Jeff

Jeff

What kind of odds are you willing to lay on that bet?…It would be up to our descendents to pay and collect:)

Jeff

From a military standpoint, our Iraq venture has been excellent. While I’m not a fan of any war, this war has been rather painless as far as casualities are concerned. We fought single battles in the Civil War, WW1, amd WW2 that had casualities that far exceeded those in our 5 years in Iraq.

War is a horrible thing, and I don’t like any war. I’m not especially hawkish, but have enough geopolitical knowledge to understand the why’s and where’s of this conflict.

Murtha even agrees that the surge is working. He did backtrack from his statement after Pelosi blew a fuse.

Jeff

My only hope at this point is that the next few presidents don’t make Dubya look good by comparison.

I, myself have no problem with that. I prefer to find common ground with what the left and right actually agrees on…that’s a good first step. Everything else can be negotiated, debated, and analyzed at a later date. A consensus can be built that’s acceptable to both sides. We just have to get over the destructive issues of hate, on both sides. I used to get sick of hearing what a lying sack of shit that Clinton was. He was a lying sack of shit, and had character flaws that were too many to mention. He was also an OK president and deserves respect for that.

History will treat GWB in a more favorable light than the roughshod treatment he’s getting right now.

Jeff

Jeff

No doubt our excellent Iraq venture made them think twice about continuing down the nuclear-weapons route too, as you mentioned.

I’m actually willing to entertain this thesis – and if you look at my analysis above I explicitly note that Bush COULD have claimed victory on these very grounds.

However, our ability to believe much of what Bush says here is challenged. For instance, have a look at this. You might not like the source, but they’re pretty much comparing what people said and looking at timelines.

And if you have a look at the piece I just posted you’ll hopefully conclude that I’m not in the business of letting Dems off the hook, whatever I may think about the GOP at this point in time.

First of all, I don’t think diplomacy had much to do with the Iranians scrapping their nuclear program. I think the military action we took in Iraq gave the Iranians pause to revisit their their programs. Iran didn’t abandon their nuclear program due to economics. Iran’s economy was in decent shape in 2003, interest rates were low, borrowing was at a sustainable rate, and their economic growth was starting to improve. Libya abandoned their nuclear program at roughly the same time, if the NIE is to be believed. Both countries abandoning their programs were a direct consequence of our military action in Iraq. Bush’s policies in the Mideast actually worked in this case. The Iranians didn’t want to suffer the fate of the Iraqis, especially aftered we labeled them part of the “Axis of Evil.”

As for the NIE, I still have to take it with a grain of salt….Didn’t NIE’s previously say that Saddam still have WMD’s?

As for the intelligence community, I think that it has systematically released things during Bush’s administration specifically to embarrass him. I find it amazing to see that the left is embracing this NIE which embarrasses the current administration, yet they chose to disbelieve other NIE’s in the past. I guess that the left gets to pick and choose, whatever suits their agenda.

As for the lying part of the administration, I don’t know if you could call that a lie, as an NIE is still just an estimate. Perhaps they didn’t know that Iran had abandoned their program, as they certainly were adding more high speed centrifuges over the past six months, and they’ve been purchasing hexafluorides on the world market in vast quantities over the past couple of years. Perhaps we need to consider the fact that this NIE could be wrong.

Jeff

I’m actually not so shocked about the NIE itself, because the idea of the Bush administration deliberately lying about the facts to pursue its agenda is beyond commonplace now. It’s routine. These fuckers lie like a throw rug. It’s all they know how to do, ever.

I can see this, except that it requires them to admit that they’ve been covering the truth up for some time. If they try and claim they didn’t KNOW about the report I’m going to want to know who precisely is being fired for keeping such important info a secret FROM THE GODDAMNED PRESIDENT.

I’m glad I’m Dana Perino today. Because I can’t think of an airtight way to spin this one, given the info before me at the moment.

The military has made it loud and clear lately that they are under-manned and under-supplied and that they could not respond to another crisis should one erupt. Contrast that against Bush’s noise-making about possible war with Iran.

Now suddenly we have a very convenient “out” for the administration that lets them stand down on the war talk (since the army says “We can’t fight another one right now”)–yet it still sounds grave enough that the war talk was justified.

Take heart, though. There’s always somebody to bomb. But we need more than the wisp of a pretext.