Bloodless Coup

About 3,000 bad guys dead this year. But military success, as a reporter said, takes the urgency out of covering these stories. We'll have to see if the Taliban didn't learn a few tricks from the Hezbozos in Lebanon when it comes to reporting false civilian casualties. This is especially curious what with Afghan soldiers being part of the protected force. I can see foreign correspondents asking us to believe that racist white soldiers thought nothing of killing Afghan children, what with that being the Democrat meme from last night about how we target then dehumanize our enemies. But do they ask us to believe Afghans would do that to themselves? And considering the obvious US Presidential political overtones of airstrikes killing civilians, this timing would be pretty convenient for a certain somebody our enemies support. Just saying.

Errr, our bombings kill a lot of civilians in Afghanistan on a regular basis Morris. That we do that is not contested by anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to the fighting there. That this is "news" is simply b/c this particular death toll is so high.

And from the latest AP story on this, the death toll is up: "The United Nations said Tuesday it has found 'convincing evidence' that U.S. coalition troops and Afghan forces killed some 90 civilians, including 60 children, in airstrikes in western Afghanistan."

You look at this headline and see something real. I ask how suddenly ten more children were killed after the raid was over. What, were they unpopular kids who nobody noticed were missing for several hours after the raid? The 90 figure likely comes in because the first figure assumes all the adult men were combatants and the second figure assumes that all the adult men were civilians.

Our enemies in Iraq today tied thirty pounds of explosives to a teenager outside a school, but you don't think they're capable of hiding among women and children?

That's Morris for ya - pulls shit out of his ass with no actual evidence for it (4:15), and then makes random comments attacking you for something you never said (4:17), the relevance of which ... well, I have no idea why they are relevant.

Y'know, Morris, if a massive, technologically superior imperialist army overran my country and knocked the whole social order upside down for no good reason other than because its leader was insecure about his dick size, leaving my beloved land in violent chaos, I like to think I'd have the courage to improvise an insurgency, and you can bet your sheltered little ass I'd get pretty fucking vicious about it.

Right, Jacflash, because imperialist armies historically have insisted that the people they conquer aren't turned into slaves, that the earth isn't salted, and that they get to elect their own sovreign government. If you're looking for the imperialists, look at the Taliban, unless you're a woman and you're not wearing a burka (in which case you die).

Where is the Taliban's empire?

Where is the Taliban's empire? How was the British Army not imperialist until WWII? Do you know what "imperialist" means?

Jacflash, I assumed you were going in the vein of "imperialist" connotations (like treating people as slaves, as the Taliban does to women) because for our liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq to be imperialist denotatively, we would have to make them our provinces or territories. We didn't, we supported their democratic elections of sovreign governments, ergo we're not imperialists. Do you know what "imperialist" means?

Another classic example in Morris going "look over there, not at what I actually said". Ummm, if you are using that definition of imperialist Morris, I think we'd still be fascinated to learn the history of the Taliban empire.

I'll also be fascinated to hear about the "sovereign" governments of Iraq and Afghanistan as in a number of ways they are anything but.

Of course that's not what this thread was originally about, but ...

I can't speak more slowly on the internet, so maybe read what I say more slowly. I assumed given Jacflash's historically uninformed perspective on so call American "imperialism" that he was speaking in the connotative sense, that is imperialists as mean and nasty tyrants who treat people like slaves. I assumed this because if we were imperialist in the true meaning of the word, Iraq and Aghanistan would be American provinces or territories at this moment, that's how empires expand.

So there is no way given the true meaning of the word that he could have been speaking about actual imperialism, and I accordingly assumed that he was speaking in the liberal meme that American imperialism is to actual imperialism as President Bush is to actual Hitler, that is faux, or FauxBama, chickens coming home to roost sort of thing. Given his impossible actual expectation to be speaking of real imperialism, I responded to his possible expectation of faux imperialism, as in rulers treating people like slaves with the use of force.

As such, I responded that the Taliban is the real threat to actual democracy, to actual representation for women, because America isn't hunting down women for going to school or not wearing a burka, as the Taliban is, and as such acting like imperialists inasmuch as they're treating women like slaves with the use of force.

There could certainly be a case made that the Taliban is partnered with others in the Middle East who oppose our interference with the establishment of an extremist islamist caliphate, that they are would-be imperialists in that sense, but to make that assumption would require you to consider the possibility that the Iranian leader actually means what he says instead of the assumption typically made by liberals that he is playing to his Guardian Council puppetmasters, and he will only actually mean what he says when he sits down with Obama to sign a non-aggression pact.

Tell me more tell me more. I'll be fascinated to hear who these "others in the Middle East" are who want to establish an "extremist Islamist caliphate. But I'm even more agog over you teaching me about how the president of Iran is a puppet of the Guardian Council. Who knew! Not anyone who studies Iran. So I do tell about your sources in Iran.

And to get less snarky - I think this is going in circles b/c you are defining "imperialist" in a way that equates only with setting up a Victorian-era empire, and while "empire" might have an agreed upon definition, that's less true of "imperialist". So I really don't see this discussion going anywhere useful.

Also, characterizing the other side as genocidal is really not the style of the mainstream left. There are far more people on the right calling leftists traitors than vice-versa, and to my knowledge no one off the fringes (or outside the Troll vs. Troll maunderings of the internet's all-too-numerous cul de sacs) calling anyone on the right or left Hitlerian. Of course, calling honorable government officials with good faith policy disputes traitors, or implying same, is, in my view, itself traitorous, insofar as it's like burning the flag one just wiped one's ass with, given all that it's supposed to stand for -- principled disagreement, freedom of thought and conscience, open political dialogue where the best ideas will out following an honest conversation, but you didn't say anything about that, or anything else that resembled the real world -- maybe I should read slower? -- so I won't go on.

Catch the news this weekend? Afghan army now reports our troops were fired on first.

Ummm, okay if you say so - but that hardly negates the negative effects within Afghanistan that are likely to result from killing dozens and dozens of children.

"Ummm, okay if you say so - but that hardly negates the negative effects within Afghanistan that are likely to result from killing dozens and dozens of children."

Whoever said it did? What liberals typically miss is the distinction, that when people are trying to kill you, you get to fight back in order that you may survive. It doesn't matter who's payroll they're on, or what kind of foster parents they had, or whether they got to watch Barney growing up. If someone's trying to kill you, that makes it a win loss scenario by their forcing your hand, unless you're Barrack Obama who doesn't want our troops to go after Bin Laden if they have to kill him. By his logic, our soldiers shouldn't kill anyone and risk creating martyrs, no matter if they kill thousands of Americans.

Well, in the first place you have Obama's position on going after Bin Laden wrong. He's taken a much harder line on that than the Republicans for years. He's worried about civilian casualties, arguably more worried than the Republicans, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't, um, pull the trigger. Consider the brouhaha over his comments regarding Pakistan - he'd actually risk our relations with the country to get Bin Laden. McCain? Not so much.

As to your "whoever said that it did?" observation - Mo all this post was ever about was that we are killing lots of civilians in Afghanistan. This creates problems for our us achieving interests - and of course for the people of Afghanistan. So, I guess you agree with the post.

"Well, in the first place you have Obama's position on going after Bin Laden wrong. He's taken a much harder line on that than the Republicans for years."

Not according to these excerpts from the Chicago Sun Times:
"First of all, I think there is an executive order out on Osama bin Laden's head," the Illinois senator said at a news conference. "And if I'm president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive."

Obama's campaign said he was referring to a classified Memorandum of Notification that President Clinton approved in 1998 -- revealed in the 9/11 Commission report -- that would allow the CIA to kill bin Laden if capture weren't feasible.

"What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he's engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism," Obama said.

To sum it up, Obama objects to the executive order that would allow the CIA to kill Bin Laden if he can't be captured. The only way he can object to that policy is if he thinks that given the opportunity to stop Bin Laden by killing him if there is no opportunity for capture (because that's what the executive order allows for) we should wait until we can capture him, so we can hold him accountable in a court of law.

He's saying we let Bin Laden get away if we can't take him alive. I say a cruise missile or a sniper's bullet would stop Bin Laden, and stopping him from killing more people is more important than parading him on the world stage. But unlike Obama's people generally, I don't think we should let jailed criminals just go home.

And, as you sometimes do, you are reading into this. He doesn't say what you are saying he says.

What are you trying to say?

I'm with Armand, re your attempt to turn Obama's statement into something it isn't. To emphasize that capturing would be better than killing is not to say that killing is off the table. Moreover -- in a point you inartfully ignore -- Obama has made clear that toadying up to whatever terrorist-tolerating Janus-faced guy is ruling Pakistan at a given moment is not on the agenda if Obama is located and the Pakistanis won't act like, you know, our allies in ensuring his apprehension. That policy, unlike what we've seen for the past eight years, is one that is focused on stopping bin Laden. The Bush admin and its apologists lost all credibility on the search for bin Laden years ago, and Bush's subsequent statements to the effect that bin Laden isn't really the focus merely underscore the point.

Finally, it's typically short-sighted of you to say Obama bad, killing him good, on the premise that it will save American lives. In fact, it is not only plausible but likely that martyring bin Laden in a really unnecessary way (as distinct from, say, killing him in self-defense or in a situation where the alternative is to let him escape (again, ahem)) will, in the long term, result in more danger to Americans. When martyring him breeds a half-dozen serious imitators, each of whom can operate freely as such in the absence of bin Laden's rather long shadow, and each of them pursues the same agenda in different ways, more Americans will be harmed. We've seen this in Iraq, where AQ in Iraq, a group that banded together from dust in direct response to our off-point invasion, is killing more Americans than the dust from which they arose ever did.

But of course, there's not a national security policy of interest to the GOP that isn't calibrated to maximize electoral gains in the next cycle, and isn't hopelessly myopic in every other regard, so I suppose I'm not surprised that your account of American interests involves who might be killed today to the exclusion of the far greater number of Americans who might be killed tomorrow. And next decade. And so on.

I'm saying that your interpretation of this - "He's saying we let Bin Laden get away if we can't take him alive" - is wrong. He didn't say that. He's saying he doesn't want to make him a martyr - that doesn't preclude killing him.

Look between the lines, here. Obama opposes this executive order, the one that allows Bin Laden to be killed if he can't be captured. With me, so far? He's not opposed to an executive order that says kill Bin Laden on sight, but one that says if we see him and can't take him alive, then kill Bin Laden, that's the executive order his staffers (always plausible deniability) say he's talking about. So how am I misreading this when I assume he would rather let Bin Laden get away than kill him, if we can't take him alive? Obama's not talking about whether to give him the death penalty after we read him his rights and try him, again, according to his staffers.

Well, in the first place, where do you see that he's opposed to that order? That's not in what you posted.