan!

How did these events lead to islamo-nazis and their suicide bombs?

start reading up on your middle eastern history, gunnut. iran's democracy was overthrown by a US/UK coup, with the tyrannical shah being put in place. the UK loved it, because mossadegh, the overthrown PM, had just nationalized anglo-iran oil; earlier attempts by the UK to get the US onboard for the overthrow had failed because they marketed the wrong idea. instead, they marketed the overthrow as an anti-communist step, which the dulles brothers instantly fell for.

autocratic shah soon crushed his political opponents and squashed political dissent. the one thing he was afraid to touch was religion. guess what happened in 1979 as a result. extremist shi'ite islam arose to lead a state. which led to fierce competition in the 80s between saudi arabia and iran to see "whose islam was purer". wahhabism became even more extreme, and the rulers of saudi arabia put still more $$ into supporting extremism.

1917, UK/France reneged on a deal struck by Lawrence of Arabia with the Arabs, after the Arabs lent their support to a bloody campaign against the turks. the area became a protectorate of the UK and france. rule of iraq was given to a saudi. gee, that's not going to cause some upset feelings...

It's human nature to challenge the top dog. Look at France. They open their doors to millions of muslims, give them shelter, money, welfare. social services, and what are they repaid with? Riots! What do you think they would do if the French government oppressed them? About the same.

if you think france's model of integration is something to be proud of, think again. instead of relying on the easiest explanation ("they're muslims and thus they riot!"), look at the multitude of factors that led to the riots. the condition of the slums. hell, the POLICE are afraid to go into the slums, and if the police are afraid, what are the chances that one will see welfare and social services workers go into the area? france's socialist system creates a poor economy to begin with. a combination of racism, poor education of the muslim immigrants, and especially poor economic activity where the muslims are mostly located ensure that the muslims usually get the scraps of what's left- if they're lucky. official french policy of a "color-blind society" ensures that the government is generally left in the dark regarding possible social-economic differentials between races.

and let's not go into all the hundreds of thousands of NON-muslims in france who strike and riot. rioting seems to be a national past-time there.

You can appease Hitler all you want. You can wave that piece of paper and say "there will be peace in our time" all you want. The fact is these extremists hate us.

extremists hate us, yes. however, based on the factors, our responses to this hate can differ. for the religious nuts, to whom the US is an implacable enemy, there's really only one solution, and that is to kill them. and ensure that no new generation of religious terrorists spring up, by promoting political/economic opportunity- show people that there's a point to life on earth

for nationalist extremists, one can see how reasonable their demands are, and see if it can be defused. that's the path the US army has tried to do with sunni nationalists in iraq, for example. try to work with the iraqi gov't to assure the sunnis that they won't be marginalized in a new iraq.

there's more than one way to skin the cat. in the end, policies are there to get things done. sometimes, multilateralism is the policy to use; sometimes, unilateralism is the policy to use. arguing for the inherent superiority of one policy over another is somewhat akin to arguing that there is one best power-tool that will deal with all of the nuts, bolts, and nails in the tool shed.

**gunnut** · 01 Aug 06,, 18:20

Originally Posted by astralis

multilateralism demonstrates to the other side that we show some concern, and at least empathy with their interests. without multilateralism, we would not have a "special relationship" with the UK, nor with canada, nor with japan, for examples. would you consider the US-UK alliance to be one of convenience only?

So it's like "we'll help those who help us, and piss on those who won't, but ask 'how are you?' at the same time."

I understand your concern for multilateralism. I'd rather have people come out and say what they mean and mean what they say. I won't show my concern to someone who hate us (Venezuela, Iran) when I have no concern for them.

Originally Posted by astralis

here's a tricky problem for the unilateralist: how, for example, would we get other nations to cooperate with us fully on the war on terror? unless we are going to get into the business of invading every country in the world with a terrorist group, we rely on the other countries to help us out by extraditing or convicting terrorists on their own soil. we rely on the british, and yes, even the french intelligence services.

Did you read the thread on Turkey asking for help to deal with Kurdish terrorists on their border with Iraq? They didn't help us when we needed to deploy the 4ID, now we're too busy to help them.

Multilateralism is nice and all. But we need other people to participate also. Right now we are too concerned about other people's "feelings" to get anything done. Tell them straight out, we like multilateralism, but you have to participate too. Here what we want. You help us. We'll help you.

Originally Posted by astralis

one final example, look at the first Gulf War. that war, unlike this current iraq war, really WAS blatantly about oil (not that it's something to be ashamed of: oil is a strategic resource). in the end, the US actually ended up making a small profit on the war, as other nations paid up or committed troops. now, guess who's footing the bill for the war in iraq. not japan!

That's because this current war is not about oil.

If it were, we'd make a profit.

Originally Posted by astralis

start reading up on your middle eastern history

History is nice. But it's over. Let's figure out how to deal with the crazies rather than find out who's to blame. There's no guarantee that if UK/France/USA didn't do what they did in the beginning of the 20th century, these crazies wouldn't have popped up.

Originally Posted by astralis

if you think france's model of integration is something to be proud of, think again. instead of relying on the easiest explanation ("they're muslims and thus they riot!"), look at the multitude of factors that led to the riots. the condition of the slums. hell, the POLICE are afraid to go into the slums, and if the police are afraid, what are the chances that one will see welfare and social services workers go into the area? france's socialist system creates a poor economy to begin with. a combination of racism, poor education of the muslim immigrants, and especially poor economic activity where the muslims are mostly located ensure that the muslims usually get the scraps of what's left- if they're lucky. official french policy of a "color-blind society" ensures that the government is generally left in the dark regarding possible social-economic differentials between races.

Score one for socialism!!!

Originally Posted by astralis

extremists hate us, yes. however, based on the factors, our responses to this hate can differ. for the religious nuts, to whom the US is an implacable enemy, there's really only one solution, and that is to kill them. and ensure that no new generation of religious terrorists spring up, by promoting political/economic opportunity- show people that there's a point to life on earth

We agree here. The problem is their culture is different than ours. What's important to us is not important to them. They will kill anyone who tries to change their ways. What are we gonna do?

Originally Posted by astralis

for nationalist extremists, one can see how reasonable their demands are, and see if it can be defused. that's the path the US army has tried to do with sunni nationalists in iraq, for example. try to work with the iraqi gov't to assure the sunnis that they won't be marginalized in a new iraq.

Nationalists are easier to deal with. They have a territory, or want one. They generally have a political structure. We can talk to these people.

I have the answer to solve the Middle East culture problem. Empower (I hate this word) their women. Their equality will bring some sense into the violent culture over there.

**astralis** · 01 Aug 06,, 19:22

gunnut,

So it's like "we'll help those who help us, and piss on those who won't, but ask 'how are you?' at the same time."

more or less. plus, an ability to compromise, at least on secondary interests. in unilateralism we don't see too much of the idea of compromise, simply because for the unilateralist, there's no need to talk to the other party. again, useful in some areas, not so useful in others.

Did you read the thread on Turkey asking for help to deal with Kurdish terrorists on their border with Iraq? They didn't help us when we needed to deploy the 4ID, now we're too busy to help them.

that's the natural response, isn't it? but here the multilateralist would respond, if it doesn't plague your interests too much, it might actually be worth it in the long-run to help, or at least to talk to the other side. the example i have in mind here is the Kyoto treaty. even under clinton, there was no way it was going to pass the senate. what did clinton do? keep it there, where kyoto for all purposes was a dead letter. when bush got into office, he axed it right away. there was no particular NEED to do so, but he wanted to be straight-forward about the whole business. fair enough, but it upset the sensitivities of quite a few governments around the world, whereas before there was at least the illusion that MAYBE the US would get around doing so. see the difference?

History is nice. But it's over. Let's figure out how to deal with the crazies rather than find out who's to blame. There's no guarantee that if UK/France/USA didn't do what they did in the beginning of the 20th century, these crazies wouldn't have popped up.

to figure out how to deal with the crazies, one's gotta look at the background. know thy enemy, anyways. in any case, i can almost guarantee you that this whole problem began with the unilateral actions of this trifecta (although honestly, the onus is far far harder on the first two). the depth of such a violent response to the west does not arise from a vacuum.

The problem is their culture is different than ours. What's important to us is not important to them. They will kill anyone who tries to change their ways. What are we gonna do?

yes...and no. for the extremists, yes, changing them is far too hard, and represents way too much compromise of our principles. but the thing is, most people are not extremists. they want a few basic things: food, clothes, shelter, dignity, and respect. i don't think it's too hard for the US to demonstrate which side will do a better job leading them to that.

Nationalists are easier to deal with. They have a territory, or want one. They generally have a political structure. We can talk to these people. I have the answer to solve the Middle East culture problem. Empower (I hate this word) their women. Their equality will bring some sense into the violent culture over there.

yup. total agreement. funny thing is, in the near east, iran's got the best track record there...and i should say, the populace, out of all the near east countries (with the possible exceptions of kuwait and certainly israel), is the least anti-american.

well, gunnut, as always, a good and enlightening conversation all around. cheers

**gunnut** · 01 Aug 06,, 19:45

Originally Posted by astralis

that's the natural response, isn't it? but here the multilateralist would respond, if it doesn't plague your interests too much, it might actually be worth it in the long-run to help, or at least to talk to the other side. the example i have in mind here is the Kyoto treaty. even under clinton, there was no way it was going to pass the senate. what did clinton do? keep it there, where kyoto for all purposes was a dead letter. when bush got into office, he axed it right away. there was no particular NEED to do so, but he wanted to be straight-forward about the whole business. fair enough, but it upset the sensitivities of quite a few governments around the world, whereas before there was at least the illusion that MAYBE the US would get around doing so. see the difference?

Good that you brought up the Kyoto Protocol.

To date, no signatories have come close to the goal. In fact, we, have polluted less than some nations that have signed the treaty (proportionally of couse).

What you want is to lie our way to friendship. Sign the treaty, or give the appearance of opening to the idea, and then do what we want any ways.

Bush is different. He saw the Kyoto Protocol as unenforceable and unrealistic. Rather than pay lip service and be a lier, he just axed it and say we'll do something else that's more realistic and more enforceable.

I like the honest approach. We'll tell people straight out what we can and cannot do, let's go from there.

The Kyoto Protocol is like a unilateralist movement against the US. A bunch of people came together and said this is what we want and you'll like it. If not, you're a tyrant, bigot, heartless, cowboy, moron who doesn't recognize the danger of pollution to this planet. Meanwhile, we'll do what we want and lie to the people as to the true intentions of our goal.

Bush is bad because he's honest.

European multilateralists are good because they tell you what you want to hear.