NEWS: The Real Iraqi Election Fallout

Michael,

Who, besides Christopher Hitchens, gives a fuck what Kissinger thinks about anything? He doesn't speak for geopolitical realists. In fact, he barely speaks at all anymore. Being implicated in illegal loans and arms sales to Iraq might make his opinions sound...a bit hollow.

Plenty of realists, like Brzezinski, launched their careers by criticizing Kissinger's policies. Now they criticize Bush's. Even neo-cons like Fukuyama think Iraq is giving regime change a bad name.

But in foreign policy, you're either a Kissinger-loving apparatchik, or you're all about the Iraq war. Right?

Despite their chest thumping, credulous hawks like you are still a minority in the foreign policy establishment. And despite recent back-patting, y'all still haven't explained how exactly "voting" is going to prevent Iraq from electing itself a Shiite dominated theocracy.

Actually, you sort of did.

"If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power."

How exactly are "we," that is you and Hitch, going to stop them?

Yes. I see far too many people - American, and British, and others - who have the stupid delusion that because their enemies are bad people, that they themselves are good people.
The frightening thing is, they probably were, once. Positive feedback loops....


[Edited on Feb 11, 2005 by waldo]

There's always been a revolving-door policy on the reasons given for the Invasion Of Iraq...First it was about retribution for 9/11...then it was about Destroying Terrorism...then it was WMDs, and National Safety...and then it was about freeing the Iragi citizens from a tyrant..and now it's about spreading Freedom and democracy.

And each time they change their focus, they pretend that it was the focus all along. And the majority of Americans swallow it.

BTW, Michael.

You kind of forgot to mention how Kissinger supports the Iraqi invasion.

Sure wiping the floor with that ol' realpolitik ain't we.





[Edited on Feb 11, 2005 by Pav]

You misunderstand what I meant. To paraphrase Thomas Friedman: there was the right reason, the moral reason, the real reason, and the stated reason.

WMD was the stated reason.

Maybe he supported it because the world situation is much different than it was in the early 70's. Most saliently, there's no more Soviet Union. Unless you believe a man must intellectually adhere fast to position and hold it the rest of his life despite any changes in the world, your point is pretty fucking inane.

I'm sorry. I missed the part where Kissinger "changed his mind." He was a cynical war mongering opportunist and still is. Only now, like it or not, he's *your* cynical war mongering opportunist.

Michael's smearing of realism by calling it "Kissingerism" falls comically flat on its face. The entire stated goal of realpolitik has always been to shuffle power relations in order to keep us out of war. Kissinger was a failure at this, and continues to be.

...I think you can imagine where I'd go with this, so please do. It's easier.

Keywords: "Kerry" and "Bush".

There's a difference between adjusting your views to fit the structural change in geopolitics, and the expedient changing of your position every five minutes in order to please whatever audience you happen to be in front of today.

[Edited on Feb 11, 2005 by stockula]

There are several problems here:

1)Your claim that the invasion, for the Bush administration, "Wasn't about WMD" is, at best, a half-truth and more likely to be flagrantly false. Not only did the Bush Administration justify the invasion in these terms, but the way they fought the war (not brining in enough troops to maintain order, underfunding the resconstruction, importing Heritige Foundation hacks with no relevant skills to do crucial work) makes clear that democracy wasn't a major goal. There are sincere neocons, like Wolfowitz, in the administration, but he obviously has less influence that people like Rumsfeld and Cheney. This can be seen if you look at Bush foreign policy as a whole; I'm not sure what the Bermaneque angle is in cudding up to Karimov, say. (Where I come from, boiling dissidents alive just isn't compatible with democracy.) These policies may be defensible in some cases, but there's no consistent support of democratic values here. People would be less likely to assume you're a Republican if you didn't consistently attribute your policy preferences to Bush despite a paucity of evidence that he actually shares them.

2)Your claim that democratic states in the middle east would be more pro-U.S. is also obviously wrong in many cases. Democratic states in Egypt and Saudi Arabia would, of course, be far more hostile to the U.S. (and Israel) than the current (strongly Bush-supported) dictatorships. And while the new Iraq can't really get any worse, it's unlikely to be either a liberal democracy or pro-American.

3)While Iraq was anti-U.S., it also posed no threat to the U.S. whatsoever. If we invaded Iraq for security (as opposed to humitarian) reasons, the invasion was absolutely indefensible.

"Adopting a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi ... and offers facilities to citizens to build homes."

Good luck to them!! That seems to me to be a very admirable goal and I hope that things work out for them.

nicely done.

michael?

Actually, Bush did want elections in the first place. It was always a part of the plan for reconstruction - which despite the White House's best attempts to the contrary - was never clearly stated. Where did smithers_jones get his info?!?

Oh...right. Nowhere, probably. Just another rapid-fire ill-researched opinion from the misinformed masses.

your position is indeed friedmanesque. (i've followed his position pretty closely, and, though i don't agree with him, i find him more consistent and coherent than the administration's policymakers.)

but his argument crucially depends on buying the notion that if the "right," "real," and "moral" reasons had been explicitly presented to americans or to the world community after 9/11 and before the war, only a minority would have supported the war, and that we could only gain support for the invasion by using the more alarmist "stated reason" of WMDs, almost certainly knowing that most of the important details were false. (in everyday life, statements like these are known as lies, even if they are made with good intentions.)

why should this be so? if the "bush doctrine" as it applies to iraq is indeed "right," "real," and "moral," why did the administration have so little faith in its persuasive power, both domestically and internationally, as a call to arms?

[Edited on Feb 12, 2005 by in_a_blue_state]

I would imagine you would think it would be worse if we wound up with an Islamic Republic of Iraq -- i.e. a similar state to the one next door called the Islamic Republic of Iran. It's not a highly probability outcome, but it could happen.

I think though that the point was that it's quite possible that whatever state emerges could be pro-Iran, anti-American, anti-Israeli, quasi-socialist, seriously nationalistic (after all we seem to be content with the re-ba'thification of the government to a large extent) in a way that has a big impact on the oil output... there are any number of ways that the election could, and probably will, result in a government hostile to at least some of the interests of the US.

And we'll see how awesome the blue fingered republicans think the election is after those things start happening...

uh, no. just as the 9/11 commission and the department of homeland security were both opposed by the administration, so were the popular elections in iraq. note that smithers_jones is not necessarily saying that the administration was wrong--in fact, the shiite domination of the election is precisely what they were worried about.

and before you cry "liberal media," the tribune endorsed bush.

it seems like you're the one who's misinformed here.

[Edited on Feb 12, 2005 by in_a_blue_state]

How convenient to be able to disavow the articulated motive, for I'm afraid that Mr. Friedman aside, ascribing "reason" to it is more than the weight of the evidence will bear, in favor of some nebulous schema to be decided after the fact.

Believe it or not, some of us who post in the current events board, actually keep up with current events and have memories longer than the current news cycle; you might want to give it a try sometime.

Try here: (Excerpted for the reading impaired)

And here:

I realize that this happened over a year ago, and it is really hard to remember all the way back to 2004, but do try and keep up in the future.

To sum up: I was right and you have no idea what you are talking about.





[Edited on Feb 12, 2005 by smithers_jones]

wait you mean we haven't brought peace and stability to Iraq yet?
I got distracted by the super bowl

He escaped to Puerto Rico *just* to avoid this thread.

Next time, Totten...next time....

Someone should tell shrub that.

Who was it who said "you're either with us or against us"?

but john kerry was nothing but a flip flopper because he 'voted for the war' and then criticised it.

Well stock, you might not be consistant, but at least your consistantly inconsistant.

double clicked

[Edited on Feb 13, 2005 by JunkiePuppy]

The problem with the liberals, is that a lot of them know nothing and thinks that being a liberal is a trend... Their actions do not follow their ideals.

And the problem with conservatives...their ideology is old. What is conservative is determined by how things have progressed. They are from the right, but the right is always moving to the left. Compare 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000. With time, they always tend to move left, especially on moral issues. Black slavery is one example, if it wasn't for the left who pulled the society towards it's ideology, conservatives would have kept slavery as legal.

In my opinion, red states keeps their youth in old culture, which is illogical, since society changes. There's a gap between generations, and if you do not respect this, you create a gap inside the generation itself. Not only we are separated by age, but also by social classes, income, race, culture, and ideology. When is the last time on the planet where you had such a mix of pont of views ?

We are living in a time where religion is making less and less sense, and where individual spirituality is the way to go. People still believe in God, but in their own way. Intellectual individualism seems to be the 21th century ideology. Now if we could only get rid of all this egocentric, nationalist non sense. I think that the life of my fellows canadians are not worth more than the people who lives in Africa, or Asia, or wherever. As long as people act like it was, there is no way you can establish some kind of global peace, justice.