Posted on 02/20/2004 7:08:54 AM PST by u-89
That's right. They threaten to hurt you, so you'll give up your freedom. It's not a complicated concept.
I'm starting to see some "conspiracy theory" language at the end of your most recent post. I don't waste my time speaking to people who think the Black Helicopters and Trilateral Commission are the biggest threat to American security...
Oh so predictible response. We start to get near the heart of the issue, so you seek to discredit the opposition by linking it to absurd nonsense.
Why don't you address these without resorting to Rat tactics:
Are there elections for the national government in Saudi Arabia? Yes or No
If there were elections in Saudi Arabia, would the House of Saud stay in power? Yes or No
In the absence of these elections, what nation helps the House of Saud maintain power?
If a foreign nation propped up a government here, would you consider it an act of war?
If such foreign nation were unbeatable on the battle field, what recorse would Americans have to regain self-government?
Answer these (I know you won't) and you'll find the source of the terrorism we suffer. And black helicopters have NOTHING to do with it.
A watered down version was proposed by Clinton after OKC, it was denouced as UnConstitutional by none other than Ashcroft himself, along with many other conservatives. These people just want the proper boot on the proper throat.
I haven't dodged any questions.
No nations, they help themselves. The United States makes deals with them for oil, which is an asset the United States needs.
Those two sentences contradict each other. So, we agree the US makes deals with them for oil. And in return the House of Saud gets military equipment and training, which in turn is the sole reason it retains power at home.
4. Yes
And there you have it. I'm not getting a national ID so we can get oil from Saudi Arabia. And the neo-cons can go pound sand if they think otherwise.
5. They would do whatever possible to regain control, but that would not include strapping bombs to yourself and purposefully blowing up children and other non-combatants.
I'd like to think so as well.
BTW, I greatly appreciate your willing to honestly address the issues in your last post. It's a rare thing around here.
What, you thought you had a real clincher there? I answered the gist of you post in a short but effective manner which caught you off guard. Sorry that from your perspective I didn't meet the big challenge you set up.
> your lack of a serious reply suggests that you may be the "troll"
Come on, that troll bit is soooo weak and soooo over played. If you expect better of me than you'll have to try and do better yourself. You see the war through the two options the propagandist want you to 1) fight continuous preventive wars and remake the entire Islamic culture, accept a high security police state at home or else option #2 - DIE! Didn't it ever occur to you that there could be other ways to look at the situation and other ways to deal with it?
By the way have you read this thread? No End to War. The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.
"No military force on Earth can occupy the United States. You know it, I know it, and most importantly Islamonuts know it. That's why they don't send armies, they send terrorists. Terrorists cannot hold ground, they can only do some quick damage in which they are also killed."You're half there. Have you not yet realized that, while invincible militarily, our military can be rendered impotent and we can easily be defeated politically, and that the Left helps fight that battle on the side our enemies?
And they most certainly can hold ground once we've lost the will to fight.
Even the North Vietnamese were aware that we absolutely would have beaten them militarily, had they not been handed the political victory by us.
Our loss during Clinton in Somalia, a country we were trying to help feed (your "interference") was a political loss, not a military one.
Israel today is losing politically and facing a very real existential threat, while sitting on a vast but impotent military machine.
On the day of his capture, the mastermind of the nightclub bombing in Bali thanked the anti-war protestors in America for their support.
Now there is one way we can be subject to Shari'a Law: we can impose it on ourselves. Why would we do this? Because of the absurd immigration policies neo-cons love so much allow for pretty much anyone to emigrate here and start voting. In the pure democracy we've become, all Sharia's advocates need to do is win a voting majority.Again, I agree with you 100% on this point. Their war is three-pronged: (1)demoralization through dramatic but strategically insignificant terrorist strikes, (2)a political win by mobilizing our own liberals to speak unwittingly in favor of action (or inaction) that favors the terrorists' desired outcome, and (3)a demographic war.
But get real! This immigration policy is most certainly NOT purely a neo-con construction - the groundwork for this sort of open border mindset was laid decades ago BY LIBERALS, the chief architect of which was largely Teddy Kennedy. The minority-group vote-pandering was a game created and mastered by liberals, and now you feign concern that conservatives are playing the game too? Please!
"America will continue to draw terrorism so long as it continues to interfere with other nations"Ah yes, this empty rubric. Total crap. Fact Check: Terrorism grew and flourished and Osama bin Laden found tolerance and encouragement during the laisez-faire foreign policy days of Bill Clinton. Tell me this: what lesson did bin Laden derive from Clinton's non-response to the first WTC attack, the non-response to the bombing of the USS Cole, the non-response to the bombings of our Embassies (having an embassy is "megalomaniacal interference?") in Africa, or the tail-between-the-legs retreat from Somalia?
Need I remind you that 9/11 happened a mere 9 months into Bush's presidency, after having been planned and coordinated as a follow-up to the previous unsuccesful attempt to take down the World Trade Center during Clinton.
Or would you mind telling me exactly which "megalomaniacal foreign policy" of the 9-month-old Bush administration brought on 9/11?
Meanwhile, in complete contravention to your assertions, our "megalomaniacal foreign policy" has induced Libya to renounce its covert nuclear and WMD programs without a shot fired. How do you explain this? Shouldn't our policy have induced them to step-up their efforts and cultivate more terrorism? Why did the exact opposite happen?
Finally, upon what fantasy do you base your belief that the Islamocultists would simply leave us alone if we would just "mind our own business"? Please try to reconcile your opinion with the clear, unequivocal declaration from many top Islamic clerics that their goal is to destroy the US and spread the domination of Islam worldwide.
According to Frum and Perle, “Terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause.... There is no middle way for Americans; it is victory or holocaust.” The terrorist threat is largely equated with the Muslim threat. Protecting Americans from terrorists requires toppling numerous Arab and Muslim regimes and compelling the reformation of much of Islam: “We must discredit and defeat the extremist Islamic ideology that justifies and sustains terrorism.”
Obviously, Bovard has not bothered to do the simplest of research on Islamism. He has not read Bin Laden, the Hadith, or the Koran. If he had, he would understand that the Muslims do wish to subjugate teh world. They are commanded to do so!
The book jacket identifies Frum as the “most influential thinker in the foreign-policy apparatus of the Administration of George W. Bush” and hails Perle as “the intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.” Inside the book, Frum and Perle reveal that people who say neoconservatives have vast influence are anti-Semitic. This is typical of the perverse double standard that pervades The End of Evil.
I think the issue is more those who see a neocon conspiracy to tkae over the government.
This book is impossible to understand without recognizing the neoconservative concept of government. The key to ending evil, from Frum’s and Perle’s perspective, is to greatly increase the power of the federal government both at home and abroad. Government becomes the ultimate force for the good — and distrust of government is the ultimate proof of a lack of sophistication.
That is a problem with neoconservatism. They do not distrust the government. Of course Bovard sees a conspiracy around every corner, ignoring real threats that are ideologically inconvenient for him.
Yet, on this subject, as on every other civil-liberties issue, Frum and Perle offer no explanation of why people opposed the government. The feds sought to sign up an army of people to report almost anything — no clear guidelines were ever issued on what could be considered “suspicious” and worthy of being entered into someone’s federal dossier.
And Bovard doesn't seem to understand that with Islamist cells and a communist fifth column operating in America, we need to track these domestic enemies.
Frum and Perle liked Operation TIPS in part because they believe good Americans must always be ready to “drop a dime” on Muslim neighbors, co-workers, or suspected fellow travelers:
Who exafctly has declared war on America in Bovards view, if not Islamists, who like to hide behind Muslims?
The authors also advocate canceling the tax-exempt status of some American mosques and Muslim nonprofit groups.
Seditious Islamist community centers, religious institutions, or "charities" are real threats. We need tools to dela with them. Bovard does not want to see the enemy, becuase of his ideology.
Frum and Perle also call for a National ID card, including “biometric data, like fingerprints or retinal scans or DNA.” Again, they shrug off any concerns about how such a system could be used to sabotage people’s lives and privacy, asserting, “The victims of executive branch abuse will be able to sue the wrongdoers and collect damages; the victims of a mass terrorist attack will have no such recourse.” This would be hilarious except for the possibility that people who watch Fox News might actually believe such a remedy exists.
1. Bovard seems to forget that between the misues of the Social Security system and other government ID's, we have a bad system now.
2. The contempt for Fox News is right out of the leftist handbook.
Judges have no discretion: they must approve wiretaps based on government agents’ unsubstantiated assertions. And, if past is prologue, there will be little or no oversight of how the FBI is using its new email vacuum.
That is simply false.
But telemarketers do not conduct no-knock raids that leave innocent people dead, and spammers do not conduct mass secret arrests (followed by prison beatings), as did the feds after 9/11.
What prison beatings? The unsibstantiated claims by those who wish to bring down our government?
From the 1992 unconstitutional “shoot to kill” orders that spurred an FBI sniper to slay a mother holding a baby in a cabin door at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to the 1993 tank-and-gas assault on civilians at Waco
That was ATF, not FBI.
Frum and Perle’s domestic recommendations seem almost mellow compared with their foreign-policy prescriptions. They call for a war to the finish with “militant Islam” — which is sometimes identified as “fundamentalist Islam” and sometimes as “extremist Islam.” The terms are never lucidly defined, though it is a sure bet that there is plenty of evil in Islam.
Nice blindness to the threat.
“Where intelligence is uncertain, prudent leaders will inevitably minimize risk by erring on the side of the worst plausible assumption. And rightly so.” In other words, if there is any doubt that a foreign nation might pose a threat to the United States, it would be irresponsible not to bomb that country into submission.
Cute. However, most regimes in the midle east have harbored, aided, and funded anti-American terrorists and many still do so.
Frum and Perle were fiery advocates of going to war with Iraq. Perle famously predicted that the invasion would be a “cake-walk” for American soldiers — no fuss, no muss. There is not even a hint of remorse in this book for the fact that far more Americans have died in attempting to conquer Iraq than Perle promised.
Silly overpromising by armchair generals. However, by historical standards, we are doing very well, with few casualties.
). The Los Angeles Times surveyed hospitals in and around the capital and concluded in mid May 2003 that between 1,700 and 2,700 Iraqi civilians were killed in the battle of Baghdad; more than 8,000 Iraqi civilians were wounded.
An astonishingly low figure for a contensted city, especially where paramilitary units fired from civilian positions.
Nowhere in the book do Frum and Perle even attempt to estimate how many Americans will need to die to fulfill their vision of victory over Islam. This may be tactical on their part, as such numbers would not spur converts to their cause. Or perhaps the authors don’t consider American casualties relevant in the grand scheme of things.
Or maybe because they don't know!?
However, the presumption that such a war either does not exist or is a choice of the US is delusional.
Frum and Perle offer nothing to justify the book’s basic thesis that the United States must choose between “victory or holocaust.” There is no evidence that Islamic governments or movements threaten the survival of America. America’s survival is far more likely to be threatened by launching an endless series of religiously motivated unnecessary wars.
Absoulutely no understanding of the enemy here. The threat is not over the next decade in the US. It is a civilizaitonal problem over the next century. In 50 years, muc of Europe will be Muslim and there will be a large community in the ethnically fragmented US.
Frum and Perle repeatedly urge the U.S. government to intervene to suppress anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic incitements at home or around the world. Yet, if someone wrote about Zionism the way The End of Evil writes about Islam, Frum and Perle would be first in line to accuse the writer of anti-Semitism — and rightly so.
The difference being that Islamists wish to take over the world, while Zionists want a plot of land the size of New Jersey!
Jews wish to be a light unto nations. Muslims desire worldwide control and dhimmitude of Christians and Jews.
Frum and Perle boast, “Now that the U.S. has become the greatest of all great powers in world history, its triumph has shown that freedom is irresistible.” But the more aggressive the U.S. government has become, the less its military triumphs have anything to do with freedom. For Frum and Perle to portray their war on terrorism as a crusade for freedom is a joke — especially since freedom to make money is the only freedom for which they demonstrate consistent enthusiasm.
That is a problem with neocons unmoored without raditionalism.
(The authors, perhaps inspired by the ghost of Richard Nixon, ominously warn, “We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.”)
Earth to Bovard, there were subversive, seditious, and treasonus groups in that era. Many openly worked with the USSR.
Bovard cannot see reality. His fear of government blinds him to actual threats.
The Middle East is a quagmire and no amount of U.S. bombing will turn it into a Garden of Eden.
No, it is desert. We will never be able to fully control it, but we can destroy the real threats and prevent it from unifying against us!
We are far more likely to reduce terrorist attacks on the United States by exiting the quagmire than by tripling or quadrupling military assaults in that region.
Perhaps in the short run. However, we will simply face a larger, emboldened, and united foe in the future.
It is a delusion to assume that the more wars America starts, the more peace and liberty Americans will eventually enjoy.
It is delusional to ignore open threats.
Yes.
And they most certainly can hold ground once we've lost the will to fight.
Hold ground where? Here? The will to fight would be volcanic.
Our loss during Clinton in Somalia, a country we were trying to help feed (your "interference")
That's right it was interference. I'm not their mommy. If we play world's policeman, we'd better not be surpised when someone decides to shoot the sheriff. And when they do my means of terrorism, we'll lose freedom at home. So the choice becomes: Do somalis eat, or do I stay free? I choose the latter. What would somalis do for me? NOTHING.
This immigration policy is most certainly NOT purely a neo-con construction - the groundwork for this sort of open border mindset was laid decades ago BY LIBERALS, the chief architect of which was largely Teddy Kennedy
Both sides have a vested interest in illegal immigration. Cheap labor on the right, a new herd of young workers to prop up the socialist ponzi scheme as the baby boomers invert the population triangle, on the left.
would you mind telling me exactly which "megalomaniacal foreign policy" of the 9-month-old Bush administration brought on 9/11?
America's meddling in the middle east is decades old.
How do you explain this? Shouldn't our policy have induced them to step-up their efforts and cultivate more terrorism? Why did the exact opposite happen?
Who says they aren't? Them? Oh good I feel safer already. Even if one nation is intimidated, it only takes one to attack us. Heck, no nations are needed. Individuals and groups will do it. Are we going to succeed in intimidating everyone forever? That is megalomania.
upon what fantasy do you base your belief that the Islamocultists would simply leave us alone if we would just "mind our own business"?
Why did they pick us to attack, and not others? And our decades long meddling in their affairs had nothing to do with it? You even said if another nation propped up a govt in this country it would be an act of war. Why should they see it any different?
No, it would be like saying we're going to war with someone because they're protecting, arming and training our enemies. Which is precisely the reason for our attacking Taliban and Iraq.
so we do business with vermin...but that's not why we are hated by Islamic extremists.
Right. So we're propping up hated regemes in their homeland, committing some kind of sacrilidge to them for having "infidelels" (our military) in their stinking "holyland". But that's not why they hate us. No, it must be something else. I got it! They hate us for Starbucks coffee!
"cancer analogy"
Terrorism is cancer.
A police state is chemotherapy.
Our foreign policy is a 40 year, 5 pack a day smoking habit.
Not bad analogy.
I'm trying to understand where you are coming from, but you're all over the map.
"Meddling in the middle east for decades". Ok, fine. Sure, we buy their commodity product, which would be utterly useless and worthless if it weren't for Western industrialization and development. But Islam's bloody history and constant state of invasion and warfare with their non-Muslim neighbors predates the discovery or commercialization of petroleum.
You aren't seeing the big picture.
[re.: Somalia] That's right it was interference. I'm not their mommy. If we play world's policeman, we'd better not be surpised when someone decides to shoot the sheriff. And when they do my means of terrorism, we'll lose freedom at home. So the choice becomes: Do somalis eat, or do I stay free? I choose the latter. What would somalis do for me? NOTHING.
I don't disagree. I'm totally fed up with our charity towards our mortal enemies. But it's hard to square this argument with the simultaneous but contradictory argument from the Left that we're somehow causing all the plight in the world and ought to be doing more to help the third world.
"Both sides have a vested interest in illegal immigration. Cheap labor on the right, a new herd of young workers to prop up the socialist ponzi scheme as the baby boomers invert the population triangle, on the left."Spot-on.
"Why did they pick us to attack, and not others?"Red herring. Yes, the strike on the World Trade Center was a strike against America, but it was also a symbolic strike against the perceived heart and soul of Western culture. And the rest of the world has hardly been spared the wrath of Islam. Indonesia. Africa. Saudi Arabia. Turkey. Iraq. Israel. Moscow (who do you think the Chechen "rebels" are?). Kashmir. India. Afghanistan. The demographic/culture war now going on all over Europe.
"Are we going to succeed in intimidating everyone forever?"Who said anything about "intimidating everyone forever"? I'm suggesting that we need to kill enough of them such that they realize and accept that their goal of a global dar al Islam simply ain't gonna happen.
How much trouble are we getting today from Nazi Germany, or the Imperial Japanese?
Lather. Rinse. Repeat as necessary.
I propose we buy oil on the free market by willing sellers. If they don't want to sell it to us, tough luck. Commerce with all, entangling alliances with none.
it was also a symbolic strike against the perceived heart and soul of Western culture.
It was an economic target. Also it was very high profile. Remember the primary purpose of terrorism is to instill fear.
the rest of the world has hardly been spared the wrath of Islam. Indonesia. Africa. Saudi Arabia. Turkey. Iraq. Israel. Moscow
I don't care what happens to those countries, or any others. I care about this country. I agree Islam has an expansionist bent, and they'd like to run the show here. But like I said the only way they can do that is immigration.
How much trouble are we getting today from Nazi Germany, or the Imperial Japanese?
Those were nations, using attrition style wars. The WoT is a new paradigm. Terrorism is a method and cannot be killed. Even if Islam is subdued, if we interfere with other cultures/nations/individuals they'll resort to terrorism.
I propose we buy oil on the free market by willing sellers. If they don't want to sell it to us, tough luck.And this differs from reality how? We're confiscating oil without compensation from whom? OPEC is going to reduce output, and thus raise prices (so much for your free market idea, huh?), and we're going to do what about it, exactly?
"I don't care what happens to those countries, or any others. I care about this country."Then why'd you ask me why they supposedly only chose to attack us? The question implies concern for what's going on in other countries. If you don't care, don't ask the question.
"I agree Islam has an expansionist bent, and they'd like to run the show here."Thank you. Now that wasn't so hard, was it?
"Those were nations, using attrition style wars. The WoT is a new paradigm. Terrorism is a method and cannot be killed. Even if Islam is subdued, if we interfere with other cultures/nations/individuals they'll resort to terrorism."The "WoT" is a term of concession to political correctness. There is no such thing as the War on Terror. But you are right - terrorism is merely a weapon. We didn't fight WWII against Japanese Zeros or German Panzers. We fought against the people who built and operated those weapons.
It's exactly the same thing now, except the liberal-induced coma of political correctness has backed us into a corner where we think we're fighting a weapon, and not the ideology weilding the weapon.
WWII was a war against ideologies also (Nazism was an ideology, Japanese Imperialism was an ideology), and we won.
Simply because Islamists operate outside the conventional constructs of their host nations' governments, an employ unconventional weaponry, does not mean that there is no enemy. They've simply found a strategy, tactic, and weapons system that works against us - but it only works if we let it.
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