President Bush The Smarter Has Passed Away

[Amarok]

So now he's advocating political espionage  and no bush obeying the law was not a blunder .

[Brian37]

The simple problem with blaming Bush, Sr. with not taking out Iraq is that doing so would not have been a just war and would have compromised our aims in the region and elsewhere by setting a precedent that the U.S. was willing to shamelessly engage in conquest and imperialism for unjustifiable reasons.  A precedent that would have had far reaching and damaging consequences.  Bush, Jr. realized this.  That's why he manufactured the charge of harboring WMDs in violation of UN agreements and violating the no-fly zone.  Bush, Jr. attempted to give a war on Iraq the legitimacy that it would have lacked under Bush, Sr.  To say that Bush, Sr. was a failure for not engaging in an unjust war is simply short sighted thinking, concentrating  only on the immediate goal of regime change in Iraq, and ignoring the consequences of engaging in such without adequate moral justification.  It is not only immoral, it is bad policy.

Why did the US, under Bush Sr., encourage an internal revolt in Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam?
It has nothing to do with imperialism or conquest. Once free, Iraq auctioned and contracted its oil to the Chinese.
WMDs and oil were just a pretext. The real reason was to get rid of a dictator like Saddam. As far as I'm concerned, that's all that matters and that's all the justification needed.
When troops were already on the ground in Kuwait, it was just a matter of crossing the border and heading north a few miles to Baghdad. Bush Senior made a blunder just admit it.
Instead, we allowed Iraq a full decade to regroup and try to recover. That partly explains why the insurgency during the Second Gulf War was so intense. The Baathists were preparing for it and had increasingly militarized the Sunni triangle. They knew they could never defend against the Americans in a conventional war, which is why they didn't even try in 2003.

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There is no such thing as a "leftist" government. I am a liberal, I value the protection of pluralism. I am sick of the bullshit slur that all closed societies are "leftist". No, they are conservative. Iran does not value political or religious pluralism. They are a one party CONSERVATIVE theocracy.

China is also A CONSERVATIVE STATE. It values blind loyalty to ONE PARTY. That is hardly a value of openness and pluralism.

And what Reagan did with "tear down that wall" had nothing to do with the GOP starting the age of failed trickle down economics. From a social perspective in pushing an open society in Germany and Russia, he was right. But that does not mean what he did locally here with economics worked. 

"Capitalism" is not a form of government. China allows the private sector too, it is why when you go to Walmart you see 99% of the labels on products "made in China". They are a one party conservative AUTHORITARIAN capitalist country. The Saudi Royal Family also are a RICH family who owns banks and oil companies. Gadaffi was a billionaire who owned stock in General Electric. Fidel Castro died with an estimated personal wealth of $800 million.

What failed with Iran ending up in a theocracy, was our miscalculation that by busting them up it would lead towards a more open society. But that does not make the Iran we have now a liberal country, to claim it is is absolute bullshit.

Again, "liberal" does not mean closed, it means "open".

Dude stop trying to redefine political terms. This isn't about the liberal conservative binary. That binary is for people with a simple minded approach to politics.

Not the one doing that. Conservatives are the ones whom have vilified liberals as nanny state communists, or Hitler's Germany, and that is what THEY, not me define as "left".

No sorry, but that is exactly what dictators do and one party states do. They limit competition to one party and or section of society whom they deem loyal to that state. That is conserving power to a limited section of a given population. It is a monopoly. 

The private sector is not exclusive to the west. There is not one nation, friend or foe alike that does not invest in the global market. The private sector despite what you might think also existed under Hitler and Stalin. The difference between those dictatorships and the west is which sect of the population had more power over the economy. In those dictatorships, the private sector was merely crony capitalism as to which the benefits of the market went to the party loyalists.

Again, see China. That is not a leftist state, it is a conservative one party authoritarian capitalist state. 

"Leftist" to today's conservatives is a bullshit pejorative having nothing to do with what what western liberals want. What today's liberals want isn't an end to the private sector. What today's western liberals want is the same economic policies that gave rise to the middle class after WW2. Nobody wants Castro's cuba or Stalin's Russia. 

Being anti monopoly, being pro livable wages is not a leftest idea, it is what America used to do after the Great Depression up until Reagan. Today's conservatives are simply a product of the fear mongering of the old white men who sell the cold war crap. But I do warn you, if the GOP got everything it wanted we would have the same slave wage economy as China. 

The goal in the west isn't to compete to become a labor force whom works for pennies.

[Anomalocaris]

So now he's advocating political espionage  and no bush obeying the law was not a blunder .

It has to be said that prior to Clinton great powers largely respected eachother’s Right to decide how it wished to run itself. Even Cold War efforts to subvert eachother was limited to largely limited to influence on peripheral players in eachother’s heirarchy.

It was under Clinton that the US took advantage of the chaos resulting from collapse of soviet union to attempt to weave the disparate political fractions in the former Soviet Union into a web through which the US can menipulate political outcomes in the former Soviet States, and used it with the singular goal of crippling forever Russia’s position in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

Shortly after Putin ascended to Russian presidency in 2000, he took advantage of the opportunity afforded by 9/11 to try to play nice with the US in the hopes of calling a truce with the US in the american war to subvert core Russian geopolitical interests. Bush junior pretty much just laughed and spat in his face. The US under Bush continued to try to subvert Russian influence in Ukraine, Armenia and Syria. It can be said what Putin has done since around 2006 was to,push back on american efforts to roll back Russian influence in traditional Russian sphere of influence.

The Russian electoral meddling of 2016 was precisely the sort of brilliant political influence stroke that changes the world’s balance of power at a stroke, doing grave and difficult repair to harm to the adversary across multiple fronts, while securing one’s own geostratetic interests, with no bloodshed. It is the sort our friend the cherubic fool here advocates.

But we are the loser. We instigated the conflict. We sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind in the political espionage and covert influence game.

It should be a guiding principle of American covert operation:

Where ever the conflict involves careful assessment of the interests, motives, conflicts and weaknesses of human elements in societies, America will lose. Our opponents will win. Because we are ego driven and congenitally suck at assessing other people. So we should not play.

[Angrboda]

The simple problem with blaming Bush, Sr. with not taking out Iraq is that doing so would not have been a just war and would have compromised our aims in the region and elsewhere by setting a precedent that the U.S. was willing to shamelessly engage in conquest and imperialism for unjustifiable reasons.  A precedent that would have had far reaching and damaging consequences.  Bush, Jr. realized this.  That's why he manufactured the charge of harboring WMDs in violation of UN agreements and violating the no-fly zone.  Bush, Jr. attempted to give a war on Iraq the legitimacy that it would have lacked under Bush, Sr.  To say that Bush, Sr. was a failure for not engaging in an unjust war is simply short sighted thinking, concentrating  only on the immediate goal of regime change in Iraq, and ignoring the consequences of engaging in such without adequate moral justification.  It is not only immoral, it is bad policy.

Why did the US, under Bush Sr., encourage an internal revolt in Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam?
It has nothing to do with imperialism or conquest. Once free, Iraq auctioned and contracted its oil to the Chinese.
WMDs and oil were just a pretext. The real reason was to get rid of a dictator like Saddam. As far as I'm concerned, that's all that matters and that's all the justification needed.
When troops were already on the ground in Kuwait, it was just a matter of crossing the border and heading north a few miles to Baghdad. Bush Senior made a blunder just admit it.
Instead, we allowed Iraq a full decade to regroup and try to recover. That partly explains why the insurgency during the Second Gulf War was so intense. The Baathists were preparing for it and had increasingly militarized the Sunni triangle. They knew they could never defend against the Americans in a conventional war, which is why they didn't even try in 2003.

You're still ignoring the larger ramifications of doing so, which, in and of themselves, make going to war in that instance bad policy. It's true that the U.S. engages in attempts at regime change, but such attempts are almost always covert. Engaging in regime change overtly through the expedient of an unjust war sets you up for the negative consequences that I've already outlined, whereas covert actions are not as likely to do so. The fact that the U.S. does and has preferred covert attempts at regime change to overt acts of war aimed at regime change undermines your argument because it shows that, for reasons which I've only partially argued, doing so is worse and more harmful to our long term interests than covert action is. Your own example refutes your argument that overt action in the absence of moral justification is a desirable and that such would not be bad as a foreign policy. The existence of plentiful covert action and the paucity of actual overt actions shows that the people who are actually responsible for such decisions don't consider such overt attempts at regime change solely for the sake of regime change to be good policy. Maybe you know better than they do, but I doubt it. I suspect you simply haven't considered how such an overt war in the absence of sound justification and multilateral support would actual be harmful to our interests in the world instead of helpful. I agree that in some parts of the world, regime change would be desirable. That doesn't mean that all methods of achieving regime change are equally desirable or even good, on balance, overall. You have confused the goal with the method. The goal of regime change is desirable. Overt military action with neither moral justification or multilateral support is not.


A quick note about our "allies" and them being largely a group of Arab countries. That's actually a positive and not a negative as the goal in such actions, including regime change, is to further stability in the region. Stability in the region is enhanced if the Arab countries in that region are onboard with what we are trying to do in the region via regime change. If it is not supported by Arab countries in the region, that just sets up the conditions for divisiveness in the region and undermines the goal of stability in the region. The goal of regime change is sometimes about extending our sphere of influence, but where it has been the primary goal of action, doing so tends to have bad consequences, up to and including undermining stability in the region. We want allies, not puppets. Puppets don't work and undermine both our effectiveness in the region, as well as the harmony necessary for stability in the region. It is typically an unhealthy sign if your policy is aimed solely at making our side happy. Any conversation about happiness has to include the other side or it leads to bad results.

[Cherub786]

You're still ignoring the larger ramifications of doing so, which, in and of themselves, make going to war in that instance bad policy.  It's true that the U.S. engages in attempts at regime change, but such attempts are almost always covert.

Yes and I mentioned the US should continue to invest in these covert operations to destabilize all the antagonists in the world, especially China and Russia.

Engaging in regime change overtly through the expedient of an unjust war sets you up for the negative consequences that I've already outlined, whereas covert actions are not as likely to do so.   The fact that the U.S. does and has preferred covert attempts at regime change to overt acts of war aimed at regime change undermines your argument because it shows that, for reasons which I've only partially argued, doing so is worse and more harmful to our long term interests than covert action is.

Overt action should be used when it's a soft target, as Iraq and Libya were. 

A quick note about our "allies" and them being largely a group of Arab countries.  That's actually a positive and not a negative as the goal in such actions, including regime change, is to further stability in the region.  Stability in the region is enhanced if the Arab countries in that region are onboard with what we are trying to do in the region via regime change.

Wrong. All these Arab countries are not allies. They serve no useful purpose. Obama did one thing right which is to pivot the US attention to the Pacific region and away from the Middle East. So on one hand the US should continue to build up its naval power in the Pacific and eventually strangle the Chinese by limiting their access and then swarming them by the South China Sea.

As for the Arab countries, all those regimes which haven't already gone (Iraq and Libya) need to go. The US doesn't need their approval or help. One of the aims of the Iraq War was to send a message to the Arab dictatorships to smarten up or they could be next. While Bush was president, those Arab states were genuinely scared.

Now while we're on the subject of the Iraq War, I should note that one thing I was delighted about, as a religious person, was the removal of a secular fascist regime which allowed Iraq to become politically more religious, since Iraq's society is deeply religious and conservative (always has been). The Mahdi Army, SCIRI, and Dawa are the mainstream political parties and they quietly made Iraq more conservative and religious. They smashed the liquor shops and forced the cross dressers and shemales off the streets and into the sewers.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yes and I mentioned the US should continue to invest in these covert operations to destabilize all the antagonists in the world, especially China and Russia.

Oh....christ.  Never have two nations been so thoroughly dependent on each other and so thoroughly alike each other..except in the minds of dolts.  If the US engages in covert action to subvert china, it will inevitably be engaged in covert action to subvert itself.

Russia, meh, more of the same, but not quite so much the same as.

You're a cold war jingoist who never takes a breath to critically assess your own jingoism..and this..only, because you think that china and russia are preventing islamists from being islamists. Yeah, no shit. So are we. Now, you can conceptualize that and give that all the cover that you want, but I aint buyin it...because your cover is shit. China and the US have more in common, ideologically and practically and geographically and ethnographically.. than you have with either.

If china is an antogonist, it's only an antagonist in exactly the same way and to the same ends as the US. We'd do better by joining hands -as- antagonists than demmuring to you fragile islamist sensibilities. We could, together, crush the world underfoot, you see...you underfoot as well in the process. When everyone else has been beaten into submisson (again, we're antagonists, lol) then we can hash out whatever difficulties there are between us and portion up the globe...but not before.

Good luck to you and yours in that future sino-american hellscape, lol.

[Cherub786]

Yes and I mentioned the US should continue to invest in these covert operations to destabilize all the antagonists in the world, especially China and Russia.

Oh....christ.  Never have two nations been so thoroughly dependent on each other and so thoroughly alike each other..except in the minds of dolts.  If the US engages in covert action to subvert china, it will inevitably be engaged in covert action to subvert itself.

Russia, meh, more of the same, but not quite so much the same as.

You're a cold war jingoist who never takes a breath to critically assess your own jingoism..and this..only, because you think that china and russia are preventing islamists from being islamists.  Yeah, no shit.  So are we.  Now, you can conceptualize that and give that all the cover that you want, but I aint buyin it...because your cover is shit.

I don't see how. Take out the communist regime in China and return the territory to the legitimate Republic of China. The economy will stay afloat, in fact there will be more trade. More balanced trade too.

The Communist regime doesn't just suppress Muslims ("Islamist" or otherwise), it persecutes the Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong, and Christians too.

As for Russia, it's not so much the state that needs to be replaced. The problem is basically Putin and the ex KGB cabal. Those guys need to be neutralized. There are favorable democratic forces already in Russia. But since elections are fixed, they are unable to form a government. Russia was tolerable under Yeltsin. We simply need another Yeltsin type figure. Perhaps Medvedev or someone even more pro-West.

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Are you kidding me? As a so-called "Islamist" the US has been a Godsend for us. First they got rid of Saddam to allow "Islamists" to take Iraq, then got rid of Gaddafi. The US supported the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets, support the Chechens against Russia in the 1990s, supported the Bosnians against the Serbs as well, supported the Albanians of Kosovo. Most recently, the US supported the FSA in Syria.

We "Islamists" and the US were natural allies during the Cold War. Our common enemy is the godless Soviets and commies.

The only blunder of the US is in fighting the Taliban. But don't think the Kabul govt. is secular. All those warlords and their political factions that make up the Kabul government are "Islamists" too.

[Amarok]

Lol so once again Cher thinks the "good guys " should break the law

[The Grand Nudger]

Some people confuse being useful tools with being allied.   The us is more allied with china than it ever was with a useful islamist tool.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

...and New Zealand plays the waiting game...

Boru, from the Secret Volcano Lair