The Issues

[selenite0]

John Seward does a great job of summing up my attitude toward the issues of this election:

Did George Bush get preferential treatment to get into the National Guard, and then not show up sometimes? Undoubtedly, but I don’t care.

Did John Kerry exaggerate and lie about his military record? Yeah, looks that way, but it was a long time ago, and I don’t care.

Is the doomed Federal Marriage Amendment a stupid, bigoted, paranoid idea? Yup, it sure is, but it ain’t gonna happen, so I don’t care.

Did the Bush tax cut save the economy? No, it probably had only a marginal effect.

Has the Bush tax cut and big spending doomed us by letting the deficit get out of control? No, it probably had only a marginal effect.

Is it a mistake for Bush to have cut off federal funding for certain kinds of stem cell research? Yeah, maybe, but it’s not a big deal.

Is John Kerry a glib, phony liberal? Well yeah, but what’s your point? How do you think you get elected to the Senate in Massachusetts?

Is George Bush a dyslexic, inarticulate, simpleton? Well, he’s obviously dyslexic and inarticulate, but doesn’t look like that much of a simpleton to me. I wish he could speak like Winston Churchill or Tony Blair, but I don’t care that much.

Did John Kerry give aid and comfort to the enemy during the Vietnam war? Yes, clearly, but . . . . I just don’t care.

Will George Bush fight the war against the jihadists with everything he’s got, without wavering, without backing down, no matter what? Yes, I’m sure he will.

Will Kerry? It’s conceivable, but very doubtful.

Comments

[icequeen-tpz.livejournal.com]

Same here. I wish people would look at the bigger isues and let the past go.

(frozen)

[oilhistorian.livejournal.com]

Is the Bush administration prosecuting Reservists and National Guardsmen for failing to show up for service just as Bush did three decades ago? Yes. Does this reflect on Bush's character? Yes.

(frozen)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Do I care? No.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nymphette_/]

lol! Oh, but I love me some Jon Stewart! Now please oh please let me gak your icon. I norked the coffe over that one... Bwahahahahaha!

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Go for it. I actually don't remember where I got it from, it should be attributed to somebody on LJ but I don't know who.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

So who are you voting for?

Did he fight it with everything he's got?

[abovenyquist.livejournal.com]

> Will George Bush fight the war against the jihadists with everything he’s got, without wavering, without > backing down, no matter what? Yes, I’m sure he will.

Nearly everyone I know who is planning to vote for Bush is voting for him for that reason.

I'm forced to vote against George Bush, because I'm sure he _didn't_.

Whether you believe that Bush will "fight the war against the jihadists with everything he's got," or whether you believe that Bush squandered most of his resources to fight the war against the jihadists (notice I quite distinctly do not include Saddam Hussein in their number) and simply used 9/11 as an excuse for invading a country he had long wanted to invade, depends on how you view the Iraq war.

View 1:

If Bush had stopped with Afghanistan and focused all of his efforts on securing the U.S. homeland and in fighting Al Qaida, I have no doubt he'd have been re-elected in a landslide, and go down as one of the great leaders of U.S. history (gulp!), however inarticulate he might be. (I gave him a reluctant thumbs up on his handling of things until I started to see the signs of the blatant, cynical bait-and-switch from Osama to Saddam.)

Instead, he wasted $200 billion and all the goodwill he built up among the American people (and the world) in his initial handling of the 9/11 crisis on a b******* war against a two-bit dictator with no links to Al Qaida and no substantive weapons programs. (It is ironic that out of the three countries in the Axis of Evil, Bush attacked the only one that did not have an active nucelear weapons program.) Iraq was not a haven for anti-U.S. terrorists before the invasion, but it certainly became one after. (True, Saddam funded Palestinian suicide bombers, but so did any number of governments in that region. That alone was not a sufficient reason for invading Iraq in particular.)

View 2:

Now, of course, Selenite has a long series of well-reasoned arguments on how the war in Iraq will lead to a spread of democracy in the middle east and, in the long run, reduce the threat of terrorism.

Ultimately, I find that View 2 requires too many things to go perfectly, too many links in the chain that must lock exactly in place to be feasible, even if I bought Bush's reasons for invading (or at least his current reasons in his ever-shifting reasons for invading).

> Will Kerry? It’s conceivable, but very doubtful.

That's the scary part about Kerry. He is the Devil You Do Not Know. If you subscribe to View 2, then Bush is your obvious choice. If you subscribe to View 1, and suspect that in twenty years historians will be debating how such a drastic, irreversable mistake like the unilateral Iraq invasion could have taken place, and contemplating how long it took to undo the damage Bush did, then Bush is the Devil You Know. Kerry's judgement may be questionable, but Bush's already has been demonstrably proven to be deeply flawed, and I shudder to think of four more years with him at the helm.

Of course, I reason thus since I subscribe to View 1. If you subscribe to View 2, I will not argue with your selection of Bush.

Alas, the invasion has happened, and you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. There is no going back, and I we can argue whether it was a good idea or not, but it won't change anything now. Regarding the way forward for Iraq, there's so little _substantive_ difference between the Kerry and Bush policies it reminds me, in a twisted a way, of the perscription drug benefit BS from 2000. Kerry's only substantive disgreement with Bush on Iraq (now at least, I do wish Kerry would have come to his current position sooner) is largely confined to whether it was a good idea to invade, in the way Bush did, in the first place. As far as what to do now, both sides sound the same.

Re: Did he fight it with everything he's got?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Oh, Kerry does have a big difference in how to handle Iraq--admit it was a bad idea in the first place and ask more allies to help out. In best case, troops from all Security Council members line the Euphrates and the bad guys throw down their arms in despair. The worst case kinda looks like this: http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7267

Worse from the View 2 point of view is Kerry's long-term view. If you read the cover story of the 10/10/04 NYT Mag (no longer on line) Kerry makes it clear he won't stay on the offensive, thus ceding the initiative to the enemy. Neither will he take any risks to promote democracy in Arab countries. To me that's a much bigger issue than just how he'll handle Iraq.

Promoting democracy, etc.

[abovenyquist.livejournal.com]

> Oh, Kerry does have a big difference in how to handle Iraq--admit it was a bad idea in the first place
> and ask more allies to help out. In best case, troops from all Security Council members line the
> Euphrates and the bad guys throw down their arms in despair. The worst case kinda looks like
> this: http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7267

It is an interesting quandry - when is the best way to deal with a bad idea to bury your head in the sand and not admit it? That seems like the Bush strategy, and it seems to be working for him, so I can't fault him for that. Americans appear to prefering a politician who takes a wrong position and sticks with it over one who would take a wrong position and later, based on more data, change it to a right one.

There were any number similar "worst case" articles posed about the Iraq invasion before the war, both for and against. The "worst case scenario" article in the pro-invasion camp all involved terrorist blowing up Saddam-supplied atomic bombs (which of course he didn't have) in the U.S. The "worst case" scenario in the anti-invasion camp all involved mass mideast instability involving fundamentalist forces using the U.S. invasion as a cause to overthrow the Saudi Royal family. One even suggested a chain of events whereby invading Iraq would lead to Pakistan and India lauching nukes at each other. I find the Spectator article about as credible as any of those.

In terms of bringing in allies, I find Pournelle's arguments compelling:

[quote]
The Iraqi Meatgrinder

We continue to feed a trooper a day into the Iraq meat grinder. It's a small cost except to the one fed and his family, but it mounts up: units have to toughen up under continual danger and losses. Add the heat and it can get serious.

The proper way to occupy Iraq is to build a comfortable enclave with good defenses and secure perimeter, garrison that, then bring in a client army to do the actual occupation. The client army should be from a state in which, or near which, we maintain a substantial garrison, so that the homeland is held hostage (although we would NEVER say it that way) to the good behavior of the field army doing the dirty work. There are plenty of countries that would like to rent out their soldiers and would actually welcome a substantial US force in their midst. They don't intend disloyalty to the Alliance, they want in on it; they would like to be part of the hegemony. 

The advantage of this is that most of our troops either get to come home or take their families to the client state where it's a lot more pleasant than Iraq in the desert (116 F at 2 PM average last week), and the body bags don't go to the US. In fact, most client states will simply bury their troops where they fell rather than send them home.
[end quote]

Probably not pratical. But one can nhope.

> Neither will he take any risks to promote democracy in Arab countries. To me that's a much bigger issue > than just how he'll handle Iraq.

It depends on what you mean by "promote democracy in Arab countries." If by that you mean "invade countries that pose no threat to the U.S. in a hairbrained experiment to try to make them into U.S.-style democracies," I think I'll pass, thank you. I'd rather not see "promote democracy" become a euphamism for "invade."

"President Bush launched a new plan to promote democracy in Syria today. The 'shock and awe' part of the promotional campaign has begun."

From a somewhat Machiavellian point of view, whether a country is democratic or not is less important than whether they are in line with U.S. interests or not. Russia looks like it's taking a step back from democracy, with Putin consolidating his power. I don't care; what we need in Russia is an ally. They had their own 9/11 in a school last month, and are cracking down on actual terrorists more than ever. How they want to pick their leaders is not our concern. In China, we need an ally in dealing with North Korea; it would be nice if the Chinese could have a wider choice than voting between Communist Party Member A and Communist Party Member B, but there's no point in the U.S. trying to force that.

Re: Promoting democracy, etc.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Catching up on various stuff . . .

From a somewhat Machiavellian point of view, whether a country is democratic or not is less important than whether they are in line with U.S. interests or not.

I think the lesson of 9/11 is that we can't follow that policy any more, at least for Arab nations. Festering swamps of human misery spawn very nasty people. That's who formed Al Qaeda. If we can give those people a better life, they'll live it instead of becoming suicide bombers. Hopefully the domino effect will be sufficient for Syria. For Egypt and Saudi Arabia we can start squeezing economically after we've extracted our balls from their grip. But the status quo in the Arab world has to be changed.

Russia, China, etc. don't seem to be a threat in the same way, so I don't see any need to change their governments. Hopefully they'll have changed on their own before the world shrinks to where we do have to care.