You did kind of omit that little item of being the second president to be impeachedOriginally Posted by Abu Buckwheat
Brilliant, useful
Interesting, perhaps useful
Of little utility, not practical
Delusional
You did kind of omit that little item of being the second president to be impeached
Answers to the question of whether or not President Bush has lied can rest solely on the words of President Bush:
1) When asked before the 2006 elections whether or not he planned to keep Rumsfeld, he said he did. A day after the election, Rumsfeld was fired. (The right move, BTW).
2) Just before the 2006 election, when asked if the US was winning the war in Iraq, the President said, "Absolutely we're winning." Shorlty after the election, he said, "We're not winning. We're not losing."
Out of those two different positions on two different issues, we can all make arguments for which presidential answer is the right one, but they are clearly contradictory answers. Maybe you can even justify the lack of honesty. But justifying a lie does not make it less of a lie. I don't mean to harp that these examples mean that dishonesty is the crux of who President Bush is. Heck, every president has lied at some point. I only want to address the silliness of claiming that people believe Bush has lied because many people have claimed that he has lied. Rather, we can claim that President Bush has lied because he has lied.
Investigations into Iran-Contra found a LOT of subsantive stuff. Helping terrorists get weapons is a heck of a lot worse than messing around with interns.
Bottom line: to say that only President Clinton's investigations turned up substantive wrong-doing points to a speaker's partisanship and not to any understanding of history. Wrong-doing is not a Republican or Democratic problem, it is a political problem. William Jefferson and the Dukester help us understand the bipartisan reality of problematic politicians.
Last edited by jlechelt; 07-03-2007 at 05:02 AM.
Not really. Bill Clinton Lied Under Oath, which is a crime. A demonstrably criminal act. Something that umpteen politically-motivated investigations into this current White House has STILL failed to produce.
As much as I like Abu Buckwheat, he disregards the fact that since the 2000 election, the opposition has made the "smoke" he refers to. Continuously and in large amounts. And sometimes, smoke is just smoke. I bet anyone here can be made to look guilty of something, if they were accused of enough.
I find it odd that you insinuate partisanship in this post, especially since your previous post was so filled with venomous innuendo. So, in your eyes, does calling venomous innuendo what it is constitute partisanship?
Perhaps you should take a breath, read a little more, and not make assumptions as per the political motivations of a poster. There is a lamentable tendency, imo, to demonify Bush, when his failures and he's had some doozies can ALSO be attributed to incompetence, lack of communication, propaganda by political enemies, and even (gasp) the fact that he had very little time to set up his presidency because of the 2000 election fiasco.
Of course, there is also a lamentable tendency for those of the military and political persuasion to use Bush's unpopularity to excuse their own incompetence and/or malfeasance. Or to make their chops, a la Shinseki.
Iraq: Debate on the Baghdad Surge
3 July BBC - Iraq: Debate on the Baghdad Surge by Paul Reynolds.
A debate is raging in Washington about whether the so-called surge of US forces in Iraq is likely to work.
Tension is growing between the political pressure to get results and the military imperative to give the plan time.
The critics include not only Democrats but Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who said in a speech on 25 June that the prospects that the surge strategy would succeed in the way envisaged by President Bush were "very limited"...
On the other side are proponents like commentator Frederick W Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, one of those who first proposed the plan.
He has written in the Weekly Standard magazine that Operation Phantom Thunder, as the operational phase of the surge is known, "is so far proceeding very well"...
Informing the debate is a key article in the Small Wars Journal, a discussion forum founded by former members of the US Marine Corps.
On the site's weblog, the Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser in Iraq, David Kilcullen, an Australian expert, has written about how the plan is supposed to work. He withholds judgment on whether it is succeeding or will do so. On that, he simply observes: "Time will tell."
He points out that major operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces started only on 15 June. "This is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing," he said...
The meaning of "lie"
One of the things that has made the debate on the war so ridiculous is the misuse of the term lie.
For example a mistake is not a lie. If you believe something to be true, such as Saddam having WMD, and you can't find the WMD. that does not mean you lied when you repeated intelligence you were given by the CIA or the UN weapons inspectors.
Changing ones mind is also not a lie. A statement of present intentions is just that and if you change your mind, your original statement was still not a lie.
Perhaps it is because I have prosecuted fraud cases and other cases involving false statements, that these kind of arguments bother me so much. But, they really distract from the substance of the debate we should be having on policy.
BTW, Bill Clinton's intentionally false statements were not just about a personal matter. They were about an attempt to deny a plaintiff in a sexual harassment case a fair trial. Defendants in cases are not allowed to lie to avoid responsibility for their conduct. That is why the court held him in contempt.
Agreed. There is much misuse of the term lie. Also, mistakes and the changing of minds are not lies. However, the two points I made regarding President Bush were not examples of mistakes and mind-changing.
First, President Bush was already considering changing his Secretary of Defense when he stated clearly that he had no intention of changing his Secretary of Defense. Read the transcript of President Bush's post-election press conference: he even explained why he said he was going to keep him when he knew he wasn't going to.
Second, when he stated just before the election "absolutely we're winning," and then flip-flopped immediately after the election and stated that "we aren't winning, we aren't losing," there was no real-world event that hit the US war effort in such a way that would have magically brought about a changing of the presidential mind. The US situation in Iraq was the same when he made both statements.
Perhaps you can offer an explanation for why he lied. Maybe you think the lies were justifiable. Elections are important events, and I'm sure he felt the nation was better served with the GOP still in control of Congress. And so, towards those ends, he felt the lies were justifiable. But none of those factors make the lies he told anything other than lies; a reasonable person cannot claim that both examples were not lies.
I don't want to harp on these points. The lies were not the worst things that ever happened. And all reasonable people can agree that all presidents and political leaders have lied at some point. (Who among us would claim he or she never told a lie?) However, it amazes me that people have a tough time admitting this simple fact. So lets get back to the mind-changing experiences and mistakes at hand.
Indeed these arguments distract from the larger discussions of the mistakes made in this war. So admit to reality and let's move on.
Bill Clinton's intentionally false statements were indeed about a personal matter. That personal matter ALSO had to do with accusations of sexual harassment. Charges of sexual harassment, mind you, that were never proven. That doesn't justify lying under oath, but it's a far cry from the problems we now encounter in the world.
Last edited by jlechelt; 07-03-2007 at 06:44 PM.
Politicians lie. It's what they do. The level this is "exposed" has more to do with political affiliation than it does facts or at times the good of the nation. However, everyone here is expected to keep the discussion civil. That includes avoiding "my lying politician is better than your lying politician" polemics.
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt - Question for LTC Kilcullen
Dear Sir,
I'm currently writing on the Taliban, tentatively titled, "Cultural Intelligence: The Taliban, Pashtuns and Counter-Insurgency". Your answer, if possible, would aid my work. You wrote:
One of AQ’s standard techniques. . .is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. . .(Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me “we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa’ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it’s hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.”)
Why was there not, if you know, a similar reaction among Pashtuns, to non-Pashtuns, say, Chechens, Arabs, Uzbeks, marrying Pashtun women? Or if there were reactions, how were they resolved?
Thanks,
Shivan
Charlie Rose: An Hour with Dave Kilcullen
Video: Charlie Rose: An Hour with Dave Kilcullen - Friday's interview with Dave Kilcullen.
Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency
Road-Building in Afghanistan
Part 1 of a Series on Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency
By Dr. David Kilcullen at SWJ Blog
As a tactics instructor in the mid-1990s, teaching British platoon commanders at the School of Infantry, I spent many weeks on extended field exercises in the wilds of south Wales and on windswept Salisbury Plain. Both landscapes are studded with Roman military antiquities, relics of ancient counterinsurgency campaigns – mile-castles, military roads, legion encampments – as well as the Iron Age hill-forts of the Romans’ insurgent adversaries. Teaching ambushing, I often found that ambush sites I chose from a map, even on the remotest hillsides, would turn out (once I dragged my weary, rucksack-carrying ass to the actual spot) to have Roman or Celtic ruins on them, and often a Roman military road nearby: call me lacking in self-assurance, but I often found this a comforting vote of confidence in my tactical judgment from the collective wisdom of the ancestors.
Like the Romans, counterinsurgents through history have engaged in road-building as a tool for projecting military force, extending governance and the rule of law, enhancing political communication and bringing economic development, health and education to the population. Clearly, roads that are patrolled by friendly forces or secured by local allies also have the tactical benefit of channeling and restricting insurgent movement and compartmenting terrain across which guerrillas could otherwise move freely. But the political impact of road-building is even more striking than its tactical effect.
This is my first Small Wars Journal post for several months; since leaving Iraq last year I have been working mainly on Afghanistan, in the field and in various coalition capitals. This brief essay (brief by my risibly low standards, anyhow!) describes recent road-building efforts in Afghanistan. A follow-on piece will explore the broader notion of political maneuver in counterinsurgency, using road-building as one of several examples...
Excellent as expected
It really helps some of us when it broken down in laymans terms.
Keep up the good work Doc
Any man can destroy that which is around him, The rare man is he who can find beauty even in the darkest hours
Cogitationis poenam nemo patitur
Synergy in Action
There is an interesting synergy going on here. I worked with CJTF-76 planners quite a bit in 2006, and the bright young majors in the cell there were all enthusiastic readers of Kilcullen. Now he is going back and seeing (and learning from, one supposes) his own theories more or less brought to life. Luckily for us, he then turns this experience into more thoughtful prose. I still have reservations over the operational decisions made in Afghanistan - the resources spent in the Korengal valley would have been better allocated elsewhere - but at the tactical level we are making great progress.
Road lessons
Dave Kilcullen's post is a reminder of lessons learned long ago in the development world. Over 40 years ago, anthropologist Carlton Beals remarked that it had been his experience that one road was worth more than a dozen schools and 100 administrators. My doctoral research in the Peruvian Andes took a somewhat different perspective. I found that the key factor in development was leadership in the locality - whether it was from someone born there or an outsider such as a teacher assigned there who identified with the community. I did note that if the locality did not have a road, the first goal of the local leaders was to acquire one.
Hence, my experience supports fully Kilcullen's report. A road ain't just a road but rather a vehicle for achieving political goals and objectives.
Cheers
JohnT
In the March-April edition of Military Review there is an article on applied Systems Thinking by none other than the 82ND Airborne(some guy wrote it) about how linking stuff togather (roads!) is key to COIN Ops. Don't have time to find the link but it is a good one. It has drawings and diagrams that help explain the concept.
Killcullen Briefing
Found this today on Col. Pat Lang's site.
Well, since I was sitting about five feet from Dave when he gave that, it's a bit of a stretch to refer to the event as "trendy." (Apparently I'm sort of the Forrest Gump of the counterinsurgency world). The briefing is also on the Consortium for Complex Operations portal for those of you who use it.
(I sure wish I knew where I could find a good copper Chinese sink about now)
Last edited by SteveMetz; 05-22-2008 at 02:43 PM.
I get the sense that Col. Lang is critical of COIN "trendiness" from that and other posts, but he hasn't fleshed-out any detailed criticism yet - at least that I can find - so it's hard to say for sure.
Well, I'm a big fan of Dave's and thought the briefing was quite good.
Looking at my notebook, here are a few of the points I made during my commentary on it:
--If we accept the idea that counterinsurgency operations can actually speed or facilitate the evolution of insurgencies by "weeding out" the less adaptable ones, what can we do with that information? In other words, it is possible to design a counterinsurgency campaign that does NOT speed or facilitate insurgency evolution, perhaps by pulsing and rapidly shifting methods rather than sticking with one thing until it becomes ineffective?
--Is there some other way to inject a pathology into the insurgent adapation process?
--In Iraq today, are we so concentrated on operational success that we're setting ourselves up for strategic failure by empowering local security forces?
Great points
Steve,
Great point on mitigating the effects of co-evolution. This area should definitely be studied. Injecting the pathology may have to be based on managing their perceptions on how effective they are. It will be a challenge, but definitely worth pursuing.
As for empowering the local security forces, I tend to agree. On one hand the local security forces are essential (we can't succeed without them in my opinion), but on the other hand if they are mobilized, led and supported by the HN government, then they aren't security forces, they're something else that we will have to deal with later.
Bill
I have an example
Steve, in our AO (Jazeera area between Ramadi and Fallujah in 2005-06), I was tasked out to both our infantry battalion and as a combat augmentee to the MTT w/ IA 3-3. We had to face the unfortunate discovery of many hundreds of weapons (Glocks, mostly) intended for IA and IP personnel come up missing from a "secured" shipping crate.
This led to much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts, but I argued that there might be a plus to this, one that (without violating OPSEC) I saw was taking place.
One of the means insurgent cadres can keep order is by having a monopoly on weapons and the materiel necessary to wage war. While many consider AK-47s "fungible" in Iraq, this isn't exactly so. There are only so many to go around, and they cost money that unemployed MAMs find difficult to obtain.
When many hundreds of AKs and Glocks (hand guns) all of a sudden flooded the local market, many dozens of insurgents from Ramadi to TQ had a commodity that made them independent of the larger insurgent network. They could go it alone, and they could do so with weapons (hand guns) that have a unique cultural meaning (a symbol of authority in Baathist Iraq, they were typically used for executions or maimings, giving the men who possessed them a totemic quality the AK itself didn't confer).
As was famously said about The Velvet Underground, few bought their records but everyone who bought one started his own band. So too with the Glocks and the AKs that entered the market. They gave those who possessed them the ability to strike out on their own, with their own bands of recruited MAMs also dedicated to competing in the Darwinian world of illicit fuel sales, contraband smuggling, IED emplacement, etc, etc, etc.
As the network fractured, they were under less tight control by less intelligent and sophisticated SULs. In other words, a net gain for the good guys as the attrition carried itself out to natural conclusions.
C
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