Wow, check out the wailing and gnashing of teeth going on right now over Joe Lieberman's statement on Face the Nation. Memorandum is starting to smoke under the load.
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman told Bob Schieffer. "And to me, that would include a strike into… over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."
The Indepedent former Democrat from Connecticut said that he was not calling for an invasion of Iran, but he did say the U.S. should target specific training camps.
"I think you could probably do a lot of it from the air, but they can't believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans," Lieberman said.
The Jammie Wearing Fool donned protective gear and waded into the fever swamps where heads are popping left and more left. (Language warning applies).
The fact of the matter is that the Iranians think they can get away with this because of the weak response the left promotes.
Pingback: JammieWearingFool
A single Tomahawk (targeted at one of the power transmission towers) can shutdown the enrichment centrifuges. That will probably get their britches in a twist more than anything else.
The fact of the matter is that the Iranians think they can get away with this because of the weak response the left promotes.
Gosh, that makes SO much sense, given that it was what you would call the “strong” response (aka regime toppling and full-scale war, invasion, and occupation) that put Iran in this catbird seat to begin with.
And of course, as soon as the bombs start falling, Iran will come out with the white flag waving and surrender immediately. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what Iran was supposed to do in the fantasy spun by the neocons in the White House before March 2003. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein and destroying his government with our bombs and Marines was going to serve as a cautionary tale for Tehran, which would then think twice about going up against the mighty U.S., knowing that if they did they would suffer the same fate as Iraq.
OOOOPS! Ooopsie! Didn’t quite work out that way, did it?
War lust is a sickness, Gaius. It’s a pathology. The more war fails, the more its adherents believe it’s needed. And unfortunately, the people who suffer the most and pay the highest price for this bloody addiction are our troops, and the millions (in total) of Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, and whoever lives in the countries that are next on our list. They pay with their lives for America’s little war hobby.
A single Tomahawk (targeted at one of the power transmission towers) can shutdown the enrichment centrifuges.
Can I save this so I can throw it back in your face when a full-scale massive bombing campaign fails to put a dent in Iran’s nuclear capacity?
In all honesty, I have no idea why I am even answering you, Kathy. Your worldview is so childishly simplistic, I genuinely fear for you and those who believe as you do.
Are so so foolish to believe that I think war is a great, wonderful thing that we should use as a recreation? If you do, then you are completely hopeless. War is the very last thing I want. But the soft and fuzzy thinking of the left is making it inevitable And, unlike you, I have a 12 year old boy who is very likely to be drawn into the wreckage you and your pals are creating.
Are you so focused on your soft and fuzzy ideals that you are unaware of the fact that there are an awful lot of people in the world – a damned sight more than you and your fellow travelers – who think people who believe as you do are easy targets?
Would you try to intervene – by force if necessary – if someone you loved was being attacked or killed? Would you intervene for a stranger? I would. Hell, I actually have done so.
You really are idealistic – and extremely out of touch with the reality of what the world is. Seriously.
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Can I save this so I can throw it back in your face when a full-scale massive bombing campaign fails to put a dent in Iran’s nuclear capacity? I got $1,000 cash that says a "full-scale massive bombing campaign" doesn't happen within the next two years. Care to back your bull**** with some green? Any mutually acceptable 3rd party can hold the cash.
(EDIT, PA – seriously, watch the language – my 12 year old reads this.)
Pingback: Sister Toldjah
Are so so foolish to believe that I think war is a great, wonderful thing that we should use as a recreation? If you do, then you are completely hopeless. War is the very last thing I want. But the soft and fuzzy thinking of the left is making it inevitable And, unlike you, I have a 12 year old boy who is very likely to be drawn into the wreckage you and your pals are creating.
I don’t think you believe that war is a wonderful thing in the same sense that a vacation in the Caribbean is a wonderful thing. I do believe, from everything I have read here over a period of well over a year, that you have utter and complete faith in war as the best and finest and most effective tool to solve global conflict. You might not love the idea of war, but I certainly think that the principle of settling conflict between nations via war is one you value in the same way that I value the principle of settling conflict between nations through non-violent means. I don’t think you worship death necessarily, but I am convinced that you are profoundly suspicious, not only of the idea that peaceful ways to resolve conflict exist, but that it should be a priority for human beings to find those ways and make them work.
Your statement that the “soft and fuzzy thinking of the left” is making war inevitable is just a contemptible refusal to take responsibility for the failures of what you have supported. The U.S. started the war with Iraq, and that war has been going on for over FOUR YEARS now, and has become a raging inferno that only gets worse. It is just a fact that the fall of Iraq’s former government is what put Iran in the position of having the kind of power in the region it now has. It’s not the doing of leftists. It’s the doing of the war, and everyone who supported it.
Now you propose to make the catastrope even worse by bombing Iran. And when Iran starts bombing U.S. oil interests and military bases all over the Gulf, you will say they are doing it because of the weak leftists.
The childishly simplistic thinking is coming from YOUR side, not mine, Gaius. The Iraq war has solved NO problems and has created many that did not exist before. So it’s not me who is engaging in fuzzy thinking to object to starting another war in the same region. It’s YOU who is engaging in no thinking process at all by thinking the same strategy that failed miserably with Iraq will work with Iran.
Finally, you are right that I don’t have a 12-year-old boy. However, I do have a 17-year-old daughter, and although I don’t have to worry that she will join the military, I *do* have to worry about the world she will have to live in long after I am gone. I love my daughter as much as you love your son. I pray that both your son and my daughter will be safe from war, and the ravages that war creates.
Yeeoow,
I go away for a couple of days and the knives come out.
Kathy my love, keep voting for Charlie Rangel the Draft Introducer and you will have to worry about your daughter going into the military. Oh, I also left you a reply on the thread we were at earlier.
Seriously, do you see, anywhere, Gaius advocating war? I read it as his commenting on a statement made by Liebeman and the responses it has generated.
As to the inevitability of war, well… hmmm. Violence is inevitable, of course, due to our very nature. Many who do not understand the nature of animals, or of nature itself, say things such as “We are only genetically 2% different than chimpanzees and they don’t have war”, completely ignoring that tribalism in chimps leads to far more savage encounters on a far more regular basis than humans usually have. They are emphatically not the peace loving/slightly retarded hairy reflection of mankind’s better self. But maybe, very maybe, that 2% gives us the ability to choose when and where to engage in violent struggles and the wisdom to accept short term ills for long term benefits.
The closest thing in my lifetime to a bloodless conflict resolution was Grenada. That was an almost textbook example of how things can be done, but it was an outlier, a freak and an aberration. In every conflict rules will change, but once you start playing you have to win or draw or die.
The most beautiful part of the human spirit is the willingness to suffer for the sake of future generations. Sometimes that suffering might be sitting around a negotiating table, other times it involves misery and death, the “Ultimate cost for perfect value.” Bill Whittle writes well on this in attempting to define the concept of “Remnant.” Highly recommended.
Kathy
Whether you like it on not this is your daughter’s war now; a war brought to us, waged against us for Jihad and one we would rather not have to wage, but we have no choice. So, the longer you continue with you holier-than-thou pacifisism today means your daughter will face a more devastating war tomorrow.
People like you scare me to no ends, for you represent allowed Hilter to decimate all of Europe, to incinerate 6 million Jews, kill 405,000 American soldiers. Because of you we are heading down that same road again.
People like you scare the begeebas out of me.
Whether you like it on not this is your daughter’s war now; a war brought to us, waged against us for Jihad and one we would rather not have to wage, but we have no choice.
That’s absolute, arrant nonsense. I don’t know who you think “we” is, but the people making the war policy decisions in this country do have a choice, and they are choosing war — not because our existence is threatened, but because their profits are threatened. Like most wars, the so-called “war on terror” is a war for natural and economic resources. It’s a war to maintain U.S. power for its own sake — not to advance the cause of democracy or liberate anyone.
This is not a war brought to us. There is not a shred of truth in that. Terrorism is a tactic, not a person or a state, and the West has birthed and fueled that tactic with almost a century of foreign policy decisions, starting with the end of World War I when the Brits carved up the old Ottoman Empire like a birthday cake.
History did not start today, or yesterday.
People like you scare me to no ends, for you represent allowed Hilter to decimate all of Europe, to incinerate 6 million Jews, kill 405,000 American soldiers. Because of you we are heading down that same road again.
Was your family incinerated in the Holocaust? Mine was — much of it, anyway. My paternal grandmother and most of my father’s extended family were murdered by the Nazis. I am here only because both my parents escaped the gas chambers and crematoria and met each other in the U.S.
Hitler’s decimation of Europe and near-extinction of European Jewry was not caused by peace activists or advocates of peaceful solutions to conflict. Hitler’s rise to power was a *direct* result of World War I, combined with the economic suffering and devastation caused by the Great Depression. The latter was made immeasurably worse for Germans because of the crippling war debts imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles.
Even after Hitler took power, his crimes against humanity were greatly enabled by the West’s indifference to his persecution of the Jews. The mechanized, industrialized murder of millions of Jews and others that the Nazis called the Final Solution did not begin in 1939. There is abundant evidence that the Nazis were quite concerned about public opiinion — not in the sense that they had a conscience about what they were doing, but in the sense that they *knew* the rest of the world would consider it a crime. The West had hundreds of opportunities to prevent the slaughter before the war began, but ignored them. Even after the mass killing of Jews and others began, there are numerous documented instances of Jewish lives being saved when outside individuals or groups stood up to them. The Nazis murdered six million Jews (and millions of non-Jews), but the West, including the U.S., gave them tacit permission to do so. Until you can explain to me why Hitler’s regime was able to fire German Jews from their jobs, deny them the right to work in their professions, force them to wear yellow stars, evict them from their homes and deport them to the East, burn their synagogues and places of business, pass laws criminalizing relationships between Jews and ethnic Germans, relationships, clear entire neighborhoods of their Jewish population and give those homes to non-Jewish Germans, without a peep of protest from the West; or send a ship full of Jews to every country in the West (including the U.S.) to give each one of those countries their chance to turn the Jews away, and send them back to Germany, so Hitler could crow triumphantly that nobody else wanted the Jews either — until you can explain these things to me, then don’t tell me that “people like me” allowed Hitler to decimate Europe and kill six million Jews and 405,000 American soldiers.
Here is a truth for you: If there had been no WWI, there would have been no war now called WWII. There would have been no Holocaust, there would have been no Hitler (in a political and historical sense). And if the U.S. had not put Saddam Hussein in power and then supported him with money and weapons and tacit approval while he murdered literally millions of people, both his own and Iranians and Kurds, he would not have been able to get away with the crimes he got away with, and overthrowing him would not have even come up.
So, the longer you continue with you holier-than-thou pacifisism today means your daughter will face a more devastating war tomorrow.
Americans have not had to face any war at all since the Civil War — and even then, the war affected only one region of the country. Even as our government, and Americans like you, blithely start wars in other countries, most of which have known nothing but war for decades, Americans have not had to find out what war is like for so long that we really have no idea what it’s like. So spare me your hypocritical talk about the wars my daughter will face, because the entire point of U.S. foreign policy is to make other people in other countries suffer through the reality of war so Americans will never have to — even while we piously discount that suffering and insist that the people in the countries we bomb and occupy love us and are grateful to us, and are falling on their knees begging for us to stay and keep warring on them.
My daughter is 17 years old and has been a committed peace activist for several years now. Among other things, she works for Peace Action, an organization that advocates and works to achieve non-militaristic solutions to conflict. In high school, she became involved in counter-recruitment issues, as a result of the back-door provision in No Child Left Behind that requires public secondary schools to give students’ private, personal contact information to the U.S. military or lose federal funding. The U.S. military is not required to ask parents’ permission to obtain their children’s contact information (opt-in); rather, parents have to opt out if they don’t want their children’s personal information given out to recruiters — and the opt-out policy is not made known to parents, so many parents don’t even know there is such a policy.
Kathy
Whether you like it or not this war is now your daughter’s war.
I guess you learned very little from history.
Peace for whatever it’s worth because there is won’to be any for your daughter’s generation.
I feel sorry for you, I really do.
Kathy
Pearl Harbor
Wow, you really are childish.
What peace will you daughter have when she wakes one morning only to find Israel wiped off the face of the planet. When that happens, you and your daughter will see war like no other. World World 2 taught the lesson that Peace Peoples create greater death and destruction but you don’t seem to want to learn that your actions are inhumane.
I know that the reason you hate me Kathy is because deep down in your soul you know I am right.
Can someone tell me where the Plonk feature is?
Whether you like it or not this war is now your daughter’s war.
Uhhh, I know it’s my daughter’s war. It will also be *her* children’s war, if she has children. The “global war on terror” that George W. Bush and his minions adopted as a product label to serve as brand recognition for aggressive, preemptive war is going to be with us for the rest of my life, and if human life still exists then, for the remainder of my daughter’s life and her progeny’s as well. And yes, of course it’s her war, in addition to being your kids’ war, and everyone else’s kids’ war, because it will affect every single aspect of their lives. There is the obvious question of whether my daughter’s freedom to dissent, her privacy rights, her right to keep her religious beliefs — or lack of them — private; her right not to be proselytized or forced to pass a religious test to secure a job in government; will still exist by the time she is my age, or long before that. There is the question of whether she will have to live in constant fear of terrorist attacks if, as seems likely, her government continues to help terrorist groups boost their recruitment numbers by bombing and invading other countries and by detaining thousands and thousands more “suspected terrorists” and stripping them of their legal and human rights, and thus stoking the anti-American hatred that fuels terrorism. There is the very real possibility that she , along with everyone else, will have to leave with greater and greater extremes of climate change because her government cannot conceive of there being any global threat to our lives and well-being other than international terrorism. If things continue the way they are going, my daughter will be living in a theocracy while her mother is still alive; and *her* daughter, if she has one, will have no choice but to be taught in school that the world and everything in it was created 6,000 years ago by a supernatural being in six days.
So we have no argument on the question of whether it’s going to be my daughter’s war. Our disagreement lies in our differing views on the benefit of endless war. I believe that endless war and an increasingly militaristic society which values force and violence above everything else will make my daughter’s life infinitely more difficult, and could potentially make her life hell on earth. You, on the other hand, believe that a United States at war with the vast majority of the planet for the rest of foreseeable time is something that will increase my daughter’s quality of life. I only wish that I could wave my magic wand and create another planet where you and all the other warmongers could take your bombs and guns and $500 billion military budgets and go and happily slaughter and torture and indefinitely detain each other to your heart’s content, and leave me and the people I love alone.
I know that the reason you hate me Kathy is because deep down in your soul you know I am right.
I don’t hate you at all. It’s not hatred I feel. It’s anger. I’m angry at the damage being done to my country by the policies you support. And I’m afraid of how much worse it will get in the future if bombing countries to get our way continues to take the place of adult behavior.
In every part of my soul, deep down and otherwise, I know that a person who could say, and actually believe, that “I know that the reason you hate me is because deep down in your soul you know I am right,” is either a very dangerous person or is following a very dangerous philosophy. That kind of certainty that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, is *precisely* the mindset of the fanatics and fundamentalists you so decry when they happen to be Islamic. And deep down in my soul, that scares the living daylights out of me.
Exactly right, Kathy…sadly if you have your way that’s exactly what will happen. Your granddaughter will be wearing a bhurka.
::QM wildly looking around for the Plonk feature::
Sigh
Kathy on 9/11/2001 America woke to the fact that we had been at war for some three decades. The current administration isn’t the problem and I am not the problem.
THe problem is radical Islamic Jihadism. And, because this vicious and barbaric ideology so frightens you, the only way you can deal with it is to safely project all your fear upon that which is not the threat. It is easier and safer for you to attack GWB and me than Islamic Jihadism. GWB or myself are not going to hack off your head if you insult us, Islamic Jihadist will.
You seem to feel that we began this ‘endless’ war for the purpose of war however, we did not begin this war nor do we want war. War came to us and the longer we deny the enemy the more this emboldens them to take increasingly extreme steps to kill us. Over almost three decades of peace, with the exception of the momentary Gulf War 1 waged to stop Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, we have engaged in your peace plan. Because of this appeasement policy, over the last three decades Islamic Jihadists went from hijacking airplanes to seizing embassies, to bombing American interests to attacking America twice on our soil, the last attack killed 3000 Americans when Islamic Jihadist hijacked planes then flew them into civilian building.
In other words, for three decades we gave your peace plan a chance by ignoring we were at war and what we got was 9/11/2001.
Your belief that GWB made up Islamic Jihad terrorism flies in the face of those actions and words spoken by the enemy. This is what scares the begeebas out of me, you refuse to acknowledge that there is an enemy.
Your mentality is the very same which existed during Hilter’s rise to power, intellectual Brits and isolationist Americans refused to acknowledge Hilter while he devastated all of Europe. “Peace in our Time” never came and millions lay waste to that ideal.
Islamic Jihadism brought war to us and until we break their will to kill us there will not be Peace in our Time.
Please don’t let this come to another Holocaust for you to understand why we are at war.
I am not the enemy, Gaius is not the enemy, Republicans are not the enemy and GWB is not the enemy.
Islamic Jihadism is the enemy.
If you continue to beat us down who will be left to protect you and your daugther from Islamic Jihad?
By the way Kathy, Islamic Jihadism believes that females are sub-human and are treated accordingly.
As a free woman I will not deny the evil present in Islamic Jihadism. I will not deny their determination to oppress females, to treat females as sub-human, to beat females then force them to hide their brusies under a veil, to hang females for having been raped, to stone females for having loved a non-Muslim, to cut out their clitorius.
I wage war today so that females will not be crushed by our enemy’s barbarism.
In another time I suspect you once fought for women’s rights, please rise again to fight for those women who are denied the liberation we so enjoy today.
If not for your country, won’t you at least recognize the evil enemy for the sake of women around the world?
…sadly if you have your way that’s exactly what will happen. Your granddaughter will be wearing a bhurka.
I have seen no evidence (because there is none) that anyone in the Middle East wants to convert my daughter to Islam or make her wear a burka. I have seen abundant evidence — not just these days, but going back for years — that there are many people in this country who would dearly like to make the law conform to their belief that God wants them to convert the Jews to Christianity. The difference now from when I was younger is that these people are not a fringe movement anymore. And while you indulge your hysterical, bigoted rantings against Muslims, apocalyptic Christians who want to see a Christian theocracy in the U.S. gain more and more power and acceptance.
You are extremely ignorant of a subject you think you know perfectly. In Muslim tradition, as in Jewish law, forced or coerced conversion is not allowed. In fact, in Jewish tradition (the one I know best), even voluntary conversions are discouraged.
Christianity is the ONLY one of the three major world religions that not only encourages proselytizing and conversion, but actively uses it as a membership tool. Christianity itself would not even exist as a major world religion if it were not for conversion.
Here is a short list of consequences my daughter could easily face in 10 or 20 years if Americans don’t get their heads out of the sand and start taking the Christian Right seriously:
1. An outright ban on abortion nationwide with no exceptions, even for rape, incest, or the life or health of the mother. Women who had illegal abortions and doctors who performed them would be subject to imprisonment, and eventually maybe even the death penalty.
2. An outright ban on birth control and contraception of all kinds: traditional birth control pills, emergency contraception, condoms, IUDs, the whole nine yards. It was legal for states to ban birth control before Griswold v. Connecticut (1965); it could certainly happen again.
3) The criminalization of individual choices that violate “Biblical standards of morality”; i.e., premarital sex, homosexuality, the aforementioned abortion and birth control. And concurrently, the legal mandating of practices that uphold a literalist interpretation of the Bible: compulsory prayer in public schools, perhaps including specifically Christian references; religious tests for public office; teaching creationist religious dogma alongside evolutionary biology in public schools, eventually morphing into a ban on teaching evolution at all; “modesty” laws for women that would dictate dress, personal appearance, speech, etc.
4. Active, government-sanctioned and -aided public policy aimed at proselytizing the Jewish population, with the goal of converting all Jews in the U.S. to Christianity. The opprobrium attached to observant, traditional Jewish practice and observance would grow alongside the official conversion efforts. Already, as a Jew, I would not feel comfortable living in most places in this country outside of a large city. I live in the NYC metropolitan area, and I feel safe here; I would not feel safe at all if I lived in the Bible Belt, which obviously encompasses a vast part of the country, not just the South.
*Everything described above is already happening*, albeit not yet in consistent, organized form; and much of it is still only on the Christianists’ wish list. But if you read and watch and listen, you will know that this is the kind of society desired and advocated by large swathes of a religious right that has, now, significant and growing political power way out of proportion to their actual numbers.
By contrast, I do not see ANY Muslim organizations in this country calling for Christians to convert to Islam or for women to wear the burka.
Kathy on 9/11/2001 America woke to the fact that we had been at war for some three decades.
I think what Americans woke up to on 9/11 was the reality that we can no longer live in a safe and dreamy, protected and privileged little bubble unaffected by the outside world. Before 9/11, Americans imagined that their country could reach out from inside the bubble and act in the world exactly as we pleased and in any way that we pleased, and yet we could remain insulated from any possible repercussions of our actions.
That illusion is over now, although many Americans remain outraged that the rest of the world doesn’t recognize our God-given right to have a kind of physical and economic immunity and privilege that is only possible because of our indifference to the conditions in which the rest of the planet must exist.
THe problem is radical Islamic Jihadism. And, because this vicious and barbaric ideology so frightens you, the only way you can deal with it is to safely project all your fear upon that which is not the threat. It is easier and safer for you to attack GWB and me than Islamic Jihadism. GWB or myself are not going to hack off your head if you insult us, Islamic Jihadist will.
Islamic Jihadists are not going to hack off my head, unless I invade and occupy their country, abuse their people, and attempt to enrich myself at their expense. How am I in danger of being beheaded in New Jersey? If I went to Anbar Province I would be risking my head; but I have no business being in Anbar Province, or anywhere else in Iraq, and neither do U.S. troops. It’s astonishing to me that you can tell me I should fear “Islamic Jihadists” coming to the U.S. and beheading me, when no one in that part of the world has ever come to our country to do such a thing, whereas we Americans *have* done horrible things to them. How do you become the victim; how do you make me into the victim; how do we here in the United States become the victims in your mind, when all of the killing and human rights violations and atrocities have happened in Iraq, to Iraqis? How are WE the victims when THEY are the ones dying and being tortured and humiliated?
I disagree with your notion that it’s easier for me to blame the Bush administration than Islamic Jihadists. It’s a lot more scary to acknowledge your own government’s attacks on Americans’ freedom than to blame an outside entity. If you allowed yourself to believe that one day — and not too far away a day, either — *you* could be the one arrested and detained indefinitely and without charges on “suspicion of terrorist activity” because of your associations, or because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because someone who doesn’t like you decides to turn you in, or simply because the government made a mistake, that would be a terrifying thought. Much safer to attack Islamic Jihadism than to fear your own government.
And btw, I am not attacking you — or at least, that is not my intention. My intention is to express my strong disagreement with your political position and with the policies you advocate. I am not attacking, nor do I hate or even dislike, you as a person. I do, however, find it extraordinarily offensive when you tell me that I don’t really believe what I’m saying, and that deep down I know you are right. Two can play that game, but it’s really not going to get us anywhere.
In truth, it would be quite easy for me to demonize two billion Muslims and blame “Islamic Jihadism” for the scary condition our world is in today. I’m an American, living in the United States, where hating and fearing anything Islamic is accepted ideology. It can be both tiresome and tiring to think for yourself, and it would be lovely, in a certain way, to turn my brain off and just accept and believe all the toxic waste coming out of Washington that passes for truth. It’s always easier to swim with the current than against it.
But I wasn’t raised that way, and I can’t do it.
You seem to feel that we began this ‘endless’ war for the purpose of war however, we did not begin this war nor do we want war. War came to us and the longer we deny the enemy the more this emboldens them to take increasingly extreme steps to kill us. Over almost three decades of peace, with the exception of the momentary Gulf War 1 waged to stop Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, we have engaged in your peace plan.
I’ve already addressed this idea. I cannot fathom this level of naivete and ignorance. War did NOT “come to us” without any reason that could be traced back to U.S. actions. Three decades of peace? For YOU, maybe, in your safe, insulated, privileged American bubble. But over on the other side of the world, while Americans were enjoying their “three decades of peace,” people living in the Middle East were suffering under brutal dictatorships and dying like flies in one war after another, in large part because of what your government and mine was doing. From 1980 to 1988, the U.S. helped Iraq murder — including by the use of poison gas — about two million Iranians in a war that nobody ultimately “won.” The Reagan administration stood by and watched while Saddam Hussein murdered hundreds of thousands of Kurds by gassing them from the air. Then came that “momentary” Gulf War you mention, which was only “momentary” from your perspective standing in the bubble. The low estimate for the number of Iraqis killed in that war is about 20,000 — and that comes from the U.S. military, so it’s obviously a very conservative figure. For one thing, it doesn’t include women and children. The actual figure could be as high as 200,000 — I’m not sure if that would include the Shiites who were slaughtered immediately after the war by Saddam Hussein after the Bush 41 administration let Saddam use our helicopters and then watched as Saddam massacred the Shiites who rose up against him at our urging.
After the Gulf War, and for the next decade-plus, there was no policy of “appeasement,” as you call it. There was no peace. Rather, there was a silent genocide against the Iraqi people that did not hurt Saddam Hussein at all (in fact, the sanctions helped him enormously), but that killed somewhere between one and two million ordinary Iraqis — and increased Iraqis’ anger and resentment toward the U.S.
So, since 1980, there has not been anything resembling peace in Iraq or in the large region.
Also,to fully understand anti-American feeling in the Middle East, you have to go back not three decades, but over five decades — to 1953, when, as I said before (but it goes in one ear and out the other) that the Eisenhower administration overthrew a popular, democratically elected leader of Iran and installed a savage, brutal dictator in his place. Iranians suffered under the Shah for 25 years. And then in 1979, when the Shah is overthrown in an Islamist revolution, Americans throw up their hands and shriek, “Oh mygod, why do these Iranians hate us so much!” That’s the advantage of living in a bubble; you do not have to know anything about what’s going on outside the bubble.
In other words, for three decades we gave your peace plan a chance by ignoring we were at war and what we got was 9/11/2001.
In order for you to call the past three decades a “peace plan,” you have to ignore everything I wrote above. You have to ignore the entire history of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East since 1953. You have to pretend that the U.S. has not even had any connection to the Middle East or presence in the Middle East or any interests in the Middle East for the past 60 years. In order to believe that the U.S. has been at peace with the Middle East for three decades, you have to believe that nothing happened in those three decades or the two decades before it. You have to actually believe that for those decades, history stopped, and the countries of the Middle East just existed in stasis, frozen in time, to be re-animated in September, 2001. You have to believe that history started on September 11, 2001. And to do all that, you have to possess powers of denial that are far beyond anything I can imagine.
By the way Kathy, Islamic Jihadism believes that females are sub-human and are treated accordingly. … I wage war today so that females will not be crushed by our enemy’s barbarism. … please rise again to fight for those women who are denied the liberation we so enjoy today. … If not for your country, won’t you at least recognize the evil enemy for the sake of women around the world?
This is cartoon talk. But I can feel how stirred up you are by your own words. There is something thrilling and terribly exciting about having an evil enemy that you can fight, isn’t it? It gives meaning and purpose to life.
It’s undeniably true that women in the Middle East are treated as third-class citizens, lack rights that we take for granted, and are often viewed as subhuman. It’s also true that war has not done much to make women’s lives better. War usually tends to make women’s lives worse, because it kills their husbands, thus removing a source of income (we’ll ignore the sentimental value that a husband may have for a woman). In societies like these, where women do not have very strong economic opportunities to begin with, killing the male breadwinner can create severe hardship for the woman left behind. Then, too, there is the sad reality that war does not play favorites. Women and children die as well. If a woman’s children are killed as a result of war, that’s pretty devastating for a woman, and not very conducive to making her life better. In general, war tends to destabilize the society in which it takes place. War tends to create a lot of chaos and confusion, and suspends the normal rules of civilization, so that atrocities and human rights violations become more, rather than less, likely. It is well-known, for instance, that rape is a weapon often used during war against women; and rape has become if anything even worse as a problem for Iraqi women since the U.S. invasion than it was before.
As an American, of course, I am far more likely to be endangered by the ways in which my own government tries to restrict my freedom as a woman than by the way Saudi Arabia treats its women, and my daughter even more so. Taking just one example, if my daughter becomes pregnant and develops a life-threatening condition as a result, and is advised by her doctor to end the pregnancy; or if my daughter becomes pregnant as the result of rape (God forbid), there is a very real chance that at some point in the future she will not be able to obtain a legal abortion. There is a very real chance that in the not too distant future, if current trends continue, she will not be able to get a birth control prescription filled, either because birth control will be illegal, or pharmacists will refuse to fill the prescription.
I am much more worried about these threats that exist for my daughter as a direct result of her being a woman than I am about a Saudi royal prince cutting off my head.
I also feel I should point out that, if you are really that concerned about the inhuman way in which women are treated in the Islamic world, you might want to lobby the Bush administration to stop allying with some of the world’s most repressive regimes. It’s kind of sticky to preach on the evils of Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women and be best buddies with Saudi Arabia’s royal family at the same time. Ditto for Pakistan, and for that matter ditto for Iraq during the 1980s when the U.S. was hanging out with Saddam.
In closing, I wonder at your statement that Islamic Jihadists consider women to be subhuman. Given the fact that anyone who comes from a Muslim country, or who looks Muslim, has a Muslim name, lives in a Muslim community, attends a mosque and prays daily, or opposes U.S. policy in the Middle East would be considered either an Islamic Jihadist or an Islamic Jihadist sympathizer in your ideology, is it not logical to conclude that American neocons and Bush supporters consider *Muslims* to be subhuman?
Does it alarm you that a majority of call-ins to a radio talk show on the West Coast agreed with the host when he said that Muslims in this country should be forced to wear identifying markings (like the yellow star Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany) and should be deported? The radio host did not actually believe this. He was presenting it as his belief to see what kind of reaction he would get. Some listeners expressed outrage, but the vast majority agreed with him.
I also worry that a Nazi-type Holocaust could happen again. But it’s not Westerners who are at risk from some new version of Nazi gas chambers and crematoria. It’s the two billion Muslims in this world who are at risk. Not that I think this is *likely* to happen, but to the extent that I see a path being blazed in that direction, it’s being blazed by Americans and others who hate Muslims and consider them all to be subhuman terrorists, and not the reverse.
You ma’am are willfully blind. Ever heard of Adam Gedahn? You are, sadly, deluded to the actual facts. Perhaps because they destroy the fantasy world you desire.
You ma’am are willfully blind. Ever heard of Adam Gedahn? You are, sadly, deluded to the actual facts. Perhaps because they destroy the fantasy world you desire.
Put your facts where your mouth is. Give me one concrete fact that will serve to prove that my daughter is in danger of being forcibly converted to Islam or forced to wear a burka. Tell me specifically who is trying to do it, how they know my daughter, and what steps they are taking to travel to New Jersey, and force my daughter to wear a burka.
You do that, my friend, and I will give you not one, but two examples from my own experience and half a dozen examples from the experiences of real people — Americans who happen to be Jewish — who were subjected to acts of violence or threatened anti-Semitic violence, as well as to coerced observance of Christian doctrine and attempts to convert them to Christianity.
No one has EVER — *ever, ever, ever* — that means not even once, *ever* tried to convert me or my daughter to Islam or force me or my daughter to wear a burka. So the burden is on you to provide definitive proof that someone who is Muslim and living in the Middle East is planning to come to the U.S., seek out me and my daughter, and force us to become Muslims and wear the burka.
Prove it to me.
Until you do, kindly turn your concerned attention to the fantasy world that YOU inhabit and the delusions that YOU cannot give up.
I can give you at least two examples in which I or a family member was the target of anti-Jewish hatred to the point where physical violence was a real possibility. I can give you at least three other examples of instances not including threatened violence, but in which anti-Semitic remarks were directed at me or uttered in my presence in the knowledge that I’m Jewish.
I can give you several examples of instances in which Christians who were convinced that theirs is the one true religion either made direct attempts to convert me, or made me aware of their certainty that I was bound for hell because I did not accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour.
I would feel safer and less personally threatened in the company of a Muslim-American or as a visitor at a mosque than I would in the company of James Dobson or Pat Robertson, or at the annual Southern Baptist Convention, where attendees are told it is their obligation as Christians to go out and convert the Jews.
I will stack up my concrete, real experience against your Islamophobic fantasy world any day of the week.
Pingback: A Mistake of Historic Proportions at Shakesville