Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 04, 2011

Ooh, this just got interesting!

I’m expecting BD to have a helmet on tomorrow and to see Toggle and Phred in the classroom.

Heh, surrender monkey my ahem

Trust gbt not to take the cliche rout

Who in their right minds believed a word Powell said in 2003? Certainly nobody I know. And whoever is taking this class had to wait till 2006 to discover that invading Iraq was the worst blunder in the Empire’s foreign policy history? He’s like something out of the pages of bushflash and other satire websites…

• “… many in my command.” — Sounds like prof was a high-ranking officer.  • “… Powell’s 2003 address … persuaded me … to remove Saddam …” — Sounds like he was too politically plugged in to reach an independent judgment. At the time I and tens of thousands of other Americans thought Powell was lying.  • “But by 2006 I’d come to see that invading Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder in American history …” — So that’s when he decided he had to resign his command and become a college prof?  • Seems like BD’s having a relapse.  • The really truly interesting question is: how’s RAY going to react?  • Make no mistake: Trudeau is booting backside here.

If it was a blunder to keep the Islamist Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq at that time, then it is a blunder to keep the Communist Wen Jiabao in power in China at the present time. Inevitable conclusion: China has weapons of mass destruction! Go after those Commies with SHOCK and AWE! Now!  (Of course we’ll first have to go hat in hand to Beijing and ask to borrow money from them in order to fight them. But details! Details! Huah!)

Saddam Hussein was never an Islamist. The invasion was always a crock – as can be seen by the rollout of spurious reasons – first it was all about the WMDs, then we were all supposed to forget that and think it was about a sudden desire to topple nasty governments (well, one), then it was about establishing democracy. The Iraqis I know all think Saddam was horrible and that things were better when he was around. Still, it gives Americans another defeat to be narcissistic about in case they run out of Vietnam

Let’s not forget the obvious….IT IS NOT UP TO THE USA to decide who should/should not be in power or indeed what political systems the rest of the world should employ! Lets just breathe and concentrate on making up for past mistakes before making any new ones! Qou Fas Et Gloria Ducunt

The original blunder was the Crusades. The rest is fallout and repeating the same kind of imperalist nonsense while expecting different results.

Saddam took power when the USA got his predecessor ousted and then left the country in shambles and no clear replacement model for a new government. When we leave Iraq, Iran will step in to take over there when we eventually pull out of Afghanistan…

Powell wasn’t “lying.” He was LIED TO! He believed his boss, Bush 2, that Saddam had WMDs. When Powell learned the truth later that year, he announced he would not serve Bush in a second term, paving the way for Condeleza Rice to take over. Unlike Powell, she drank the Kook Aid her entire 4 years.

Ironically, when Saddam was captured, he said the WMDs that he DID have were ordered destroyed after some were destroyed in Tomahawk raids ordered by a U.S. President when it was learned that Saddam tried to assasinate Bush 1 in 1992.

The President who ordered the Tomahawk strike? Bill Clinton.

Viva Air Power!! (See Lybia, Bosnia, Six-Day-War, et. al.)

I was shocked when Powell ran his number. Disillusion comes slower to some than others. There is something about career bureaucrats that makes them lie to, use under false pretenses, and discard the honest and upright when no longer useful…like shot-up vets, or the old, for instance…we unfortunately are usually pretty dense, do not have access to truth, and have been persuaded early to avoid holding power because it’s a difficult, thankless, nasty job…like money, which seems to have similar lies camoflaging it’s ruthless purposes…

Not instigating a fight is not surrendering.

Yes, Powell was lied to, but he did what he said he would never do…send troops somewhere without overwhelming force. He knew that Rumsfeld was sending it a small number of troops. When the civil war broke out, because of the invasion, they didn’t have enough troops to protect themselves…Powell broke his own doctrine…Iraq really was and is the worst policy blunder in American history. Bush, Chaney and Rumsfeld should be tried as war criminals…

Sorry, sir; the biggest blunder was the Spanish-American war, the one that turned the US from a beacon to an just another arsonist’s torch. See William Graham Sumner’s “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences runs rampant through American foreign policy. One of the best (or worst) was due to our fear of communism and communist sympathizers. The democratically elected president of Iran was assasinated in the 1950s by the CIA because he was viewed as being pro-Russian and we put the Shah back on the throne. That eventually lead to the Islamic revolution and the current state of affairs in Iran. Our invasion of Iraq took a country with maybe a dozen terrorists and created hundreds or thousands of people willing to die in order to kill Americans. Countless other negative consequences have come about from not thinking through all the ramifications of our foreign policy, if you can call it policy. More like act and react.

Wow, where did that come from?

No surrender monkey, he just rediscovered his cognitive faculties.

I see the Christian liberals (christlibs) are out in force today. Where Jesus and his Apostles evaded war and military service by pretending they were God’s subjects and not Romans, the secular liberals, no longer subject to the draft, can pretend that war is merely a bad option, not a civic duty.No wonder B.D. is disgusted. The lecturer is revising history by calling our nation’s impressively unanimous response to 9/11 a “policy blunder.”The only blunder was in punishing the wrong Arab country. We should have bombed Saudi Arabia instead; they paid bin Laden to leave them alone and go after us. A far greater blunder was committed by Bush Sr. ten years earlier. He ought to have let Saddam overrun Saudi Arabia along with Kuwait.That would at least force the christlibs to decide whether they’re willing to fight to keep their gas tanks full.

One of the many LAME reasons used by the Bush regime was that the no-fly zone pilots were being fired on. It was dangerous for the pilots… so, after 5000 dead and trillions down the hole, the skies are safe above Iraq for our pilots. Mission accomplished.

Sorry Pa;lin Drome, but, you have some basic facts wrong. Nobody in Judea, Samaria, or Galilee were Roman cicizens, so, they didn’t have to serve in the army. Also, Rome exemepted the Jews from Emperor and idol worship. Look it up, it’s in the history books.

That was my thought, as well.

At least President Bush II got revenge upon Hussein for his attempt to kill Bush I. I call that a family fued not a war.

Paul was both a Jew and a Roman Citizen, but he was hardly typical of Jesus’s first followers. For one thing, he never met the man during his (Jesus’s) lifetime (whether he met Jesus THEREAFTER I’ll state no opinion), and for another his “mission” after his adoption of Christianity was largely to make Christianity safe for the Gentiles.

My understanding is that Jews in Judea were largely exempt from conscription into the Legion – not because they were pacifists (they weren’t) but because their Sabbath observances/prohibitions were more trouble to work around than they were worth.

I’d say JESUS was a pacifist (“turn the other cheek”, it is better to be killed than to kill, etc.), although not averse to occasionally using warlike imagery. However, many of the trappings of modern Christianity have their roots in the Cult of Mithras, and Mithraism was very much a “soldier’s religion”; if a conscious effort was being made to win early followers away from Mithras, an emphasis on pacifism would be one of the first weights to be dropped; with Mithraism, a soldier didn’t have to give up his livelihood.

There were several times that Powell would make a statement of his position on an issue, be called back to DC and then give a statement of the position of the US Government, different from his original position, which was never mentioned again.Yes, Powell lied for Bush/Cheney, but they needed to be specific about what lies he was to tell. He wouldn’t cover for them on his own.

Saddam was no threat. The first gulf war rendereed him irrelevant. Starting a war over anything less than a viable threat to the nation is morally indefensible.

In the case of Iraq it was a blunder because it was paid for with borrowed money. Also it killed and maimed thousands of US troops for no good reason and put many more through an emotional meat-grinder.

Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” But if there are no victors in modern wars, then what? You get all kinds of histories written from different slants…and all of them are partly right.

If only 2003 Dick Cheney could remember the sage advice of 1994 Dick Cheney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w75ctsv2oPU

I watched Powell’s address to the UN, with huge enlargements of aerial photos of Iraq’s WMD sites. It was totaly credible and I beileved him.

But when the inspectors couldn’t find the WMD and Bush changed his reasons for going to war, I stopped believing those guys.

Talking about the Spanish American War, even though it was short, the people of San Francisco (boosted by the Hearst Corp) built the Dewey Monument in the heart of the captalist ghetto of Union Square, celebrating the triumph of the White Fleet over the Spanish at Manila Bay. This expression was a classic manifestation of Manifest Destiny, of which some principals linger today, i.e. “We are so providentially exceptional that we alone can make it all better, and it’s OK to mislead, distort and propagandize if necessary to do so”.

palin, my own mistrust of the military isn’t from hard-line pacifism, but from a sense that when a country has a large standing army there’s too much temptation to use it (if only so as not to “waste” the cost of keeping it).

I’m not against “preparedness”, and I’m not against “fighting the good fight.” But I also believe that pacifism IS a viable philosophy, and that military action ought not to be entered into lightly; the cause must be just, and the stakes must be fairly high.

What I’d LIKE to see is the standing military cut to a minimum, but increase the role of (and enrollment in) the Reserves and/or National Guard. That way, if something DOES come up we can mobilize reasonably quickly. Frankly, I’d like to tie legalized gun ownership to compulsory military training and availability; you can own as many guns as you like, on the understanding that you must report for training regularly and you might be sent overseas on a couple of days’ notice.

While Iraq was a blunder, it’s a bit of a stretch to say it’s the worst foreign policy blunder in our history. To do so ignores the whole debacle in the Philipines after the Spanish American War, the Bay of Pigs, our involvement in Vietnam, Somalia, etc.

Keep in mind, too; active-duty military are strongly encouraged to not think too hard about policy matters and politics. “That’s above my pay grade” is a favorite response. Such consideration leads to cognitive dissonance and possibly hesitation at a crucial tactical moment, when following orders like a good little cannon-fodder is a survival tactic. In Vietnam, it led to fraggings when the BS factor overwhelmed the training.

Well it was also a blunder to PUT Saddam in power.

Except for the fact that, while Europe was in its dark ages, Islam in the Middle East and North Aftrica (and Spain) was relatively cosmopolitan, open, and valued education and art. Much of our knowledge of ancient scholarship comes not from European records, but through the records and studies of Islamic scholars. So while nominally Christian Europe was relearning mathematics and classical scholarship from the Moors and Turks, Islam itself became insular, closed, and reactionary – partly in reaction to the European crusaders.