An Intelligent Comment?

Fresh Meat…

As I’ve written many times before, I rarely get comments disagreeing with my writing. All I ever get is either polite comments agreeing with my position or the occasional illogical rantings of some “barking moonbat” featuring insults and name-calling.

You can imagine my surprise tonight when I opened my E-mail and found this fairly lucid comment to my earlier posting called “Winning The War”:

“General Casey of the United States armed forces submitted a timetabled plan for withdrawal to the Pentagon the day before Murtha spoke. You can bet DOD didn't ask them for it.

Murtha is generally and correctly percieved to be a direct dial-up to what the JCOF brass are thinking.

The army itself thinks this war is pointless bleeding. Generals aren't making speeches about it, because they have a job to do, but General Shinsheki tried to tell Rumsfield that we would need 400K troops to do this job and got shitcanned for it. That's because we don't have 400K available troops, regardless of what our active duty stats say. In other words, the message was that this war can't be done, at least not without really shaking up the homeland. Which Bush, from your POV, wimped out on, but again, realism is that he never had a political hope in hell of instituting a draft.

It should also be mentioned that The American people did not write their constitution over 11 years under the saturation presence of troops from a foriegn country. The US hasn't fought a war of that timetable ever in its political life. That may have something to do with its ability to survive as a first-rate power, unlike, say, Imperial Spain or colonial France. Long wars suck countries dry.

Iraq's regional environment and political history dooms it to be a violent, chaotic, repressive regime for the near future. Whatever marginal changes we can make to that dynamic have already been made. We're dying with no victory in sight, and it's not because politicians are holding gloves on the soldiers. This is a fantasy you use to express your hatred and disdain, no more, no less. The US is using exactly as much force as can be used while trying to establish a liberal, stable democratic government. You can't build a western democracy while acting like the Khmer Rouge.

If you were capable of disinterested thought on the real nature of these situations, you'd be able to put forth a civil response to these statements of fact. But I don't think you're up to it, so I expect you'll respond with a wild-eyed bundle of insults.

Do your country a service, and stop letting dumb-ass machismo and thinly veiled bloodlust compensate for some real awareness of America's abilities and limitations.”

I’d say that this is a fairly well written comment. Thank you for so eloquently expressing your opinion, Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms. commenter

I also must say that this reader has obviously not been reading my blog for very long or they would know that I do not rely on “wild-eyed bundle(s) of insults” to answer my critics—that is the method employed by most liberals and nearly all Democrats.

I believe that this commenter deserves a thoughtful, genuine answer based on something liberals either don’t know or absolutely hate—FACTS. Further, I’m going to answer publicly, on a point by point basis.

Here goes…

“General Casey of the United States armed forces submitted a timetabled plan for withdrawal to the Pentagon the day before Murtha spoke. You can bet DOD didn't ask them for it.

Murtha is generally and correctly percieved to be a direct dial-up to what the JCOF brass are thinking.”

So my reader opens their argument with a statement based on recent news reports that General George Casey had submitted a written plan for troop withdrawal from Iraq. Further, they (my reader) somehow believe that General Casey is sitting around writing such proposals on his own, in his spare time, without instructions from the Department of Defense or the President.

I beg to differ, but I can’t find anything on Google indicating what the exact timeline for Casey’s report was. I would say that it was reasonable to assume that the timing could be coincidental to Murtha’s comments, but it might not be. I think that the Pentagon probably asked him for his opinion, since being a Army General generally means you know a thing or two about troop deployments. Based on a lack of information, I guess that I wouldn’t be willing to bet that the DOD did or didn’t ask for the report, however.

I will also concede my readers point that Murtha, as the senior Democratic member of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, might know a thing or two about what the Joint Chiefs of Staff (that’s JCOS, not JCOF, by the way…) might be thinking. Also, Murtha didn’t specifically say that he was basing his demand for an immediate troop withdrawal on any secret knowledge attributed to his position on the subcommittee.

In fact, I heard today that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic leadership planned to have Murtha come out on his own, all by his lonesome, on this topic. Then they would either jump on the bandwagon if the concept took off else distance themselves and yell and scream about critics "questioning a good ex-Marine's patriotism."

Next my reader tells me that the Army thinks that the war is “unnecessary bleeding.” Is my commenter actually in the army in a leadership position? I haven’t heard that slant on things and would appreciate receiving a link to the story if anyone has one.

"The army itself thinks this war is pointless bleeding. Generals aren't making speeches about it, because they have a job to do, but General Shinsheki tried to tell Rumsfield that we would need 400K troops to do this job and got shitcanned for it. That's because we don't have 400K available troops, regardless of what our active duty stats say. In other words, the message was that this war can't be done, at least not without really shaking up the homeland. Which Bush, from your POV, wimped out on, but again, realism is that he never had a political hope in hell of instituting a draft."

If my reader had actually read something besides the Clinton News Network (CNN) or the liberal blogs, they might have found this recent press release from the Department of Defense addressing the recent troop strength issue:

Q: When are US forces pulling out of Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Well, they are going to be drawing down over time as conditions permit and military commanders and the Embassy in Baghdad are working with the Iraqi government to determine what those conditions are and in what case that would be appropriate.

In the meantime, we have put more forces in for the referendum in October and the election coming in December so we are up from 138,000 to 160,000 and we’ll be going down from 160,000 back to 138,000 after the December 15 elections. But reductions beyond that are things the President will decide based on the recommendations from the battlefield commanders.

My guess is we’ll continue to find that the conditions will permit reductions as Iraqi Security Forces continue to grow.

Q: What’s your take on the [inaudible] that military officers requested more troops and been turned down?

Rumsfeld: In fact, no military officer has been turned down needing additional troops at the senior levels. I don’t doubt for a minute that if you have a captain or a major or a lieutenant colonel somewhere in that country that at some moment they need more forces to do this or do that and they ask for them and the senior commanders decide how they want to allocate forces they have and they move the 160,000 forces around depending on the conditions on the ground. So it’s perfectly plausible that colonels have asked from time to time for forces and have gotten them or not gotten them depending on General Casey or General Vines’ decisions. Any implication that there has been a request for additional forces by General Casey or General Abizaid that has been turned down is just flat not true.

Q: Isn’t Iraq in the middle of a civil war and isn’t the US presence exacerbating that by being there?

Rumsfeld: Well, no. Iraq is not in the middle of a civil war at the present time. There are obvious tensions in the various regions between the Sunnis, the Shia, the Kurds and there have been hostilities between them from time to time. But basically you have got insurgents and terrorists that are trying to start a civil war. They are going out and killing people and suicide bombers are blowing up people inside of mosques and trying to [inaudible] but fortunately, it hasn’t happened. The leadership has been measured and balanced and calm and that’s been a big help. People are behaving reasonably well -- the leadership [inaudible].

Then there is the matter of General Shinseki’s pre-war troop strength estimates, addressed in this February 2003 NY Times article.

Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.

How my reader/commenter got to 400,000 troops from “several hundred thousand” troops is a matter of contemplation but, in the interest of brevity, not worthy of detailed discussion here.

I appreciate them pointing out, incorrectly, that we don’t have 400,000 troops to deploy in Iraq without “compromising homeland security.” Last time I checked, troops “deployed” here in the United States are either training for overseas deployment or waiting for deployment. Of course I guess that the liberals would rather leave the troops here at home resting on their laurels, waiting for the terrorists to come driving down main street in Muscatine, Iowa with an explosives laden minivan, but then again--I'm not a liberal so I can only guess what their logic is.

Fortunately, for all of us civilians, President Bush has chosen to take the war on terrorism out of the US, off of our soil, and put it in the homeland of the terrorists. Regarding troop numbers, I’ll add that president CLINTON, in his infinite military hating ignorance, oversaw the reduction of our military forces from over 1,800,000 active duty troops down to around 1,300,000 troops, a reduction in force of ONE HALF MILLON HELMETS AND PAIRS OF BOOTS.

Further, we have about 70,000 troops stationed in Germany—a left over artifact of the cold war with Russia. It would really piss the Germans off losing the US dollars spent by the troops in the local economy, but don’t you think that we could pull one half to two thirds of this crowd out of Europe, into Iraq, if we really wanted to?

And regarding the hated “DRAFT,” Republicans and President Bush have never once publicly mentioned the draft as a solution to the troop strength situation. It was the DEMOCRATS, John sKerry, and the mainstream media that brought up the draft just before the last presidential election as a desperate last minute scare tactic.

Fortunately, it didn’t work.

Moving along…

"It should also be mentioned that The American people did not write their constitution over 11 years under the saturation presence of troops from a foriegn country. The US hasn't fought a war of that timetable ever in its political life. That may have something to do with its ability to survive as a first-rate power, unlike, say, Imperial Spain or colonial France. Long wars suck countries dry. "

Oh boy, can I ever have a good time with this paragraph.

Yes, the US didn’t write our constitution “over 11 years under the saturation presence of troops from a (sic) foreign country…” In fact, if you want to get real technical, we actually took thirteen years from the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774 until the constitution was ratified in 1787, and of that time—we were fighting the Revolutionary War for EIGHT of those years.

We fought the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, we beat Cornwallis at Yorktown October 19, 1781, and Congress declared an end to hostilities April 11, 1783.

History is a bitch, ain’t it, Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms. Reader? The internet makes EVERYONE an expert, IF you just take the time to check your facts rather than relying on your memory and the crap you learned in government (public) schools, you know?

If you are going to argue with me, please do your homework in the future, mmmkayyyy?

Next my reader continues to state the obvious and then makes my point for me…

“Iraq's regional environment and political history dooms it to be a violent, chaotic, repressive regime for the near future. Whatever marginal changes we can make to that dynamic have already been made. We're dying with no victory in sight, and it's not because politicians are holding gloves on the soldiers. This is a fantasy you use to express your hatred and disdain, no more, no less. The US is using exactly as much force as can be used while trying to establish a liberal, stable democratic government. You can't build a western democracy while acting like the Khmer Rouge.”

My “hatred and disdane”?

Of what?

The Iraqi people?

Freedom?

Liberals?

Democrats?

Or possibly the conditions of peace that could inevitably come as a result of some well placed military force. You know, open up an industrial strength can of “whoop ass” and apply it where needed?

And dear Reader, thank you for saying that “the US is using exactly as much force as can be used while trying to establish a liberal, stable democratic government…”

But who says that a democracy has to be “western”?

This one will obviously be “middle eastern.”

In closing, my gentle Reader resorts to the very acts which they challenge me to not engage in—INSULTS.

“If you were capable of disinterested thought on the real nature of these situations, you'd be able to put forth a civil response to these statements of fact. But I don't think you're up to it, so I expect you'll respond with a wild-eyed bundle of insults.”

Do your country a service, and stop letting dumb-ass machismo and thinly veiled bloodlust compensate for some real awareness of America's abilities and limitations.”

Isn’t inferring that I suffer from “dumb-ass machismo and thinly veiled bloodlust” that prevents me from having “some real awareness of America’s abilities and limitations” an insult in itself?

Well, that's OK.

I’m not insulted, I’m amused.

And finally, I have an admission....GASP...

I am, in fact, “(in)capable of disinterested thought,” Mr./Mrs./Miss./Ms. Reader.

If I think about and bother to actually write about something…I’m INTERESTED in the subject.

Imagine that???