I have been troubled by what seems, to me, to be a willingness to "hope for the best" out of a resentment of Bush. I've though about trying this and would like to welcome anyone still honestly on the fence to write me at submandave-at-gmail.com to really discuss why I think Bush is the superior candidate. I am worried that the prevarication, maleability and sheer verbal obtuseness JK has shown in this campaign is just asking for someone to "test" his resolve, and I desperately don't want that to happen. Please, if you have questions or concerns write me. I don't think I have all the answers or that I'm the smartest guy on the block, but maybe I can answer your question in a way noone else has.

Yeah, well -- before anyone gets Too carried away with all this righteous hullaballoo, it would be well to review once again the status of Dubya's actions before, during and after the Iraq invasion.

Here's a comment made on a listserver to which I subscribe, and it discusses some of that rather cogently:

For some of the details on mismanagement in Iraq, see Larry Diamond's "What Went Wrong in Iraq?" in the September/October 2004 issue of
Foreign Affairs.

His article is about how the Bush administration mishandled the responses to the "Now what?" questions after the Iraqi military forces had been
defeated (in terms of mass troop confrontations). His credentials are unusual because they are hardly liberal: a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford, he served for a few months earlier this year as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provision Authority in Baghdad.

His first point has been made more public by Paul Bremer saying much the same thing: "...the Bush administration was never willing to commit
anything like the forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq. From the beginning, military experts warned Washington that the task would
require, as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress in February 2003, "hundreds of thousands" of troops. (...) Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call for a much larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous promises to give the military 'everything' it asked for, that such requests would not be welcome. No officer missed the lesson of General Shinseki, whom the Pentagon rewarded for this public candor by announcing his retirement a year early... Officers and soldiers in Iraq were forced to keep their complains about insufficient manpower and equipment private..." [Note: What Diamond does not discuss is the likelihood that the Bush administration could not afford to send hundreds of thousands of men to Iraq, not only because of the scarcity of suitable forces and the effect on military missions elsewhere, but also because of the political costs of such a move at home.]

Another major flaw, easy to see from the outside but rarely admitted from the inside: "Throughout the occupation, the coalition lacked the linguistic and area expertise necessary to understand Iraqi politics and society, and the few long-time experts present were excluded from the inner circle of decision-making in the CPA. Thus the coalition never grasped, for example, the fact that, although most Iraqis were grateful for having been liberated from a brutal tyranny, their gratitude was
mixed with a deep suspicion of the United States' real motives (not to mention those of the United Kingdom, a formal colonial rule of Iraq); humiliation that the Iraqis themselves had proved unable to overthrow Saddam; and unrealistic expectations of the postwar administration, which Iraqis expected to quickly deliver them from their problems. Too many Iraqis viewed the invasion not as an international effort but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers, and this invoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraq's former overlords."

Finally, "The obsession with control was an overarching flaw in the US occupation from start to finish. In any postconflict international intervention, there is always a certain tension between legitimacy and control. Yet for most of the first year of occupation, the US administration opted for the latter whenever the tradeoff presented itself." This was a major reason for delaying general elections in Iraq, even for local offices, Diamond suggests: the wrong people might be voted into power. He then details a whole series of ways in which the US administrators in Iraq fatally delayed responses to emerging problems of legitimacy and violence until such problems were too severe to be
resolved. [Note: What he does not address, except through the problems he describes, is the policy of *denying that control is in danger or has
been lost*, which paralyzed or fatally delayed many responses to problems, from the jeopardy of UN assistance, to the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr, to the clashes of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites over the constitution-to-be. Such denials of loss of control were presumably imposed from the top: the Bush administration did not want bad news.]

This should be more than enough for people who hate long messages, and a good enticement for others to read the whole article, as a crash course on how the policies went wrong, written more coherently than in newspaper articles. The simplistic assumptions that "they want us here," "we're in charge now," and "things are getting better, not worse," should be painfully familiar to our Viet Nam generation. One of the TV movie channels was showing "The Quiet American" last week; I suspect that the
timing was not accidental. As one of the Vietnamese might say, lr plus ca change, lr plus ca meme chose.

Inadvertently left out the URL for the article mentioned above. It's at:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040901faessay83505/larry-diamond/what-went-wrong-in-iraq.html

Thank you for the read Don, a very insiteful article.

There are more than a few mistakes that could be pointed out (such as the impossibility of sending such a massive contingent, which would actually need to be much larger then the number he stated (300,000), or the authors lack of understanding on the needs of reconstruction. Or the wisdom in waiting for the vote (like you mentioned.))

However, the point he is trying to make I totally agree with (that we did a bad job planning the aftermath of the war.) The problem I have with your post is that it has little or no bearing on this conversation.

We are currently discussing Kerry's ability as a commander in chief. As bad as Bush is, it seems Kerry is much worse. It was people like him who lost Vietnam, and forced the South Vietnemise to suffer so greatly.

To push people towards Kerry, you shouldn't brow beat Bush. Rater attempt to lift up Kerry, and his admitedly terrible foreign policy. I think most of us agree that it is a choice between bad and worse.

Thing is, as much as I disagree with Bush I disagree Kerry (both his past, and his future plans) more.

Kerry did Not "lose Viet Nam."

That discussion was, to all intents and purposes, over long before he ever even got there.

Our folks Knew, beyond question, that we were never going to "win" Viet Nam. It was a civil war, and only the Vietnames were in a position to win it on their own. Had we actually Won it, what would the alleged "victory" have looked like? Would we have occupied the North?

Nope. That was just Never in the cards.

That conflict was going to go on essentially forever. We knew that when McNamara was SecDef under LBJ, and in his cowardly fashion never dared to say so. We knew it when RMN was Prez, when he said he looked for Peace With Honor -- an action that involved neither, and which only resulted in another 20k American dead as he sought to keep his honor intact.

What should have happened is for us to have left after the First Tet Offensive in 1968. An orderly withdrawal, coupled with support of the RVN regime would have been Just Fine.

It didn't happen that way, in large part because the Rs would have screamed to the heavens that we left with our tail between our legs. RMN did Not have the much-discussed "secret plan" to end the war. There was Never any "plan" for "victory" -- only a political need to leave.

Leave we did, even after Abrams -- the only competent US general ever to be in charge in RVN -- fundamentally put the war into a winnable place, even as we were withdrawing.

But in the end, the entity that actually did Lose the war was the RVN. When attacked, their "leaders" fled their commands, their troops deserted en masse, and just let the NVA come south essentially unopposed.

In the end, it was always Their fight -- not ours. We were supposed to arm them. We did. They abandoned the arms in the field. We were supposed to train them. We did. It didn't help.

When push came to shove, the south fell because its leadership was corrupt, its military unmotivated, and its population indifferent as to which regime governed it.

Kerry fought it. Two tours. Did pretty well. I fought it as well. Twenty months. I did pretty well too. It just didn't matter.

We were never going to "win" in Viet Nam. We didn't believe that for a long time. But we now actually do Know what some knew then, and never bothered to mention.

If you're looking for an act of cowardice in the matter, it wasn't folks like Kerry.

Don: My invitation isn't open for you 8^D. I was never a fan of the clasic "Fisking", but there are a few glaring items in your post that deserve comment "before anyone gets too carried away":

1. "No officer missed the lesson of General Shinseki, whom the Pentagon rewarded for this public candor by announcing his retirement a year early" - This has been debunked so often even ABC News got it right in their "Fact Check" after the last debate. The General's retirement was anounced long before his "hundreds of thousands" comment.

2. " the coalition never grasped ... that, although most Iraqis were grateful ... their gratitude was mixed with ... suspicion, ... humiliation ... and unrealistic expectations" - What? Yes, Arabic linguists were a high demand specialty, but it required neither a linguist nor a PhD in political science to know this. These feelings were discussed in depth by almost everyone looking at the situation, from pundits to soldiers to individual Iraqi bloggers. If the author believes this is some startling epiphany he is sorely deluded. And as for the suspicion mentioned, I'm sure all the people making outlandish and loud claims that we were there for the oil didn't help.

3. Finally, in your "finally" paragraph you take an evaluation that legitimacy of the people and institutions in charge was sacrificed for the sake of control and extrapolate it to a general assumption that all problems encountered so far could have been avoided had we just followed the right course of action. Would an excellerated general election process early in the occupation, when Sistani first called for them, produced a more legitimate political force in Iraq, or would it, in the presence of multiple armed sectarian militias, served to establish multiple local pockets of legitimacy competing (perhaps violently) against each other for overall control? As it is, the approach of control taken resulted in the peaceful disarming of most militias and reduced the military encounters to just two (the formal militia of al Sadr and the informal militia of the Ba'ath). We will leave aside your "presumption" that problems were ignored because Bush "did not want bad news" as it is purely personal speculation.

I've never said that everything has worked great in occupied Iraq, and while I might, in my armchair, make different calls, I trust the wisdom of the boots on the ground and the reflection of it in the attitudes of the individual soldiers, sailors and Marines. Everything has not gone perfect, btu I still challenge anyone to provide a counterexample of any action on this scale that was more successful or better executed. Hell, Bosnia wasn't nearly as messed up as Iraq and we're still stuck there with the dead-end UN.

Maybe I'm slow on the take, Don, but I think you and Kerry are more alike than I ever realized before. The Vietnam War was clearly a very important and formative experience in both of your lives. It also seems to me that experience informs many of your opinions and positions, even in circumstances where it may not be particularly relevent. Yes, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, but so too are those who dwell too much there. Not a man I often quote, but Richard Nixon was right when he said "'No More Vietnams' could mean we will not try again. It should mean we will not fail again."

It bears repeating that Bush's opponent isn't Kerry, it's divided government under Kerry.

Let's say Kerry is president and we hear about 25 Chechen terrorists infiltrating the U.S.

Does the GOP hush up about it? Or, do they keep hammering it until Kerry is forced to do something about it?

That's just one example of how divided government would be better for the U.S. than four more years of Bush; there are many more along those same lines.

I have a feeling you won't respond, but...

"Kerry fought it. Two tours. Did pretty well."

(1)Define "fought it".

(2)Define "Two tours".

(3)Define "Pretty well".

I'm not holding my breath.

It seems that Bush and Co. haven't learned from history and repeated it - oops! The Brits invaded and occupied Iraq back around 1912 and I'll leave it up to you to research it to find out what happened.

i partially agree with amadeaus. it is a choice of bad or worse; however, i am confident that the vast majority of evidence points to bush being worse. although i can easily bring myself to vote for the leading non-bush candidate, i could hardly argue for this cadidate. if anybody is interested in reading a few logical essays against voting for bush, please go to www.pleasedonotvoteforbush.org . is the site filled with fancy graphics? no. are there pop-ups? no. is registration required? no. is the site biased? of course, but unlike the rest of the political garbage out there, it is highly rational. the site uses only non-controversial sources and quotes every one of them. thanks for reading my shameless promotion.

nate carr

p.s. here's a sample :


Introduction

The president of the United States is probably the single most powerful individual in the world. It is of utmost importance for the president to use this power wisely. If the U.S. president doesn't make wise decisions, serious negative consequences will likely result. The following essay will discuss some of the evidence presented by the Bush administration that was used to justify the preemptive invasion of the nation of Iraq. Even though past decisions are not necessarily indicative of future decisions, it will be assumed that a politician's past decisions are a solid indicator of a politician's future decisions.

Before the actual war in Iraq, the Bush administration presented their argument to invade and rebuild the nation of Iraq (it should be noted that a possible invasion was not explicitly stated in their presentations, but such consequences were implied in the text, and the same arguments in the presentation were later used to legitimize an invasion of Iraq). On February 5, 2003, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in a presentation to the United Nations Security Council, conveyed the Bush Administration's views on Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his terrorist connections. In this presentation, which was built from the White House paper on Saddam Hussein and Bush's presentation to the U.N., Powell gave one primary reason and two secondary reasons to support the argument that the United States military should invade and rebuild the nation of Iraq1...

I believe the "Bush failed to plan for the peace" argument is weak because in each and every concurring opinion on the matter always fail to note a few important facts.

First, consider the political calcualtions. The DOD planners knew Iraq's army would be no match for our own and also knew that the size of our post-regime force would play into demagogic shouts of 'Zionist occupiers'.

If the common Iraqi doesn't see massive displays of American presence, the demagogues have no one who will believe them over their lying eyes. I believe the Kurdish areas of Iraq are largely autonomous, with little US troop presence. Where there are troops, they are hiring workers and helping repair what Saddam neglected.

So 'boot print' was an important factor in the decision making process. This ties in to a second point, which is training Iraqis. Certainly some mistakes have occurred, perhaps failing to allow some of the professional officers (which could have been screened to exclude committed Baathists) to help with the new Iraqi Security forces was one - regardless, it was clear in the aftermath that such a plan did exist as training began fairly soon after the end of the regime.

This strategy may take longer, but promises to be more effective in the long run. It seems many opponents of the Iraq war suffer from the impatience pushed by a 24 hour news cycle. Very few critics have written anything which acknowledges the long term strategy.

Finally, as with the opposition during the Vietnam War, the enemy still in Iraq is counting on vocal anti-war types to help them in their PR war. They cannot win this battle (the same as N. Viet.) via stronger military force. The only way to defeat the US is via change in public opinion, in other words: POLTICALLY.

As happened with John Kerry and others in the 1970s.

Has Don (or any others) heard some of the POWs describe how the war was extended while they suffered, as their captors were just waiting for Kerry types to succeed? Does it matter at all to them how many of the Winter Soldiers Kerry relied upon for his testimony in the Senate were frauds? Does it matter that many of these antiwar groups were backed by the Soviets?

Does it matter that the parallel is currently attempting to unfold in the Iraq conflict? I haven't the time to expand on this, but it seems to me John Kerry's repeated line in the debates about what Americans are seeing on their TVs each night as proof Iraq is a failure is more of the same script from 1972.

Indeed, Americans who get their news from the heavily anti-war TV networks are not getting the picture one gets when reading blogs such as this and those written by now free Iraqis.

This seems so simple to grasp, yet many intelligent and otherwise honest people do not want to grab hold of it. Repeated obfuscation in light of these base arguments I've just presented makes it difficult to withhold contempt, much as I try.

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