[lit-ideas] Re: Victor Hanson in Iraq ... me for Kentucky
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:53:24 -0500
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 12/11/2006 1:18:14 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Victor Hanson in Iraq ... me for Kentucky
>
> >>We caused the mess in Iraq.
>
> I'm not disagreeing. That's the current majority opinion.
> Hanson does a good job of presenting it, no?
>
>
No. He thinks we weren't attacked because they're scared of us. They just
have other things to do. We're so vulnerable they could have hit us
(quoting a quote from Suskind) hundreds of times by now and didn't.
> Here's a question: what would have worked? I can imagine two
> postmortem plans that would have worked, had we known what
> was really going on. Maybe you want to play this fantasy game.
>
Staying out of a place that we knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about. No
idea who lived there, why, nothing. Gates' lack of such basic information
*even today* is stunning given that it's that very know-nothingness that
Bush & Co. drove over a cliff with. Even today Gates doesn't know OBL's
group? Wow. He'll probably just tell Bush what he wants to hear, will
politicize the intel. Lawrence of Arabia said way back that it would take
about 900,000 soldiers to secure the country at the population of his time.
Today the population is higher. We have 150,000 soldiers in a country of
26 million. What more is there to say? We needed to finish in
Afghanistan, demolish al Qaeda and make lots and lots of friends in the
area to help us out. Instead, Afghanistan is stirred but not shaken and
recovering nicely, al Qaeda is cozy and untouchable in Anbar, we have
enemies galore, and our management still doesn't know what's over there.
What else is there to say?
Later.
> (1) We could have put the entire army in Iraq at the
> beginning of the invasion and stabilized the place.
>
> (2) After 9/11, we could have begun to build up the army.
> EU/Russia/China, driven by oil deals and bribery, were
> pushing for an end to sanctions back then, remember? Bush
> countered with the invasion plan, which changed the game
> from end/don't end sanctions to invade/don't invade.
>
> At this point, we could have stalled. Let the various rounds
> of inspectors go in -- all the while building up the army --
> and then invaded in 2005 with a large force. Even if we
> didn't invade at that point, we could have kept the
> sanctions (which we now know worked) in place by threatening
> to invade.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
> digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
