Ted Cruz: Maybe the U.S. Should Not Go Around Toppling Dictators
At The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty published a piece yesterday titled The blindingly obvious political attack that every 2016 candidate should use against Hillary:
Just 350 miles from the tiny European member state Malta, ISIS has set up a colony in Surt, Libya. This Libyan outpost is now receiving veteran fighters and administrators from the burgeoning theocratic blob that has spread across Syria and Iraq. It is from this redoubt in Surt that the Islamic State can project power across North Africa, according to an in-depth report from The New York Times.
Now that we’ve seen the Islamic State lash out on European soil, the prospect of them establishing a statelet 400 miles from Italy should give us pause. How did they get there? How was Surt made ready to be the Islamic State’s caliphate away from the caliphate?
Look no further than the woman most likely to become our next president, Hillary Clinton. Using American power to help overthrow Moammar Gadhafi’s government was her signature idea as secretary of state. Surely, the Arab Spring rebels would handle the mop up. Alas, it didn’t turn out that way.
However, beyond a tut-tutting tweet from Jeb Bush, don’t expect any of Clinton’s 2016 rivals for high office to criticize her for it. The Republican Party is now congenitally unable to criticize the result of a war without promising to double — nay, Supersize — its awful consequences.
Bad timing, Mr. Dougherty! Because look what Ted Cruz said just yesterday (beware annoying auto-play videos at the link):
“Senator Rubio emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya. I think that made no sense,” Cruz told Bloomberg Politics in a wide-ranging and exclusive interview during a campaign swing through Iowa. He argued that the 2011 bombings that toppled the Libyan leader didn’t help the fight against terrorists. “Qaddafi was a bad man, he had a horrible human rights record. And yet … he had become a significant ally in fighting radical Islamic terrorism.”
“The terrorist attack that occurred in Benghazi was a direct result of that massive foreign policy blunder,” Cruz said during a drive eastward from a town-hall event near Iowa City to another in the town of Clinton…
“If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neo-cons, they have consistently mis-perceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists,” he said…
Cruz has a similar complaint about Syria:
On Syria, Cruz inveighed against Rubio and Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, for supporting a no-fly zone and arming “the so-called moderate rebels.” “I think none of that makes any sense. In my view, we have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war,” he said, arguing that Rubio and Clinton “are repeating the very same mistakes they made in Libya. They’ve demonstrated they’ve learned nothing.”
“The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend,” Cruz said. “If the Obama administration and the Washington neo-cons succeed in toppling [Bashar al-] Assad, Syria will be handed over to radical Islamic terrorists. ISIS will rule Syria.”
I made similar points recently in a post titled Democrat: ISIS Would Not Be So Strong If U.S. Did Not Topple Dictators, in which I agreed with a Hawaii Democrat that we have destabilized regions like Libya and Iraq by toppling dictators willy-nilly, without regard to what comes next.
I’ve always loved Ted Cruz’s economic and constitutional positions. It’s nice to see him lining up with me on foreign policy as well. He rejects the utopian radical libertarian ideal that the world will be full of sunshine and lollipops if we just stop being so aggressive. But he is also rejecting the neocon philosophy that always seems to want war, everywhere. Cruz rejects the notion that we must topple a Bad Guy because he is a Bad Guy, because he understands that there are often Worse Guys waiting in the wings.
I like this guy more every day.
Meghan’s coward daddy wants to flush 20,000 troops down the Syrian toilet
#theydidsomethingtohisbrain
happyfeet (a037ad) — 12/2/2015 @ 7:22 amHaving had to cast my vote for McCain and then Romney, I am familiar with this principle. Choosing the better of two poor choices may not be utopian, but it beats not choosing at all. This is the reality that confronts us in many situations. Particularly if we are passive consumers of political action, constantly reacting to initiatives of those who wish to control our lives. The delusional left doesn’t understand this. In their fantasy world, the messengers are always the problem, and the solution is always the same.
BobStewartatHome (a52abe) — 12/2/2015 @ 7:48 amThat is exactly what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the government of China and Vladimir Putin want everyone to think:
DON’T TOPPLE DICTATORS!
YOU CAN’T IMPROVE THE SITUATION!
Because things allegedly will be always be worse then.
Ted Cruz here (and also Donald Trump part of the time) is echoing Russian propaganda.
That’s not historically true. That’s only true because they do their best to make it true.
Now it is true sometimes you have more than one bad actor around. But they shouldn’t always come
out on top. The lesson isn’t really don’t topple dictators. The lesson is, that’s not he end of the job.
If you think this is true, perhaps we should also apply this to Chicago, and to the idea ousting incumbents in the United States.
Sammy Finkelman (4d9cfa) — 12/2/2015 @ 7:56 amI like this guy more every day.
Most certainly!
Moreover, when a Democrat/liberal says the same thing, I also find myself nodding in agreement.
I wasn’t always totally sympathetic with what I call principled isolationism — and, yes, I’m aware of how the condition “America sleeps” in the 1930s didn’t prevent World War II, and may have made it even worse — but the situation today (ie, in the sharia-ized, jihad-ized Middle East) isn’t exactly identical.
Mark (f713e4) — 12/2/2015 @ 8:16 amDuring the Cold War, we discovered that if the commies took over from an authoritarian
bad guy, things got worse internally. And then the reds wanted to take their show on the
road, which the kleptocrats generally don’t bother with.
Back in the day, some folks favored Hitler because it looked as if he’d keep the commies
in check. Wonder how things would have gone had it been Stalin and not Hitler glaring
across the Rhine in 1936.
Thing is, you don’t know. However, with the lessons of Libya, we might be learning
Richard Aubrey (472a6f) — 12/2/2015 @ 8:35 amsomething. OTOH, things were going so well in Iraq that, in 2011 and 2010, Obama was
talking about it as an achievement–of his administration, of course–until he did the
predictable dem thing and pissed it away. So maybe that’s the lesson.
Cruz is right. No one arguing for greater US involvement Islamic struggle for power ever answers the question “and then what?” Another surge of American military power in western Iraq can deal a decisive blow to the self-proclaimed emerging caliphate led by al-Baghdadi but then what?
As with the problems caused by the Barbary Pirates 200 yrs ago, military power can end the threat to non-Islamic states for a time but the ideology that fuels that threat remains until the next determined leader rises from the ashes of the last humiliating defeat.
There are multiple ways that the US can be helpful or even decisive with our allies in destroying the latest threat to our mutual interests but until somebody answers the “and then what?” question we’ll just stay stuck in the same metastasizing mess we’ve been in for centuries except for the quiet periods under strong autocratic rulers.
crazy (cde091) — 12/2/2015 @ 8:39 amthere is a distinction, Libya and Egypt were at least implicitly antiIslamist regimes, whereas Iraq, re Kyle Orton’s reports was much less secular then was presented, now their alawite twin
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 8:40 amSyria, isn’t entirely secular either, but you would think they would have learned ‘the lesson’ of Iraq, that silly Pottery Barn meme,
it suggest they aren’t a good bet either,
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/how-assad-funds-the-islamic-state/
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 8:46 amI totally agree. And Obama keeps talking tough about Assad? Who is going to succeed him? I could scream it’s so stupid and so blatant.
He is trying to act like a big boy against Putin, and he’s failing.
Patricia (5fc097) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:08 amIt’s always good to have clear goals. Which is why I think we should revisit one of the chief obstacles to that clarity. An organization to which we belong. An organization we largely are responsible for creating. That organization is of course the UN.
I think it’s time we faced up to the fact that while it may have been created with the best of intentions by well-meaning people who didn’t want another WWII or worse WWIII (and I actually mean it, as opposed to those high-minded pirates on the left who are not well-meaning but simply enjoy moralizing and preening while they indulge their greed [see the Clinton Foundation for exhibit A]) it has failed to meet expectations. In fact, it’s counterproductive. Look at this damn Iran nuke deal, for instance. Obama the anti-American runs to the UNSC as if it’s super-legislature and now we are told our obligations to the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world is binding international law because the UNSC ratified it. But binding on Iran, the US only. And take this current UN Climate Conference (fittingly, the symbol the UN chose for this Climate Conference is almost exactly the same symbol the Comedy Channel uses; seriously, check the two logos side by side). Obama is trying to ram some legally binding agreement through that will obligate the US to impoverish itself by redistributing its wealth to Third World dictators.
This is a good idea, again, why? I think the original idea was that it would function like the “superfriends” cartoon but its gotten way out of hand.
And of course, China and Russia are not our “superfriends” so why do they get a veto over
our freedom to act in our own national interest?
The UN charter has been the main cause of our problems. Chapter VII in particular, “CHAPTER VII: ACTION WITH RESPECT TO THREATS TO THE PEACE, BREACHES OF THE PEACE, AND ACTS OF AGGRESSION.
(search for it, it’s not hard to find).
We fight now where we don’t have any dogs in the fight simply to maintain the credibility of the UN. That has become our dog. For instance, Iraq. Would we have given a rat’s @$$ if Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait otherwise. But Kuwait is a member state of the UN. And we were members of the UN, members of the UNSC no less, if we didn’t fulfill our internationalist duty to the UN that would have gutted Chapter VII entirely. It would have revealed the UN as a paper tiger. That would have been a bad thing, we were told, so it was in our national interest to prevent that. So the UNSC produced a resolution that authorized force to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.
In case anybody forgot how that movie ended, we drove Saddam out of Kuwait. ‘Ceptin,’ in case anybody forgot, that wasn’t the end of the movie. We ended up squatting in the desert for 12 years and became a target for every budding Islamic terrorist outfit in the M.E. So the third worlders running the damn UN could get rich being bribed by Saddam Hussein to look the other way while he evaded sanctions, among other things.
At the time I recall thinking that what we should have done is to drive on to Baghdad. Why didn’t we? Because the UN resolution only permitted the “coalition” to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. And Bush1 was worried the “coalition” would have fallen apart. A “coalition” that served no other purpose than to make sure we didn’t do what would have been in our national interest. Which I still believe would have been to force Saddam into a humiliating surrender.
Instead we had to wait 12 years to drive on to Baghdad and things would have been a lot cleaner and easier if we had just done it while we were there the first time.
But that’s what I still believe would have been in our national interest thinking “inside the box.” The “box” being the UN. It would be better to get rid of the stupid, corrupt, filthy, money-sucking box entirely. So we could focus on what’s in our own national interest without having to worry about what’s in the UN’s best interest. And if we do have to wage war we could focus on achieving the military objectives to actually win the war, instead of how to keep some stupid, counterproductive UN coalition together. Which always involves stopping short of victory.
You know, before the UN existed wars ended. We only still have troops stationed in Korea because it was the first UN war.
This is not normal in the course of human history. A ceasefire that went on for 12 years in the Middle East. A ceasefire going on 65 years on the Korean peninsula. It only has been made possible because, thanks to the UN, a bunch of third parties that have anything but the United States’ best interests in mind have a vote on our freedom of action.
I agree with Ted Cruz that we have no dog in the fight. But I really felt the same way about Kuwait. But thanks to the UN charter we have dogs in every fight. Because we have “international obligations.”
Everybody gets what they want. The Democrats hate GWB because he broke invaded Iraq. If there was no UN, he never would have had a reason to. If there never was a UN odds are we never would have had a conflict with Iraq.
Meanwhile us righties wouldn’t have to worry about Prom Queen running around signing us onto binding and expensive international treaties. No, he’d have to bring those treaties back to Congress.
Although it might be ok to keep the UN around as a harmless, powerless debating society. So if this country is stupid enough to elect another Prom Queen he can go out of the country and fall in love with his own voice all over again speechifying his heart out. But nothing more.
Steve57 (a13395) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:13 amNOT binding on Iran.
Steve57 (a13395) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:15 amwell much of the world, signed on to the Iran/Iraq war, re Timmerman’s fanning the flames or the SEPRI project, the UK and the US, were small players compared to France, Germany, (those two were
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:18 amthe major players in the early Iranian nuclear program as well) and of course the Soviet Union,
I think it is silly to imagine that the “solution” will ever be isolationism, a la Rand Paul. My take is that Cruz is not rejecting the notion that we might find it in our interest to occasionally support a tyrant. The lefties, for example, had no problem with our shipping goods of every sort to Stalin in WWII. The point is that the decision to support someone has to be made on the basis of strategic interests. Just because two thugs are trying to kill each other, and one is a sworn enemy doesn’t make the other one an ally.
It is also silly to imagine that there will be a simple long term solution, a la neo con dreams of democratization, or lefty dreams of daycare centers, universal healthcare, and all the other crassly materialistic nostrums they prescribe. The muslim world was of no significance until we armed them. But we will shortly be confronting two nuclear muslim states, Pakistan and Iran, and that will lead to a lot of misery. This misery is a direct consequence of our electoral decisions in 2008 and 2012, and it will not go away by thinking happy thoughts.
BobStewartatHome (a52abe) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:26 amnot to mention, the three baltic states, which were scarfed up, during the ‘phony war’ and the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact,
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:26 amfailmerica has to be out of the military interventionism business
you suck ass at it plus you’re ludicrously poor and everyone hates you guts
happyfeet (a037ad) — 12/2/2015 @ 9:28 amI think this will bump him up in the polls. At least five points, just this statement
papertiger (c2d6da) — 12/2/2015 @ 10:00 amSandy Burglar dies:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sandy-berger-ex-clinton-national-security-adviser-dies/2015/12/02/acfdfa16-9905-11e5-aca6-1ae3be6f06d2_story.html
Thoughts:
1. Without telling the truth about Vincent Foster and some other things.
2. This means that his getting back his security clearance didn’t mean anything.
3. He won’t get to be National Security Adviser
He died of cancer, the article says. It also says he had known Bill Clinton since the 1972 McGovern campaign.
Sammy Finkelman (4d9cfa) — 12/2/2015 @ 10:09 amEveryone, including Cruz, seems to be forgetting one thing: the Moammar Gadaffi that Bush inherited from Mr Clinton in 2001 was a dangerous person, who was funding international terrorism and running a nuclear development program that was frightening, and that our intelligence badly underestimated. That Gadaffi needed toppling, and any president who didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to do so would have been criminally negligent, impeachably negligent. But the Gadaffi that 0bama and Mrs Clinton inherited from Bush was a very different creature, tamed and defanged, having turned against the terrorists, cancelled his nuclear program, and turned over his stockpile. And the only reason that happened was because Bush took down Saddam Hussein.
I’m also unhappy that Cruz called the invasion of Iraq a mistake, based on bad intel. That’s just not true. First of all, the reasons we invaded Iraq were not at all based on any intel. They were based on what we and everyone knew, and they remain as valid today as they were then. The intel was only important in the timing of the invasion. There was no question that we would eventually have to do something about Hussein, the only question was when, and the reason to do it immediately was that we couldn’t be sure of the status of his WMD development program, and — as Bush told Congress, if we waited until there was an imminent threat the first sign might be a mushroom cloud.
As it turned out, his program was not that advanced, and that wasn’t an imminent prospect. As it turned out we could have waited a few years. But it needs to be emphasized that our intel was not bad. It was the best that it could be. Everyone believed that Saddam had stockpiles of ready-to-go chemical weapons, including Saddam himself. It was a surprise to everyone when the stockpiles turned out not to exist. And if the people who pocketed the money and didn’t build the weapons managed to keep that a secret from Saddam, they would have had no problem keeping it a secret from us no matter how good our intel was.
In any case, ISIS does not exist today because Bush overthrew Hussein. Nor does it exist because we stayed in Iraq after overthrowing him. On the contrary, it exists only because 0bama abandoned Iraq and neglected the opportunity to do something about Syria, just as the Taliban arose in Afghanistan only because we turned our backs on it after liberating it from the USSR. Rubio was right that when the Syrian civil war broke out we should have immediately identified reliable allies among the rebels and armed them, so they could overthrow Assad and establish themselves before the Islamists could take root. That 0bama left it too late doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have worked at the time.
Milhouse (8489b1) — 12/2/2015 @ 10:13 amWhat do you mean by that?
Milhouse (8489b1) — 12/2/2015 @ 10:15 amwell it’s a little more complicated, the structure of Islamic State, was in embryo in Saddam’s army, since the Faith campaigns in the 90s.
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 10:29 amthe context seen here,
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/kamel-sachet-and-islamism-in-saddams-security-forces/
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:02 amAll the more reason why we had to take that army down!
Milhouse (8489b1) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:08 amwell therein lies the rub, it’s like schrodinger’s cat, the Baathist had so corrupted Iraqi society that the one alternative was the Salafi, Saddam viewed in this light, was a transitional figure, put it another way, is Islamic State doing anything different than the pre 2003 infrastructure did?
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:14 amCruz is wrong bushdork was right to depose Mr. Hussein but he showed that he was both extraordinarily incompetent as well as morally degenerate by leaving the job for food stamp to finish
now failmerica is stuck with a useless gold plated military it can never use cause everyone knows you’re a cowardly untrustworthy can’t get the job done whorestate
happyfeet (a037ad) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:19 amThere are lots of bad guys who aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell.
But those of them who have motive and means to attack us, and a demonstrated history of so doing, are in another category than those who don’t. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, for example (to pick a particularly long-lived example from among dozens available), has never had billions in oil revenues which would have permitted him to build and equip a modern army that could overwhelm its peaceful and economically crucial neighbors, nor to sponsor anti-American and anti-Western terrorism that would kill its civilian targets thousands of miles away. Saddam Hussein did; the mullahs of Iran do.
So I disagree, still, and will always disagree (respectfully) with both you & Sen. Cruz on whether we ought to have toppled Saddam. If Obama had followed that up responsibly — by keeping a few thousand troops in genuinely pacified Iraq after we’d expended the blood and treasure to get it into that condition — we (and our western Allies, including NATO partner Turkey) wouldn’t have the ISIS problem we have now in Iraq. Don’t make the mistake of blaming George W. Bush for Barack Obama’s feckless failure as his successor.
The Iran situation is already past the point at which it can end peacefully. Anyone who denies that is working very hard at ignoring reality and fooling himself. We are not going to have a choice later; and we’ve no very good ones now. But that situation is profoundly different than in most of the impoverished and strategically insignificant dictatorships run by very bad guys who very much hate is elsewhere in the world.
Beldar (fa637a) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:24 amSigh … typo’d the last phrase. Ought to have been “who very much hate us elsewhere in the world.”
Beldar (fa637a) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:25 amPatrick: In hindsight, do you think America was wise or foolish (and lucky) to pursue isolationism throughout the 1930s during Hitler’s rise? Was France?
Or instead ought all of the victorious powers from WW1 have slapped Hitler out of power and imposed a new regime in Germany within days after his reoccupation of the Rhineland?
Because I think the latter, and sadly hypothetical, course of action would have saved at least 30 million lives during the 1940s, including tens of thousands of American ones.
Beldar (fa637a) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:31 amWhen a problem is allowed to fester, it can get worse.
Gaddafi was a corrupt, brutal tyrant, venomously anti-U.S., deeply complicit in terrorism. And oh, yes, Islamist, though tied in more with Shia Islamism than with the Sunni type. (He was BFF with Iran, and BTW Venezuela, but still Islamist. AFAIK, Al-Qaeda/ISIS only moved in after the initial rebellion stalled, to take advantage of the situation.) “Defanged” only in a limited and temporary way; he was scared of Bush, but contemptuous of Obama. (As when he procured the release of Megrahi, the TWA 107 bomber.)
The Obamacrat error in Libya was failing to move quickly or decisively, so that the rebellion stretched into a civil war that opened the door to the jihadis.
Much the same could be said of Syria, except that Assad is not Islamist. But he is allied with Iran and Russia. And he was never much intimidated by the U.S. He is justly loathed by most of the Syrian people; the jihadis have won support by fighting him.
That’s the point in both cases. Robert Heinlein once wrote that the Communist Party was a useful “litmus test” for genuine social discontent – they were very good at spotting a problem and taking over the effort to fix it. He suggested that the best way to get rid of the Communists was to clean up such problems.
The jihadis play a variant of that game – they win credit and supporters by striking at real evils, as well as by theatrical anti-Western violence. The Moslem Brotherhood gained power in Egypt by resolutely opposing Mubarak; when he fell, they were the natural replacement. Fortunately, the army had stayed in place, most of the Egyptian people hadn’t bought into jihadism, and the MB overplayed their hand. The U.S. came out of that OK; if we had tried to prop up Mubarak, Egypt might have gone full jihadist.
Rich Rostrom (d2c6fd) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:33 amwell it’s actually worse than that, the means that were used to topple Muammar, where made clear in Benghazi, where ‘the chickens came home to roost’ likely the likes of bin Qumu, and company, did have State or Company ties, not to mention the February 17th or Shield Battalion leaders,
narciso (732bc0) — 12/2/2015 @ 11:40 am#17: Milhouse,
The muslim world was of no significance until we armed them ..
I’m speaking of recent times, say since the founding of the U. S. The muslim world has been totally reliant on the western world for their arms throughout this period. Some of the “tribute”, aka ransom, demanded by the Barbary Pirates were modern ships of war. The muslim world simply couldn’t assemble the artisans and craftsmen needed to make such ships, due mainly to the fact that such workers were, without exception, infidels, subject to slavery and subjugation when they weren’t the targets of the frequency mass slaughters practiced against infidels in the muslim world. The Barbary Pirates were a nuisance, but when they got too annoying, France finally crushed them. But instead of laying the land waste and salting the earth, France colonized them to her everlasting regret. The Ottoman Empire was a shambles, and they wouldn’t have amounted to anything of significance in WWI if the Germans hadn’t provided arms, leadership, and training via the Berlin to Baghdad railway. And even that railway was delayed in its completion during the war due to slaughter of Christian workmen in the mountainous area bordering what is now Syria. In WWII, the muslims were basically grave and corpes robbers and of no significance as the British fought Rommel. French colonial troops fought for the French in both WWI and WWII, but they were under French leaders, used French arms, and their contribution was as you might expect, rape and pillage when victorious, and suicidal resistance in defeat. Such troops may be useful, but they are not the sort of prerequisite needed to establish a modern, technological economy.
I knew an Iranian student in nuclear engineering at MIT in the mid-70’s who is probably now a manager in their bomb making effort. He was smart, devote but not too religious, and if Iran has 50 more like him, and they don’t stone them to death for the amusement of their imams, they’ll have a bomb in no time, if they don’t already. They will still be dependent upon the west to provide them the tools to manufacture these bombs, but there doesn’t seem to be any lack of possible suppliers.
This is not to say that muslim lands and resources are not significant. They are important for economic and strategic reasons. It is just another reminder that utopia will take a bit longer. And in the mean time, say the next two centuries, we need to figure out how to deal with the muslims who live on these lands.
BobStewartatHome (a52abe) — 12/2/2015 @ 12:41 pmBeldar – So I disagree, still, and will always disagree (respectfully) with both you & Sen. Cruz on whether we ought to have toppled Saddam. If Obama had followed that up responsibly…
If our nation-building plan requires perpetual GOP control of the White House, then it is a bad plan. Democrats never had any interest in the Iraq project, and they predictably abandoned it as soon as they could.
scrutineer (b7d257) — 12/2/2015 @ 1:15 pmScrutineer, if the last 7 years have shown anything, it’s that all our plans require perpetual GOP control of the White House. It’s not as if Iraq is the only thing that went to pot uner D control.
Milhouse (8489b1) — 12/2/2015 @ 1:21 pmMilhouse, “don’t wreck things unless you reasonably believe you will fix them” used to be a conservative principle. Neoconservatives think they repealed the law of unintended consequences.
scrutineer (b7d257) — 12/2/2015 @ 1:34 pmKaddafi’s terrorism when viewed by Muslim lights was a measured response.
The bombing of Pan Am 103 was proportional to the USS Vincennes downing Iran’s civilian Air Flight 655.
You want to paint the reasonable Kadaffi as a crazed terrorism sponsor compared to the Prince of Jordan – sure. That works. But when compared to most any other state actor in the region – no. Not so much.
papertiger (c2d6da) — 12/2/2015 @ 1:34 pmScrutineer, we didn’t wreck Iraq. Iraq was wrecked under Hussein. We fixed it, and then 0bama abandoned it.
We also didn’t wreck Afghanistan; we helped the locals get rid of the Soviets, and then turned away, thinking that they could handle it from there on. We learned the hard way that they couldn’t.
Milhouse (8489b1) — 12/2/2015 @ 2:15 pmNo, it wasn’t. For one thing, what had that to do with Libya? For anohter, that plane was shot down in the middle of a battle, which it had no business flying into. The Vincennes had no way of knowing that it was not an enemy plane about to attack, and it would have been criminal of the captain not to shoot it down. If he had let it alone for fear that it was a civilian plane, and it turned out to be an enemy fighter and scored a hit and killed his men he’d have deserved to be court-martialled for it.
Milhouse (8489b1) — 12/2/2015 @ 2:18 pmBob @12, if you were referring to my earlier wall o’text I wasn’t advocating isolationism. I’m fine with bilateral or multilateral alliances as long as the allies are of our own choosing. The UN is largely made up of dictators who hate our guts so I don’t see why we want to have them on the team.
That’s what I felt was so screwed up with the UN coalition in Desert Storm. A lot of the members only got on board so they’d be close enough to stab us in the back.
I don’t understand this obsession with having huge coalitions just so we can brag about the size of the coalition. It’s better to have fewer and better allies, instead of a lot of dead wood. Or worse.
Steve57 (a13395) — 12/2/2015 @ 2:56 pmSteve, your comments on the UN were on target. I wish I had the knowledge to put together such an essay extemporaneously. My comment at #12 was in response to some of the utopian thinking that underlies a lot of “libertarian” dogma. If you presume that war is an aberration, then their solutions have some merit. But I do not believe that to be the case. If there are 1.2 billion muslims, then I suspect nearly 1 billion of them would prefer to conquer a wealthy neighbor than to buckle down and become productive themselves, particularly when they are immersed in muslim “culture”, as in Somalia. How else can you explain the last two (plus) centuries of technological progress and prosperity that somehow missed every single muslim country on earth? Correlation is not causation, but this remarkable coincidence certainly warrants further investigation.
BobStewartatHome (a52abe) — 12/2/2015 @ 5:25 pmStrutters gonna strut.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 12/2/2015 @ 5:31 pmNo, you don’t.
Steve57 (a13395) — 12/2/2015 @ 5:38 pmScrutineer, we didn’t wreck Iraq. Iraq was wrecked under Hussein. We fixed it, and then 0bama abandoned it.
If that thing you fixed collapses the moment you stop propping it up, then you didn’t fix it.
scrutineer (b7d257) — 12/2/2015 @ 5:41 pmSteve, point taken. I will be more careful about what I wish for. I hope the restaurant business is good!
BobStewartatHome (a52abe) — 12/2/2015 @ 7:48 pmIraq and Libya were “stable” before Ghadaffi and Saddam bowed out.
Well, all right. I occasionally read this blog for a laugh.
And we can’t all have the grace and good luck of Messrs Assad and Bashir.
JP (f9be8a) — 12/3/2015 @ 6:49 am