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| 11/23 |
| 2004/4/21 [Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:13309 Activity:nil |
4/21 OSC on how Bush did or did not cause 9/11!
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-04-11-1.html
\_ See, this is why OSC gets a rep for being a crank. It's possible
to understand that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeada were responsible
for 9/11 AND see that the Bush Administration failed to do
enough to prevent 9/11. OSC needs to learn a non-binary approach
to the world. /
What happened to your moral clarity? _/
\_ Ooo, ooo! What would you have done to stop 9/11 as the new
president of the US with no idea it was coming?
\_ We've done this before. See kchang's archives:
http://csua.com/?entry=13137
\_ Ah yes, Nothing interesting, reasonable or remotely
intelligent was posted. Go motd!
\_ Kettle, pot, black. Plonk.
\_ Umm.. I was making a point that a lot of people
pass the blame, but nobody has any ideas.
\_ Yes, and you made the point through demonstration
just now. Nicely done.
\_ Shooting down hijacked airplanes could have
been made a government policy. So many
off course planes in the last 10 years
were intercepted by the Air Force, there
really is no good excuse why the second
WTC flight was not shot down.
\_ why does anyone care what a hack sci-fi writer has to say about
politics?
\_ Because he wrote Ender's Game and people somehow think that
makes up for the drivel he's written since then.
\_ Ender's Game might be fun for kids and game geeks, but it's
really not a very good book. -tom
\_ He has written a number of good books since than, and
some crap too. I read his opinion pieces because they're
online, and usually different than what I hear elsewhere.
I don't always agree, but it's usually a fairly
intelligent take on things.
\_ Note: Different is properly followed by from. Different
to, for different from, is a common English
colloquialism. Different than is quite
inadmissible. (dict different)
\_ Thank you Professor Higgens
\_ You are welcome, my lady
\_ The success of Ender's Game (and his other books) have something
to do with his ability to express himself well, and (IMO) to talk
about the truth of the human condition. That being said, his
hobbies are history and especially military history, and I find
his comments to be well-studied. -emarkp
\_ Yeah, and the next political commentator will be
Danielle Steele. -tom
\_ emarkp is being disingenuous. The real reason he likes Card
is that Card is a Mormon like him. BTW, haven't we already
discussed this to death on the motd before?
\_ Oh my gosh! It's a Mormon conspiracy! Sorry dude,
that's the dumbest freaking thing I've heard in a long
time.
\_ You corrected my spelling and then made a serious
grammatical error. Who's the dumbass?
\_ You assholes did not correct anything. You
interrupted posts to show what could be done to
correct them. Posts fixed, idiocy removed.
\_ one's a typo, the other shows bad spelling.
\_ Not the same person either.
\_ Did he say anything about not disbanding the Iraqi army? If
so, he is already ahead of Bush Jr and his advisors.
\_ Dear Mr. Card,
I am sorry that you were not born in a time when America had
stand-up enemies to fight (like the Nazis). I, too, wish that America
had an enemy that would unite us in a universal morality, an enemey
that we could point to as a negative reflection of everything that we
stand for. Then we could point to that great enemy and say, We are
the opposite of that. We could declare ourselves the good and the
right in the face of utter evil.
Unfortunately, all of our enemies these days exist on the
fringes of morality. Many of them are our children come back to
haunt us. Few of them have the military might or geopolitical will to
inspire much more than a street-to-street city gunfight or individual
suicide bomb attacks. None of them are the bogey-men we need to truly
galvanize the nation (and the world) into the world-wide benevolent
dictatorship that we need.
Neither do we have the leadership to truly lead us in a
benevolent world-wide dictatorship dedicated to the betterment of
humanity. There are no wise Hegemons to bring us to a new
Enlightenment; no Hari Seldons have stepped up to guide us to our true
potential as the rightful rulers and benificent caretakers of our
planet and our quadrant of space. No, our leaders, both Republicans
and Democrats, are much more interested in the short-term gain in
power of the next four years and the long-term acquisition of profit
for the foreseeable future than they are in the betterment of mankind.
Our leaders have allowed themselves to be led by past grudges and
debts of honor to follow bad counsel from weak and self-serving
sycophants.
It is right and good to want a strong, united America. It is
wrong and bad to mistake brutality for strength and sheepish
acquiescence for loyalty. It is criminal to turn a blind eye to
corporate greed and war profiteering especially when it is done in the
name of building democracy. We owe it to ourselves and the America
we dream of to open our eyes and see the wrong done in our name as
well as the good. Only by doing this do we have any hope of seeing
that America come to pass.
Yours,
erikred
\_ Funny you use Nazis. They were on the fringe of morality in
their time. Evil always trys to make itself look moral.
\_ that is the problem, the word "evil." Nothing is black n
white, there is no such thing as absolute evil. You need
to learn that, eventhough most people learned that at age of 4.
\_ I wonder how many victims of violent crimes are moral
relativists. I wonder how many people who saw their children
tortured and killed in front of their eyes agree with you.
Moral relativism is a product of a safe and prosperous age.
It was easy to believe in evil when you had to face it every
day. -- ilyas
\_ Evil exists but it's not a phantom force floating around.
It's simply the case when people decide not to respect the
rights of others in the pursuit of their own goals. Nazi
Germany did some evil things, but then so did the USA, Russia,
and Israel. Nations generally have more reasonable rationales
for their actions than sadistic psychos whose "goals" are
merely enjoying the infliction of suffering and pain. It seems
to be the norm historically that cultures have different
standards of ethics towards outsiders, often glorifying the
destruction of other tribes.
\_ I must respectfully disagree. - Cthulhu
\_ I must disagree also - George W. Bush
\_ w00t!
\_ No, there really are people who will just cause pain, or
steal, or do any other number of ethically repugant
things for fun or profit. If they want to do it on a
large scale, they will rationalize it with pretty words,
but it's still evil. Besides, it there's no such thing
as universal morals, why don't we just nuke thw whole
middle east and be done with it? |
| 11/23 |
|
| www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-04-11-1.html How Bush Caused 9/11 For the past two years, I could have sworn it was a bunch of fanatical Muslims under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden that hijacked four planes and crashed three of them into American buildings. But now I learn that these events were actually caused by George W Bush. I know this because Ive heard noble patriots like Richard Clarke come forward and blame him for it. FBI Its true that there was data available on the terrorists, at various levels in the FBI and CIA. And if anyone in those two organizations had gotten together and compared notes, 9/11 might have been prevented. Unfortunately, in those days the only place where those two bureaucracies intersected was at the top - in the National Security Council. And because the information each organization had didnt amount to much by itself, neither dataset was deemed important enough to send up to the decision makers who might have put two and two together. But it is astonishing that the Left is actually using this to show that Bush did something wrong. Lets suppose that, on his first day in office, George W Bush had foreseen all the potential problems and had ordered information-sharing at very low levels between the FBI and CIA. Do you know how hard it is to get entrenched bureaucracies to change the way they do business? Anyone who knows about the screaming and hair-pulling that went on right after World War II, when Truman moved to combine the War Department and Navy Department into the Department of Defense will realize that even in that celebrated case, the interservice rivalry continued. Even to get their computers to be able to read each others files would have been a nightmare. Which of them would have to give up all their old equipment and change to new software? Because the moment President Bush breathed a word about intending to get the FBI and CIA to share information, prior to 9/11, he would have been crucified in the press. Because there is a strict legal separation between the two services. To keep the CIA from spying on American civilians, it is limited to gathering data abroad. When either service had information they thought the other might need, they passed it along, of course - they were and are loyal Americans. The trouble is, the FBI was never in a position to know what information the CIA might actually need, and vice-versa. If President Bush had attempted to change this situation, the civil libertarian lobby would have had his head on a plate. It was only after 9/11 proved how devastating the consequences of separation could be that it became possible to break a few chinks in that thick wall between the bureaucracies. In other words, it was always desirable to have information sharing, in order to do a good job; Even if the government announced, Major Terrorist Threat Blocked by Quick Action, we would have dozed through the news reports, wouldnt we? And the civil libertarians would have kept the courts tied up for years, because of course the government had no right to spy on the airline ticketing system and so they shouldnt have found any information about ticket purchases by anyone. The World Trade Center would still be standing, but the Bush administration would quite possibly have fallen - as a result of having succeeded in preventing that national disaster. Personally, I couldnt care less if the government knows when Im flying. Delta already knows, and I dont get to elect anybody whos working there. If by letting the government know who is buying every ticket on every plane, I could have a better chance of getting home alive, Id let them have that information in a heartbeat. But even after 9/11, it was impossible to get civil libertarians to allow the government even to study the feasability of such a data-tracking system. If you doubt me, ask Admiral Poindexter, who was shredded in the media for trying. Preemption When George W Bush and his national security team took office, they immediately began to make preparations to eliminate the threat of terrorism, instead of just slapping bandaids on the wounds. They recognized that Saddam posed a continual threat, to his neighbors and to his own people. Something would have to be done about Iraq - they were firing on or targeting our planes several times a week, and thanks to greedy allies like France and Germany and friends like Russia, the so-called sanctions were giving Saddam plenty of money to keep his hideous regime alive. Likewise, they knew that the Taliban in Afghanistan was harboring Al Qaeda; The trouble was, war is not just a military action, its a political one as well. There was no way, prior to 9/11, that the Bush administration could have got Congressional support for a preemptive attack on Afghanistan. And Iraq always required exactly the solution that we have been imposing for the past year. This is why President Bushs father did not take out Saddam when he had the chance back in 1991: without Saddams repressive regime, every would-be dictator in Iraq would have made his play for the top spot then, just as theyre doing now. So we couldnt get rid of Saddam until we had the national will to stick with the job until a strong government with popular support could fill the power vacuum. It is not a failure of our policy that Iraq is suffering from attempted rebellions - the best hope for Iraqs future is for these warlords to make their play while our troops are still there to slap them down and clean them out. Likewise, its not a failure of our policy that now, absent the Taliban, opium production in Afghanistan is twenty times higher than it was under the Taliban. That sort of thing always happens in times of uncertainty and transition. The question is never between a choice that is all good and a choice that is all bad. Every good choice has bad consequences, too, and every bad choice was made because it seemed to offer benefits. Even though the Bush administration understood that the only way to eliminate terrorism was to transform the governments that sponsored it, they could not take action until they could marshal the political will. In other words, the only way of preventing something like 9/11 was not possible, politically, until after something like 9/11 had galvanized the public into supporting drastic action. The Might Have Been Problem Successful disaster prevention always looks unnecessary, because after all, nothing bad happened. Failure to prevent a disaster always looks inexcusable, because we forget that the will to take drastic action was not present until afterward. The political leaders of the Left are now criticizing the Bush administration for not doing the very things for which, if they had done them, they would have been savagely attacked by the very same people. Franklin Roosevelt saw in the 1930s that war with Germany was necessary and ultimately unavoidable. He also knew that if Britain and Russia fell to Hitler, Americas eventual war would be infinitely harder to win. So even though the American people had no will to go to war before Pearl Harbor, FDR persuaded, cajoled, and arm-twisted Congress into providing enough military aid to Britain and Russia that they did not fall; Right now, though, the Left is doing everything it can to blame him for everything he did and everything he didnt do. Hes being blamed for not taking preemptive action in Afghanistan, and for taking preemptive action in Iraq. In other words, Bushs critics are simply taking hold of every tool they can find to try to block his reelection . Its the lowest form of politics, to throw rocks at the guy whos leading us with amazing success in a war that was forced upon us by our enemies. Wasps in My Office I have screens and double windows with tight-fitting sashes in my attic office. I dont know how they get in, but there they are, furiously dive-bombing my chair. No matter who is President, there is no security system so tight that the terrorists cant get in and cause devastation and fear. But a good President is one who doesnt forget the terrorists as soon as theyve gone, or pay tribute to them in hopes of buying them off. A good President goes out and finds the wasps nests and kills ... |
| csua.com/?entry=13137 -> compilers.cs.ucla.edu/%7Ekchang/motd/?entry=13137 I would have made it clear that any lack of communication between the FBI, CIA, and NSA not having to do with Congressionally legislated limitations would result in the immediate termination of the various directors involved. How does having a policy on when its acceptable to shoot down a plane become an impeachable offense? What part of any lack of communication between the FBI, CIA, and NSA not having to do with Congressionally legislated limitations is in violation of the law? When will you stop fellating your dog and post something intelligent? |