Friday, March 28, 2008

No.


We don't want to hear from you yet again. We want you to shut up.
Posted by at

5 comments:

Lindsay Stewart said...

to elaborate...

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I underestimated the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite and the social impact of 30 years of extreme dictatorship," by Kanan Makiya. "

so it was the fault of them dirty iraqis that america's glorious offer of exploding democracy was so terribly mishandled. why those ungrateful bastards. the good guys took time out of their busy schedules and spent a lot of money blowing the sweet loving fuck out of the infrastructure, destabilizing the society and throwing life into a bloody chasm of endless bloodshed and strife. and this is the thanks we get? no flower petal strewn streets, no rejoicing, no admiration.

perhaps what ol' kanan should be saying would go more like this, 'i ate up every lie that the fucking warmongering liars fed me and asked for more. i ignored every lesson history had to teach. i demeaned every wiser voice as treachery. i scorned every informed critic as a traitor. my bloody ignorance and narcissism directly aided and abetted the murder of thousands of innocents. and now i will sit on my pundit's stool and blame the victims.'

to all of the kanan makiya's and andrew sullivans, the jeffrey goldbergs and william saletans, you are the enablers of the greatest criminal enterprise of the 21st century, so far. you sad fucks refused to listen when listening might have been a sign of intelligence. you are whores. you've had your silver pieces and now the once pristine sheets are stained and bloody rags. perhaps you should rinse the filth out of your mouths and get the fuck out of our lives. nobody wants to hear your apologies. you've been paid, you've put out. just fuck off.

11:06 PM
Frank Frink said...

And the icing on the cake - How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
I didn't.
By Christopher Hitchens

First paragraph of his page 2:
"This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale."

And it gets worse from there.

Who else do we know who is never ever wrong?

11:42 PM
Ian said...

Faced with two liars, how do you choose which one to believe? It would have been a difficult choice if the only options had been "take Bush at face value" or "take Saddam at face value". Fortunately, we didn't need to do that.

We had the UN weapons inspectors. A reliable source with a history on the topic versus an incompetent liar who looked like he wanted to play cowboy. The only thing that gave me pause was Colin Powell. I didn't think that Powell would lie to support Bush. But by the end of the UN speech, I felt pretty confident that he was lying.

I'm bad at reading body language and I'm no expert on "Middle Eastern affairs". So really, there's no excuse for these "experts" to have gotten it wrong on Iraq. It's different from a politician - at least they have the (bad) excuse: fear of taking an unpopular position. But columnists have no excuse. If they were fooled it was because they wanted to be fooled.

1:54 AM
E in MD said...

"take Bush at face value" or "take Saddam at face value".

Perhaps it's just the fact that I don't make a point of trusting my government in the first place. But I knew that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. Mainly because I thought about what would happened when we toppled the government and I wondered what would replace it. When I thought about it I realize that all those jokes I told about Bush senior being a coward for not taking Saddam out were my own mistake. Bush I was actually a genius for not going into Bagdhad. Because he too knew what would happen. I also thought that if the Iraqis wanted to be free of Saddam then it was up to them to stand up and sacrifice for their freedom. You can't just hand freedom to people. They have to want it or it will never take. Freedom has to be earned.

The people who attacked us on 9/11 were Saudis and the people that trained them were hiding in Afghanistan. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and we should have hunted the damned Taliban down like dogs. As a nation, that's what you do when you are attacked. You retaliate against the people who attacked you. You don't use it as an excuse to attack a random other country just because you feel the need to show how big your balls are. One of the reason i found Saint Wanda's comments so disgusting is because I believe that the original mission to Afghanistan was justified in the need to protect ourselves. Her son's death already had meaning in that he died helping to take out the Taliban. Instead of honoring that she claimed that in order for her son's death to have meaning everyone else's sons had to be sacrificed as well. An endless cycle of death in a war that can no longer be won because George W. Bush decided to lose it cannot bring value to anyone's death. We've failed in Afghanistan and we failed because of Bush's mismanagment.

As far as the Iraq war, it came about next to an election cycle and all the rhetoric was designed to get Bush elected again. That sent off my warning buzzers. You'd have to be pretty blind or a Republican not to see it. He used the troops as a propaganda tool to make sure he wasn't a one term wonder like his daddy. That's a pretty expensive re-election campaign for a $00k a year job. 4000+ lives and half a trillion dollars so far. Our children will still be paying for his re-election a hundred years from now. But I knew that taking troops off the task in Afghanistan would only weaken the effort there and I knew that committing our military to two guerrilla wars on two different fronts would mean disaster in the long run. I'm no military guy. When i tried to serve I was rejeced due to medical reasons. But you don't have to be a military genius to know that if you have a hundred apples to throw at 100 targets and you take half of them and put them somewhere else, you're not going to hit all 100 targets. I also knew ( not in the sense of 'we know where the WMDs are' but know in the sense that I know 2+2=4) that once we arrived on Iraqi soil that if Saddam had actually had any WMD's he would have used them on an invading army. After that of course the hilarity of 'mistakes' started and shit got worse. Even now 5 years later, nobody mentions Al Qaa Qaa and how 350,000 tonnes of high grade explosives was plundered because Bush had our troops guarding fucking oil wells. Nobody mentions the 100,000 some odd assault rifles that have gone missing in Iraq. Nobody mentions how we were arming people with our weapons so long as they promised not to shoot American soldiers with them. It's like this war has been managed by a 5 year old with little green army men.

I didn't take Saddam at face value. At best. he was a brutal dictator responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 of his own people in order to maintain his power over about 30 years since WE put him in power. There is no doubt in my mind he deserved to be deposed. But it should have been the Iraqis that deposed him. Not a group of soldiers from a foreign power led by a cowboy who probably couldn't find Iraq on a map. But i could feel the tension in my nation. A tension that went all the way up to the top. Americans were reeling from the 9/11 attacks. We were the big bully on the block who is stunned and angry when one of the little shrimps he's been picking on suddenly up and breaks his nose. 'We' ( meaning Georgie and his right wing hordes ) lashed out at what we thought would be a weak, easily defeatable enemy because George knew it was the only way he could get re-elected: To show the people that we were still 'the big bad ass' and that the government could still protect them.

That's basically the Iraq war in a nutshell. We were the victim of a mugging who jumps the first person weaker than themselves to retaliate. Not because they had anything to do with it. But because the mugger made us look bad in front of all our other big bad ass buddies. We had to make an example out of someone. I'm sure Rove and Rumsfeld and Cheney all licked their chops with glee at the prospect. One more chance to show how big and bad they were before the universe punches their ticket and if Cheney makes a tidy profit off it, so much the better.

an incompetent liar who looked like he wanted to play cowboy.

What I find most endearing about George W. Bush ( and by endearing I mean morally disgusting ) is how he makes jokes and sings songs about how wrong he was. "Those WMD's gotta be somewhere!" and all the little wingnuts laugh and cheer.

Perhaps Wanda Watkins and all her little wingnut cheerleaders should take a meeting with him explain to him how making light of an action that causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands and wrecks your economy is in poor taste.

I didn't think that Powell would lie to support Bush. But by the end of the UN speech, I felt pretty confident that he was lying.

Yeah a lot of people thought that about Powell. He was a hot topic for a Presidential bid at one point. But he basically sacrificed any credibility he had when he threw in with Bush and he realized it later. Thats' why he resigned the way he did.

So really, there's no excuse for these "experts" to have gotten it wrong on Iraq. By Blogger Ian, at 1:54 AM

Getting it wrong implies that they actually looked for an answer. I don't believe that's what happened. I believe that everyone was pretty well shell shocked after 9/11 and that once the Presidend decided that the best move was to attack Iraq everybody nodded their heads and went to find stuff to justify it. It wasn't a matter of getting it wrong. It was a matter of having blinders on because you think the guy in charge has an ace up his sleeve. Unfortunately the only thing Bush had up his sleeve was his hairy old man arm.

11:52 AM
Ti-Guy said...

I'm reserving my vitriol for the oh-so-sensible who maintain that we still have to listen politely to these people.

No, we don't. They're murderers. They either shut the fuck up, or when they open their mouths, it gets shut very quickly.

...sure, I can dream.

1:15 PM

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