Hawk vs. Hawk

[bemildred]

Speaking of "Cheapened Debate":

The debate on how to proceed in Iraq is not between the hawks and the doves: it's within the hawk community, and it's between the gradualists and the
confrontationalists.

The gradualists argue that it would be crazy to rush into terrorist-controlled cities and try to clean them out with massive force because the initial attack would be so
bloody there'd be a debilitating political backlash.

The terrorists would fight as long as there were heart-wrenching scenes of dead children on satellite TV, then would melt away to fight another day. And if the U.S.
did take control of, say, a newly destroyed Falluja, we would find that we didn't have enough troops to control the city and still hunt down terrorists elsewhere. We'd
end up abandoning the city (as we have other places), and the terrorists would just take control again. We'd be back where we started.

There is a reason, the gradualists point out, that counterinsurgency wars have tended to take a decade or more. They can be won only with slow, steady pressure. The
better course, they continue, is to allow some time to train and build up Iraq's own security forces, and allow some time for the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, to
build up a base of anti-insurgent political support. The lesson of Vietnam is that you can't win these wars via military means. You have to build a political structure
that organizes public support and mix it with military might.

NYT

This loon thinks:
1.) Iraq is a counter-insurgency war, not a colonial war.
2.) Counter-insurgency wars of a decade or more are a good thing.
3.) We "won" in Najaf.

The debate is reduced to whether to bomb the shit out of things now,
or to overlook a decade or so of grinding violence. No attention is
paid to the fact that Allawi has no political legitimacy at all in
Iraq or anywhere else, or to many other inconvenient facts.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. There's a nice bit of hypocrisy from Brooks too

he spends the whole article pontificating on what the Bush admin should do in Iraq; and then says "These people in the interim government are scorned as stooges and U.S. puppets".

Yeah, Brooks, you've just scorned them too.

[teryang]

2. When insanity equals leadership

...get ready to lose. "Bring it on." "The willingness of American people...to suffer casualties" Cha ching, cha ching. Sounds like money to me.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=1&u=/ap/20040908/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_040908000729

<Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited progress on multiple fronts in the Bush administration's global war on terrorism and said U.S. enemies should not underestimate the willingness of the American people and its coalition allies to suffer casualties in Iraq and elsewhere.>

[paulk]

3. it's a classic Republican argument

it almost sounds plausible until you realize the entire construction is based on a falsehood.