Cynical Nation

Republicans conveniently "leak" or "declassify" whatever portions of any "secret" document suits their propaganda. This administration "classifies" anything that might be politcally damaging. The Republican controlled congress is holding up damaging reports right now, waiting until the election is over.

With an administration full of secrecy-abusing pathological liars, patriotic Americans step forward and leak the information; otherwise, we would know nothing of the criminal Bush gulags, spying, and other flagrant violations of presidential power as laid out by the Constitution.

It is indeed a terribly written document, Barry.

Embarrassingly so!

One of the central tenets of this report has long been discredited - the view that confronting an abuser or aggressor, invites more aggression, has been proven wrong in virtually every venue.

That viewpoint in this official document, makes the West's chances at ever forging some future peace with the resurgent forces of global Islam far more remote.

There had long been an accepted view among those who worked with victims of spousal abuse to "just get away," - leave the situation, but don't confront the abuser.

I always recommended confronting your abuser, with "confronting" meaning calling in the police and filing assault charges on the abuser.

Now it does turn out that my tact does exacerbate the problem in about 10% of the cases. I know a number of women who were actually stalked and killed for following exactly my advice...and I did feel bad about that.

Still, those are generally the cases in which the abuser feels that he has a "right" to control that other person, that he/she is "doing nothing wrong."

Yes, those people are indeed only further enragaged when an outside authority is called in to stop them from doing something they believe to be "the right thing."

It's also true that even with a court imposed "order of protection," the police act reactively, NOT proactively, so the victim is very often made even more vulnerable by such a confrontation.

That is the grounds on which some people, in the past, have opposed the "CONFRONT, just don't leave," strategy for dealing with abusers.

BUT, it's turned out that merely leaving (running away) enrages the abuser as well and often leads to the same stalking and violence that confrontation does.

So, now-a-days, the advice I gave years ago - "Call the police and have the abuser charged with assault and get an order of protection, etc" is the same advice that most groups that work with abused spouses give today!

Same with the current situation between Islam and the West. Radicalized Islam has been threatening and attacking the West for decades, but even recently France, Belgium, Germany, and much of the West has been loathe to call in the big cop (a/k/a America), but the attacks of 9/11/01 brought the authorities into that conflict.

Even here in the U.S. there are some people who still believe that, "confrontation only breeds more violence, by making the abuser even more mad."

Utter nonsense!

Confrontation is the ONLY way to respond to aggression and abuse...and it doesn't always lead to more violence. It can, but it doesn't in all cases.

It is almost a certainty that the West will ultimately have to come to terms with Islam. This current fight is really all about what those terms will be.

It is doubtful that we will destroy Islam as a belief system, nor even modify it all that much. We don't seem to have the will to destroy an "accepted religion."

Not only that, but Islam is growing as the rest of the world's faiths recede.

The Philippines has long been a predominantly Catholic country, but it now has a huge and growing Muslim population - Terry Nichols' (of the OK City bombing) wife was a Philippina Muslim.

In much of Europe, European couples are now having children at below replacement levels, while the Muslim invaders in Europe are having three to four times as many children. As a result, places like Italy, France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany could all be predominantly Muslim nations by the middle of THIS century!

America and the rest of the West will almost HAVE TO come to terms with Islam before then...and by "coming to terms" I mean reaching some sort of accord that both sides can live with.

At this point, what Islam (not radicalized Islam, but traditional Islam) wants, the West cannot capitulate to, BUT it's very unlikely that the West's modern Left-Liberalism will long survive any such an accord.

In my view, to be able to live peacefully with even a much more "moderated" Islam, the West will almost without question have to re-consider its "modesty is optional" view and turn to some sort of enforced modesty laws, along with the almost certain eradication of both our porn industry and strip clubs as those things are deeply offensive to Muslim beliefs, as well as reconsidering alcohol as our recreational "drug of choice," our limited use of Capital punishment (South Carolina has already introduced the first death penalty for child molesters legislation, with almost certainly more to follow) and support for "gay rights" and the "normalization" of other sexual deviancies (practices that deviate from the hetero norm) will almost certainly have to be abandoned.

In short, in such a world, all but the most extreme social Conservatives of the West would probably feel greatly restricted.

The exchange for these concessions would primarily be the eradication of the Muslim's Sharia Law practice of dhimmitude (second-class citizenship for all non-Muslims).

Ironically enough, the West may only be able to forge any sort of lasting "peace" with the rising tide of Islam by throwing contemporary Left-Liberalism under the proverbial bus. That is, we might only be able to avoid second-class citizenship for all, by imposing a sort of second-class citizenship on some (to wit - our own social Liberals).

At this moment, Islam is resurgent and the West is retracting. If Europe (Christendom) falls and becomes "Eurabia," it will be immediately incumbent upon America to forge such a compromise.

Better to save some of the American tradition than none at all.

Documents like this, that miss that looming reality are more than a mere embarrassment, they make America's path to ever reaching a workable peace with the growing, global Islamic movement much more difficult.

Since the FIRST THING you said was a lie, JMK, I stopped reading. It was not a "central tenet" of the report that "confronting an abuser or aggressor, invites more aggression" -- you just made that up, didn't you?

I think closer to the mark is that the report said "lying to American and invading and occupying a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or the War on Terrorism invited more 'aggression', as in, the hundreds of thousand of people Bush murdered looking to get even" ... better, don't you think?

Here's a much better, shorter piece:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/why-americas-first-major_b_30373.html

At least your consistent - apparently you misread reports like this, about as profoundly as you misread my posts, Barely.

Again, not your fault, your make-up is generally too emotional to deal with facts you find inconvenient.

The central tent, that the Democrats have focused on from this report is that "The Iraq war has increased the threat of terorism," or in a parlance you might understand better, "The war in Iraq has made terrorism worse."

Yes (1) that is one of the central tenets of that report and (2) it is a misguided one for the very reasons I enumerated above.

We are not at war with al Qaeda.

We are at war with "the rogue states that have sponsored, harbored and supported terrorism." That's all spelled out in the "Bush Doctrine" that was supported by upwards of 90% of the Congress in the wake of 9/11/01.

It's also exactly the right focus - one that took terrorism from the criminal justice realm and made it a national security (military) concern.

Iraq was at or near the top of the U.S. State Department's list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism" from 1993 to 2003, so Iraq was a valid target in that regard.

Terrorism will get worse before it gets better and ultimately, as I said, the West or what's left of it (not much more than America) will have to forge some kind of peace that isacceptable to both Westerners and Muslims alike...not an easy peace to forge, and seemingly impossible unless we jettison much of our current propensity for social liberalism.

That last part is entirely my own opinion, based on the Islam's burgeoning growth and the West's continuing declining birth rate and political retrenchment.

Don't read the ridiculous Huffpo for any information!

Occasionally they're good for laughs, as when Gary Hart recently hypothesized about an "ominous October Surprise" - the Bush administration's invading Iran.

One of the most ridiculous of the Kos-MoveOn axis.

If we are at war with "rogue states" let's declare war on them, conquer them, and rebuild them like Germany and Japan.

We are not doing that. Bush is going the Vietnam route with a "police action" that the military is not equipped to carry out, because they are warriors not babysitters.

We aren't liberators in Iraq, we are targets.

We are neither "liberators"nor targets in Iraq.

We are currently training the Iraqi military and police and rebuilding that country's infrastructure.

My druthers would've been to remove Hussein and let Iraq self-partition after his ouster.

Far fewer American lives and a lot less American capital would've been expended.

The current administration went another way. They apparently feared Iran filling the vacuum and the Turks being embroiled in a war over an independent Kurdistan.

I disagree with that particular part of the policy, but I understand the reasons they did what they did.

We have a long way to go in this fight and ultimately, as I said before, the shrinking West will ultimately have to come to some kind of terms with expanding traditional Islam.

This fight will go a long way to determing those terms.

There is little doubt in my mind that the world fifty years hence will be a far more socially conservative one than even some of the more "socially conservative" Americans can envision or be comfortable with.

After all, the most radically socially conservative American is a "social Liberal" to a traditional Muslim...NOT a "radicalized Muslim," but a traditional one.

History tells us that we will fail in Iraq.

Anything short of the utter conquest and dismantling of cultures only allows their inevitable return, like Germany after WWI.

Bush is in Vietnam mode. He isn't willing to utterly conquer Iraq and install a permanent Democracy by force, like we did in Japan. He wants them to choose Democracy. Imagine if Japan had been allowed to choose.

You are right, we should have killed Hussien and left. But if we are going to stay, we need to confiscate all weaponry, impose curfews, and kill anybody who fails to comply fully.

We are in the Vietnam zone, where we can't win.

Here's the difference between Iraq & Vietnam.

In Vietnam the U.S. was fighting a war the South (it's ally) didn't even want to fight, while in post-Saddam Iraq, we are trying to help solidify a tenuous government and train its military and police.

Iraqi Kurdistan is already secured and for all intents and purposes independent, though the administration here would never acknowledge that independence.

My feeling is that we may have lost all those lives and spent all that money in post-Saddam Iraq to bolster a government that may ultimately NOT hold together.

It would've been far better (at least in my view) to have let Iraq self-partition after Saddam's ouster, though admittedly I know far less about geopolitics than those supposedly paid to make those decisions.

Nobody could know less than Rumsfeld.

Partitioning would have created a new Israel problem, and we would have to protect the Kurds forever from those who hate them and can't abide their presence in "Arab" lands.

We should have conquered (check), executed Bathists, let the mobs drag Saddam through the streets, and then left them to kill each other.