Posted on 02/09/2005 10:51:50 AM PST by gopwinsin04
'The United States needs to lose this war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.'
Author Gwynne Dyer explains how we havent grasped that the world has changed, that we aren't living in our old superpower world anymore, one in which we are the leader of the forces of light against the evil dark powers of communism.
Nor are we, in fact, even a military superpower in the way we like to think we are; in reality, our military machine can only be used by weak countries.
As he notes, 'War with a serious opponent would lead to a level of American casualties that the US public would not tolerate for long.
Dr. Dyer was born during World War II and has served in the US Navy as well as Canada and Great Britain's. He has university degrees from all three countries and a Ph.D. in miliary and Middle Eastern history.
(Excerpt) Read more at metrotimes.com ...
It's not just a message. They are doing everything they can to make sure we lose this war.
See his website at:
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/index.html
Here's part of his 2004 wrap column: "And in the Netherlands, the spiritual home of liberal tolerance, something went dreadfully wrong in November. The murder by an Islamist fanatic of radical Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie condemning violence against women in Muslim societies, was a deplorable but isolated event. The subsequent displays of hostility and outright violence both by Dutch-born Muslims and by Christian or post-Christian Dutch who used to preach tolerance were shameful and deeply worrisome -- and the further east you go in Europe, the worse it gets. The continent is still a long way from the Promised Land. ...
The dominant motif in the Middle East during 2004 was the US war in Iraq, from the repeated sieges of Fallujah, Najaf and Karbala to the disgusting images from Abu Ghraib prison, but the single great event was the November death of Yasser Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian aspirations for the past forty years. But it was a measure of the success
of the US-Israeli strategy for rendering him irrelevant that his death actually changed very little in terms of the realities and possibilities of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute."
Note that "jihad" against the infidel is an "isolated event", according to this kook.
It figures, he's got a website!
This guy's Phd must be in liberal propaganda.
Alternative newspaper = communist newspaper.
We have the same thing with the Advocate around here. Total liberal/socialist/communist/anarchist bilge. Now you know why they have to give it away!
Some tidbits from our "friend" Mr. Dyer:
http://www.gwynne-dyer.com/
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Let's%20Attack%20Iran!.txt
"After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States."
Yeah, we should have simply prosecuted them!
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Al-Jazeera.txt
"I think that if al-Jazeera had been there 15 years ago, there would have been no 11 September," said marketing director Ali Mohammad Kamal three months ago. If it is still in business 15 years from now, there will be a lot fewer dictatorships and absolute monarchies in the Arab world.
They are so pro-American, after all!
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20Article_%20%20The%20Divided%20States.txt
"Irreconcilable" is the word that springs to mind. Two separate populations have evolved in the United States, and they are increasingly unhappy even about living together. One sub-species, homo canadiensis, thinks medicare is a good idea, would rather send peace-keepers than bombers, and longs for the wimpy, wispy liberalism enjoyed by their Canadian neighbours to the north. The other breed, homo iraniensis, prefers the full-blooded religious certainties and the militant political slogans - "Death to...(fill in the blank)" - that play such a large and fulfilling part in Iranian public life.
snip
At the global level, everybody else would be quite happy with a bigger Canada and a smaller United States. That smaller US would have to pull in its horns a bit, as it would no longer have the resources to maintain military bases in every single country on the planet, but it would retain enough resources to invade a country every year or so, so it wouldn't suffer too badly from withdrawal symptoms. And the new Canadians would be free to have abortions, enter into gay marriages, do stem-cell research and engage in all other wickednesses that flourish in that bastion of corrupt and Godless liberalism. They could even speak French, if they wanted to.
No sarcasm here.
Here is a howler:
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Waiting%20for%20Iraq.txt
Most Americans don't realise how much the rest of the world opposed their country's invasion of Iraq, because most US mass media shield them from the knowledge. Watching the domestic service of CNN just after the election, I heard three different newsreaders in the same day explain to their American audience that France and Germany had been "cool" to the American attack on Iraq.
Yeah, I was just telling the wife how "shielded" I felt by the MSM re: Iraq.
Finally, this article was printed in the Teheran Times in addition to other outlets:
Democracy and rhetoric
By Gwynne Dyer
Friday, January 28th 2005
"We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy," said Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of of the organisation that calls itself "al-Qaeda in Iraq." Zarqawi is the bogeyman that the US government currently blames for almost everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he does speak essentially the same language as President George W Bush.
For Bush, as for Zarqawi, political principles come from God. In his "God-drenched" inauguration speech (as Ronald Reagan's former speech-writer, Peggy Noonan, described it), President Bush explained that people have inalienable rights because they "bear the image of the Maker of heaven and earth," and that America's mission to spread democracy around the globe comes directly from "the Author of liberty."
Bush speeches are a treasure-trove of innocent fun. His speech-writers took the quote about having "lit a fire in the hearts of men" from Fyodor Dostoevsky, presumably not realising that they were quoting a bunch of terrorists who featured in his novel The Devils, and the "dark corners of the world" phrase pops up in every second Bush speech.
The problem is that George W Bush's belief that Americans basically own the copyright on democracy is widely shared even by Americans who deplore his actions. "Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals," he said in his inauguration speech, and most Americans would probably agree that the United States is not just the "home of the free;" it is the main source of freedom in the world. The US crusade for freedom (aka democracy) is justified, even if it requires cluster-bombs and Guantanamo Bays, because otherwise there will be no freedom.
That is their fundamental mistake. The United States was the first mass democracy in history, but the "Founding Fathers" who carried out that revolution were the heirs of the European enlightenment and of over a hundred years of radical egalitarian thought in England: it was the English Levellers who first declared in 1647 that "all government is in the free consent of the people." And only twelve years after the American Revolution, a far more radical revolution broke out in what was then the biggest nation of the West, France.
America's democratic revolution had a huge impact on the world, but it was both less, and less indispensable, than most Americans suppose.
Democracy was on its way anyway: to European countries first of all (maybe because practically everywhere else was under European imperial rule), but in due course even to the "dark corners of the world." We are living through the final wave of that process in this generation, with non-violent democratic revolutions from Bangkok, Dhaka and Seoul to Berlin, Moscow and Johannesburg, and on to Jakarta, Tbilisi and Kiev. Few of them had American help.
This notion that the United States should "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," as President Bush put it in his inaugural speech, is profoundly misleading, because it suggests that American support for such transformations is essential. It isn't even relevant, in most cases. People have to do it for themselves, and the most helpful thing that Washington could do would be to stop supporting the oppressors.
Most of the world's countries already are democratic, and the exceptions are mainly in the Middle East and Africa, the two regions world where Western military interventions have been most frequent since the end of the colonial era. Indeed, it's striking that within the Middle East, the primary focus of American anxieties about terrorism, the Islamist terrorists come overwhelmingly from countries that have close links with Washington-Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and now Iraq-and not from places like Syria, Libya and Sudan. This is hardly an argument for further US military interventions.
"Liberty" and "freedom" (words President Bush used 42 times in his speech), are American catch-phrases for what other people call democracy: freedom under the law, and under the presumption that we are all equal before the law. That is the great revolution that has swept over the world in the past couple of centuries, and it is not an American gift to mankind.
It's not necessarily God's gift either, unless you are religious. It's just who we are.
Which is why, in an opinion poll carried out in fifteen of the biggest democratic countries in the week of Bush's inauguration, 58 per cent of the 22,000 people polled said that they expected his reelection to have a negative impact on peace and security, as compared to only 26 per cent who thought it would be positive. In Canada, Britain, Australia and South Africa, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, Mexico, Brazil, China, Indonesia and Japan, the story was the same: deep distrust for the Bush administration's policies and motives.
Mind you, 47 per cent of Americans have the same response.
Thanks a lot, Dyer.....
If I was him, I'd go back to the college that gave me the military degree and demand my money back.
Hey! I thought social security was 'guaranteed? Not.
LOL. Thanks for the ping, I needed a laugh. What a maroon.
Because we earned it.
I heard that he and Ward Churchill are dating...:0)
phd?
lemme figure this out. if b.s. means b.s.....
then m.s. must mean more of the same.
i guess phd means 'piled higher and deeper'!
He could be right on this one, tho' I sure hope not. Can you imagine the NYT headlines if we were in a major fight with say China?
And that means exactly what? He's somewhere between 60 and 66 years old now?
I was born during the Berlin Airlift --- that must make me some sort of expert on cargo aircraft.
...and has served in the US Navy as well as Canada and Great Britain's. He has university degrees from all three countries and a Ph.D. in miliary and Middle Eastern history.
Now my BS detector is twitching. He served three hitches in three different navies during peace time (did he renounce any citizenships to do that?) and also garnered degrees in three different countries including a Ph.D. in BOTH Military History and Mid-East history.
This is either very bad writing or someone is pulling someone's leg.
And to give advice to us slack jowled cretins, the Detroit newspaper had to import a Canadian native who now lives in London, England, whose writings are filled with rantings about the "American drive for empire", the "neocons", the "American Hegemony" and all the squalid sewage that usually pours from "enlightened" leftist pens.
Sounds more like Dyer was born during the Spanish-American War. For someone who sounds like he doesn't get out much, he has gotten around.
FYI, he has a website
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/
lives in London. No matter what his background, he's a lot like the guys who predicted that the Japanese were going to finish off the US economy back in the 80s, right before we entered the biggest boom we had in ages and the Japanese went into a real depression.
Perhaps we need to create a list of those singing the "US delenda est" song....
Nope, not 30. The US only has 12 aircraft carriers, CV/CVN (10 nuc and 2 oil-burners) and for budget reasons are considering retiring one of the older oil-burners (the JFK) in this fiscal year.
We also have 12 other ships, LHA/LHD that 'look' like carriers because of their flight deck, however they are just amphibious assault ships. They carry helos and a few Harrier VTOL type attack aircraft.
We had a large Navy under Reagan, it has been shrinking ever since...
dvwjr
Silly Liberals, keep talking, reduce your base to the most narrow of NUT CASE, LUNATIC, Walter Churchill Fringe.
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