Bloodless Coup

So he's saying that if the murder rate was cut by 20% in an American city, it would still be a failure of the police if continued killings and instability were explained as a reason to maintain a police force?

if the police in your hypothetical had begun by inciting unrest by invading en masse, then left a pile of weapons lying around for anyone to pick up, and as a consequence of that violence had ticked up to unprecedented levels with most of it directed at the police themselves, yes, i think it would be fair to look upon a 20% reduction with a pretty jaundiced eye.

Moon,
Are you actually going to return to the invasion-without-provocation theme now that the iraq-is-a-civil-war theme is wearing away? Let's look at Iraq; it's a functional representative democracy suffering the conflicts inherent in any representative democracy. It's no longer run by a thug dictator jumping up his military industrial complex budget dozens of times or importing scientists who just happen to know a great deal about chemical biological nuclear warfare or bribing political and financial elites via oil for food in order to bring down sanctions. But you can rest with that situation and your political blinders, me I'll incite some unrest in that situation because I'm not happy with it.

Let us not forget we went in without great support from other countries because many of those other countries were profiting big time off of selling illegal weapons and importing oil from Iraq. We didn't leave our weapons around for anyone to pick up, and considering most of the recent casualties are from IEDs with Iranian serial numbers, it's obvious they're not home grown from leftover Iraqi explosives.

IEDs also and principally in the first years of the insurgency consisted of reconfigured munitions that were either native or american, but in either case were left woefully unattended and magically disappeared. but in keeping with your party of choice, moon (i feel like i'm good superman to my own bad superman here), i understand that your congenitally incapable of looking back more than a year (you know, to a point where we had an opportunity to fix the problems there when we arrived, instead of finding ourselves fixing problems we created in the first place) or ahead more than a year (to a time when someone with the guts to make a tougher call than a cowboy deciding to shoot up the joint (or rather, deciding to order a bunch of people with no connection to him or his immediate advisers shoot up the joint) notwithstanding the possibility of near-term disfavor, choosing instead to ask what's really better for this country in a longer term than the next electoral cycle. i, however, am not, and the only premise above that i can agree with you on is that hussein was a manipulative, murderous thug. everything else i find rather apt to describe how we've run our own efforts in the region, especially with respect to graft. good lord you've got a lot of nerve citing financial malfeasance when everyone your boys hired was no-bid, unqualified, but happened to be in bed with the right people, and every goddamned one of them has squandered more tax dollars and more taxpayer-purchased materiel (all too much of which has ended up in the hands of terrorists we largely created and in any event effectively armed, who are using it to pile up american and iraqi bodies alike) than the mind can even fathom. and of course, you're republican congress couldn't even be bothered to investigate except at knife-point, and wouldn't even acknowledge, let alone provide one good reason for ignoring, the serially bleak reports coming out of the handful of responsible oversight organizations the bushies never figured out a way to silence or eviscerate. yeah, it's sure a good thing we got rid of the unaccountable, rule-by-fiat, corruption laden hussein regime, isn't it?

forget that we went in for the wrong reasons. we stayed in for the wrong reasons. and we're doing so now. not that i believe we should pull everyone out this second; i don't. but we continue to hear our present moves justified only in the banal untruths we've been hearing all along: that Al Qaeda in any form was welcome or materially present in Iraq before the invasion; that Al Qaeda Iraq has any material connection to the Al Qaeda that bombed us on 9/11; that the Iraqi government is any better now than it was two years ago, or its "security forces" any more capable of standing up (so that our forces can stand down) now than it was two years ago, or that anyone anywhere outside the Green Zone (a telling appellation for a subsection of the capital city) is truly safe, ever.

it wasn't the right war, but if it had been, bush still would have screwed it up, and anyone who claims to have any material evidence to suggest otherwise should have his intellectual card revoked.

How did that happen? I guess I addressed the last post to you and signed it by you, but I do like your good superman/bad superman metaphor. What actually happens if you look back more than a year is that you see John Kerry running for President saying we should have started off with more troops, but that he would not increase the number of troops. So it's difficult to see how this looks any better for Dems than for Bush because they've been using that line, that we should have gone in with more troops, but at every point been unwilling to call for more troops. That's what Bush did, how he's different.

And considering that Saddam instructed his generals to surrender after one week of fighting, it's very likely in preparing for insurgency that they had ample time to secure an abundant source of native explosives before we set foot in Baghdad, but don't let me stop your Bush is an idiot/the troops are incompetent meme, yours and Chucky Schumer's.

"but we continue to hear our present moves justified only in the banal untruths we've been hearing all along"

Do you mean from Bush or from Clinton appointee George Tenet:

"Ansar al-Islam, a radical Kurdish Islamic group, was closely allied to al-Qa'ida. Kurdish Islamists and al-Qa'ida had come together in the summer of 2000 to create a safe haven for al-Qa'ida in an area of northeastern Iraq not under Iraqi government control, in the event Afghanistan was lost as a sanctuary. The area subsequently became a hub for al-Qa'ida operations. We believed that up to two hundred al-Qa'ida fighters began to relocate there in camps after the Afghan campaign began in the fall of 2001. The camps enhanced Zarqawi's reach beyond the Middle East. One of the camps run by AI, known as Kurmal, engaged in production and training in the use of low-level poisons such as cyanide....

"Our efforts to track activities emanating from Kurmal resulted in the arrest of nearly one hundred Zarqawi operatives in Western Europe planning to use poisons in operations. What was even more worrisome was that by the spring and summer of 2002, more than a dozen al-Qa'ida-affiliated extremists converged on Baghdad, with apparently no harassment on the part of the Iraqi government. They had found a comfortable and secure environment in which they moved people and supplies to support Zarqawi's operations in northeastern Iraq...Do we know just how aware Iraqi authorities were of these terrorists' presence either in Baghdad or northeastern Iraq? No, but from an intelligence point of view it would have been difficult to conclude that the Iraqi intelligence service was not aware of their activities."

Ummm - there's something rather different in calling for more troops in 2003 and calling for more troops in 2007. Given the vast changes that have occurred between now and then it's entirely possible that the proper strategy at time 1 is not necessarily the proper strategy at time 2. Plus of course at this point one wonders more troops from where, since Adm. Mullen has said we'll have to draw down troops next Spring regardless of what else is going on, b/c we've run out.

Chucky?

And yes, those 3.5 years Tenet worked for Bush (and the heaps of praise Bush bestowed upon him)mean nothing. He's obviously a Clinton man through and through - even as he was working for Bush and implementing Bush orders.