jihadwatcher on August 27, 2007 at 9:43 AM

Well said and all true.

However, apart from that bit of common sense, Hitchens is your run-of-the-mill socialist, liberal, atheist, leftist crank, so don’t expect him to champion the virtue of any other American war. If it wasn’t for his cognizance of the incompatibility of islam to liberal orthodoxy, he would be writing for the Huffington Post.

In other words, keep an emotional and intellectual arm’s length from Hitchens.

TheBigOldDog on August 26, 2007 at 10:33 PM

Mark Steyn is great.

The price of winning is always high.
The cost of losing however, is immeasurable.

Mark Steyn: They wait for us to run again

but clearly what he had to say about Vietnam is part of Hitchen’s own past that are hard to reconcile with Hitchen’s current beliefs.

thuja on August 26, 2007 at 4:30 PM

Simple Hitchens is stuck in a worm hole time warp, as his memory travels back in time he becomes a liberal again.

“Sir Winston Churchill: Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.”

What I had in mind was to “write a check” to individual Iraqi “moms and dads” to spend as they like, which would be on food, clothes, living expenses, as opposed to giving it to the “leaders” who would use it for their own purposes including possibly as you said. Of course how it could be done without the leaders getting a lot of it one way or another could be a problem I realize.

MB4 on August 26, 2007 at 5:03 PM

Yes, along the Alaska model, I assume. I don’t think it makes much of a difference, in a tribal culture, whether the distribution is to individuals or to the leaders. There are some logistical differences, but I don’t think they amount to much. In that part of the world, the money always ends up in the same basic place, performing the same basic function.

The people I am talking about threatening are the population, not the leaders. I have no problem with specific threats to tribal leaders and such, but the country will only be moved, en masse, if the people see the future pain they are toying with. Bush is trying to give them individual liberty, already – which I do not believe will work in an islamic arab country (as opposed to Lebanon, where they still have enough Christian arabs to make it possible).

I understand your reluctance to threaten the individual Iraqis, but I do not think there is any other rational way. A pull-out would be, IMO, calamitous for our interests and for the world in general, not because of the pain the Iraqis will endure but because whoever finally took control of the fields would be a powerful and dangerous addition to our enemies, just like the last one was.

So, we disagree on that, but we are both going to be treated to watching a fossilized presence in Iraq for the next while, and there’s no question that Bush would never issue the threat that I call for. But, without it, forward movement is but a remote and unlikely possibility.

What I had in mind was to “write a check” to individual Iraqi “moms and dads” to spend as they like, which would be on food, clothes, living expenses, as opposed to giving it to the “leaders” who would use it for their own purposes including possibly as you said. Of course how it could be done without the leaders getting a lot of it one way or another could be a problem I realize.

I now definitely think that we are about 95% in agreement. You just short version/sum up your position as staying and I just short version/sum up my position as leaving. Well more or less.

MB4 on August 26, 2007 at 4:18 PM

That’s what I figured. Interesting.

I do think however that “taking” the oil fields would be hellaciously bad PR. I can hear the left now, “See we told you it was all about the oil!!! See, see, see!!!”.

Well, I’m only talking about the threat (though I would follow through on it), but there’s no question about the screaming left. Of course, the answer to the “war for oil” argument is quite direct, simple, and reasonable so I welcome that debate. Oil, among other attributes it has, is the lifeblood of the modern world and is something that all serious nations must have first and foremost in their national strategy.

Maybe take the oil and distribute the profits to the Iraqis themselves on an individual basis, although I am not sure how that would work.

But then the Iraqis lose nothing, and the threat becomes a joke. They would just use the oil money to attack us and either blow up the fields or capture them. No, if one is to make a threat, it must be carried out and it must actually hurt. I would use the oil revenues to reimburse for the costs, and for real, this time – but I’m open to other ideas on that. All that’s important about the oil is that whoever takes over Iraq does not benefit from the political power or wealth of the fields AND that the fields are secure, the flow assured and steady, and the price open to true market forces.

Some try to sell a pull-out as a threat to the Iraqis, but that scares no one but the Kurds. One can argue for a US pull-out, but not as a threat, as the dems are trying to do.

I also do not want more of our troops to die as I think that things are going to end up pretty much the same regardless of if we get out in months or years. Right now I think that we are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Well, US troop deaths can be lowered any time by changing the ROE. But I agree with you that we are not implementing any sort of plan that would move the situation forward. Bush is sort of like a deer stuck in the headlights on this one – but so are most Americans.

I am willing to give Bush a little slack on Iraq, at this point, in that Iran is the more important problem over the next year. Because of that I don’t mind a stagnant policy in Iraq, in the meantime. But I have little faith that Bush will handle Iran correctly, seeing how he has let them wage hot war in Iraq without any punishment at all. But, I don’t know what’s in the works, so I’ll wait and see … as I guess I have to, anyway.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.
William Tecumseh Sherman

I do think however that “taking” the oil fields would be hellaciously bad PR. I can hear the left now, “See we told you it was all about the oil!!! See, see, see!!!”. Maybe take the oil and distribute the profits to the Iraqis themselves on an individual basis, although I am not sure how that would work. I also do not want more of our troops to die as I think that things are going to end up pretty much the same regardless of if we get out in months or years. Right now I think that we are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

WOW!!

I could have written 95% of that comment myself. More or less anyway. I only strongly disagree with about 5% of it.

MB4 on August 26, 2007 at 3:13 PM

It is a wondrous world.

The 5% of it that has us staying in Iraq for who knows how long.

I’m not for a long stay in Iraq, as things are. I am 100% against any sort of pull-out or retreat, but I would make some very strong threats to the Iraqis about the duration of our patience. I would warn them that, if they do not get themselves together, we will take the oil fields and the gulf access and leave them with nothing. I would withdraw the troops to the fields and strategic points and leave the Iraqis to battle it out with themselves over the worthless land.

I would stay with the Kurds, since they have been the only trustworthy allies there, and let them have some of the fields to administer (through us, but with the money going to them).

I think that, without real threats such as these, the Iraqis will never get their act together. Everyone, of course, is too civilized to make such threats, since it brings up howls of “war for oil” and other silliness, but this is Behaviorism 101.

That’s how I would move forward with Iraq and how I think we should deal with the Iraqis.

I am very much a believer in the “Best friend, Worst enemy” policy for situations such as Iraq.

Did his IQ get cut by about 90%?

Me thinks that something else is going on.

WOW!!

I could have written 95% of that comment myself. More or less anyway. I only strongly disagree with about 5% of it. The 5% of it that has us staying in Iraq for who knows how long.

Go figure.

Further, the idea that the US needs to stay in Iraq for the sake of the Iraqis is moronic and incorrect. There are many reasons why the US must be in Iraq and why we must make sure that Iraq doesn’t turn back into the threat it was, but none of them have to do with worrying about what Iraqis may do to each other.

Someone needs to remind Bush that only US citizens are the responsibility of the US government. We saw that Bush had no inkling of this basic function of government when he tried to surrender US sovereignty to the hordes, and now we see that he has no clue about this with respect to external US security.

The US is in Iraq to serve our own security interests, not to give gifts to the Iraqis (that they spit back in our face, anyway) and not to save the Iraqis from themselves and their brothers. That is how sovereign nations work.

Bush’s idiotic use of Viet Nam to defend our continued presence in Iraq will go down in history with his “religion of peace” yapping, his attempt to surrender US sovereignty, his refusal to carry out his threats to the UN in the face of that organization’s clear attempt to hurt the US, his refusal to fight wars ruthlessly, …

The possible deaths of poor, Iraqi citizens is not a good enough reason for us to stay in Iraq, and has no part in any debate about US security. There are MANY reasons we need to stay in Iraq and make sure it is defanged, but caring about the Iraqis hacking each other up is not one of them.

I haven’t heard any leftist argue this, merely attempt to obfuscate it and avoid it.

Linebacker II brought the North to the table BECAUSE they no longer had a safe haven from which to conduect operations.

An insurgency HAS to have a safe source of supply or it whithers and dies. In Iraq, that souce is PROOVEN to be Iran… is it time for Linebacker III????

I would bet that if Iran was brought to the table through a massive bombing campaign of military AND Industrial targets, that the violence in Iraq would decrease dramaticly.

May want to rethink that a bit… there were a whole lot of Clinton “freinds” who died around them under mysterious circumstances during their reign… from clearly impossible suicides, to plane crashes in Africa…

I’m only discussing what Hillary has said publicly on the matter. If Maliki dies in a plane crash or a freak accident then I’ll concede you may have been on to something.