Maggie's Farm

Going to war with the current admin in place will cause great rejoicing in the camps of the enemy.

The famous "Baghdad Bob" episode marked the beginning of a period where the Mullahs were scared shitless and ready to deal. Gadaffi threw away his nuke program and joined up the mighty American victory --the whole region was recalibrating away from tyranny and oppression as a way of governance.

Go back and take a look, Zach. I'm not gonna write a book here in comments, but I know I'm right, I remember it with absolute clarity. You will be able to mine some anecdotals otherwise, but you will not furnish any quantitative analysis, keyword counter or opinion aggregator or any objective evidence otherwise.

Wars end when one side loses hope of victory. That's where we were at milepost Baghdad Bob. This period lasted until the Democratic primary candidates started contending among themselves for the Democratic nomination in the coming 2004 election.

They all needed to differentiate themselves from GWB, else the 'why dump an incumbent?' question can't get out from under the GOP triumphal procession.

So they started making antiwar speeches, and academia started writing bogus casualty reports --and right in mid-step, as our adversary organizations all over world were escorting their hawk factions out the door, they stopped for another look, because the great schism of Vietnam juuuust might claw itself up out of the memory hole, and wreck American resolve yet again.

And sure enough, it did. The power of the watergate press, subdued by 9/11, was the key indicator, and our adversaries were watching it like hawks. When John Kerry dialed the anti-war rhetoric up to new levels, and won the nomination, he as the famous anti-war 'winter soldier' conjured Vietnam in the protest streets of America, and the Iraq victory was quite quickly buried by the conjured but nevertheless real 'quagmire' of Vietnam lore.

The Democratic Party lost the war, as per custom. Sorry but dat's da faks, man.

Seven generations ago, 700,000 Americans (2% of the population) died fighting out who the rule of law did or did not apply to.

You're right --i should've used the word 'equal' re law. The non-violent deaths: secondary and tertiary effects are still effects, so your implication is misplaced. So you get a 1:1 draw on the very limited patch of ground you chose to defend.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_did_Saddam_kill

Yes, i'm well aware of the Lancet Report (issued under Johns Hopkins' cooperative auspice), and the innovative sampling which made ten times the number of actual Iraq civilian deaths 'true' according to the model.

No no no --you can't just say ''statistical sampling'' as if it is all of a same quality of model and honesty of execution.

As i'm sure you know, the Lancet Report is an important icon in this history, for its self-evident impact of course (major institutional source, timing just weeks before election), but also for the comprehensive universal debunking whose impact occured mainly post-election --clearly as per breathtakingly cynical political capture of junk science --an astonishingly adept triple play of transgression against the body politic.

''Bumps'' in the new methodology employed provided the back door for the institutions inside academia, and outside it, well, that dr. so n so who developed the new model, instead of jailtime, got the job running the census for Obama a few years later.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=lancet+report+iraq+deaths&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox

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I'm no hawk, Zach. Far from it. It's just that, well, in this particular case, American armed forces made extraordinary efforts to minimize collateral damage (civilian deaths at top of list), and to come along and smear them with junk science, and then to continue repeating that junk long after it is debunked, deliberately using the Goebbels principle of repetition, is incredibly subversive of everything outside the word-meaning inversion of the material dialectic.

IOW, when the existence of the non-material is denied, there is no source for the division between truth and lie, except the political.

So (poof) there goes the hard-won conscience --and here comes backthe ancient animal.

You seem to've forgotten 9/11. No, i don't have to tie 9/11 to saddam with rules of evidence in a court of law. USA was faced with existential crisis --another 9/11 on the heels of 9/11 would've promised the prospect of endless 9/11s, and the entire investment economy of USA would've collapsed in a rush.

We needed some years of no more 9/11 --and the genius of OIF was that of employing all the bad guys in watching each other to make sure there'd be no more 9/11s as long as a pissed-off American army was only a line in the sand away from the lairs of Damascus and Tehran.

I claim empirical evidence to support the supposition.

Even the UN grants a right of self-defense.

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As far as the prolix denials and meaningless distinctions within your rebuttals of my remarks on statistical sampling, they all rest on your accusation of assertion in and of the veracity of the number of deaths under Saddam.

However, if you'll note, i copied an entire search of a very neutral and intuitive set of terms.

The quote was picked at near-random, off the search results blurb phrase.

So your 'j'accuse' pointed finger is objectioned, and i predict, objection sustained.

BTW, Most of the deaths were caused by the internecine struggle unleashed by the invasion and bungled occupation elucidates a principle that, applied to that guy in Cleveland with the three kidnapped girls, would read as "Most of the sensationalism is being caused by the three girls suddenly escaping due to the kidnapper's bungled prison security", leaving unsaid the implied opinion that Cleveland and Zach would both feel better if the status quo ante had continued to prevail.

Zach, you're descending into nyah nyah land.

Tell you what --search you up some charts --of the Iraqi birth and marriage rate, healthcare and alcoholism stats, all the social 'tells'you can find from anywhere and everywhere, and the Dinar and stock and bond and real estate markets, and business startups and personal income and national oil production --and explain to me how a society under the sort of brutal American stress you are trying desperately to sell, can make the economic and social welfare turn that Iraq made since Saddam was removed.

Not even the most recent several years, with the 2008 financial shock engineered to bring O to office with the crisis needed to fundamentally transform etcetera, nor O's refusal to even discuss a continued American tripwire presence, combined, have been able to break the durability institutionalized since Saddam was toppled.

Get the data, and then if you come back and continue your same argument, you will brand yourself in more eyes than just mine, as not only a left-wing propagandist but also a rather silly l.w.p.

Sorry, Zach --storm got my internet connection yesterday, just now reading your last. Having a hard time maintaining interest in your rubber-ball-and-glue debate tactic --especially since, you know, the whole thing is in writing just up-column.

Decided against meeting the economic-and-social facts 'n figures challenge, did you? Figures --i can't say you change the subject without good reasons, that's for sure.

The one item that does deserve comment is the standard boilerplate ''America unleashed native internecine warfare''.

The truth is, America just brought the camera --before OIF, Saddam was simply murdering the other side of your 'internecine', behind closed doors and out in the countryside (ever heard of Anfal?), in wholesale and retail, at the drop of a hat, and as gruesomely as possible, often entire families, with each family member forced to watch while waiting his or her turn.

There are youtubes on the web of Saddam's men proudly filming such things as making blindfolded men jump off four-storey roofs. Gestapo redux, but that don't bother some folks, i guess.

But a deliberate attempt to bury all that in favor of hyping the image of America the Brute savaging the natives, is pretty despicable.

Especially from people who haven't even bothered to learn the difference between 'your' and 'you're'.

Never said that dude. Why would I say that? I'm not in the propaganda biz. Re-read the remark.

I said that was the marker of a victory --do some reading, for chrissake.

see below what? did you mean to link to one of your strawmen stretching his hamstrings?

If you really do not understand the concept, let me make it easier for you. Imagine you are an enemy (that shouldn't be too hard) and you are looking at the face of Uncle Sam. At the Baghdad Bob stage, the face looked resolute, purposeful, stern, and hard. He wasn't to be messed with --there was no telling what he might do. This is the face that made Gadaffi fear him more than he desired to keep playing with the mullahs, the Alawites, the Hez, the KGB, what and whoever. All those enemy power structures were dead quiet and trying to blend into the background. This is the psychological condition of defeat.

But it don't happen at the same instant with every soul on earth, it's not like a clock alarm. It's a process that moves at some speed fast or slow --and is subject to choppy wave currents here and there (even administratively clean war ends like WWII's surrender signing ceremonies did not prevent guerrilla sniping at the victors for years, but victory was victory, a mosquito is not a hawk even though its word glyphs are more numerous).

To retain the victory, Uncle Sam's face had to stay rock jaw, it couldn't go strobing between Boris Karloff and Harpo Marx --which it did, pace the run up to the election, thanks to your party's lack of any substance other than a talent for deligitimizing the achievements of the other party.

PS --here's what we have to watch right now: search news for [ 17 officers relieved minot ]

Now search web for [ missing nukes minot barksdale 2007 ]

Now open

http://www.bing.com/search?q=hagel+nuclear+weapons&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox

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Hagel and Obama both have questioned whether we need the Air Force Minutemen III (we have 450 of 'em, 150 at each of three sites, Minot, plus MT and WY). Hagel says of course only through negotiations with Russia. Problem is, Russia cheats. The Yamantau Mountain underground city in the southern Urals is even exempted from inspection, thanks to a last-minute waiver in the Start II treaty Obama signed after it had sat on the shelf for 25 years, mainly on the issue of verification --a sore spot ever since the Wall Fall revealed several secret Warsaw Pact sites full of nuclear missiles that were supposed to've not existed following the Reagan negotiation on theater weapons --a 'left behind' nasty surprise indeed waiting for NATO had any sort of crisis, even short of war, come along. A cave in Czechoslovakia alone had sufficient illegal MIRV'd missiles to've obliterated every city in western Europe.

And Obama will staff the verification teams, with the aid of the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen Martin Dempsey, who just yesterday got accused of being the first uniformed JCS ever in USA history to've endorsed before congress a White House statement that the uniformed forces had to have known was, have to know is, a lie.

Here's what i think: Putin, knowing Assad is out anyway, got a trade --a secret trade --out of NSA Donilon (who was in Moscow for the Boston Bombs and the 300 pt market drop two days before), and Kerry, who was there just this week, during the Benghazi hearing.

Trade for what? Dunno, but Hagel (and that whole term II state and security bunch is inexplicable except for some major Democratic-left project that was important enough to over-ride major political disqualifers for every one of them) is certainly throwing that word ''rot'' around loosely.

And i believe maybe one of those 2007 nukes was never recovered. Hope it ain't 'rotten'. It could contaminate 10 counties somewhere out west --and shucks, we'd need to junk the Minutemen.

--not the Brits --they go with ''stra tea jik''

I understand. Reading comprehension is a tough subject to learn, because you have to have it to know when you don't have it.

Also, to correct your cunning fail to re-print your remark that led to my 'didn't say that':

"The subject was and is your claim that the war ended with Baghdad Bob."

Now see if you can follow this: the entire back 'n forth has been about comparing the ratios of war-fighting and casualties ante versus post Baghdad Bob.

Does it make any sense --ANY sense AT ALL --that AFTER i claimed there was no more war after Baghdad Bob, that i would then follow with comment after comment ON the war post-Baghdad Bob?

Jeeziz H. Kee-rist, Zach --you can really overdo the disingenuous bit. And i'm guilty of humoring you, i guess.

Why don't you just quote me saying the word 'the', and then add your understanding that by that 'the' i meant 'the comments by Zach are pure genius' ?

I can't find the lie, so i really have no power over that statement. It's nature's --it only passed through yrs truly.

If i can't truthfully say 'i'm home' when i'm really only opening my door, then for sure I'll advocate for your winning the galactic nit-picking trophy. If one ever gets offered, I hasten at the double quick to add.

Are you aware that your three-word dismissal of 9/11's place in this debate is exactly akin to your major beef about folks running on and on about the weather while dismissing the climate via three words, saying 'no I haven't' --?

Precisely --thank you for making my point. I knew you would, sooner or later.

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this is a tip for the use of 'incoherent' in debate: the term is inherently subjective; its purpose as a word is exactly to differentiate between stimulus and response.

For example, say in Seattle i'm asked 'where do you live?' --i'll respond 'Austin'. Asked the same question in Austin, i'll respond 'Dripping Springs'. Asked the same in Dripping Springs, i answer 'out 290 west, along hwy 165'. Asked the same along the side of hwy 165, i answer 'other side of the ridge'. Asked on the other side of the ridge, i say 'on that hill yonder'.

Now you, with your pedantic blinders, will prosecute: 'the man is incoherent, he doesn't even know where he lives!'

Clearly, you are trained to find a lie unless i will have answered the same in every case.

Altho to the questioner in Seattle, the answer i gave behind the ridge along hwy 165 is what would have been as good as a lie, altho the truth.

And the answer i gave everywhere else, would have been a lie to the questioner along hwy 165, although the truth everywhere else.

However, nothing changed but the 'frame of reference'.

It is a well-understood control habit of the totalitarian mind to take the position that there is no such thing as a frame of reference.

Only in that way can a totalitarian wave his hand and say "hang the first hundred kulaks!"