These are the sort of things that make me so glad conservatism is the outgoing political ideology. What a sick bunch of people.
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Conservative Frank Gaffney: 4,000 Americans HAD To Die In Iraq
December 16th, 2008
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Republicans don’t even want to defend their own bullshit any longer.
(rhetorical question) Is it really worth spelling this out to Mr. Partisan Blinders Willis?
Gaffney agrees with the objectives of the war. He wants/wanted to win it. Therefore, some Americans had to die in order for that to happen, because, well, because a war usually involves military people dying. If someone said that 416,800 American military personnel had to die because winning ww2 was necessary, would that be “sick” too? No, because you would agree that winning ww2 was important, and would understand that winning a war usually involves military personnel dying. (Or maybe you thought ww2 wasn’t important to win.)
You don’t think the war was necessary, and so you don’t think anyone had to die. Fine. Gaffney thinks the war was necessary, and realizes that that involves people dying. You may not like him, and you clearly disagree with the conclusions that led him to think the war was necessary, but there is nothing sick about what he said.
Well here’s the thing: I think anyone who is for the Iraq war, especially knowing what we know know, is sick in the head. That Gaffney is gleeful in the death of 4,000 Americans as well makes him even sicker.
>I think anyone who is for the Iraq war, especially knowing what we know know, is sick in the head.
Heh, that is a fabulous argument Oliver. “If you have reached conclusion x, then you are sick in the head. And I don’t have to engage your arguments.” I’m sure that worked great in 5th grade. How about you do some actual, you know, analysis of why you think Gaffney’s reasons are bogus? Nevermind, I know why – you almost never do anything resembling serious analysis of issues – it’s all just (D) and (R) to you.
>That Gaffney is gleeful in the death of 4,000 Americans as well makes him even sicker.
[Rolls eyes.] Yeah Oliver, he’s gleeful. Ecstatic, even, that 4000 people died. When, oh when, will you stop using your childish conservative caricatures.. (I know, likely never.)
He wants/wanted to win it.
Unlike those American-hating libs, who hate America so much they want/wanted to lose. Preach it, Brother Jingo!
How about you do some actual, you know, analysis of why you think Gaffney’s reasons are bogus?
I’ve only written about it for almost 8 years. I have neither the time nor interest to rehash why I think the bogus and mismanaged invasion of Iraq is not worth 4,000 Americans dying for no reason.
The war was sold as a defense against the possibility that Saddam would sell or give his (non-existent) WMD to al-Qaida. That was the rationale for the war. The “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud” was the ONLY rationale that Americans were gonna buy.
To pretend now that Americans would have gone to war to oust an evil dictator is dishonest as hell. Did we go to war to oust Idi Amin? Did we invade Mao’s China? Or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? Hell, we wouldn’t have fought Hitler if he hadn’t been an ally of Japan!
Given that plenty of smart people were arguing for restraint until more facts were known in 2003, and since the facts were that the “mushroom cloud” was never going to materialize, arguing that Gaffney and his ilk are bloodthirsty lying scum too stupid to be allowed to live is completely justified.
The “objectives of the war” were supposed to be to stop Saddam from giving WMD to bin Laden. Since Saddam didn’t have WMD, and Bush either knew or should have known so, Gaffney and his ilk are, indeed, bloodthirsty lying scum.
I can’t speak for OW, but the point is that Gaffney and his ilk are liars. The so-called “reason” for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam had WMD’s and was going to use them against us. Period. Now, Cheney and his apparatchiks like Gaffney are (to quote Chris Matthews) “backpedaling.” There were no WMD, and the reason for the invasion was completely bogus. So assholes like Gaffney are trying to re-write history and say that the _real_ reason we went in was because Saddam was a threat, regardless of WMD. In fact, Saddam _hated_ Al-Qaida and Iran, and the feeling was mutual. But now they’re trying to paint Saddam as the center of some monolithic Islamist terror movement, when in fact Saddam was no such thing. A horrible person, certainly, but not a nexus of jihadism.
This is a lie. Colin Powell went before the UN and tried to show that Saddam had tons of the stuff and was ready to use it. That’s why we went to war, and that’s why 4,000 Americans are dead. And the reason for their death was a lie. A Republican-manufactured lie.
History will not be kind to the Republican party ca. 2001-2008.
“Weapons of mass destruction” was the tag line to feed the ignorant masses. The REAL reason was simple – the neo-cons wanted to invade a middle eastern Muslim country, install a “democracy” and use it to undermine Islamic Dictatorships in the “heartland” of the Islamic beast.
They were partly stupid and ignorant and totally deluded. Iraq has never been a country, all it is is three groups that hate each others guts put into a “country” by the British after the break up of the Turkish empire, and held together by Saddam’s brutality. They picked a bad choice for the experiment.
Worse, they left “Afghanistan” undone. Ironically, Afghanistan like Iraq has never actually been a country either – just a group of Clan “gangs” selling drugs and guns to each other.
Ironically, America has lost ALL the post 9/11 support it had world wide, lost over 4,000 brave American soldiers, killed over 250,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan, created more Al Qaeda than ever, seen over 14,000 killed by terrorists worldwide. And it could have been mostly avoided by buying a tribal chief or two in Afghanistan – locating Osama and then firing a barrage of cruise missiles.
Our world today would be SO DIFFERENT if only the Supreme Court had not “elected” for President the guy that got the least number of votes.
The left lacks the courage and the guts to do the ugly things that have to be done from time to time. Unwilling to pay the price for freedom and liberty blue america rides for free while red america does the hard work.
Clearly that’s why 2 liberal presidents led America through WW2
Thanks again for volunteering to serve in Iraq, Amused Observer.
The right doesn’t have the guts or the brains to capture the people who carried out 9/11 — Osama bin Laden and his Saudi support network.
So unless you’re currently in the military Amused Observer, go fuck yourself. Bush and his handlers haven’t accomplished _anything_ since 9/11 to make America safer. Indeed, they’ve made the world a much more dangerous place. Iraq HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.
But I won’t debate this fact with a moron like you. I’ll just remind you that a Democrat is going to be president in January thanks to the absolute clusterfuck that was Republican governance from 2001-2008.
Gaffney agrees with the objectives of the war. He wants/wanted to win it.
Okay, pop quiz. What are they and how do we do that? How will we know when we’ve won?
The REAL reason was simple – the neo-cons wanted to invade a middle eastern Muslim country, install a “democracy” and use it to undermine Islamic Dictatorships in the “heartland” of the Islamic beast.
I think it’s simpler than that. They wanted access to Iraq’s resources and markets. They wanted a “clean slate” of free market economics. “Shock and Awe” was not merely a war slogan. They wanted to shock the Iraqi people into utter compliance by destroying EVERYTHING and then outsourcing everything to rebuild it.
Iraq was the last Friedman experiment. The last in long line of fail.
Ed and Jaim,
I’m not serving but my boy is. Carrying the weight of blue America upon his shoulders.
Oliver,
What do you think FDR would say about the treasonous behavior of Reid, Pelosi, and Murtha giving comfort to our enemies in a time of war? What would he have said about Obama? What would he think about you?
Duros,
Why don’t you expand on that Friedman thing. This I gotta hear.
Red America couldn’t exist without the tax dollars generated by cities like New York and Los Angeles. But thanks for playing. Have fun being irrelevant from now on.
And best wishes for your son to make it home safe. It’d be a shame if he died for a lie, wouldn’t it?
“Carrying the weight of blue America upon his shoulders”.
Right, like no one from blue states is serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Jerk. Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan. He planned to vote for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, thought the war in Iraq was illegal and devoured the works of Noam Chomsky…sounds like a typical red stater to me!
“Have fun being irrelevant from now on.”
Given that AO seems to think that only red staters are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, he couldn’t find his way back to relevancy with a thousand maps.
“What do you think FDR would say about the treasonous behavior of Reid, Pelosi, and Murtha giving comfort to our enemies in a time of war? What would he have said about Obama? What would he think about you?”
He would tell you to shut the fuck up. He would tell you by calling these patriotic Americans traitors, you show that you have no idea what American really stands for.
I just took a tour of the DMZ here in South Korea. The two guides were US servicemen. One was from northern California, outside San Francisco, the other from Chicago. Very nice guys, pretty professional and knowledgeable.
AO – I’m sure Duros will be able to elaborate more, but in essence the (Milton) Friedman experiment is summarized in his earlier sentence “They wanted a “clean slate” of free market economics.” There are any number of articles describing how people with real foreign policy experience and who understood the regional conflicts we’d deal with over there were shunted aside in the CPA in favor of 25 year old Ayn Rand fetishist Heritage Foundation interns who didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shia but knew that the number 1 priority for the new Iraq constitution was to make sure there was no capital gains tax!
As has been America’s policy for decades, from at least the Pinochet junta forward, other nations exist mainly as laboratories for the policies of the “Chicago school” of economics (of which Friedman was the leader). If their peoples won’t vote the way we want, well, we can fix that. Better some of the peasants die than allow Friedmanism to be less than fully implemented! And that’s the “Chicago Way”!
But read the documents of the neocon think tanks. There is one other major reason to invade Iraq (or some other mideast hellhole) which hasn’t been covered: to give us the staging ground for the war with China that most neocons anticipate.
Oddly enough, AO lives in a ‘blue state.’
I’m not serving but my boy is. Carrying the weight of blue America upon his shoulders.
I don’t believe that.
My blue Marine Lance Corporal nephew served two tours in Iraq and then suffered a broken arm and fractured skull when his crew’s Humvee flipped in a state-side accident.
My blue Marine Lance Corporal nephew served two tours in Iraq and then suffered a broken arm and fractured skull when his crew’s Humvee flipped in a state-side accident.
That’s wildly unfortunate on many levels, IaH. I’m sure some of AO’s Ilk would posit that it was Jesus’s will, what with the nephew’s political hue and all.
Thanks, Ed. I think it was due more to an inexperienced driver. Also, and I didn’t know this until my nephew told me, the armor on a Humvee, while valuable, can really affect its balance.
I’m not serving but my boy is. Carrying the weight of blue America upon his shoulders.
So, AO, who’s carrying your dead weight?
AO – I’m sure Duros will be able to elaborate more,
No need. You covered it, Rheinhard.
I’m not serving but my boy is. Carrying the weight of blue America upon his shoulders.
I hope he comes home safely.
You should read what the Rude Pundit has to say about Gaffney today.