Transterrestrial Musings

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We are shocked, shocked to learn there is gambling in Casablanca! Shocked, I tell you.

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 07:00 AM

The MSM coverage of this has been deplorable. Where are the "60 Minutes" and "Dateline" stories? They don't even have to produce forged documents or rig trucks to blow up to present a compelling story. The American public needs to know about this NOW. I guess their love for John Kerry and his friends at the U.N. exceeds our "right" to know.

Posted by Bill Maron at October 20, 2004 07:33 AM

Oil corruption is rampant across the globe.

If we are to win the War on Terror America must rise above partisan hackery.

Besides, how will we convert Islam to secular Western values when we are lead by a Christian evangelical who believes he is on a mission from God?

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 07:37 AM

Bill, do you have any kind of point that's a) worth making and b) not based on a stupid caricature?

Are you saying that we should ignore the fact that France subverted our foreign policy because they were on the take from Saddam? If not, then what the hell are you saying?

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 20, 2004 07:42 AM

I am saying that if Saddam's money was indeed the reason France subverted our foreign policy then we responded in an astonishingly naive and childish manner.

As I wrote long ago, why anyone thinks France ever was our friend is beyond me. Of course the French will act in their own interests.

Evil? Perhaps, but we live in Casablanca.

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 07:49 AM

I am saying that if Saddam's money was indeed the reason France subverted our foreign policy then we responded in an astonishingly naive and childish manner.

That manner being what? Sounds to me like you're the one being childish and naive.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 20, 2004 08:11 AM

Rand, de Gaulle routinely subverted our foreign policy. The French undermined our efforts to confront the Soviet Union.

Is Chirac a corrupt bastard? Yup. Yawn. Old news.

So how do we deal with it? Whine, stamp our feet and call for another FOX News expose?

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 08:15 AM

So how do we deal with it? Whine, stamp our feet and call for another FOX News expose?

No.

Do you have any other stupid, irrelevant questions?

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 20, 2004 08:19 AM

> who believes he is on a mission from God?

As were the Blues Brothers.

Perhaps White will explain what's wrong with the mission. Either one.

Or, is he just offended that Bush has the wrong religion?

Posted by Andy Freeman at October 20, 2004 08:22 AM

I think that he's offended that we're pointing out that Senator Kerry's UN Emperor has no clothes. But it's hard to tell, because he doesn't seem interested in writing anything that's actually relevant to the topic of the post.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 20, 2004 08:34 AM

Bush is bin Laden greatest recruiting sargeant.

He is aiding and abetting the terrorists with an incompetently run War on Terror.

Many Republicans agree with me.

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 08:47 AM

Example:

http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html

Is this guy a leftie loon?

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 08:49 AM

Rand, you brought Kerry into it. I started out saying the French have always been corrupt and every oil producing nation is corrupt.

Too bad. So sad. But sinec you made it about Kerry, here is another Republican opinion.

http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/editorials/2004/10/20/oped-marlow1020-8060.html

Posted by at October 20, 2004 08:53 AM

Bill, why would you stupidly think that I care whether or not someone is a Republican, when taking their opinion into account? I'm not a Republican, and I don't care what Republicans think.

I'm still awaiting a comment that's relevant to this post, and for you to stop wasting my bandwidth and disk space with your foolishness and irrelevancies. This isn't your personal Bush-bashing bulletin board.

One more strike and you're out.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 20, 2004 08:54 AM

:-)

Okay. Okay.

The French are corrupt. Agreed.

Kofi Anan failed to stop a major scandal. Agreed.

People need to go to jail over the oil for food business. Agreed.

Now what?

What do you propose? The French have subverted our security interests for 50 years. People embezzle money every day.

Oil money corrupts.

What is your plan?

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 08:58 AM

My plan is to stop pretending that the UN has any moral authority, and to stop bending over backwards to get its approval. We should have removed Saddam much sooner, and dallying with the UN simply cost us a great deal of time in the war. We'll know better next time.

My plan would also be to withdraw all funding from the UN until it cleans up its act, and in the meantime, start forming a more useful organization that isn't a dictator-coddling club, composed of governments accountable to their people.

Finally, my plan would be to prevent John Kerry from getting into office if at all possible, because he doesn't seem to know that we are at war, or that the UN and the French are (perhaps irredeemably) corrupt and opposed to us. Talk about "childish and naive."

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 20, 2004 09:09 AM

_Say_ the French are corrupt. Then prove it.
_Say_ the UN is corrupt. Then prove it.
_Send_ people to jail.

Getting out of denial is the first freaking step.
Going back into denial (Which both the Pat Buchanons and the Kerrys propose) is insane.

Posted by Al at October 20, 2004 09:12 AM

Bill W:

What is your basis for arguing that the War on Terror is incompetently run? If part of it is that we do not have the allies we "should" have, as John Kerry argues, then the Oil-For-Food program is something that needs to be raised and repeated.

If you think that we should have gone back to the UN for another resolution (why?), again, then OFF is relevant.

If you think that war w/ Iraq was unnecessary b/c the sanctions were doing their job, and could be maintained indefinitely, again, OFF is relevant.

Posted by Dean at October 20, 2004 10:59 AM

Dean,
Bill knows the war is going badly becasue CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN told him so.

Conversely my son who just returned from over there is being told, by people like minded of Bill, that what he saw with his own two eyes wasn't the REAL war in Iraq.

The problem in our country is not one of divergent views or differing rhetoric any more. The problem is one of intentional and self imposed blindness on the leftist side of the aisle. That OR these people who think Dan Ratherbiased is right and people who say the war is going well are wrong/lying, is that the koolaid drinking Kerratherites WANT us to fail becasue that's what we deserve as the last super power.

I have wondered often how women like Mrs Bill and Mrs Ratherbiased will look in a burkah(sp). Oh wait, it won't matter you won't be able to see them, except for their toes. Mrs Kerry of course won't last 15 minutes under the Taliban, she doesn't know when to shut up. And obviously her husband has no control over her, Islamic extremists hate that!!

Posted by Steve at October 20, 2004 11:32 AM

> Bush is bin Laden greatest recruiting sargeant.

> He is aiding and abetting the terrorists with an incompetently run War on Terror.

Killing terrorists is aiding them.

Imprisoning terrorists is abetting them.

Victory is defeat.

Surrender is victory.

Strength is weakness.

Supidity is intellect.

John Kerry will make America stronger.

:-)

Posted by George Orwell at October 20, 2004 05:22 PM

Wow. The reasoned discourse around here today just makes me proud to be an American.

At the risk of being called stupid repeatedly, I feel the need to provide a perspective that might differ from that of the grand Rand.

But first, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Mr. Orwell. He (perhaps unknowingly) makes a really good point. In order to understand all the actions of Kerry and/or Bush one has to recognize that we have entered the fullness of the Orwell vision. Newspeak is the lingua franca of politics. Deal with it. Any doubt as to the line between terrorist/insurgent and freedom fighter is gone. Any questioning of the appropriateness of calling a state imposed and enforced through military violence "free" is no longer acceptable. However, it is just incorrect to state that the killing in Iraq is not creating more people who are willing to risk their own lives to inflict retribution on the US. Killing enemies when it will create more enemies is certainly "fighting the terrorists"; it is just a really counterproductive way of doing it. One legitimate question then is whether the US "liberation" of Iraq will create more people who are willing to attack US interests than there were before the war, and whether they will be able to do more or less damage.

As for the UN, it is not a highly productive organization. It is corrupt (probably even more than the US system). But it is still a necessary component in the war on Terra. It is necessary as a scapegoat. One of the dominant reasons that the Iraq war creates terrorist recruits dangerous to the US is that it is run by the US. While the UN has little credible moral force, it does have the effective ability to distract blaim from any one country (in this case the US). It also has the virtue of obscuring the real reason for taking any particular action (whether that be the unfruitful search for WMDs or the more accurate long term policy motivations involving a non-Israeli foothold in the Middle East). The UN is an organization that we set up to take the blame for our less than elegant policies abroad. This is a purpose that can save a lot of US lives and resources. However, the UN cant do it's job if we dont even try to play like its a real organization.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
--Lazarus Long (hows that for on topic)

Posted by Nathan H at October 20, 2004 07:14 PM

Perhaps you should ask this question to yourself Bill.

"Besides, how will we defeat the South and win the Civil War when we are lead by a Christian evangelical who believes he is on a mission from God?"

Posted by Mike Puckett at October 20, 2004 08:08 PM

"Besides, how will we defeat the South and win the Civil War when we are lead by a Christian evangelical who believes he is on a mission from God?"

Abraham Lincoln? Read the 2nd Inaugural Address. He never claims to know God's purposes and has a deep understanding of his own human frailities.

He was no evangelical in the modern sense.

Besides the Union and the Confederacy shared the same religion.

Posted by Bill White at October 20, 2004 09:21 PM

Nathan, I won't call you stupid but I will ignore Mr. Orwell as I dislike posts signed with pseudonyms. There is still a line between freedom fighter and terrorist and it is easy to see. Attacking civilian targets is the work of terrorists. There may be Iraqi fighters in that country who have tried to only attack military targets, I don't know if that's true. If they are supporters of Saddam, they have no moral ground that would usually be associated with freedom fighters; i.e. oppression, genocide, the acts Saddam was inflicting on half the population. The creation of new fighters is subject the law of diminishing returns. The more we kill, the fewer to fight, eventually. Simple math there.

There aren't many countries in the world that became free without the imposition of some military violence. While India achieved independence with very little violence, the religious and ethnic fighting that followed certainly produced enough casualties for a war.

I don't like the consideration that the U.S. is almost as corrupt as the U.N. Where would the world be with the U.S.? We saved Europe from itself twice, three times counting the Cold War. We don't run the U.N. and we didn't start it, otherwise we would have no vetoes from others in the Security Council. That we would be far-sighted enough to see our mistakes and think we needed a world body to throw the blame at is ludicrous. Most of the member states are despots and dictators. France and Russia are more corrupt that us. We get plenty of blame and NONE of it gets laid at the feet of the U.N. instead of us. We HAVE tried to play like it will work but in the words of Dennis Miller, "Watching the U.N. would make a glacier want to take Ritalin." The U.N. has shown itself incapable of working. The inmates are running the asylum and any talk to the contrary is just wishful thinking.

Posted by Bill Maron at October 20, 2004 11:18 PM

3rd para, 2nd sen. is ... without the U.S.?

Posted by Bill Maron at October 20, 2004 11:22 PM

> Any questioning of the appropriateness of calling a state imposed and enforced through
> military violence "free" is no longer acceptable.

So, how did you manage to get Inernet connectivity from your prison cell?

What? You haven't been imprisoned? Executed? Even tortured?

So much for your paranoia.

You choose to slander one of the few nations on Earth where you *can* openly express such bitter hatred of your government, a freedom protected by the very men and women you hold in contempt -- and you can't see the irony in that?

> Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
> --Lazarus Long (hows that for on topic)

Indeed. Do you know what he said about loud-mouthed pacifists?

Posted by Edward Wright at October 20, 2004 11:38 PM

Hmmmm, let's do the math. In order for killing your enemies to be a losing proposition, then you need to create 2 enemies for every 1 you kill. (If you create just 1, you've neither lost nor gained ground.)

Actually, I guess it's all on average, so you could create 1.1 or 1.7 new enemies for every 1 you kill, on average.

Note also that the new enemies must have been your friends or at least neutral before, and they must have been willing to stay that way right up until you killed the old enemy, and nothing you do afterward should be able to dissuade them. Otherwise, of course, you're not creating more than 1 new enemy per old enemy killed, and your policy would in fact pay off eventually.

Let's take Iraq. What we need, then, is an essentially infinite pool of people who are indifferent (at worst) to the US, and whom no ordinary run of events would turn into jihadis, but among whom 1.3 or 1.6 or whatever will reliably turn into jihadis for every 1 previously-existing jihadi the US kills, and for whom no other action by the US (e.g. nation-building) would dissuade from that action.

A very strange demographic indeed.

Posted by Josh K. at October 21, 2004 03:24 AM

Loud mouthed occasionally, but never a pacifist. I just find needless killing distasteful. All my arguments are for the most elegant application of force.

Mr. Moran, I agree that there can be any number of definitions proposed, and dont have a big personal problem with yours, but I do think that objectively it oversimplifies the situation. When you start sending military troops to govern another State it will inevitably become "messy" (to use a Rumsfeldism). There are plenty of people who through no malicious intent of US soldiers probably have very good reason to resent US presence in Iraq.

My fundamental problem with the administration's strategy in the war on terra, and Mr. Moran's answer is that the math here is not so simple (much like it didnt turn out to be so in Vietnam). It would be true if we were willing to include every Muslim in the world (or even just everyone in the middle east, or some other smaller subset), and start our final solution there. However, I think even our leadership is not so fumbling in its policymaking as to allow that as an option. There are plenty of people who might not be happy with the US, but dont have enough of a personal reason to actually act to cause us harm and have too much to live for to risk any attack. By severely disrupting the lives of millions (to put it most mildly), while simultaneously opening up Iraq to the terrorist forces we were initially fighting, we are creating more people who might be willing to act on their desire to cause harm to the US.

And yes, independence does normally involve military force. My point is that when that military force is imposed over time by a foreign State, the locals tend to get upset, even if they didnt like their former leader.

As for the UN, we might not have created it because of actual forsight (Woodrow Wilson did found the League of Nations by the way, and without FDR, efforts to modernize it into the present UN would have been impossible), but regardless, it can still be useful for the purpose of blame distraction. I hate to break it to you, but the US can do great things while also being plenty corrupt. Were not Russia or France corrupt, but we sure try. But this is ultimately irrelevant to my ultimate concern, which is lowering the bodycount required for Iraqi "freedom". The corruption of the UN doesnt stop it from being a good scapegoat. It just means we have to actually have a compelling reason to invade other nations, or be willing to offer the biggest bribes, er, I meant trade deals, to get its approval.

Id say more, but the warden is signaling lights out on my cell-block. Oh wait, thats just my paranoia. No worries.

Posted by Nathan H. at October 21, 2004 03:35 AM

My objection to the Bush strategy, over-simplified?

They can make babies faster and cheaper than we can make JDAMs or Hum-vees

Its a 50 year war or a 100 year war and we can only win by closing the terrorist schools (in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt) AND by changing their culture.

A culture that prizes martyrdom will not be defeated by letting them make more martyrs. Especially when the annual birth rate for new martyrs is so high.

Its not about morals. I prefer ours. Its about prudence.

Posted by Bill White at October 21, 2004 04:59 AM

Quote from Nathan H. : "While the UN has little credible moral force, it does have the effective ability to distract blaim from any one country (in this case the US)"

Usually when the U.N. acts in concert with the U.S. then we end up getting blamed from everything that goes wrong anyways since the U.N. is most often accused of being the puppet of the U.S. So in some ways the U.N. going one way on the war on terror and the U.S. going the other actually is a good thing to dispel those beliefs that we are an all consuming and controlling faction.

Plus, in regards to recruitment of terror you all should read Instapundit more. Almost daily Glenn Reynolds posts about how the recruitment of terrorist amongst the Iraqi's is going terrible from Al Qaeda's point of view. Hence the reason that coordinated attacks have increased against police and military recruitment stations in Iraq. There are reports even that Iraqi's cheer everytime they hear about another U.S. bomb dropped on Falluja.

Posted by Josh "Hefty" Reiter at October 21, 2004 06:24 AM

> My objection to the Bush strategy, over-simplified?

> They can make babies faster and cheaper than we can make JDAMs or Hum-vees

Yes, greatly oversimplified. You fail to differentiate between babies and terrorists, nor have you bothered to research how fast we can make JDAMs or Humvees. Fortunately for the US, the Bush strategy does not oversimplify.

> A culture that prizes martyrdom will not be defeated by letting them make more martyrs.

Do you think Imperial Japan now rules the world? We couldn't possibly have defeated a culture that prized martyrdom by killing them, could we? Too bad FDR, like Bush, was too dumb to see that?

Just because you see a slogan on a Kerry bumper sticker doesn't make it true.

Do you really think surrendering to Tojo would have caused the Japanese to reform and become good Kerry Democrats?

Posted by Edward Wright at October 21, 2004 11:34 AM

Do you think Imperial Japan now rules the world? We couldn't possibly have defeated a culture that prized martyrdom by killing them, could we? Too bad FDR, like Bush, was too dumb to see that?

Fair enough, except we needed two atomic bombs, the obliteration of Tokyo and destroying every meaningful weapon the Japanese had. Hardly two bricks were left standing in Japan.

=IF= the Bush plan was to quickly follow on Iraq regime change by Syrian regime change, Iranian regime change and Saudi regime change =THEN= I will concede your point.

We can defeat martyrs IF we kill them all. I stand corrected and acknowledge my error.

But unless we kill them all, if we use less than decisive military action, we only breed more jihadists.

Pushing over all the dominoes actually is better, IMHO, than what Bush is doing now, except I doubt Bush has the balls to actually undertake regime change in Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia during his next term.

Remember, Bush already caved in at Fallajuh and Najaf.

If the idea is to go tough, WHY isn't the thug Sadr in custody, or dead?

And if Allawi is really calling the shots, I need to ask, why? Why are we letting a foreign leader determine US foreign policy?

Posted by Bill White at October 21, 2004 09:54 PM

> We can defeat martyrs IF we kill them all. I stand corrected and acknowledge my error.

We didn't have to kill all of the Japanese army. You acknowledge errors just to replace them with new errors.

> =IF= the Bush plan was to quickly follow on Iraq regime change by
> Syrian regime change, Iranian regime change and Saudi regime change
> =THEN= I will concede your point.

So, it's Bush's fault that you don't have the patience for a war that isn't over instantly?

Do you think John Kerry would overthrow Iraq, Syria, and Iran, all within a four-month tour of duty?

Posted by Edward Wright at October 22, 2004 01:15 PM

Ed, didn't you get the memo? Everything is Bush's fault.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 22, 2004 01:21 PM

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