I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong'

[AlicetheKurious]

DISMANTLE IRAQ

Which brings us to Iraq. Of all the artificial nations of the Middle East, Iraq is the most bogus. Even the name “Iraq” reveals the wishful thinking of its architects. It means ‘’well-rooted country.’’ Of course, it’s not well rooted. Shiite Muslims form the majority of the country (assuming Saddam hasn’t killed enough to put them in the minority). The Kurds comprise another fifth of the Iraqi “population” (the quotation marks are there because it’s not clear that Saddam thinks the Kurds qualify as Iraqis, which is why he was so cavalier about gassing them). When Col. Edward House, an adviser to Woodrow Wilson, looked at the British plan for Iraq, he told the president, “They are making a breeding place for future war.”

The Ottomans never conceived of Iraq as a nation, in fact no one did. To the Turks the area was comprised of three imperial provinces centered on three respective cities: Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. When the British laid claim to the area they made Faisal Hussein king of Iraq. He was well qualified for the job in that he had previously been king of Syria until the French decided they didn’t like him there (Faisal felt he’d been promised a kingdom over all Arabian lands). The Brits also made his brother Abdullah the King of Jordan (his descendents still rule there). The Husseins also got Arabia, but the Sauds — another tribe — stole it away from them and renamed the country Saudi Arabia (this is like me laying siege to Cleveland and establishing “Goldberg’s Cleveland” or “The Goldbergian Caliphate of Ohio” or something like that). Shortly before his death King Faisal wrote, “I say with my heart full of sadness that there is not yet in Iraq an Iraqi people.”

Anyway, there are any number of excellent reasons to topple Saddam Hussein: We should have done it the first time; he tried to murder the first President Bush; he’s developing weapons of mass destruction; he gassed the Kurds; he’s got that pickle-sniffer mustache; whatever. I don’t care. All of that is a conversation for another day.

The point for now is that Iraq shouldn’t have existed in the first place. It’s lasted this long thanks to the Stalinist repression of the Baath regime. And the only reason we didn’t get rid of it last time was that the Saudis despise the idea of toppling Hussein because they don’t want us to establish an attractive alternative to the nasty form of government they profit from. Well, boohoo for the Saudis. If they hadn’t found oil on their land they’d be a trivia question for students of comparative government today.

Wouldn’t such a huge move inflame the Middle East? Sure. Wouldn’t such a humiliating effort give Osama bin Laden exactly what he wants? Yes. Wouldn’t this cause the European diplomats to drop their egg spoons in disgust over such barbarism? Most definitely. Wouldn’t the civilized world — with the notable exception of the British — turn its collective back on us? I guess so.

All that would in all likelihood be true.

Until we win.

Jonah Goldberg, National Review, April 18, 2002

Guess who's "we"?

[Elihu]

Until the ignoble and unhappy regime
Which holds all of us through,
Child-abuse, yeah, child-abuse yeah,
Sub-human bondage has been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war.



"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' Dick Morris, 4/9/03

Tue Jun 20th 2006, 03:59 PM


"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom
that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively
bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly
shattered skeptics' complaints." (Fox News Channel's Tony Snow,
4/27/03)



"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside
liberals, and a few people here in Washington." (Charles Krauthammer,
Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)


"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego
that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to
take that wager?" (Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)



"What's he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war
went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose
their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean--4/9/03)



"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the
broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that
nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him.
The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)



"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in
Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)



"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's
most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just
wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to
say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House
will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now,
Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....

"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N.
weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr.
Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, "The United
States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs,
defeated." Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail,
again.

"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this
guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and
so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is
going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)



"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To
hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory
meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at
least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend.
Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and
for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a
defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened.
Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront
an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might
can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)



"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don
Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war
with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There
is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated
so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)



"Shouldn't the prime minister and all of us who thought the
war was hasty and dangerous and wrongheaded admit that we were wrong? I
mean, with the pictures of those Iraqis dancing in the streets, hauling
down statues of Saddam Hussein and gushing their thanks to the
Americans, isn't it clear that President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair
were right all along? If we believe it's a good thing that Hussein's
regime has been dismantled, aren't we hypocritical not to acknowledge
Bush's superior judgment?... Why can't those of us who thought the war
was a bad idea (or, at any rate, a premature one) let it go now and
just join in celebrating the victory wrought by our magnificent
military forces?"
(Washington Post's William Raspberry, 4/14/03)



"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless
military intervention.... The president will give an order. attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by
the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring
it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer,
3/30/03)



"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State
Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb
and the desperate could ignore it."
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)


is this the beginning of a new Jim Crow era of imposed white supremacy or just the white man’s last tantrum?

you know, the sentiments of my fellow peeps sometimes make me sad. to roll out a list like this and be perplexed as to how these people live with themselves.... its as if, in the left side of our split personality, we cling to the idea that we still have some sort of pluralistic government in which a public disgrace or public opprobrium means anything. they're just people doing a job within a system that has a power source we don't want to can't seem to understand. and the galling part is a script doesn't even need to be written. they just act (and if you'll notice, the plot is the same over and over again, just change the names, dates and locations, and spare the emotion), tell any offhand lie and the script writes itself including the "opposition".

government power ultimately rests on opinion, not brute force. Bush does not himself kill or put a gun to the head of those he orders to kill. Generals and soldiers follow his orders on their own. Nor can Bush “force” anyone to continue providing him with the funds needed for his aggression. The citizenry must do so on its own, because it believes that, by and large, it is the right thing to do. On the other hand, if the majority of generals, soldiers and citizens stop believing in the legitimacy of Bush’s commands, his commands turn into nothing more than hot air. It is this need for legitimacy that explains why state governments itching to go to war (and especially democratic governments expecting popular war support) must offer a reason for their actions. The public is not typically in favor of killing innocent bystanders for fun or profit. Rather, in order to enlist the public’s assistance “evidence” must be manipulated or fabricated so as to make aggression appear as defense (for what reasonable person could be against defense). We know the catchwords: FortSumter, the USS Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, 9-11.

really, we don't live in reality. they do. and they know it. they act with purpose and we, their victims, acquiesce via "coke vs pepsi", which is to say manipulation of our emotions. that's why you're so incredulous that not just a few caught in lies continue to wield influence and get paid for it. the same would shame us into exile. for them it's a systemic performance. they don't feel bad because it's all part of the management strategy and they understand that and believe in it.

let's face it. for us "citizens" less than 100% control over the central government equals zero control. we'd be better off going back to a monarchy. the government is completely and utterly (from the reality of our viewpoint) out of control. it has embarked upon, short of dissolution, a determinate course that is irreversible: expansion. it's the journey because the endpoint is a civilizational reboot.

and hillary. don't you remember, in her oratory ahead of the 03 authorization vote, how ripped apart her heart was that she was having to vote "yes" on this thing? he11 she was sorry even way back then. bartender gimme a suicide: mix the coke and pepsi together...

[stickdog99]

[NeonLX]

Wonderful commentary there, Elihu.

And completely, utterly spot on.

really, we don't live in reality. they do. and they know it. they act with purpose and we, their victims, acquiesce via "coke vs pepsi", which is to say manipulation of our emotions. that's why you're so incredulous that not just a few caught in lies continue to wield influence and get paid for it. the same would shame us into exile. for them it's a systemic performance. they don't feel bad because it's all part of the management strategy and they understand that and believe in it.

let's face it. for us "citizens" less than 100% control over the central government equals zero control. we'd be better off going back to a monarchy. the government is completely and utterly (from the reality of our viewpoint) out of control. it has embarked upon, short of dissolution, a determinate course that is irreversible: expansion. it's the journey because the endpoint is a civilizational reboot.

and hillary. don't you remember, in her oratory ahead of the 03 authorization vote, how ripped apart her heart was that she was having to vote "yes" on this thing? he11 she was sorry even way back then. bartender gimme a suicide: mix the coke and pepsi together...