Whether MB is a racist or not is a pointless argument. I doubt that he is. The fact that he has adopted the Pat Buchannon foreign policy that states that the people of the middle east do not want to have a Democratic state with rights and participation in their government, that they prefer the “strong hand” of a dictator, and that if you assume that they have aspirations for freedom you are an idiot because they don’t and it is wiser to accept that fact, deal with the tyrants, ignore the Human Rights violations and let the competing tyrants go after each other now and then if they want to as long as we get our oil. This is Security for Oil, this has been the defacto policy of the U.S. for the last 60 years,both Democratic and Republican, and this was the policy that the current President was going to follow until events opened his eyes.

Please don’t recite the poetic appeals for Human Rights that flowed from various White House Administrations and from the U.N. over the last few decades. The various tyrants of the Middle East read them and used them to wipe themselves. They could do this because they knew these were empty threats and that no concrete actions would be taken. “Oh, but look at the first Gulf War and the help we got from the region and the world”. That is true but the aid was given with the promise that we would not remove Saddam. That was why Saddam felt free to crush the opposition groups that rose up because we told them to rise up and the entire world ignored his actions and took no concrete steps to remove him. They contained him. But that allowed him to send $25,000 to each suicide bombing, it allowed him to corrupt the U.N. and use the aid that was intended for women and children and use it for his cronies. And before 9-11 the pressure to remove the embargo was growing and it would have been removed without removing Saddam. And when he got hold of the billions of petro dollars that the oil of Iraq would generate I feel it is the height of naivete to believe he would not reach out and aid the terrorist groups that had shown that they would attack us all over the world. He was contained but I have never seen any plan, any action that was going to remove him and other then saying that it was up to the Iraqi’s themselves to get rid of him I have not seen a single realistic plan that was going to topple the Saddam regime. Because he had no problem with the notion of mass murder of his own people there was no way that an Iraqi insurrection was going to work. Look how well it worked after the first gulf war.

I despise Buchannon’s foreign policy but he is consistent. He is against nation building, he thinks that if a tyrant has something that we need for our our security, oil, we have no choice but to work with the devil we know and ignore what he does to his own population or any other population as long as it doesn’t directly hurt America. If he is overthrown by someone who will give us what we need and is not evil great, but it is none of our buisness what other countries do and unless they attack us it is none of our buisness. It is simple and it is practical. But I think it is short sighted and it is the ostrich method to foreign policy that doesn’t works.

The idea that central-casting Politburo members like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld could call into being anything as fair and delicate as a democracy is laughable.

“the one thing that annoys me, probably most of all, from the critics is that they seem to believe the TV template; that every problem has to be solved perfectly in an hour….

with commercials”

You think?

What is Roger’s place to you? Practice? I mean you’re getting the form down, it’s just the content that is lacking.

You don’t need a sophisticated taste in art to judge the drawings of toddlers. You don’t need a sophisticated world view to understand the ham-fisted Republican plan for Iraq.

I believe what we are setting up in Iraq is something the late, great, Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman would have called a “Cargo Cult Democracy.”

From his book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character:”

We really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science. I think the educational . . . studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science.

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller – and they wait for the airplanes to land.

They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.

So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

It takes a lot more than purple thumbs and a piece of paper to turn a country into a democracy.

A reactionary fear of change.

Unfortunately this change is inevitable and we will have conflict with the Islamic World if we like it or not. We can either wait until thousands or tens of thousands (a few hours later and 14,000 would have died on 9/11) or millions and believe me THEN the killing will REALLY start.

Muslims see the total failure of the Islamic World (in 2004 gross revenues of NOKIA exceeded that of non-oil related exports from Arab nations) and must find someone to blame. The Jews, Israel, and of course the evil Great Satan the United States. Are not Britney and Christina on MTV on satellite TV? What more proof of evil can you have than the righteous Muslims suffer (and see with their own eyes the wickedness of the infidel) while the right hand of Satan prospers? It is the duty of the faithful therefore to destroy the infidel whenever and wherever he can be found.

The general Muslim reaction is to destroy modernity and rule the embers. MODERN LIFE itself as epitomized by the US makes this conflict inevitable, accelerated by technology like TV, radio, Satellite TV, DVDs, and the internet.

Yes it would be nice to think that Saddam or Osama or whoever had “stopped most of the killing” but that’s a fallacy. Like imagining that suppressing 80% of the population by a Sunni minority was any more stable (or different from) Apartheid or Pinochet’s military government and attempt to turn Chile back into 1932. Saddam WAS a problem, aggressive, harboring terrorists, acting against the US, refusing any prospect of dropping hostility or regional ambitions.

Monkeyboy and Leftists both suffer from the same delusion: that with just enough effort it can remain 1994 forever. Well, it won’t. CHANGE WILL HAPPEN. We can either try and shape it for the better or just sit by passively till the next atrocity ala Beslan or worse hits us. There is also on Monkeyboy’s (but not I believe Marc’s) the belief that the US is the sole source of all evil and for the world to be utopian the US simply has to disappear (best) or withdraw into a shell and apologize for existing.

Marc at least recognized that a. the lesson of the Iraq War was that to remove tyrants ONLY the US will do; b. people around the globe desire something more than to be ruled by a hereditary dictatorship (Castro, Saddam, Kims etc); c. the US MUST ACT or be shaped by a changing world, the Ostrich strategy is simply stupid.

Marc still does not recognize that there is a difference between using the Marines to overthrow legitimate but anti-American governments that don’t pose a security threat in the Cold War (Honduras, Dominican Republic) and the modern challenge of hostile states aligned with terrorists planning things along 9/11. He’s not there yet on military force but I think he will get there.

The mistakes that have been made in the prosecution of this war are legion and if one wants to attack it after the fact it is easy to do. But for those who tear and shred President Bush I have a few questions. How were the efforts of the U.N. and the International community for bringing a democratic change to the Mid East working? How many of the dictatorships that were a cancer to the area and the world were overthrown during the last two decades? Yes, Saddam was “contained’ and he could not carry out a aggressive war against his neighbors but what were the prospects of ending his Bathist party reign and exactly what steps were taken to remove him? Do you really think anything other then a invasion was going to get him out of Iraq and if so, what was the plan and how was it going to be implemented? (please don’t try the economic embargo gambit, we saw what happened to that fiasco) Was the occupation of Iraq by the air force that kept saddam “contained’ but had done nothing to kick him out of power going to go on forever? How were the critics going to handle the declaration of a independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq that would have been declared if the no fly zones were kept on for the next decade and what would they have done when Turkey attacked that state as they promised they would? Do they think that Libya’s dumping of their nuke program had nothing to do with their leader seeing what happened to Saddam?

Was the status qou of the stability for oil program of both Democratic and Republican administration over the last 6 decades working for the world in general and for the people of the middle east? I think it would have been better for the Iraqi’s to have overthrown Saddam themselves but that was the plan that Bush 41 suggested and we saw how Saddam crushed that attempt without breaking a sweat. I agree, political solutions are always better then War. But other then wishing for them I have not seen a political solution that was going to remove Saddam and there has been more movement towards democracy in the middle east during the current administartion then in the previous 5. Is this transformation going smoothly? No. But at least it has started. Other then empty proclamations there was nothing going on before this President. The regimes of the area were not changing one bit and no one was taking any concrete steps to do anything. NOTHING WAS CHANGING.