Infinite Monkeys

Remind me again who the enemy is/are, and what we are doing that has any reasonable possibility of achieving victory against them.

You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to believe we invaded Iraq for no good reason. Similarly, you don't have to believe the "jihad is not real" to believe that we're "at war" against an abstraction. When you declare war on an idea, you will never know if or when you have won.

In the meantime, thousands have died, hundreds of billions have been spent, and we're still no closer to understanding how to win the "war on terror" than we are with the "war on drugs."

For all the talk of how dem libruls have ruined national security, it's been a Republican-controlled Administration and Congress that have:
-ignored a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US"
-opposed the creation of and then severly underfunded the Dept of Homeland Security
-drastically underestimated opposition in Iraq and then short-changed their own troops
-played the blame game with their own intelligence community, all the while weakening their ability to tell what's going on
-claimed to create a democracy in Iraq, then allowed the govt to base laws on strict Islamic guidelines
-failed to catch or even minimize the impact of a international criminal madman or any of his top brass
-allowed the Justice Dept to spend more resources on fighting pornography, illegal drugs, and animal rights groups than terror groups home and abroad
-cut taxes while spending at unheard-of levels
-not reigned in the the corporate cronyism you mention, even within their own ranks

The list goes on and on...

To question how we meet the threat of islamofascist terrorists as RedAssedBaboon did is appropriate. To pretend that the terrorists don't exist is just absurd.

I didn't set out to be a reporter or a bloger or a teacher or anything... I just got to pissed off with people talking about Saddam Hussein as a benign old man, peacefully trying to take care of his people living in a desert utopia. So I began a list of sources that document Sadam has ties to al Queda an dother terrorist groups, Saddam had WMD (mustard gas, anthrax, missiles), and Saddam was a cold-blooded killer who was planning attacks against the US. There is much more to the story... I didn't include the damage caused by Oil For Food but that is also something to look into.

Here are links:

Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties -- 10/04/2004
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=%5CSpecialReports%5Carchive%5C200410%5CSPE20041004a.html

CNS is a wonderful source because they have 42 pages of documents from Iraqi intelligence online...you can see the original Arabic and the English translation.
Coalition Troops are finding documents in Iraq, thousands of pages and still more to be translated...A memo from Iraqi intelligence shows Saddam Hussein had ties to al Queda. Saddam Hussein possessed sarin and anthrax, and gas masks. Iraq was a training ground for terrorist operations (Coalition troops are finding bomb making devices that are not detected by airport screening devises and also hulls of planes used for training in high jacking planes). Saddam also financed terrorist operations, and wrote letters of support to terrorist groups in Palestine.


Investigative ReportSaddam's WMD Have Been Found - Insight on the News - World http://www.insightmag.com/media/paper441/news/2004/05/11/World/Investigative.Reportsaddams.Wmd.Have.Been.Found-670120.shtml

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors
Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

Iraqi Weapons in Syria
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=670123

We have had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official tells Insight. "In every case, the U.S. intelligence community sought to discount or discredit those reports."Another piece of this puzzle was provided by a Syrian intelligence officer in letters smuggled to an antiregime activist living in Paris named Nizar Nayouf. In one letter the source identified three locations in Syria where WMD materials had been buried under an agreement between the Syrian and Iraqi leadership. Two of the sites were specially dug underground bunkers and tunnels. The third site was a factory operated by the Syrian air force in the village of Tal Sinan, located between the cities of Hama and Salimiyyah. In a follow-up letter dated Jan. 7, Nayouf's source provided more details on these locations, along with a map, and alleged that some of the weapons had been moved out of Iraq in ambulances.

Russia Moved Iraqi WMD
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/3/2/230625.shtml

Russian special forces moved WMD from Iraq into Syria and Lebanon. This is information coming from a defector.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Goldberg cited former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, who stated that Moscow supplied Baghdad with fermentation equipment to produce biotoxins.

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraqhttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html


NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story Iraqi Truth Project http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/1/13/70852.shtml
Coaltion troops finding rounds of sarin and mustard gas, planes hidden beneath the sand. ""At least one Cold War-era MiG-25 interceptor was found when searchers saw the tops of its twin tail fins poking up from the sands, said one Pentagon official familiar with the hunt. He said search teams have found several MiG-25s and Su-25 ground attack jets buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad. ..."

I'm not denying the existence of terrorists at all. But I AM saying that we can't fight a "war" against them in the way we have. And we certainly can't fight a war against "terror" - it's far too abstract.

In Afghanistan, at least, we had a clearly culpable and identifiable government to topple. But Iraq was a mistake from day one, continues to be a waste of lives and resources, and is not showing any evidence of representing strategic "progress" against any meaningful enemy.

To those on the right who scoffed that you can't declare war on a technique, I pointed out that Britain's Royal Navy fought wars against slavery and piracy and were largely successful. Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war...

So four years on we're winning in the Middle East and Central Asia, floundering in Europe and North America. War is hell, but a war that half the country refuses to recognize as such staggers on as a very contemporary kind of purgatory. -Mark Steyn (in the article AnonyMonkey's post linked to)I might add such practical successes as "wars" on illiteracy and unimmunized children; the "ideas" have not been wiped from Plato's Forms or even from the earth, but they have been virtually won for most intents and purposes.

I will agree that the terminology may be in need of an update. But to dismiss the validity of the matter based on its name seems to smack of Logic's Spotlight fallacy. I think anyone honest about the conflict knows it's more a battle against hostile organizations supporting a particular strain of militant ideology than it is against the general idea of terrorISM. Unless it is to be ignored, it must be fought through a means of both hot and cold tactics; military and political strategies. Some surely argued that a "cold" war with various hot zones was a fruitless, or worse, exacerbating approach to the Soviets a world away. But the threat was real, and the subtle slow grand strategy that defeated it was no industrio-Orwellian coordinated stasis.

I'm reminded of people's reactions to the scenes of helicopters dropping thee initial bags of sand into the gap in the levee outside New Orleans. When the bags were dropped, they disappeared into the deep water. And then the helicopter flew away. Seemingly no progress was made. The helos came over, and over, and over, and over. The bags disappeared into the deep dark water. The helos flew very slowly, and they hovered for a maddeningly long time before each bag was dropped. It was a long, slow exercise, and it consumed a tremendous amount of man hours, resources, and fuel. I heard several people express how futile the exercise seemed. But we need to be reminded that most of the progress in an incremental effort will be invisible, imperceptible. Such progress will only become obvious when the task is almost completed.

Re: "Wars" on illiteracy and childhood immunization

It's not usually all that difficult to fight an opponent that doesn't fight back. The "war" on drugs, on the other hand, has been an abysmal failure, because the "enemy" (i.e. those who profit from illegal drug sales) fights back with a vengeance. Nobody in particular profits from illiteracy or lack of immunization, but PLENTY of people (e.g. the massive education and pharmaceutical industries) profit from the "fight."

As to "dismissing" the GWoT because of its name, I wonder if you have actually been reading my posts before responding to them. The terminology is critical here, because the Neocons have justified massive expense in dollars and bodies, not to mention crippling our civil liberties, based on the TERMINOLOGY. We are "at war", these are "wartime policies", etc. etc. etc. Well, tell me when these "wartime" policies will expire? When will we have "won"?

The answer is, of course, never. We'll just keep spending, dying, and imprisoning ourselves until, like the British empire, we collapse under the weight of our own "good intentions."

Did we have terms of victory stated in advance during the Cold War?

Did it end?

We had much more objective policies (i.e. containment, Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan) in the Cold War, yes. Also, one might concentrate on the "Cold" part of the Cold War - as regards the Soviets and Chinese, there was very little actual "war" going on with either of these governments, directly. But as long as you bring it up, let's take a look at the Cold War scorecard, shall we?

1. Vietnam - humiliating defeat, etc. etc. Also cf. Cambodia, Laos. Massive loss of resolve with regard to tangential military action.
2. Korea - never officially ended, and boy aren't thinks looking great in the Korean peninsula right now?
3. Central America - decades of abjectly immoral behavior by the US Govt and our agents, thousands upon thousands murdered, hardly our finest hour. Currently awash in drug-mob corruption. Lots of communism still alive and well in Central and South America.
4. Afghanistan - Horribly bungled funding of the Mujahideen via the Pakistani ISS, resulting in the rise of the Taliban and, eventually, a certain horror in New York Ciy four years ago.
5. Former Soviet Union - Crawling with "loose" nuclear weapons that can now get into the hands of low-rent baddies much more easily than before. Most former Soviet countries are run by mobsters, wallowing in poverty, still living under the jackboots of Russia, emerging into Muslim theocracies, or some combination of the above. In any case, most have not moved significantly in the direction of what could meaningfully be called "democracy." Glimmers of hope here in some areas, but by and large it's still pretty bad.
6. China - Still there, still communist, still nuclear, still dangerous.
7. Cuba - Castro's still killin', cigars are still illegal.

So, with terms of victory having been more clearly stated than they are in the GWoT, the answer to your question, "Did [the Cold War] end?" is, "Of course not." China and Korea are still there, and very dangerous, and the former Soviets have simply transformed from a (by and large) single major threat into a dozen or so less predictable, minor threats.

Interesting list--it includes all kind of actions, from U.N. approved wars (such as Korea), to illegal Central American activity, to the old chestnut of "who lost China?" I especially like the "loss of resolve" line in reference to Vietnam, since loss of resolve is exactly what you're urging.

Yep, foreign policy is hard. It's messy, it doesn't fit in neat little ideological boxes that wacko newletter writers love so well. But it's complicated and difficult precisely because it's so important. Saying, as so many paleo and liberterian folks do, that we should therefore just not participate in the world is ridiculous. It's as realistic and effective as a tinfoil hat to stop the mind control rays (trust me, I tried that, and they still get through).

The intention of my list was to respond to Brad's comments about the Cold War and his implication that it "ended," which I'm asserting hasn't happened yet. Whether or not it was worth it to engage in those activities is a discussion for another thread, I believe.

Several other things to respond to here, but as to the "loss of resolve" issue, I would argue that engaging in high-loss military action on frontiers of questionable value weakens the will of the people to engage in truly important military action. That is no small problem when the s*** really hits the fan.

On the contrary, showing a lack of resolve is precisely what emboldens our enemies. Some argue that our resolve in Vietnam--and it was a long, long war--is what weakened the resolve of the USSR. Certainly our behaviour in Lebanon, Somalia, etc. made Bin Laden confident that a struck at America was a good idea (and he has said as much). Withdrawing from Iraq now would be a disaster.

I think jumping straight to "Withdrawing from Iraq now..." misses the point. Before deciding what to do about the situations we are in, it is a worthwhile exercise to evaluate the merit of having gotten into those situations. I think you know that I would assert that we had no business being in Lebanon, Somalia, or Iraq in the first place.

Also, your comments about Vietnam seem to be changing the subject. My assertion was related to the effect of our lossess in Vietnam on the American people, not the Soviets. If I lost a friend or relative in another country's war, one that MAY have had some effect on the "resolve" of a hostile country, I would be furious, and I think rightly so.

The response in Afghanistan was appropriate. But invading Iraq was like punching the kid across the street for laughing at you, rather than actually finding the bully who beat you up and dealing with him.