dagblog - Comments for "Kidnapping in Israel"

Even Megyn Kelly of Fox News

rmrd0000 — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 18:35:50 +0000

In reply to We were. You chose to judge

Even Megyn Kelly of Fox News found Cheney's op-ed ridiculous. Cheney's comments are worthless.

That's a very simplistic way

ocean-kat — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 18:29:12 +0000

In reply to We were. You chose to judge

That's a very simplistic way of looking at things. Its not just how events unfold on one's watch. Its also what one is given to deal with. To expand on Powell's "pottery barn" metaphor.

One is given pottery and they don't break it on their watch.

One is given pottery and they do break it on their watch.

One is given pottery broken into shards and they don't fix it on their watch.

As I've said the middle east is falling into chaos so I can't endorse Obama's policies. They are obviously not working. But as I look at the situation in Iraq I can't come up with a set of policies that Obama could have enacted that would have made it better. The pottery Obama was handed was so broken that I have difficulty seeing any way to fix it.

Cheney's op-ed is worthless since it doesn't have a path to success. Its just a generalized critique of Obama.

The best writers during Cheney's prosecution of the war didn't just criticize the Bush Cheney failure. The best writers offered different paths.

As I look back at the years of war in Iraq I can see some choices that might have made a difference but they're all in the Bush years. DeBaathification was so obviously wrong. The Sunnis had to be given a place in the new Iraq with sufficient power to force the Shites to compromise to avoid civil war. If a unified Iraq was deemed unlikely to survive Biden's idea of three simi-autonomous regions might have worked.

But by the time Obama got there it was too late to create three simi-autonomous regions. It was too late to empower the Sunni minority. There were already elections and a government in power that was oppressing a mostly powerless sunni minority. What exactly could Obama have done when handed a country firmly placed on a trajectory to civil war by the Bush policies?

I read as far as "Rarely has

Michael Wolraich — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 16:59:15 +0000

In reply to We were. You chose to judge

I read as far as "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is 'ending' the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so."

I'm happy to address the age-old intervention debate and will blog about it next week if I have time, but Dick Cheney is a dogmatic hack and a hypocritical clown. The fact that he reached such heights of power is a sad joke on America and several other nations. The only silver lining to his tenure as vice president was George W. Bush's success at not not dying in office.

So no, I did not address the alleged validity of Dick Cheney's arguments for the simple reason that I did not read his arguments. We've all heard far too much of Cheney's bullshit already.

We were. You chose to judge

Lurker — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 15:19:50 +0000

In reply to Sorry, I thought we were

We were. You chose to judge it not by the validity of his arguments (such as they are: I largely agree with ocean-kat's criticism), but by the way events unfolded on the ground during his watch. Using this yardstick, how does the current administration measure up?