October 8, 2014

Jimmy Carter is criticizing Obama.

"[W]e waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria... Then when [ISIL] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”
"I noticed that two of his secretaries of defense, after they got out of office, were very critical of the lack of positive action on the part of the president."

88 comments:

Paul said...

Jimmy who?

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Or, we could have just let them fight it out amongst themselves.

Jim said...

I get the feeling that Leon Paneta's book may be battlespace prep for HRC 2016. Of course, this is based on not reading the book and seeing him for about 5 minutes with Andrea Mitchell.

RecChief said...

If Jimmy Carter is criticizing your decision making abilities on military actions, you are in deep shit.

Brando said...

Maybe the Nobel Prizewinner who let the Ayatollah come to power could trade war stories with the Nobel Prizewinner who's starting an unwinnable war in the Middle East.

Ghandi would have nothing to add to that conversation, as he never was awarded the Nobel Prize.

pm317 said...

Good.. people like Panetta and Carter are speaking up. Ralph Peters on Hannity was making the most sense last night (I never paid attention to him before). His point (as is mine) are that we should take the Saudis, Turks, Qataris and other such Muslim countries to task -- the leadership of those countries and not necessarily the people on the street. So going after Islam as a religion is futile but go after these state actors who are funding the evil bastards everywhere. These ME states have money but no real clout and their weapon against the west is ISIS, AQ, and others. Death by thousand cuts is what seems to be their goal and a kind of blackmail on the western countries.

MayBee said...

Obama was praised for this behavior with the tag "No Drama Obama". Prior to this point, he has rarely offered solutions and when instead listed both sides of an issue as he saw them, he was labeled a pragmatist.

So what is he supposed to do now? Become someone he has never been? That's pretty tough for a 52 year old man. Especially since the consequences for him in *not* making decisions are almost non-existent. So people criticize him? So what. Valerie will just tell him they are haters.

rhhardin said...

Richard Epstein says Obama has a 1-ply mind. He knows one sentence about any topic and has no fallback or ability to process information.

Kirk Parker said...

When you've lost Jimmah....

pm317 said...

And the gaffe-prone VP was showing off just the other day about how much he knows what the Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis (he knows how to say that word) did in Syria of which ISIS is reaping the benefits .. he may also know a thing or two about what Obama and co did in Benghazi. The fool did not know he was spilling the beans. But all these ME states are supposed to be our allies after wrecking havoc. Why are they our allies and why is he apologizing to them?

Anonymous said...

Let me know when the Clintons show up to triangulate.

Kelly said...

When I listen to Jimmy Carter, I see Obama's future. He's going to be that one president who is a thorn in every future Presidents side for the next thirty years. Commenting on and criticizing them despite his own failed presidency.

pm317 said...

Carter is securing his 'second' worst president place.

Skipper said...

Under how many buses can one man be thrown?

Big Mike said...

Obama dithers. So did Carter. It's pretty well established that one of the problems with Operation Eagle Claw was that it was repeatedly delayed, consequently it was attempted during the Iranian sandstorm season.

Much as I disagree with Obama's actions w.r.t. Iraq, I think Jimmy Carter would do well to emulated both ex-Presidents named George Bush.

jacksonjay said...

Jimmy Carter? Bwhahahahahhaha!

To be fair to Swaggy, Clapper waited too long.

Mid-Life Lawyer said...

Is it possible that prominent political people from the same side of the aisle are only just now finding it safe to state what has been obvious to most reasonable people for years?

Or is every public statement made simply an attempt to sell a book or promote a potential or real candidate?

Personally, I think there is more of the first than of the second. I think that many of the politically elite are truly alarmed about the direction our country is heading and stating the truth in an effort to sound an alarm.

George M. Spencer said...

It is almost as if Obama wants to lose, wants to create wreckage...on every front—ISIS, ebola, healthcare.

chuck said...

..he was labeled a pragmatist.

IIRC, it was a sign of genius. Academic genius, that is, which differs from ordinary genius in that it never reaches a conclusion and fails at all endeavors.

Todd said...

Jimmy Carter is criticizing Obama.

HAHAHAHAHAHHHAaaaaaaaa.

OK, that one almost cost me a keyboard!

Todd said...

We should get Carter and Obama on a show together to debate foreign policy!

Now THAT would be a show!

traditionalguy said...

What a surprise to his worshipers Obama suddenly seems to be.

But all that has changed is that the true nature of the Muslims Obama truly loves and protects is being asserted by some Caliphate Muslims who are now out and proud as they boldly practice the rape and slaughter of infidels.

furious_a said...

Mr. Carter clearly had his.faults, but he was capable of learning while in office (deregulation, confronting the Soviets).

Pres. Obama manifestly lacks that capability -- after all, he's.better at policy than his policy people and a better speechwriter than his speechwriters.

lgv said...

He must be a racist.

I mean, Carter was tough. He boycotted the Olympics, which really gave the Soviets pause.

Let face it, JC would have exactly as BO has done. So now he goes all Panetta on BO. I think Jimmy should just shut up and keep building houses.

Fernandinande said...

I Don't Want a Bunny Wunny
Words and Music by Tom Paxton

President Carter got into his boat;
Wasn't in a hurry, wanted to float.
Think about the country, think about sin.
Along swum a rabbit, and he tried to climb in.
(spoken) "And what did Jimmy say?"

-- [Chorus:]
-- "I don't want a bunny wunny in my little row boat,
-- In my little row boat in the pond.
-- For the bunny might be crazy and he'll bite me in the throat,
-- In my little row boat in the pond."

Look at him swimming, look at him fly,
Ears laid back and a gleam in his eye!
Hissing through his front teeth, swimming like a seal!
If you were the President, how would you feel?
You'd prob'ly say,
[Chorus]

President Carter saved the day;
Splashed with the paddle, rabbit swam away.
Jimmy was a hero, felt it in his bones,
Said in the words of John Paul Jones,
[Chorus]

furious_a said...

Blogger rhhardin said...
Richard Epstein says Obama has a 1-ply mind.


More like a steel-trap mind -- no new ideas get in.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Yeah, well, Desert One.

RecChief said...

It's interesting that the weaknesses of this president were pointed out by the loyal opposition. And were told they were stupid and racist. Now, when leftists criticize him for exactly the same failings, suddenly it's a revelation.

Is this all battlespace prep for Hillary!? It looks to me that reliable clintonista and other Democrats who just want to keep the presidency in Democrat Party hands are creating distance so that Hillary! won't have to run on a "third term for Obama's policies". It will be be interesting to see if it works.

kcom said...

Ghandi -> Gandhi

See, it's not that hard. Just say 'hi' to Mohandas and you'll get along much better.

Michael said...

ARM:
"Or, we could have just let them fight it out amongst themselves."

Who would "them" be? The Kurds?


Brando said...

"Ghandi -> Gandhi"

I always make that mistake...

Carter is a pretty obnoxious sort, certainly since he left office, but I'm not sure his presidency was as leftist as it gets credit for. Consider the following:

1) He didn't raise taxes.

2) He appointed Volcker, who would do the temporarily painful but necessary step of raising interest rates to fight inflation (unfortunately for Carter, during an election year).

3) He began a big de-regulation push, for industries including trucking and airlines.

4) He began the military buildups that Reagan continued.

Granted, Reagan would make his predecessor seem left wing by comparison, as that's when the bigger defense buildups and tax cuts and ending price controls would take place. But considering Carter had a Democratic Congress for his entire term, his record is remarkably less leftist than his two predecessors.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

After a quarter century of war in Iraq are the Kurds really better off than if we had never become involved at all?

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is not a sane foreign policy.

Joe said...

Carter has never met a dictator he didn't like. Still, he has a perverse point: Assad was keeping the fanatics in check. So was Gadaffi and a myriad of other Middle East dictators. (I am not endorsing them, just pointing out the political reality.)

So, now what? I haven't heard a clear, realistic strategy from anyone [that won't create another shit storm.]

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

ARM-

I think you should read about the genocidal campaign against the Kurds by the Hussein regime. Maybe 100,000 were killed in the late 80s. We don't know.

The Kurds are the only large group in Iraq that is unquestionably better off than they were before 1991. And they are the most pro-American and pro-Israel group in the Middle East.

Paul said...

Brando said...

"Maybe the Nobel Prizewinner who let the Ayatollah come to power could trade war stories with the Nobel Prizewinner who's starting an unwinnable war in the Middle East."

It's only unwinnable if you TRY not to win. But then Democrats are good at TRYING not to win wars. Notice Korea and Vietnam were started with Democrats as president.

And the latest Democrat president looked the other way and withdrew our army from Iraq and let the ISIS take over.

Paul said...

RecChief said...

"Is this all battlespace prep for Hillary!"

Yep. Panneda is trying to make himself and Hillary look like the wise ones.

But if they were so wise AND HONORABLE, they would have resigned in protest of Obama's policy. But they didn't, so why should we believe Panetta actually opposed Obama?

Where is the proof? Emails (or has that computer crashed to?)

Peter said...

"So, now what? I haven't heard a clear, realistic strategy from anyone [that won't create another shit storm.]"

Perhaps the CIA could trigger a 3/4-way war involving Iran, Iraq, ISIS and (what's left of) Syria?

Paul said...

I hear now Obama says "There’s a sense possibly that the world is spinning so fast and nobody is able to control it,"


Is this now Obama's 'Malaise' moment?

Jimmy Carter II? Or worse?

FleetUSA said...

The pot calling the kettle "black".

Oops

Achilles said...

AReasonableMan said...
"Or, we could have just let them fight it out amongst themselves."

We could. And the resulting genocide and mass rape is the result of that choice. What is going on in Iraq now is the fault of Obama and people like you who support him.

You of course blame it on those jerks in the US army who were just murdering and raping civilians anyway. And Buuussshhhh. All his fault for going in in the first place. As if bad things only happen because of us.

You are despicable.

Michael said...

ARM

So it is a good thing that the stupid little Kurdish city of Kobani will shortly fall. Not our problem, of course, albeit our puff chested president said he would defang ISIL the soon to be victors who will control this rather important strategic spot on the map. Because Bush. Because Cheney.

Right?

There is no thing or no people for whom you would raise a fist is there? Because blood for oil.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Achilles said...
What is going on in Iraq now is the fault of Obama and people like you who support him.


This is truly nonsense. Since you are so concerned about the Kurds you could have addressed my question: After a quarter century of war in Iraq are the Kurds really better off than if we had never become involved at all?

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

ARM-

Yes, the Kurds are better off. Ask them. Read about them.

Are Iraqi Sunnis better off? No. Shia? Maybe, maybe not. Kurds, unquestionably yes.

The Hussein government killed far more Kurds than ISIS, and the Kurds are far more able to defend themselves now.

RebeccaH said...

Jimmy Carter is probably thanking God every day that Barack Obama came along.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

John Lynch said...

Yes, the Kurds are better off.


What if we factor in the fact that the US has extended a civil war for 24 years resulting in the decimation of the country's infrastructure, economy and future earnings, not to mention the human cost not just in deaths but lost opportunities.

No one is arguing that Saddam was a great guy but 24 years of civil war is no walk in the park either.

And by arming the Kurds we are now effectively condoning the disintegration of Iraq, something all the proponents of the war initially said was the furthest thing from their minds.

Now, if the goal of US intervention was to decimate a mid-level country in the ME, then mission accomplished but to argue that the Kurds are beneficiaries of that mission is not as easy as you seem to think.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Saddam wasn't a bad guy to the Kurds- he tried to exterminate them as a people. The Iraqi state simply lacked the capacity to do it.

He gassed entire towns. There's no way around it, it was genocide, and you really need to look at the facts in this case.

I'm open to the idea that kicking over Iraq and enabling a huge civil war was a bad idea. But in the case of the Kurds, there's no question that they are better off as an independent nation free of the Husseins.

There was no war in Kurdistan from 2003 on. The war was in Mosul and the other parts of Iraq. It was a peaceful place until very recently, and that's connected to ISIS and what our President didn't do about it.

Read about Kurdistan. It's not Arab, and it's not the same as the rest of Iraq.

The Crack Emcee said...

Yawn.

So much of the criticism of Obama can be laid at the doorstep of "polling" - the right or wrong, good or bad, calculus doesn't exist - it's all stupid opinion.

People thought slavery was O.K. and blacks have always lived "fine" when asked.

That's what their opinions are worth.

Obama's killing fewer people than most and - based on the values WE PREACH as our heritage - he deserves a LOT of credit for that.

If it doesn't fit the "policeman of the world" mold - considering what assholes our cops are - that can only be a success.

I now invite the hypocrites to do your worst,...

mccullough said...

Jimmy Carter is a jerk and always has been. None of the other presidents can stand him.

Meade said...

According to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter is racist.

Anthony said...

I am sick of long serving Washington insiders like Panetta, GAtes and Powell writing tell all books after the leave office claiming they knew the president was not up to snuff but they said nothing., If it was as bad as they say, they had a duty to resign and actively oppose that president's reelection. Instead they sat their, got the salary and the perks and THEN the big book advance.

Our governing class is useless.

Brando said...

Whatever Obama's failings as a president, and there are many, Jimmy Carter should keep his whore mouth shut. It's unseemly for former presidents to go spouting off about their successors. He could learn a thing or two about class from how the two Bushes acted when they left office.

And his constant meddling in foreign policy by cozying with foreign dictators is getting close to illegal.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

John Lynch said...
he tried to exterminate them as a people. The Iraqi state simply lacked the capacity to do it.

He gassed entire towns. There's no way around it, it was genocide,


At the time the Kurds were a separatist movement that had been involved in a civil war with the central Iraq government for 25 years, which they ultimately lost in 1991. Civil wars are ugly but they get a lot uglier when foreign powers prolong the conflict by feeding arms and support to one side or the other. Imagine how much worse the US civil war would have been if the European powers decided to forestall an American century by arming the Confederates.


My problem is two-fold.

1. The ever-changing rationales for the war indicate a complete lack of strategy. Now were are doing it to protect an embryonic Kurd state.

2. US involvement seems to simply fuel the on-going conflicts. It is estimated that 30-50% of ISIS's armaments are of US manufacture.

Scott M said...

No one is arguing that Saddam was a great guy but 24 years of civil war is no walk in the park either.

Which civil war? Saddam came to power in 1979, if memory serves, and was there until Ol' Spiderhole was deposed in 2003. That's 24 years, but was there a civil war going on in Iraq the entire time Saddam was in power?

Meade said...

"My problem is two-fold. [...] It is estimated that 30-50% of ISIS's armaments are of US manufacture."

If it were estimated that 100% of ISIS's armaments are non-US manufacture, your problem would be reduced to 1 and 1/2-fold?

Jason said...

Crack: Obama's killing fewer people than most

Right. He's just standing aside and letting other people do all the killing. And ensuring that it's mostly noncombatants, women and children getting killed, and almost all from our friends in the region, as well.

You've got to be an idiot to try to count that to Obama's credit. People who stand by while watching the neighbor behed children in his front yard and rape the neighborhood girls do not get credit for refusing to jaywalk to put a stop to it.

The Crack Emcee said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Crack Emcee said...

The Crack Emcee said...
Jason,

"He's just standing aside and letting other people do all the killing. And ensuring that it's mostly noncombatants, women and children getting killed, and almost all from our friends in the region, as well."

When you care as much about blacks here - as you do everyone overseas - I'll consider you sincere.

Until then, shut-the-fuck-up.

"You've got to be an idiot to try to count that to Obama's credit."

Then I'm an idiot - because I don't use the white supremacist's formulation that non-Americans are more important than black Americans. Silly me.


"People who stand by while watching the neighbor behed children in his front yard and rape the neighborhood girls do not get credit for refusing to jaywalk to put a stop to it."

Um - you're describing whites for 400 years - here.

The fight against the terrorists has always begun at home.

Funny how few whites ever took it up,...

Nonapod said...

Jimmy Carter criticizing Obama on foreign policy is like Smallpox criticizing Ebola.

The Roller said...

Are not the Billary Clintons out there running for office? Is she and he not currently sitting on the caboose of the money train campaigning for cash? Massive piles of cash?

Isn't it clear, Jimmy Carter is on team Clinton?

Drago said...

CR

crack: "Obama's killing fewer people than most and - based on the values WE PREACH as our heritage - he deserves a LOT of credit for that."

LOL

The soft soft bigotry of low expectations.

Predictable.

Paul said...

"Then I'm an idiot - because I don't use the white supremacist's formulation that non-Americans are more important than black Americans. Silly me."

No crack, you are just a black supremacist/racist that sees blacks in America as more important than non-blacks around the world.

Like I’ve said before crack, wake up, get ahead in life, get some responsibility of having a family and your world view will change.

And you do that first by stop using crack and taking responsibility for your own actions.

dreams said...

Remember it was Jimmy who opened this can of worms.

Skeptical Voter said...

When Jimmuh can badmouth you, your reputation is lower than whale dung in the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Just how low can our Nobel Prize winning Lightworker go? Stay tuned--it'll get even lower.

The Crack Emcee said...

Paul,

"No crack, you are just a black supremacist/racist that sees blacks in America as more important than non-blacks around the world."

It's wild - blacks have called for "justice" for decades now - and all whites hear is "supremacy".

That they themselves have been white supremacists is ignored, as they project their image onto those who reject their ideas - because we reject their ideas. Like supremacy.

You poor ignorant boobs.

"Like I’ve said before crack, wake up, get ahead in life, get some responsibility of having a family and your world view will change."

Please - Jordan Davis was just killed by a white man for playing music. Why do you guys lie to yourselves so? Trying to do it to me, I understand - whites naturally lie to blacks - but to yourselves?

That's weird.

"And you do that first by stop using crack and taking responsibility for your own actions."

Taking responsibility in a racist white supremacist country - and that's advice from the white descendent of a slave nation. I'll tell you what - we've got 400 years of white meyhem to cover, starting with slavery. You go first:

Take some "responsibility'....

Clyde said...

Who knew that Jimmy Carter was such a damn racist?

Todd said...

Clyde said...
Who knew that Jimmy Carter was such a damn racist?
10/8/14, 3:30 PM


Well as a Democrat from Georgia, what were the odds?

Paco Wové said...

"Civil wars are ugly but they get a lot uglier when foreign powers prolong the conflict by feeding arms and support to one side or the other."

So you're saying the Kurds would have been much better off if they'd just allowed Saddam to kill them off quickly and cleanly, rather than endure that long, messy struggle for autonomy?

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Paco Wové said...
So you're saying the Kurds would have been much better off if they'd just allowed Saddam to kill them off quickly and cleanly, rather than endure that long, messy struggle for autonomy?


No I am not saying that but it is good that you acknowledge that the entire rationale for the Iraq war has now been turned on its head and we are now helping to destroy the country.


Douglas B. Levene said...

Jimmy Carter was the first modern American president to break the long tradition of former presidents staying out of politics and in particular not second-guessing their successors. I thought it was low rent when he criticized President Bush and I see no reason to change my views now.

Douglas B. Levene said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Douglas B. Levene said...

ARM - The only policy I can see that makes any sense vis-a-vis the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks and all the other bad actors in the ME is to back the Kurds (with money and weapons, lots of weapons) in creating an independent Kurdish state, carved out of Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

ARM-

What you're doing is having it both ways. You're pointing out that previous errors led to civil war in Iraq while simultaneously advocating a course of action that will make things worse. It's like you want to be proven right more than you care about the outcome. It's not even Monday-morning quarterbacking. It's getting together Saturday night and deciding to lose the next day because the coach screwed up last week.

It's possible to hold Bush responsible for a mistake while also holding Obama responsible for compounding it. If Obama can't fix Bush's errors, then why did we elect him? What's he good for?

If ISIS needs to be stopped, we should stop them. If they don't, then why does it matter what we did before?

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

John Lynch said...
If Obama can't fix Bush's errors, then why did we elect him? What's he good for?


This is an impossible standard. While your life may be relatively blameless, I have made mistakes that weren't 'fixable'. Not everything can be fixed.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

So, it's "No, We Can't?" That's the new line?

FDR had real problems. Lincoln had real problems. Reagan had less bad, but still significant, problems.

They were all elected to fix things. They did.

I guess Obama isn't up to it. Glad we cleared that up.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

John Lynch said...
What you're doing is having it both ways.


I honestly don't see this. I am criticizing Obama's policies now.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Douglas said...
back the Kurds (with money and weapons, lots of weapons) in creating an independent Kurdish state, carved out of Turkey, Syria and Iraq.


Turkey is a member of NATO and we have treaties committing us to protect its borders. How exactly would carving out a slice of Turkey for the Kurds fit in with this?

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

John Lynch said...
FDR had real problems. Lincoln had real problems. Reagan had less bad, but still significant, problems.


Reagan had less problems than most of his predecessors, the USSR was collapsing under its own weight by then.

Douglas B. Levene said...

ARM,
We can give lots of weapons to the Kurds in Iraq and let them figure it out. If the Turks can ignore their NATO obligations when we need them, we can turn a blind eye to whatever the Kurds decide to do vis-a-vis Turkey.

Paul said...

crack,

So those Black Panthers in Philadelphia with clubs keeping out whites and others from voting were, uh, only protesting injustice?

No crack, the problems with blacks in America have to do with getting on the free-be welfare that LBJ launched and then were trapped for generations.

You did know in the 1950s blacks had few illegitimate children, right? Now the majority of children by blacks are illegitimate. They are that way case welfare made it easy for the fathers to leave.

And once they left crack, the children and very little guidance. Hence so many ended up in crime, and thus jail. And that perpetuated more youths with no family.

Now I know the likes of Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, Crystal Wright, Clarence Thomas, etc.. are just 'Uncle Toms' to you, but they show the way, not the likes of Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, or Louis Farrakhan.

So sorry crack, I see you as going down the 'gimme gimme' hole. And it's just going to be the same cycle of poverty.

Get up and get going crack. Two of my friends are black computer programmers and they don't think much of the welfare crowd.

And yea, they know about racism but they just know the best way to get even... is to get ahead.

Paul said...

And crack,

Yea a few cops do screw up and kill innocent folk. And maybe a few actually hated the color of the individual.

And some blacks kill innocent whites and do it cause of their color.

But that does not mean racism is all over the place. If it was.. Obama would never have been elected (TWICE). Nor would there be black judges, black cops, black lawyers, black professors, black surgeons.

Like I said crack. Get off your posterior and get going in life. You are letting your perceived racism behind every rock smother you.

Drago said...

AReasonableMeltdown: "Reagan had less problems than most of his predecessors, the USSR was collapsing under its own weight by then."

LOL

What an utter moron you are ARMeltdown.

Go ahead and provide a few links to anyone of note who was saying that in 1980.

You can't. Because they weren't.

This is just the latest lefty lie to try and minimize the role that Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope (along with our Solidarity friends in Poland) played in collapsing the Soviet empire (much to the left's dismay).

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/20/everything_you_think_you_know_about_the_collapse_of_the_soviet_union_is_wrong

snip: "Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon."

ARMeltdown, just another leftist revisionist historian, and, if samples of his postings on this blog are any indication, barely clinging to sanity.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Drago is a troll, I think he meets all the criteria.

cubanbob said...

AReasonableMan said...
Paco Wové said...
So you're saying the Kurds would have been much better off if they'd just allowed Saddam to kill them off quickly and cleanly, rather than endure that long, messy struggle for autonomy?

No I am not saying that but it is good that you acknowledge that the entire rationale for the Iraq war has now been turned on its head and we are now helping to destroy the country.


10/8/14, 4:17 PM"

And now you are arguing that Iraq should be what? A shotgun marriage of peoples who hate each other? Thats what the European Colonial Foreign Offices created. Are you now a reborn colonialist?Didn't your guy Slow Joe say the best outcome in Iraq was it to be split into various ethnic sectors? So what are you saying, that we should have left in place a murderous Arab Nazi dictator who did possess and use WMD and did attack his neighbors? In spite of it all the Kurds are without a doubt far better off and one can argue so are the Shia. We didn't destroy a country. It never was a country. We tried to build a nation and in large part thanks to the left in this country we failed but we didn't destroy what didn't exist.

ken in tx said...

I was once driving between Atlanta and Mobile. I stopped for refreshment somewhere in lower Alabama (LA). It was a Mcdonald's. It was an obviously racist place because the people on one side of the counter were white and the people on the other side of the counter were black. Me and the guy in front of me were the only white people there.

He was angry and started yelling. He said, "I am not a racist, but every time I come here, you try to turn me into a racist, because you f' up my order, and I think you do it because I am white. I am sick and tired of it." He said many things after this. I ordered a diet Coke.

Achilles said...

AReasonableMan said:

"This is truly nonsense. Since you are so concerned about the Kurds you could have addressed my question: After a quarter century of war in Iraq are the Kurds really better off than if we had never become involved at all?"

Of course they were. We brought them some autonomy and relief from being gassed by Saddam. We know you are all about government sponsored genocide. We know you hate it when the US armed forces steps in to stop it.

You hate this country and the people who defend it. You impugn our motives at every opportunity. We made everyone in Iraq safer and gave them more freedom than they ever had. I am proud of that accomplishment. There were many brave Iraqis that rose to that challenge.

But they were not ready to be on their own yet. Obama abandoned them out of political expedience and pieces of shit like you blame us for the current situation. You needed Iraq to fall into chaos and genocide to make the world conform to your world view so you caused it.

You are disgusting.

Achilles said...

AReasonableMan said...
John Lynch said...
If Obama can't fix Bush's errors, then why did we elect him? What's he good for?

"This is an impossible standard. While your life may be relatively blameless, I have made mistakes that weren't 'fixable'. Not everything can be fixed."

It is true not everything can be fixed. Sometimes things are difficult and there is good and bad that results from every choice. But if you believe in freedom and are willing to not just insist on yours but defend others freedom as well at least you can look at yourself in the mirror and say you tried.

Or you can tear down those that do try and create a warped reality where you claim moral superiority over those that protect you and your freedom. It must be so easy to just sit at a computer and bitch about the world and how the US screws everything up and feel awesome about yourself.

tim in vermont said...

Let me make this clear, I despise Obama as POTUS, but I won't dignify any criticism from Jimmy, the ravager of Afghanistan and Iran by even clicking on it.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Achilles said...
You hate this country and the people who defend it. You impugn our motives at every opportunity.


You are fighting a straw man of your own imagining here. I supported the war in Afghanistan. I am not reflexively anti-military. But, like every government program, it should be subject to some form of cost-benefit analysis. We have spent trillions in Iraq to date, it is hard to define the benefits, for anyone.