After the [9/11] attacks, Wolfowitz talked to his friend Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, who gathered together a group of intellectuals and academics for a series of discussions that came to be known as "Bletchley II" (after the World War II think tank of mathematicians and cryptographers set up at Bletchley Park).[5]What planet do these people come from..
The famous weapons of mass destruction are gone, most of them probably fifteen years gone, and their absence has likely damaged the United States and its power！the power, deployed daily, that depends on the authority of words and pronouncements and not directly or solely on force of arms！ more severely than their presence ever could have. While no doubt convinced that Iraq had at least some chemical and biological weapons, Bush administration officials, like the cop framing a guilty man, vastly exaggerated the evidence and in so doing！and even as they refused to allow UN inspectors to examine and weigh that evidence！ they severely undermined the credibility of the United States, the credibility of its intelligence agencies, and the support for the war and US policy among Americans, among Muslims, and around the world.posted by Chuckles at 2:32 AM on November 23, 2006 [3 favorites]
Three years and eight months after the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense and his allies see in Iraq not one war but two. One is the Real Iraq War！the "outright success" that only very few would deny, the war in which American forces were "greeted as liberators," according to the famous prediction of Dick Cheney which the Vice President doggedly insists was in fact proved true: "true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly."[4] It is "within this context" that the former secretary of defense and the Vice President see America's current war in Iraq as in fact comprising a brief, dramatic, and "enormously successful" war of a few weeks' duration leading to a decisive victory, and then...what? Well, whatever we are in now: a Phase Two, a "postwar phase" (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) which has lasted three and a half years and continues. In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died！ and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized！unplanned.The "real iraq war" being the military thinker's ultimate dream of true war, while what is happening in Iraq now, so called asymmetrical warfare, is real war..
"Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate！on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, "in order to make a point that we're not going to live in this world that they want for us."Kissinger, the famed expert in realpolitik, is falling back on some idealized notion of true war to formulate a response to 9/11; the same as his response to losing in Vietnam. Well, like I said, I need to learn more..
by providing too few troops to secure Iraq's borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states
And every time someone dies, it hits another record high.
They set two lurchers... They're dogs, before you ask. On a hare. And the hare has to outrun the dogs.posted by kirkaracha at 1:52 PM on November 26, 2006
So, what if it doesn't?
Well, the big rabbit gets fucked, doesn't it?
Proper fucked?
Yeah, Tommy.
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Also: Critics of the Lancet study suggesting hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion should call for additional, independent studies that could provide a scientific basis for either confirming or refuting its alarming findings.
posted by homunculus at 12:30 AM on November 23, 2006