Keeping it short

[unixronin]

Two good articles in Iraq, by Tony Blankley and by Thomas Friedman.

Best quote (from Blankley):

"Fighting and winning always impress.  Even merely fighting and persisting impress.  Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general.  He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there.  They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States.  What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?"

Comments

[smandal.livejournal.com]

You know where American gumption would have been useful? Afghanistan.

Blankley is such a tool ...

[ossuarian.livejournal.com]

You know, convincing the rest of the world that we are out of our fucking minds is something that we, as Americans, have always been really good at. Surely we could have done that in a way that didn't cost 500 billion dollars and make Saddam Hussein look like a great humanitarian.

Here's an idea. We have a reality show. Citizens chosen at random are made to dance with a variety of primate, chosen at random (pity the bastard that pick baboons). Every week, one contestant is chosen by viewer phone poll to be thrown into the Pacific with a trebuchet.

I know, it sounds Japanese, but if the Japanese suddenly had five times the land mass, twice the population and an army, we'd be shitting ourselves. History bears me out on this one.

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

If you think anything we've done in Iraq makes 'Saddam Hussein look like a great humanitarian', there's a ship leaving your planet and headed for Earth any day now.

[ossuarian.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty outrageous thing to say. It's a hyperbole. I just Googled it, and he executed 600,000 civilians. 500,000 died in the war with Iran. That's just over a million people in five years. It's really hard to imagine what could be worse.

Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths since the U.S. occupation are between 500,000 and one million in five years. So the U.S. occupation and its failure to keep order is killing people somewhere between two and four times as fast as Saddam Hussein.

You yourself called Iraq "the smoothest reconstruction since Berlin after World War II". I try to remind myself that you're just trying to get under the skin of your liberal peers, and you're just paraphrasing what you read in Fark.

In Baghdad,they bolt manhole covers to the ground so it's tougher to dump dead bodies into them so the sewer won't get choked. We did that.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

We could have nuked Afghanistan on 9/12. I'm pretty sure we could have named a dozen really solid, actual, AQ training camps. And using The Bomb would have shown that we were Really Serious. Small tactical yield nuclear weapons are even pretty clean, these days. (Yes, it's comparing old diesel busses to new diesel busses, but still.)

The message would have been "Do not fuck with America, because when she gets punch drunk, she pulls out the straight razor."

If we were so desperate to spread democracy and overthrow a crusty, tyrannical dictator, we could have just invaded Cuba. They probably would have actually "greeted us as liberators" and thrown flowers instead of grenades.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

Well, of course. I've appreciated the value of sheer pugnacity ever since I saw a hummingbird chase two swallows, either of which was easily three times its size, up a creek. But it doesn't always work, and it comes at a price. The USSR's pugnacity in Afghanistan only hastened the fall of the Soviet Union.

If we waste our resources on ill-advised demonstrations of pugnacity where we have no perceptible strategic interest, what will we be able to do when our strategic interests really are threatened?

p.s.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

And of course pugnacity can be exploited. An age-old strategy is to continually irritate a regime with operations that are, each by itself, inconsequential, but like a swarm of mosquitoes eventually bring it to a crisis, simply because it refuses to (or cannot) stop swatting.