RRC Archives

I think this is funny as hell

now that is funny!!!

Good interview with T. Blair on NPR this morning at least from Blair I personally find the NPR reporters to be annoying.

First the proportional response bit then the Tony Blair bit.

LK Day, you interpret the proportional response idea too literally. It is generally not one eye for one eye. If they take a U.S. citizen's eye it usually happens that our government takes, well, more than just one of theirs, but apparently not enough for Mr. Lewis. That having been said and taking into consideration what Bush did in the days and months after that day, what would a better response to 9/11 have been? Were you calling for something more intense or less intense than killing 3,000 Al Qaeda terrorists? I'm assuming more intense, in which case, the response was, in deed, more intense than that. With the benefit of hindsight, what do you think a proper response would have been?

And Pigsteak, yes, Blair is a lapdog (or, better, the underdeveloped member of a pair of conjoined twins who simply can't conceive of ever being separated from his bigger, badder, and more profoundly stupid brother who insists on blundering his way through the world), but when you say that, "...Blair has always been for American intervention, even when he was buddies with Clinton." Into what were we intervening? Nothing that did not have the backing of all of Western Europe and the UN, I'm sure. Blair was all for the original response to Sept. 11; there wasn't a major ally that wasn't. And when fed the what-we-now-know-is-bullshit "evidence" for wmd's and links to those attacks in Iraq, Blair, like 99% of Congress went along with it. Bush can try to hide behind the "coalition of the willing" and Tony Blair who are gradually turning sideways, though still attempting to deflect criticism with their bodies, but they might as well be hostages held there at economic gunpoint.

The war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are two very different things. The first was a response to the worst foreign attack on US mainland soil, and something any president would have carried out, in some permutation or another. The Iraq war, make no mistake about it, was a strategic, offensive move to do with the neoconservative agenda and oil.

Francis Fukuyama, who I mentioned before, is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins and, with Paul Wolfowitz, wrote the Book for neoconservatism. From the NY Times article "After Neoconservatism" which you can read online, he says:

"The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document."

And that was written more than a year ago. He says in another article that the administration predicated its decision to invade Iraq based on the idiosyncratic fall of the Eastern Bloc, USSR and communism. They figured that fundamentalist Islamic states would fall just as easily, with democracy waltzing in and completing Fukuyama and Wolfowitz's idea of the End of History, in which the capitalist democracy is the near-perfect endgame of governmental development. They, on the fundamentalist Islamic state count, were wrong.

So while Blair may have been dragged into this because of ties that many Britons see as too close, the Iraq war was definitely something conceived of by neoconservatives well before September 11 and brought into much sharper focus shortly after that day.

I recommend looking up the stuff that Fukuyama has written in the past -- it's pretty enlightening stuff as to the debacle we find ourselves in these days. Now I must stop thinking of all this titillating stuff and do my wildly boring work.

Responses?

uncorked a civil war.....

damn right

wouldn't the best thing for the middle east just be a huge civil/ethnic war??? allow them to occupy themselves with themselves. we can become friends with whomever is left.

Except that nothing unites people better than a common enemy. They'd probably go after each other, Anchorman style, for a while, and then realize, hey, what the fuck are we fighting each other for, when there are infidels to kill?

The other problem would probably be that we would end up with dictators in those countries way worse than Ahmadinejad or Hussein.

Alex3000 wrote: And when fed the what-we-now-know-is-bullshit "evidence" for wmd's and links to those attacks in Iraq, Blair, like 99% of Congress went along with it.

Afghanistan was a reaction to 9/11. Iraq was a preventative war / stabilize the area for oil. I'm not sure whether prevention was the cart or the horse but we are trying to prevent nukes/dirty bombs from getting into the US plus secure oil for the masses / cut off source of funds to terrorism. There is even credible information that a bomb has already been sneaked into the US. So credible that detection equipment has been placed in strategic locations within the US. Plus, the govt. put the likelihood of a bomb going off w/in the US in the next 10yrs at 40%. Scary times and I’m sure we don’t know the half of it. I think education and democracy would go a long way over there to calm the area. Right now they have nothing better to do than be a terrorist. Give them some democracy, money and entertainment and the problem goes away. A study was just done on violence and how much entertainment one receives. When someone has something fun to do the crime and violence decrease.

My 2 cents

I know, Iraqy Idol!

I'd hate to get "voted" off that show.