Many on the right think President Obama's Oval Office address last night should have credited "the Surge," and they would have preferred thanks to his predecessor for taking and implementing a decision that Senator Obama and others fiercely criticized. The left would have preferred a more ringing indictment of the Bush Administration, and a "never again" promise. The war's strongest supporters will, with notable exceptions, remain convinced that going to war was the right decision, that its positive effects are under-appreciated, and that the unknowable alternative history would likely have been at least as violent, and more difficult to influence. The war's strongest critics will remain convinced that going to war was undeniably the wrong decision, that any positive effects could have been achieved or even outbid by other means, and that the unknowable alternative history might have been much less violent and expensive, and have allowed America to retain much greater influence and freedom of action. No one knows for sure where actual history is leading, but everyone is prepared to blame someone else if things go poorly, and all will feel fully justified in their own eyes.
The President chose to let left and right cancel each other out:
As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.
It was his demeanor, called "half-hearted and detached" by one as-ever implacable critic, that expressed and may have resonated with a broader public sense of exhaustion regarding the whole subject. He seemed to be saying, "We're working hard to make the whole thing as boring and forgettable as possible." He did not promise "never again," possibly because he is not in a position to keep such a promise, otherwise because for the foreseeable future an Iraq Syndrome ought to handle the matter anyway. With 50,000 troops still in Iraq and in a re-negotiable position, with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan - and still an angry, self-righteous, globally committed, and incredibly well-armed nation - the U.S. will remain involved in wars and warfare, but we are, for now, exceedingly unlikely to undertake a new major military expedition except as a true last resort, and we are even less likely, next time, to assume an ability to change regimes and contain aftermaths. The experience of the '00s has erased the imperial hubris inherited from the '90s on both economic and military fronts. Call it our intellectual war dividend: Revolutions, we now recall, are not always, or even usually, velvet ones. Wars, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, end more quickly and at less cost than predicted. And, incidentally, incomes, revenues, and stock and property prices, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, rise continuously. In this sense Iraq was just one self-chastening among others.
My personal view remains that we were destined to become deeply, bloodily, and expensively engaged in and around Iraq: Too much unfinished business, too much political, economic, and moral involvement. Following 9/11,with both our fear and our blood still high, our confidence boosted by a seemingly easy victory in Afghanistan, we chose to act rather than react, to pre-empt rather than retaliate, to take the dice in our own hands rather than bet on someone else's throw. To indulge for a moment in a-what-might-have-been, if we had not acted when we did, then, sooner or later, by whatever concatenation of collapses or aggressions, we would have found ourselves on propinquitous ground, sea, and air taking and giving heavy fire anyway. The world economic and political system or "order" that we uphold and depend upon is itself too dependent on what flows out of the geographical Gulf for us to abide indefinitely all of those other gulfs: the gulf in our knowledge, troubling gaps in our sense of control and predictability, the increasingly intolerable moral chasm in our then existent policy. Nature abhors a gulf of gulfs, and "if we knew then what we know now" is a vain exercise, since we never would have learned what we now know except by having acted, suffered, and desperately fought to rescue ourselves. Compare what our armed forces, the political class, and the interested public now have learned about Iraq and environs, and all related issues, as compared to what we generally knew in the year 2000. Operation Iraqi Freedom was as much an exploratory expedition as a "real war" - for the country - if too real for our carefully counted soldiers and much less carefully counted budget.
As for the Iraqis, it is an index of our former naivete, insuperable except by experience, that we hoped to "give" them freedom, and, through their happy example, to spread it to the rest of the Arab and eventually the Islamic world. We simply allowed ourselves to forget what our own history would have taught us, if only anyone ever learned from history. Maybe deep down we remembered, but put it out of our minds -choosing to believe (not all of us, but easily enough of us) what we needed to believe. You can say we chose to trick ourselves into acting, and, even though we saw the bucket of water placed strategically above the partly open door, we decided to blunder forward anyway. Except the bucket was full of blood, and most of it Iraqi, the critics will say - and they are right. Yet can anyone with much knowledge of the history of the region pretend that the violence and destruction would likely have been avoided for very long? That they weren't bleeding out month by month already - with an ever-present option on the next catastrophe, against a background of misery and despair? That goes for the violence and destruction of the first liberation, the liberation from Saddam - it had to come someday; it goes for the violence and destruction of the second liberation - from foreign masters and would-be masters, including but not limited to us; it goes for the violence and destruction of the third liberation, from the "thousand Saddams" that now compete in Iraq for position.
By intervening as we did and how we did, we helped set the timetable of revolutionary violence and put ourselves in place to absorb and channel it, but it may be another form of hubris to assume anything more. Here is the simple summary that the President supplied, using terms that his predecessor might just as well have used, putting a hopeful emphasis on how Americans enabled Iraqis to take their fate into their own hands:
The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians – and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people – Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.
The difficulty for Americans, especially for onetime proponents of the war like myself who hoped for a simpler, smoother, and much less costly transition - though who had been willing to contemplate a much costlier initial battle - was coming to understand why the Iraqis themselves were so resistant to seizing that historical opportunity and acting in their own collective interests.
So here is what I think we have re-learned, and had to re-learn: Prior to "Operation Iraqi Freedom," as the name emphasizes, the Iraqis were un-free. They were unprepared and perhaps unwilling to enter history as free human beings, and, though we removed one seemingly insuperable obstacle, the terror regime, we could not relieve them of the struggle that alone gives meaning and, potentially, durability to freedom. Without us, the Iraqis might have put off a new effort of self-liberation for many years. They might never have gone the final distance as a people (or set of captured peoples), but such a description ignores the extent to which they were held back and hemmed in, trapped by history at the cradle of civilization, at the crossroads of the world, on an ocean of oil, and at the same time pushed forward by larger forces - the same ones that gave Saddam his weapons and his dreams, the same ones that enslaved the Iraqis together in a "republic of fear," the same ones that made the world so interested.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" could therefore only have ever meant a willed confrontation with catastrophe. We can take this knowledge with us on the next "operation," and there will very likely be a next one, different because of our additional knowledge and our new cautions, but sooner or later on the same terms.
On “In a world of their own: Conservatives and Avatar”
Come on, if they wanted a little more verisimilute they would have at least one terrorist, somewhere inthe screenplay, the only Middle East
looking fellow, is an Agency mercenary. Everybody involved except Landry and Julia Stile's NSA clerk, is deemed the villain.
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Well the Alliance in Firefly, is at least half Chinese, I know few people saw it . Australia is the closest to the US, specially the Texas vision of same, so it would serve as a good standin. The Bourne films turned the
character of David Abbot, the circumspect CIA man, into the malevolent Ward Abbot, who sends Jason off to kill anyone he pleases
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Helicopter gunships in formation, instead of the dropships of Aliens and even Star Ship Troopers, is clearly a Vietnam touch, right out of Apocalypse Now's Wagnerian interlude
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If not for the Haditha witchhunt, and the media pileon on shows from Crossing Jordan, to Boston Legal, where the marines were portrayed
as blood thirsty savages, I'd agree with you. Rambo was in 1984, or else how could Reagan have commented on it, for his reelection, Not too mention the films, like Redacted which wasn't strictly about the Army. The facts are the enemy is more like the Predators or the Face
huggers, than the noble Naa'vi
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Shouldn't have clicked on that link, Maybe James the people in WTC #1, and#2, and the Pentagon, have a little understanding of what happens when missiles hit targets on our shore. Maybe the Marine Corps spokesman is also misinformed about the film, Honestly I'm checking for the Ceti Alpha 6 slugs
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No, the Template is Vietnam, Quaritsch is Kilgore, the irony is Lang often plays abusing husbands and other criminals, on shows going back to 20 years to Surnow's the Equalizer
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Dyer, rather succincty brought up all the arguments I've been making, and in a much more organized, and even elegant. Look Avatar, is where you have chosen to stake your ground, as I have on other subjects. The Unit featured an avuncular Bill Macy as the President, on the one instance which they chose to show case him, it did drift into moonbat land, for a while in the last season (Haney, the former Delta Sargeant, the real life version of Sully, is quite a lefty). McGovern, has proven to the touchstone of hypocritical Senators like Edwards, Biden, and Clinton, give me someone who had real objections, like Gravel and Morse, over someone who had
his innocence stolen. The abbatoir that was Cambodia, hasn't
awakened any rethinking in him, as he pushed us to abandon Iraq and cease and desist in Afghanistan today, as he would in Yemen
tomorrow.
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One could make the parallel to Kipling's Kim O'Hara, the young lad raised in the Lahore Cantonment, trained as a spy among the NorthWest Frontier, but who ultimately goes native.
But we're not talking about fact, but meme and subtext, and seeing
as Cameron started on this enterprise in 1994, the great Jungle Quagmire was what beckoned as did Lucas a generation earlier.
Now ironically for such a successful film, the script pens them into
a box, what to do for an encore
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@CKMcLeod. Avatar is not about Iraq, it's about Vietnam, the original left bugaboo, Jake Sully is Willard, Quaritsch is Col. Kilgore, or as both
Kerry and Kerrey biographer, paint it Navy Capt. Hoffman. In this he shares the utopian delusions of Lucas, whose set piece battles Yavin,
Endor and going back further, (Kashyssk and Naboo) occur against
arboreal or jungle landscapes
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Well I didn't ask for it, I don't mind it, except when strangelet, shows up with the same one. Now the irony of a 400 million dollar tribute to an anti technology mindset, is often not widely remarked on, well until now.
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Was that Avatar, get it, randomly assigned like the zombie crowd one
I got. I posted some of my other comments on the wall.. Considering
that there is a whole host of dystopianism on offer in scifi, like the Book of Eli, and the latest vampire allegory film, thank heaven for small favors
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That's not the wierdest thing, I saw Nader, on a connecting tunnel between hotels in Vegas, must have been a book tour or something.
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@Ck , no for the love of the creatures of that trench in the Abyss, don't
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Because it seems an easy move, rather than challenge the current mishapen policy consensus, with some achievable steps, it is necessary to advocate strategems that even a dictator would have
trouble implementing. Rather than agreeing with certain premises
that are so obvious that they seem evident, it is easy to denigrate.
I get a little loquacious here, partially because I got tired of Allah's
jibes and an inability to respond.
Now I get angry at "Frogman Henry" at times, but he really doesn't know any better, he just forwards whatever meme the Daily Show
has put forth today. I get more peeved at Mr. Carruthers, when he
presents rather flimsy premises, because I expect more from him. (ie; neocon doesn't mean anything you don't agree with) Avatar is yet another example of the left seizing 'the commanding heights'
of the culture, something I thought had subsided for a bit. And we needed that about as much as another 'Inconvenient Truth'
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I guess they were going for a "Three Days of the Condor" redux feel, but they did lose the point of the books, David Webb, chose to become
Jason Bourne to fight a greater evil, Carlos the Jackal. Imagine if they had really updated that aspect, there is evil in the world, Awlaki being
the most recent example, and handwringing won't get the job done. I'm still a fan of '24, which plays of these same memes more effectively. copying Surnows' original vision from La Femme Nikita, of the elusive covert department with shadowy allegiances
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Now, honestly you don't think that putting up Black Briar in a Manhattan Sunrise, is highly subjective, remember that Capt. David Webb probably signed up slightly before 9/11 for this program, the fact that hooding and sensory deprivation is part of the training regime.
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I was a big Ludlum reader in the 80s and 90s, I found out about Tienanmen Square, in the real Bourne Supremacy, set in China, yes his manichean view is not all that far removed from Cameron's, most of his characters are betrayed former military or intelligence official, who uncover the big conspiracies, from Nazi takeovers to variations on Seven Days in May. I don't think that Greenglass really brought that
aspect to light enough
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Don't diss the Stache, Michigan J, what have we won with the Kumbaya routine. Terrorists seem to have gotten the crazy notion they can target our military bases, our intelligence outpost with impunity, which I wish I could refute. The Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians, are all imposing demands on us. We insult our allies, and we embrace our foes. We bring the terrorists one step closer to total
freedom, and we put a muzzle over our most diligent operatives.
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Now, back to the Bournw series, are you going to tell me that script wasn't decanted out of the Huff Po and Kos, or whatever British equivalent there is, making the point that our security services, typified
by "Black Briar" are the real threat. Why I the only who cheered when
the Guardian reporter was targeted by the sniper. One wishes our surveillance systems were anywhere as advanced as that posited in the film, clearly they are nowhere close
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No, she was captured by Foggy Bottom, which is an almost regretable certainty. That's why we need a real nationalist like a Bolton in that slot. I had great admiration for Jeane Kirkpatrick's insights on Latin America, she gave the left conniption fits as well. They have favored
Carter, Clinton, & Obama, not the greatest indications of insight, you will admit. Who do you think is an unabashed exponent of America's interests adn values, and don't say Ron Paul
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One understand the company that sponsors this expedition, as a variant of Weyland Yutani, so callous as to let an alien organism fall into their hands with total disregard to the crew, I get that. Now making them a predominantly military effort, is meant to touch into the well of hatred for PMCs, who are villains from CSI Miami to Moonlight. Now are we not to infer, that the settler enterprise was a bad idea
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It is however, a very real place, where the ruling class wants to return
the hoi polloi, who have risen above their station, to a 17th century
preindustrial state, with the likes of cap n trade, and climate control
garbage, they have loathed the mobility symbolized by the suburbs
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She's the gunslinger, the huntress, or as the Russians call her the Akhanitsa, the last real populist not affected with the rot characterized by Bryan and Watson, a character out of Jack London,
we are not supposed to rally to someone who somewhat of a throwback, not the plastic politicians, and bureaucrats of today
On “Tales from the Geopolitical Crypt: Seven Deadly Scenarios by Andrew Krepinevich”
Well there was that attempted coup, revealed in " The last mission", that was prevented because a trusted confidant hid the record with the message
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This was the initial meeting that laid out the particulars of how and wjhere the bomb would
be used:
http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html
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