The thing that scares me most is that people will actually buy in to this unbelievable crap. What is wrong with this country that a PRESIDENTIAL ad like that is acceptable? When will they be issuing our brown shirts? Or do we just keep our duct tape and plastic?

Why isn’t the abhorrent nature of this ad mainstream media news? Where is the outrage beyond this web page?

Damn.

Another nail in Rudy’s coffin. The fear-mongering doesn’t seem to be working this time.

The country is in a ton of trouble economically and voters are waking up to that fact.

Since when this is news?
C’mon we know this already… It is unfortunate the average US citizen has no idea what their country is up to since many decades time… this is an arrowstick up in our ass, one way…

G

Two Words,

FUCK YOU

I’ve really come to appreciate the deep analysis and insightful comments found on leftist blogs. No need to waste time with argumentation, as it’s completely obvious that the threat from state-sponsored Islamic terror is utterly negligible in comparison to that from global warming. It’s almost as obvious as the fact that Islamic terror will vanish as soon as the U.S. becomes a polite isolationist country, rather like Luxembourg.

Belizean

An overwhelming majority of members of the Human Species-including the American variety-are opposed to continuation of the Iraq war. Do you think the Human species has got it wrong on this one? Yes, I would say the argument is over. The war criminals have been defeated in debate quite a few times.

We are now moving into the stage where there will very likely be mutines by ordinary America GIs(American teeenagers a lot of them)

Let us face it, you and your war criminal friends haven’t a leg to stand on. The human species has passed judgement on you folks.Go back to Gravitational Lensing research if thats what you do for a living.

Joshua, you are making Belizean’s point by using argumentum ad populum. Not that I agree with him, but his point still stands.

Re: Belizean

When monkeys fling their poo, do you respond with insightful commentary? “Yeah, I was down at the zoo, in the primate house, when the shit literally hit the fan. A few choice Chomsky quotes with a Sartre frosting and *phew*, order was restored.”

Sometimes the baser tripe needs to be dismissed — not discussed. Or maybe you’d like to discuss why you still beat your wife?

…as it’s completely obvious that the threat from state-sponsored Islamic terror is utterly negligible in comparison to that from global warming.

Let’s consider a very unlikely worst case scenario involving terrorism: A 25 kiloton nuclear device explodes in downtown New York. Despite the terrible damage and loss of life, the US will easily survive this attack, even New York will eventually be rebuild as was were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now consider a far more likely worst case scenario involving Global Warming: Temperatures rise by 6 degrees centigrade in the next century because we fail to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. This causes problems on a global scale. In the US, Florida disappears into the Sea. And when that happens the people will blame their great grandparents for being preoccupied with Islamic Terrorists.

Sorry, it was only the second paragraph that was supposed to be italicized. I must have mixed up my slashes.

People seem to have a strange obsession with global warming in this thread. Firstly, per capita Canada is a worse offender than the US. For some reason, people dont like to call out Canada on that. In terms of GHG release per unit economic activity, US is far more efficient than a lot of countries. Since most economic treaties aimed at tackling this do not want to put any kind of control on GHG release from countries like China or India, what you’ll end up having is a case where manufacturing activity shifts from US to less efficient countries worsening the problem, not improving it.

Umm, Coal power and nuclear power are the obvious scientific short term solutions to the energy problems as well as being the most eco friendly major grid generators.

Better filtering technology can and will make coal plant emmissions extremely low in the next twenty years, and well theres maybe a dozen physicists alive who don’t endorse nuclear fission plants. So I’d say Rudy is right on the money in that regard.

Conservation is fine. Its also irrelevant, b/c it doesn’t solve anything.. It just pushes the problem further into the future. Ultimately the issue is simply that population and demand for watts are on nonlinear curves that fit well with exponentials, ergo you eventually have to grow your energy supply with the same sort of analytic shape.

Fossil fuels, fission and fusion are more or less the only things we can conceive off that can possibly output that sort of growth. Wind and solar are nice, but they eventually have land issues.

Of those options, nuclear fission is the best bet (albeit expensive). Then clean coal, which is far less a pipedream than some of the other pie in the sky ideas floating out there. Already its pretty good.

I lived under Giuliani for the time he was mayor in NYC and he did some good things. Mostly, he has VERY good at making it seem like he accomplished something grand when in fact it was inevitable or, more likely, a sham.
He never in a million years would’ve gotten re-elected as mayor if he said and did all the crazy things he continues to do on the campaign trail. I’m not sure if he really means it or is just pandering to the masses. Either way, its completely reprehensible.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/giuliani_to_run_for_president_of_9

Nuff said.

Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.

No, it wasn’t it Saddam Hussein?

/snark

Your current one does seem to have been the pick of the litter since… oh, FDR at least? My American history before that is light on the non-entity Presidents: there’s so much history, a general grounding only hits the high spots. (“,)

Wow, is Hilary so deep into trouble now you have to help her?

I always wondered if this is really science blog.

slide2112 wrote:
Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.

Do you really think this would be a popular view on this blog? The “9/11 was an inside job” people use the classic crackpot style of argument (especially when it comes to the scientific questions about what kinds of effects we’d expect to see from a jet crashing into a building), something that science-geek types usually have a lot of experience recognizing. Y’know, it’s quite possible to accept that Islamic terrorists pose a threat without thinking they are the Greatest Threat Facing Civilization Today (TM) — unless they get their hands on a nuclear weapon or assume control of a nuclear-armed state like Pakistan, there’s basically no way they can manage to kill even a small fraction of the people killed every year by common diseases, not to mention the types of natural disasters which are likely to increase drastically if global warming isn’t curtailed.

Mister Cloud wrote:
Wow, is Hilary so deep into trouble now you have to help her?

Actually, I imagine Sean is pretty happy with how things are going right now…

#37: slide, please tell me your geopolitical sense is that weak. First off: whenever a foreign army comes stomping in in their size 12s to kill the bad guys, they’d better be damn sure they know who the bad guys are. it worked in World War 1 and 2 because the bad guys were other foreigners, the locals didn’t want them around, and the Allies tended to leave moderatley fast once they ran out of Germans. It doesn’t usually work when the bad guys are local boys, because they’ll always have support – and in fact, the invader can often increase their support more than decrease it.

Case study: Northern Ireland.
Do you know who the IRA’s best recruiter was? The British Army.
Before 1968, the IRA was an irrelevant leftover. Six months afterBloody Sunday, they were well-organised and well-supplied enough to bomb 22 targets in a single night. It wasn’t direct cause and effect, but it’s a decent illustration.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The IRA continued their ‘struggle’ for 30 years. Are you be willing to have soldiers’ bodies coming home from Baghdad in 2038?

I suspect Almighty Bob doesn’t understand the meaning of geopolitical, clearly he does not know WW2. Forget about the first world war. I am dumbstruck, I don’t know where to begin.

Jesse M. How quaint. I’m sure we can agree that diplomacy does not always work. The subject of Rudy’s ad is a case in point.

Let us hold a high standard here. The subject at hand is ugly enough.

I’ve studied geopolitics. In a university, even.
It wasn’t a precise use of the word, I will admit, but it was a long enough post without writing “is your understanding of sociology, psychology, group dynamics, and politics (as they apply to international relations and terrorism) so feeble as to not be able to grasp the concept of ‘if they don’t like what you’re doing, they may attempt to stop you’?”

Okay, okay, there’s still US bases in Germany, Italy, the UK… There was no long term occupation of any country: Germany became independant in 1949, Japan in 1952, Italy in 1946. You think you’ll be out of a stable Iraq by 2010? World War I, there were occupied territories: Alsace, Lorraine, and the Ruhr valley were occupied by the French. Alsace and Lorraine had been taken by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War: Alsace had been swapped backwards and forwards quite a bit previously, and Lorraine was a piecemeal mix of French and German ex-duchies. The Ruhr valley was taken in 1923 when Germany didn’t pay reparations. Of course, the first step in Hitler’s conquering movements was his re-occupation of the Ruhr valley. Germany also lost its colonies, but that was just a change of bosses.

Are there any other aspersions you wish to cast?

Almighty Bob, also now that Iran has almost build up their nuclear infrastructure, they won’t dismantle it just because some Western countries feel threatened.

If a country wants to mine their own uranium, enrich it in their own centrifuges for use in their own nuclear powerplants, then who are we to demand that they stop doing that just because they could in theory, at some future time, kick out the IAEA inspectors and make nuclear weapons.

If we have certain doubts about the Iranian nuclear program without firm evidence, we should talk to Iran in a very polite manner and certainly not demand that they suspend their program and impose sanctions.

slide2112 wrote:
Jesse M. How quaint. I’m sure we can agree that diplomacy does not always work. The subject of Rudy’s ad is a case in point.

The subject of Rudy’s ad is for the most part shots of various crowds of what I imagine are random Islamic extremists, along with known terrorists like Bin Laden, not states that actually have the means to build nuclear weapons. Do you agree that the primary focus should be on preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons, or do you think that non-nuclear terrorist attacks like Sept. 11 are themselves threats to civilization on the scale of climate change? Rudy’s ad does include a shot of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, calling him a “madman”, but he isn’t really crazy any more than the soviet leaders or Saddam were, and diplomatic solutions such as UN inspectors (who in retrospect we know were doing just fine at preventing Saddam from building nuclear weapons) and perhaps allowing Iran to have nuclear power plants with imported fuel, would likely work fine. And if there was strong evidence that Iran was unrepentantly developing nuclear weapons, I think there’d be a lot of other countries that would join a coalition to intervene with attacks on the facilities where they were being developed, the lone-gun approach is counterproductive in all sorts of way. Of course, on the subject of evidence, part of the problem with the Bush administration was that they didn’t evaluate the evidence fairly and instead saw what they wanted to see, few other countries went along with the US because they listened to their intelligence agencies. I don’t see Rudy being any less likely to jump the gun in this way.

The Almighty Bob:
If there was evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, what would be the justification to attack them? Why treat them differently from Pakistan, or even North Korea?

Well, Iran was a signer of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so I’d think that in the UN that would provide some kind of legal justification. Whether it would actually happen would depend on how different countries saw the danger from a nuclear-armed Iran, but it’s hard to imagine that Israel wouldn’t take some kind of action, and France has also suggested it’d be likely to attack in these circumstances. Not saying this would be the right thing to do, just that it’s plausible it’d happen. Even if Iran got nuclear weapons, I’m sure the chances of Iran actually using them or giving them to terrorists would be pretty low, since it would be suicide for the country…however much of a “madman” Ahmadinejad is, he isn’t an all-powerful dictator, his actions would have to be agreed on by others like the “Supreme Leader of Iran” Ali Khamenei.

That would be the extreme; guys like Red Adair make a living getting oil wells back in production after disasters. Iran would run out of missiles eventually, and the oilfire specialists took only 9 months to get 117 wells back online after Gulf War Mk. I.
One of the first consequences of such an attack or threat (in the best power-politics fashion) is that the North Slope would be opened to oil exploration so fast the Sierra Club’s heads would spin.

Jesse? North Korea’s an NNPT signatory.

Are you [slide2112] willing to have soldiers’ bodies coming home from Baghdad in 2038?

I think it’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t care how many soldiers die in this war.

He probably doesn’t even care that THIS YEAR was the deadliest year in Iraq for American soldiers… so far.

All he cares about is that we keep on killing brown people, regardless of reason.

Not that he has anything against brown people, per se, but that he shares the same disturbing ideologies as those who are currently in power.

He cares not for others, but only for himself. Leave him be.

The prevailing logic here seems to be that the bad things are Bush’s fault. Russia and China are not to be held accountable and their aiding the likes of such innocents as North Korean and Iran are only in response to Bush. Islamic fascists are not really a threat coz they can only kill a few thousand at a time, at least for right now. All was peachy before 2000.

As for #37:
WWII ended in our favor because the Nazis, AND their local sympathizers (perhaps you did not know we had to fight through the French in North Africa to get to the Germans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch )

and the general population where brutally beaten into complete submission. The Nazis had sympathizers through out Europe. Examples can be found that active resistance began only after the locales experienced the brutality of the Nazis personally, as Iragi’s have turned against Al Qaeda types in Iraq.

As Almighty Bob has corrected himself, the U.S. maintained a military presence in Europe, Japan, Korea, but why? As a force to maintain stability against the foreign and domestic threat of another brutal state philosophy called communism. The U.S. only gained favor by proving to be the most benign conquerors the worlds has ever known. ( insert a string of all the bad and terrible things the U.S. has done, well documented and open, my statement still stands).

If the occupation of Germany is considered to have ended in 1946 then the occupation of Irag ended in Dec 2005 with the election of a national assembly.

Unfortunately a presence will be maintained for years to come, as a force against Islamic brutality and the general tendency of the region to degrade to despotism.

I don’t like any of this. I wish the world were different. The ad remindes us it is not.

…the point being the Vichy French are an example of ‘local boys’, Iraqi resistance to Saddam and support for the Coalition (you like to pretend the 21 nations who contributed military forces in Iraq don’t count) were also active on day one, and the support has grown.

The ‘good war’ was not clean and clear, the outcome of the war was in doubt, the human cost for all was terrible, the aftermath lead to the Cold War, wasn’t that great…still it was the right thing to do…

Just as an example to your list in the context of history, given the choice between a Soviet Puppet state or the current Islamic regime, the rest of the world would be better off with the Shah, the people of Iran are still screwed.

Oh, and here’s a link to a contemporary compilation of the approval for war in the populations of Coalition countries. It states only Romania had a majority of the population in favour of invasion – and this is in 2003, when approval was at its highest.

I know I left them off. I provided a link to the full list, and said I was leaving them off. It’s condensation, or even being polite; the bloody post was long enough as it was.
Norway? Not on the list I used, and that was the March 2003 list produced by the White House, who ought to know. They joined afterwards, but yes, they weren’t on my list. If you want to dispute my framing rather than my points, do so, but please be clear.
Withdrew their troops in 2005.

Spain elected an anti-war government at its next election and withdrew their troops in 2004.

The Netherlands?
“Then missiles started raining down on Baghdad, and the mood suddenly changed. Instead of the expected shock and horror in Dutch public opinion, there seemed to be a short period of uncertainty, only to then sweep into a mood of compliance with US policies. The most heard argument for this case, was that “We were not for this war, but now that it has started, we cannot afford to refrain from supporting the American strategy.” ”
Not lapdogs at all.
Troops withdrawn in 2005.

Portugal?
José Manuel Durão Barroso and his cohort were true conservatives, who looked to Portugal’s Renaissance glory, and criticised the ‘premature’ granting of indepeandence to Portugal’s colonies. He is quoted as saying that the experience gained during the GNR mission would be “useful in similar future operations.” Which is a rather onimous statement, despite the aforementioned GNR mission being just 128 soldiers.
The troops were withdrawn in 2005.

Japan sent 600 soldiers (in their first overseas deployment since they decided to take a stroll through China) on a non-combat and humanitarian mission, Japanese troops being banned from doing anything but defend themselves by the constitution. They were withdrawn in 2006.

Denmark appears to have fallen for the WMD FUD, but there were also statements like “the Danish Government believes that it was right to show solidarity with the United States in its fight against a repressive tyrant.” (Frank Laybourn, a Foreign and Security Policy Adviser to the then-Government)
There is faint hint of doggy-breath about that statement, isn’t there?
Troops withdrawn August 2007.

Italy: “But the minister, speaking at a ceremony in Grosseto to mark the F2000 Typhoon jet fighter’s 1000th hour in flight, went on to stress that his country were on America’s side and not Saddam Hussein’s when given the chance to take sides.” (From here)
They also din’t take part in the invasion, merely allowed the US to use Italian airspace and transport infrastructure.
Sounds like they took Bush’s “you’re either with us or you’re against us” at face value.
Troops withdrawn in 2006.

Australia: “There seems to be a compliant acceptance that if America goes to war we will go to war, but should we?” from a 2002 article in The Age.
Australia has fought alongside the US in World War 1 and 2, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. That’s even better than the British you call lapdogs.
Troops to be withdrawn by mid-2008.

To make myself clear, I am not calling these countries American lapdogs, if for no other reason than I hope I’d never use such a hackneyed old cliche when there’s plenty of more informative (and less pejorative) ways of saying they were more influenced by who asked than by what the question was.
Slide introduced the term; if he thinks of the UK as a lapdog, maybe he’s willing to accept other pets…

That would have been an accomplishment indeed, considering he was 13 when the war ended. And even if he was a truly precocious politician, it’s irrelevant anyway.

Come on slide, you can do better than this. You’re not even trying! Obfuscating the argument is bad arguing, but an okay tactic if it works. You’ve tried it subtly a few times, and I’ve tended to follow a bit; both to correct what I saw as mistakes, and for my own amusement. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you get away with heaping manure into the discussion.
And for future reference, the key in making up facts in arguments is their believability. When the person you’re discussing with has Google at their fingertips, believability goes way down; it’s generally better not to try.

Ah. Apologies for the ad hominem, so.

The point I ws trying to make is that many of the smaller NATO countries went because it was the US asking, and the US had produced intelligence saying Iraq had WMD, and (I’m assuming; intelligence services tend not to advertise their existence, operations, or anything else) these smaller countries wouldn’t have the intelligence assets to independently check the intelligence. Germany, on the other hand, had BND agents in Baghdad before and during the invasion (as evidenced by the fact that a German agent in Qatar was assigned to pass information to the invasion force, which included troop disposition – and in some cases positions – in what was apparently a quid pro quo arrangement with US intelligence), so perhaps they knew that the dossier that was the stated reason for the war was, to quote Ford, bunk.
The French had the best intelligence on the ground according to a British agent (in fact, they extracted the German agents); remember how vociferous France was in attempting to prevent the war?

Okay, if my point about local guerilla resistance being enormously difficult to defeat doesn’t stand up, knock it down. Explicitly, please, as I can think of three examples (that lasted 30 years, at least) without trying.

The Bush Administrations has made Iraq a battelfield for the war on terror.

Oh boy, haven’t they.

I linked to the full list at the time of the invasion, said I was using that list, and said I hadn’t included all the members. In fact, here’s precisely what I said:

Here’s the Coalition in 2003, according to the White House. I’ll use extracts here, as the whole list is unwieldy.

Now, if you think I should have cut and pasted the whole list for no good reason, I’m sorry. I find encountering a post in a blog’s comments that is as long as the blog itself a very bad sign, and try not to write such.

And if you have to use statements like “any human endeavour is flawed from the start” to excuse the idiocy, graft, and mayhem that has been the Iraq “war”…

Anyway: I’ve let you set the pace, and drag us backwards and forwards across the actual argument, and I have yet to see you make one substantive point.
Here are mine, the main thrust of what I’ve been trying to say.

The Iraq invasion has made the USA – and the world – a less secure, more dangerous place. Fact.

The War On Terror is a war on an amorphous, chameleonic Hydra that will never be defeated by sending in the Marines. You fight terrorism like you fight a forest fire; you deprive it of fuel, and try to put out sparks. Deprive Islamic terrorism of fuel? Remove the reasons young Islamic men feel they have nothing to live for, are full of hate, and are vulnerable to being indoctinated that dying will bring them to Paradise? It’d probably involve such things as education and jobs. Other than that, it’s beyond me; but that’s okay, I’m just an idiot at a computer.
Put out sparks? Abu Ghraib was a spark. Blackwater and its ilk are sparks. Guantanamo is a spark. The rape and murder of that 14-year-old Iraqi girl is a spark. The internment of large numbers of Iraqis for no stated reason is a spark.
You get the picture?

oh blaa blaa blaa. You make a statement that NATO countires were not part of the war effort then publish a list that puropsly excludes them, for lack of space you say, and then you write the above? There is no logic here, it is just intellectually dishonest.

I think we probably are done here. If the Coalitions attempts to create a democracy in Iraq fails, then the world is worse off. If the democracy succeeds, the world is better for it. Should it have been attempted in the first place? Well lets not start that again.

The main problem with post-invasion Iraq (never mind the presence or absence of secret police) is its radicalising effect. Think the Alamo.
The Iraq invasion was also a godsend for Bin Laden. It gave him a respite from being chased all over Afghanistan by SEALs, distracted political and military attention from the patch he was operating in, provided reams of propaganda and mujahideen hand over fist. Before the Iraqi invasion, one “Al Qaeda” existed, which tended to be more terrorism finance than bombmakers. Now there’s “Al Qaeda In Iraq”, Al Qaeda sympathisers in Palestine, UNIFIL have been attacked several times by Al Qaeda sympathisers in Lebanon…
It also allowed the Taleban to rest and resupply while materiel and personnel needed in Afghanistan was drawn off to Iraq. There’s been a resurgence, and the last two years have been the deadliest for Coalition troops since the invasion.

Slide, I left some NATO countries off – I put up the ones I had something to write about. Though after checking the NATO membership, I find I did actually leave them all off… hmm. I suppose I must have thought they were semi-credible allies at the time of posting.

You make a statement that NATO countires were not part of the war effort

No, I didn’t. I said “Germany and, France, which are NATO countries“. I was trying to establish why their absence would be considered strange.
Please try to attack what I write, not what you thought I wrote.

I can’t spend the time to thoroughly refute you anymore, slide. It’s a pity, I was enjoying myself. If you promise to play nice and restrict the arguments to things I can respond to in 20 lines or less, I might be able to continue. Ad hominen attacks should do fine, if you can’t come up with anything else.

Let me help ya’ll out with this whole support thing.

The major reason for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam’s willingness and perceived ability to use WMD in terror attacks posed an immediate threat to the rest of us. Because it was a perceived threat, support for the war was not as strong as in the first Gulf War.

This ‘ability’ to use, and therefore the immediacy of the threat, has been shown to be wrong. Support for the war as fallen faster then it otherwise would have because of this.

This is the problem with preemptive strikes.

If they were trying to bring about a free Iraq, why have the US built the biggest embassy in the world in Baghdad, and a base meant to stay there for 50 years at least? Why is passing legislation allowing American oil companies… generous… access to Iraqi oil one of the “benchmarks” imposed on the Iraqi Parliament to get reconstruction funds?

No, slide: the reason Iraq was invaded is because your government (and the British, yes) lied and stated that Saddam Hussein had or was attempting to acquire or build nuclear (Niger yellowcake), chemical (sold to him by US companies, with approval from State Department in the 80s, and any stocks left (unlikely) were almost certainly denatured by 2000), and biological (US pharmaceuticals sold him anthrax and botulism) weapons. All this forgot or ignored the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors had been poking their noses into every awkward corner they could find, making it quite difficult to make new produiction facilities, and had completely decommissioned the aforementioned pre-Gulf War WMD capability.

There was no “perceived ability,” your government just lied through its teeth!