Ann in AZ @ 74

And can anyone remember the last time we provided arms to any country that the country we provided them to hasn’t turned them against us?

In addition to England; Nicaragua and Israel haven’t yet…what is left of Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t turn their weapons against us until we bombed the crap out of them. I’m sure there are many more…

Israeli aircraft attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.

“I do not believe that America’s leadership has a clear idea of how America needs to be using its armed forces. We have militarist views, imperialist views, anti-terrorism views, protect the oil views, and so on. Which, if any of these, is legitimate? Until we have a decent debate about what our military is for, I think it’s mindless to enlarge it, particularly when we have so little faith in the kinds of people who either are President or seem to want to be President but who will want to play Commander in Chief.”

All that talk about ‘we have to be right 100% of the time, and they only have to be right once’ – or words to that effect – in reference to the terrorist threat, really just points up a glaring, and hopeless, cost/benefit imbalance from using a military approach to self-defense from terrorist attacks and sabotage, compared to the effort required to succeed in such terrorist sabotage. In other words, no one can or will “win” with such “perfection” odds against them in the struggle against terrorism.

I think the right way to look at this is to consider the use of brute military force against terrorist tactics to be akin to “uparmoring” to an impenetrable level every home in the U.S. against the existing threat posed by house burglars, or akin to ‘targeting known pockets’ of burglars in inner-city slums with air power bombing runs… The cost vs. the benefit of such an approach is absurd on its face. Now obviously house burglary doesn’t compare to the potential threat from terrorism in our high-tech age. But nevertheless, the more high-tech our society is, the more impossible it is going to be to “uparmor” “100%” of our high-tech facilities against the remote chance of a major, successful terrorist attack on an individual facility. The costs – in resources and quality of life – will sink us long, long before the actual terrorists will. Yet that’s pretty much the trajectory this Congress and President now have us mindlessly pursuing, barring a change in course.

We need to stop, look, and listen. It’s way past time to do serious due diligence to study and understand the effectiveness (or not) of detective work, and police work, against the threat of terrorist attack, vs. the effectiveness (or not) of brute military force against the threat of terrorist attack. Obviously the financial benefits to the country’s taxpayers are massively in favor of police work. No society can sustain a full-blown ‘war of attrition’ that is so unbalanced in favor of the opponent: a massive and growing high-tech, energy-intensive, U.S. military on the one side, and a mobile, mostly very low-tech, no- or low-energy infrastructure, and often invisible terrorist on the other side.

What’s left is serious insurance-industry-style (but humane) weighing of the potential benefits in safety to citizens from various kinds (and costs) of different ‘uparmoring’ possibilities for our infrastructure. I’ve seen no evidence of any such serious scrutiny of the pros and cons of different “common defense” approaches being conducted by our federal representatives, as you wisely indicate desperately needs doing, Scarecrow.

Have a super solstice.

By waiting, and hedging her bets, instead of providing some real leadership, when she DOES sits down to scarf it, it will be seen as all that more politically expedient, and Kucinich, for example, can scathingly welcome her “aboard”.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. The argument I hear being made is that we shouldn’t do the immediate surge, because there’s no defensible rationale for what those troops would do during the surge. But then the experts agree we need more troops overall, to increase the size of the military. My point is that these experts also fail to articulate a defensible rationale for that increase too. They’re getting a free pass. But when you probe the responses, it seems that the implicit rationale is that we have to account for the 150,000 troops that are bogged down in Iraq. I’m sugesting we need to address the latter problem, because it will lead to cures for the former, without just expanding the size of the military (and giving future presidents more “toys” to play with.

I do not believe that America’s leadership has a clear idea of how American needs to be using its armed forces. We have militarist views, imperialist views, anti-terrorism views, protect the oil views, and so on. Which, if any of these, is legitimate? Until we have a decent debate about what our military is for, I think it’s mindless to enlarge it, particularly when we have so little faith in the kinds of people who either are President or seem to want to be President but who will want to play Commander in Chief.

‘no one has stated a clear, finite, and achievable military mission for the extra troops the neocons want to surge into Iraq. But the lack of a defensible mission has never stopped this Administration in the past. And it’s unlikely to encourage the Democrats to ask the same question. How do I know? Because none of these Democrats has put forth a “clear, finite, and achievable mission” for the overall increased troop levels.’

We are at war, and too few are being forced to carry that load. The national guard has no business there. The surge is typically stupid of our foolish prez, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need a larger military now.

I’m as concerned as you are about feeding another of his idiotic escapades (Iran), but it also bothers me that we’re powerless to help in Darfur, as we did in Kosovo, as we should have done in Rwanda, as we thought we had in Afghanistan. Troops in reserve don’t need their mission clearly defined until they get one.

Of course, George Bush and his even more reckless Vice President will be gone in January, 2009.

Don’t be so sure. These criminals are capable of anything.

I’ ve said all along that there’s no way Hillary can win dem primaries; I just wanted to put on record that she has backed off a bit cheerleading the invasion.

Any damn idiot Senator knew that even if Saddam had WMD, he was still not an imminent threat to the US, and thus the war was not just. Hillary, like all political snakes knew this. She and the other Dems who voted for the war did so because they were afraid that the overthrow would somehow be a success and they wanted to be included in the winners. That is the fact; they voted not with their convictions or what they knew to be morally correct, but for the possible political upside. Period. If the war went badly, hey, they knew more of the blame would be on the Administration, and they could live with that.

How the fuck sick is that? But that is what it is.