Thank you, you're a solid debater yourself, and it's difficult coming up with things to refute some of your points. But I'm still going to try! :)
However, I also think war is as much political as force, in that force needs to be applied in relationship to the political calculations regarding what the population is willing to accept. (not sure I said that very well, I may have to come back to it)
Well, you might want to take that opportunity. I don't believe there is a political solution of any sort here, we are asking a multicultural Mideastern nation to deal with something it hasn't even earned. All of the current successful democracies in the world have fought tyranny to get them, learning important lessons in the process. We can no more hand the Iraqis freedom than we can hand a six-year old the keys to an automobile. In the 1300 year old history of Islam, there has only been one successful political nation-state that has not involved monarchy or dictatorship, and that is Turkey.
Turkey had their own George Washington in the form of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who strengthened that nation by his rejection of the caliphate, and turning his people towards Europe without fully emulating the fascism of Germany, Italy, and Russia.
Turkey faces being swept back into the grip of Islamic fundamentalism today, because statesmen have to be rediscovered at least once per generation for a country to retain its path to greatness. In Iraq, only the strongman represents stability to these people, whether its a caliph, a dictator, or a monarch. There's no George Washington there, not even a Millard Fillmore.
Right now, it looks like we’re finally having success. What is even more promising is that Iraqi forces took the lead in Basra. Considering Iraqi armed forces were built from scratch, this is an excellent first step.
I remember all the reports of 'success' coming out of our commanders in Vietnam, too. But in the end, it was all number shuffling without meaning. Iraqi troops might have been 'taking the lead', as you put it, but I think its more likely that they were just engaging in more sectarian violence under cover of a uniform. There is a huge danger in each new potentially democratic state that the electoral victors will just simply use the mechanisms of government to silence or eliminate their cultural opposition.
So, only time will tell. My time limit is 4 years and I think McCain knows enough to allow the people on the ground to make decisions.
I don't think McCain gets four years, even if he wins. Should he be the one taking the oath of office, it will not be because he's loved and admired, but because the alternative of Hillary or Obama looked so much worse to enough people in about five or six swing states. If he cannot bring substantial amounts of troops home in eighteen months, he risks the Rats coming up with enormous margins in Congress. They haven't been able to shoot straight since the 2006 elections, because they were trying hard not to cripple Hillary when she was the presumptive nominee, but if McCain is President, they'll go full tilt on cutting off war funding. If McCain goes into the election looking like a BIG eventual winner then there will be the tendency of many voters to send him there with an even more Democrat Congress to balance him out.
I think Senator Clinton or Obama would try to run the war out of the White House. We already know what happens when wars are micromanaged by presidents.
Who's to say that the 'compassionate conservative' President we already have has not done this? And if it was our present set of military leaders that has taken this long to pacify a technologically backwards enemy, why have faith in them to get us through the next few years under McCain?
Young Americans signed up in record numbers after 9/11. They really believed that their President would empower them to defeat islammunism, by stamping out the will of the enemy to fight, even if that meant wiping out the enemy. Now, they are the leading opposition to the war, many of them listening to the siren song of Obama, who really looks like a middle-aged guy to them. I saw America transformed from a state where even Democrats had to get tough on communism (Kennedy's Bay of Pigs was ill-conceived, but it meant well) to a nation where even the most bitter commie fighter of the postwar era went to make detente with the most notorious Communist states.
Our poor prosecution of this war, and the wasting of the power the American people invested in the President to fight it, has guaranteed that we will have a liberal in office for the next four years. I advocate that like with Jimmy Carter, the very worst liberal be in there, so the American people will be more able to wake back up again. When I say, "Sometimes you've got to go through a Jimmy Carter to get a Ronald Reagan," what I mean is that the American people need to see the extreme of where they've been drifting, in order to pull away from the rocks along the shore. It is those dangerous times that bring out the statesmen from the ranks of the American people, and that's who we're going to need in 2012.
Four years of John McCain is not going to give us that. All it's going to give us is the horrible time we got from 1969-1976, when we saw a Republican president continue to fiddle with an unwinnable war, muck up the free market with wage and price controls, expand welfare with the earned income credit, cripple the economy with the EPA, guarantee the profitability of drug trafficking with the DEA, push racial harmony back decades with support for forced busing and reverse discrimination, and strengthen the central government through 'revenue sharing' with its attendant strings. Republicans suffered in the 1970 elections, and even though Nixon won re-election, it was only because the Democrats nominated a truly stupid man, and Nixon felt he needed to cheat, anyway.
Would Humphrey really have been that bad? If we had taken Congress back in 1970, we could have avoided the disaster that was Jimmy Carter, and HHH's ties to LBJ and the war would have left him with the blame for the bug-out that would have happened in the early Seventies rather than the middle of that decade. Half the liberals minted during that time would have never been created, there would have been no Republican responsibility for losing Vietnam, and there would have been no Watergate. We might have even gotten Reagan in 1972 or 1976, before much of the damage of the Seventies had been done.
Thanks for the compliment. It’s nice to actually debate something. While we may not change each other’s mind, we’ll at least be able to hone our arguments and get an alternative point of view.
I tend to agree with you on the “Jimmy Carter to get to Ronald Reagan” theory.
My disagreement is whether or not we should let it happen now or in 4 years.
My position is McCain now, consequences later as I think we’re finally seeing some progress in Iraq. I do agree, things have to be a lot better in the next year and a half or the troops have to come home.
I’ll have to leave your Turkey of an argument (haha) for later, because that’s a good point. I’d forgotten about Ataturk. (It’s obvious you’re not a liberal, because you actually pay attention to history and are able to draw conclusions from it) I’m only leaving it for later, as I’m just having my morning coffee and need to get ready for work.
Keep it up, this is one of the few debates I’ve had that didn’t devolve into “you’re just a big poopy head and mean, too.”
Quite a few years ago, George Will wrote an op-ed (It was in the back of a news magazine, US News I think) where he mentioned that he thought the Middle East was a mess and the best you can do with a mess is contain it.
This article was prior to 9/11.
My thinking is that 9/11 proved the mess wasn’t contained and a different approach is needed. Hence the invasion of Iraq.
I mention this as a prelude to getting back to your Ataturk argument, in that someone has to step up and be the personality that leads a country forward.
I seem to vaguely remember that Ataturk was educated by the British. I suspect this education helped when it came time for someone to step up and lead Turkey away from an oppressive theocratic form of government.
However, I would also argue that Ataturk was in the right place at the right time. He was able to accomplish great things for Turkey, but only because conditions were right at the time.
With Iraq, I think the conditions are being created for someone like an Ataturk to step up. Is there someone who can take advantage to lead Iraq forward? Only time will tell.
I think a lot of people need to consider, with this election, is judges. I think McCain will nominate conservative judges. The impact of judicial activist judges cannot be understated.