Me, I’m for blood purges where you line up every editorial writer in front of a mass grave, read them what they wrote back in 2003, and then mow them down, but I’m willing to settle for hard labor for life. Cheney on the Chain Gang. Has a ring to it.posted by kaibutsu at 7:36 AM on September 14, 2011 [1 favorite]
Since the end of the Cold War 16 years ago, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have been running an experiment with U.S. grand strategy. The theory to be tested has been this: Very good intentions, plus very great power, plus action can transform both international politics and the domestic politics of other states in ways that are advantageous to the United States, and at costs it can afford. The evidence is in: The experiment has failed. Transformation is unachievable, and costs are high.posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:33 AM on September 15, 2011 [2 favorites]
The United States needs now to test a different grand strategy: It should conceive its security interests narrowly, use its military power stingily, pursue its enemies quietly but persistently, share responsibilities and costs more equitably, watch and wait more patiently. Let’s do this for 16 years and see if the outcomes aren’t better.
What should Gore have done? Not invade Iraq, which involves leaving Saddam in place to abuse his people atrociously.I obviously disagree but I do respect your candor.
The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. "All the evidence ... indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level," they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on "the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel". Palestine, the authors state, "was certainly the principal political grievance ... driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg".If we acted less like an Empire practicing gunboat diplomacy, there would be much less resentment. If we started treating Israel as a grown-up ally on the US taxpayer's teat with rights and responsibilities as a nuclear power, rather than a nation-sized Eric Cartman in an Afrikaans accent with tanks and jets and The Bomb and a guaranteed US veto in the Security Council no matter what, there'd probably be less resentment regionally. If we stopped preferring friendly dictators (whom we arm and support while looking the other way @ their abuses) to local democratically-elected leaders (whom we sicc the CIA on to overthrow), there'd be less resentment
The motivation for the attacks was "ducked" even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this "issue" – cliché code word for "problem" – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: "This was sensitive ground ...Commissioners who argued that al-Qa'ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa'ida's opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy." And there you have it.
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posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 2:39 AM on September 14, 2011