You are right. Our government is not popular. Bush isn’t getting any popularity points because all the people here in America hear is bad news from Iraq. And any time some good news comes out, especially out of the mouth of a decorated war veteran, all that is shown is the blowback from the lunatic left.

Congress is not popular, mainly because they promised the moon and the stars, they stumped that they could get the troops out immediately, and they have failed miserably, about the only thing they did was raise the minimum wage 2 bucks over a couple of years, wow, great job.

Now with Mr. Paul, he may make grandstanding speeches, but he ignores the reality of this world, and he knows absolutely nothing of history. It’s great that he spouts out about the constitution, but who wants a man in office that can’t protect the country from those out to destroy the ideals in that constitution?

He also does not have near enough support. You can claim the libertrians and all those others want him, but where are the numbers? He’s at 1-3% in all polls. Hillary is at 40% RP will not bring out the republican base or the evangelicals. Fred Thompson will, but I feel he will not get the nod from the party, I think Rudy will. And I think the 08 election will be close.

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With all due respect, it is you sir who needs to face reality. The Repubicans are rapidly becoming a 3rd party. The Party is dying. The Republicans cannot win without the support of Christian Conservatives, libertarians and Constitutionalists.

The libertarians and constitutionalists have already endorsed Ron Paul. Paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanon has endorsed Ron Paul.

Newt Gingrich has said that the Republicans have about 1 chance in 5 of winning the elections with one of the current front runners, and went on to say that the party has to make a radical break from Bush if it wants to have any real hope of winning.

The party base may not like ROn Paul, but Ron Paul is the only chance the Republicans have at winning. That sir is reality.

Right now oil is trading at around 80 dollars a bbl. The Pound Sterling is trading at over $2 dollars, the Euro at around a $1.50 and now the Canadian Dollar has reached pariety with the US dollar. All of this is a direct result of our idiotic national policies, and that sir is a reality that affects everyday Americans and has made us all poorer and people are sick of it.

Bush has an approval rating of around 29%, congress 11%. Our government is not popular, the Republican Party is not popular, and if you are too blind to see that a radical shift is coming, then you sir are the one who needs to wake up and see reality for what it is.

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Johnnyb: You keep rattling off those prescribed and approved talking points. But aside from your fellow Ron Paul fantasists, no one is buying it.

You people haven’t got a clue and Ron Paul hasn’t got a prayer of winning either the GOP nomination or the presidency.

When you do face reality, I want to be there.

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Jesus, way to keep it pithy guys…

1. The Iraq war is stupid, it does nothing to enhance our national security, Mike Huckabee Acknowledged as much with his retarded “We broke we bought it, bullshit!”

2. The Republican party IS going to lose if we run a pro-war candidate. The majority of the people are against the war, and those that are against the war are more pssionate than those that are “For” the war. This means that they will turn out to the polls in greater numbers to vote on that one issue.

3. If we lose this next election, the Democrats will increase their majority in both houses and we will lose the presidency. This means that America become a fully socialist State.

4. Winning in Iraq is not as important as losing the America to a bunch of goddamned commie democrats!
4b. Haven’t we already won in Iraq? I thought we kicked their ass a long time ago.

5. The government cannot solve our problems, why in the world would we think that our governmnet could solve anyone elses problems? How would you like a bunch of fuggin frenchmen to come over here and start telling us how its done? I don’t know, but I might become a suicide bpomber myself!

6. Remember this is a battle for freemarket capitalism v. Commie-ism here at home. Not in Vietnam, but on our home turf via the Democrats! The same assholes that brought us Waco, and the Great Depression!

Ron Paul is the only Republican that can win the national election, and this is a national election that must be won. The rest of the republican have lost their way, the only candidate besides Ron Paul that is not CFR is Duncan Hunter and he is further behind in the polls and cannot win the national election.

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Thank you for being civil, i’m so used to defending myself and my fellow service men fiercely in these types of forum.

Not so hard for me to be civil, since you and I seem to be on the same page in regards to Ron Paul.

But I do try to be civil even to those who disagree with me. Sometimes I succeed; other times I don’t.

Thank you for the recommended reading, I will look it up and if I get a chance to head to the library I will check it out.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Robert Kaplan last week. Checkout the transcript, or listen to it. Hewitt had Kaplan on for all 3 hours.

I only got the new book over this past weekend.

I think Bush made a mistake by doing his whole carrier speech. We defeated their army, but we knew that it would be hard, he should have been a little less optimistic there.

Jim, please check my previous posts regarding the carrier speech.

Here.

And here.

In hindsight, the banner was a mistake and the overall optimism, only in that it’s provided plenty of fodder for the detractors and latenite pundits.

But in and of itself, it was the right speech at the right time.

…we all just need patience. I know its alot to ask for that, but that’s what I’m doing. If you can’t afford us patience, whats to say in the next conflict we won’t pull out again quick because the next bad guy found out how to make some IED’s. It’s pretty simple logic, fight them now, show them that we aren’t scared, that we will fight them no matter what, and we’ll win.

I think our show of irresoluteness and wavering support only encourages them all the more to continue. It tells them that what they are doing is having a negative effect on the morale of the American public, and Congressional leaders.

One of the things that Robert Kaplan brings up in Warrior Politics is the role of media (just touches upon it). He brings it up again in his Hewitt interview:

HH: I want to go to Algeria with you, Robert Kaplan, because I found this to be the most striking chapter of many striking chapters. How did you get there? And what did you think…give us the circumstance, physical first, of when you went there and how long you stayed.

RK: Well, I wanted to embed in a number of missions in sub-Saharan Africa that Army Special Forces were doing. And the European command had invited a number of top foreign correspondents from American media to go, but many of them couldn’t go. They were willing to cover it from Senegal, in Dakar, as a overview, all of these deployments. But they weren’t willing to invest a lot of time on the ground with any particular unit. So I was alone with twelve members of an SF A-team not just in Algeria, but in the extreme south of Algeria, meaning 1,500 miles south of the capitol of Algiers. I was closer to Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea than I was to Algiers, even though I was still in Algeria. And you know, listeners should go to a map and just see how far south Algeria goes. This was the Sahara desert in the height of summer. It was so hot and so dry that I almost never use my towel to bathe, because the moment you turned off the water in the makeshift showers, you were like instantly dry and your hair frizzed up. That’s how dry and hot it was. There were scorpions all around, and it was…and everyone lived in the same tent. Now the Algerians were very gracious hosts. They had built several tents for us. But it was just amazing the way everyone congregated. We would rather be close together in one tent than to have just three or four guys in three separate tents. You know, that’s an indicator of the togetherness of this A-team, and just how unified they were.

HH: Now the reason I was riveted by this is because I know the history of Algeria both in terms of the war against the French for independence and their own insurgency with an al Qaeda off-shoot. But if you could summarize for people why Algeria is of such strategic importance to the United States?

RK: Well, first of all, this was the first American military mission to Algeria since Eisenhower’s Operation Torch in November of 1942, because after the War ended, Algeria shortly after had a war with the French for independence, where a million people were killed. Then Algeria became one of the most radical extremist countries in the whole Arab world. It led the third world movement, the anti-American, anti-Israeli third world movement. And so, relations with us were very, very low key for a long period of time. Then, Algeria had a civil war in the 1990’s, and this was very instructive, because the Algerian military essentially fought a counterinsurgency against Islamic militants that was every bit as brutal as the one in Iraq, and they one. They won, more or less, hands down. And the media rewarded them, with their victory, by just stopping to pay attention to the story. So it wasn’t clear what had happened, it was just that sometime in the late 90’s, you stopped reading about Algeria as the media moved on elsewhere, because the Algerian government, for all intents and purposes, had defeated this particular group of Islamic militants. But the U.S. military had taken notice of Algeria’s success. And because the Algerian government felt itself deserted by countries in Europe, by its own so-called Arab allies, it really led to a change of heart in the people in power in Algiers. And afterwards, they wanted a closer working relationship with the U.S. military. And this Special Forces A-team deployment was the ultimate fruit of all of that.

HH: Now Robert Kaplan, tell me if I’m wrong, but it strikes me that we have going in Algeria what we hope to potentially get in Iraq, eventually, a military and a government open to spreading stability and some transparency, while crushing extremist Salafist ideology at the same time.

RK: Yes. No, what we hope to accomplish in Iraq is what has been accomplished in Algeria, and has been accomplished in Colombia against another sort of extremist. The problem in Iraq is that we don’t have the advantages that the Algerian government had. The Algerian government allowed in no media, number one, and it could get away with that, because it had no pretensions at the time to democracy, though now, it’s a democratically elected government. It was also dealing with its own people. This Islamic insurgency was an Algerian Islamic insurgency, so the government had no problem with language, it completely understood the culture, and so it had, it could block out the media. It understood the culture and language perfectly. And thirdly, its population was willing to put up with the cruelest of techniques that the government employed, so that the Algerian government was able to win, Hugh, with methods that we simply cannot employ and should not employ.

HH: Right, but they also are able to teach us now, this is something that I thought was an amazing insight. You mentioned it in the first hour of our conversation today, that our staff colleges in the military are now benefiting from the return of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have deployed forward, and are learning how to fight this war. In Algeria, they’ve been teaching, even as our guys teach them tactics, they’re teaching us the situational deployments of the bad guys, and they’re teaching them how they set up camp and all this sort of stuff. Very much a two-way transaction.

RK: Oh, very much so. This was not like observing training missions in Mauritania or Mali or elsewhere. For everything we were teaching them, they were teaching us about how to infiltrate terrorist compounds, how to attack them. So it was very much a two-way street. Also, because the Algerian government was friends with all the wrong sorts of people during its decades of radicalism, it has real contacts in the Arab world, which have been very useful to us in Iraq. You know, Algeria has been a quiet provider of intelligence to us in our battle in Iraq.

HH: You also mention that in the Algerian army is a recurring problem in third world armies, that their non-commissioned officers are so far behind the American…of course, the American tradition is extraordinarily successful and esteemed. But that’s what they lack in the third world, the ability to make decisions.

RK: Yes, that’s what they lack. Remember, our NCO corps was really started to be formed at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-1778, when Baron Friedrich von Steuben, through his decentralization of command, established basically the principle of an NCO corps, which you find in Western militaries, the British, the French, you know, all have it. But you don’t find it in a country like Algeria where the major, the lieutenant is overloaded with tasks to do, which means he doesn’t perform them all that well, because he has to basically discipline his corporal, discipline his private, whereas in the American system, that is done by sergeants. It’s things that the major doesn’t have to deal with.

HH: Can the Americans convey that? Are they successful in conveying that to the Algerians?

RK: They’re successful in conveying it, but an NCO corps, it’s kind of like winning an insurgency. It’s not a decision, it’s a process. I mean, first of all, you need a lot of extra money you’ve got to put into it to raise salaries for NCOs. You have to establish training schools, you know, NCO schools, higher education, all this. You have to provide family support. If your NCOs are going to be talented and well-trained and confident, they’re going to be the product of education and training academies. So it’s a big investment for a military.

HH: Now before we move on to the A-10s after the break, I want to talk a little bit about these Special Forces operators, and their attitudes. One of them is they hate Al Jazeera.

RK: Yeah, they hate Al Jazeera. But let me point something out about Al Jazeera. I understand why the military, in fact, many Americans hate Al Jazeera. But remember, as to Arabs, Al Jazeera is provocatively pro-Western. You know, you’re dealing with a culture and a society that for decades just had the dullest national media, which merely mouthed the pronouncements of the dictator. Now, you have a semi-independent television station which is prone to all the hopes, fears, conspiracy theories, prejudices of any society. And just like you see America through CBS or Fox News or CNN, you see a lot of the ideas prevalent in the Arab world through Al Jazeera. You know, the Arab world now really has a mass media that it never had before, but lo and behold, this mass media is going to reflect feelings on the street in the Arab world, some of which we’re not going to like.

HH: A minute to the break here, just an odd question harkening back to the first hour. Do these guys like you, Robert Kaplan, by the end of your deployment? I mean, you’re such a foreign presence to these people.

RK: Well, you never know if people like you, because you know, most people are very diplomatic. If there’s something about you they don’t like. They may not even say it. But I felt…the way you test it is will they still talk to you afterwards, like after they’ve seen what you’ve written, or two months later when you’re no longer reporting. And I’ve developed quite a lot of friendships in the American military through this project.

HH: I’m not surprised by that. It’s amazing reporting.

It’s a great interview, and an amazing book.

Stay safe, Jim. And God bless you for the important work that you are doing.

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Thank you for being civil, i’m so used to defending myself and my fellow service men fiercely in these types of forum. Thank you for the recommended reading, I will look it up and if I get a chance to head to the library I will check it out. However I am always on a 6-ring notice for deployment (sucks when I’m drunk and have to have my wife drive me to the flight line for outprocessing) But my experiences in both wars, my research, and my family history (and all my family veterans) only reinforce what I know to be true. In order to keep the peace we need to intervene sometimes. I do not mean all the time. But new articles are showing a possible N. Korea/Syria/Iran buddy group going on. Thats something we can’t handle.

Was the war in Iraq handled in the best way, no of course not. Mistakes were made. It’s war, nothing is perfect, but progress is clearly being made in all parts. The example of Anbar province is being exported to other areas especially the Diyala province. No one said war was easy, and I think Bush made a mistake by doing his whole carrier speech. We defeated their army, but we knew that it would be hard, he should have been a little less optimistic there.

But I’ve been there done that, and going back again soon. Every time i go back, there is more progress, its tough going, no doubt, it sucks, its hot and I don’t like getting shot at but its going…we all just need patience. I know its alot to ask for that, but that’s what I’m doing. If you can’t afford us patience, whats to say in the next conflict we won’t pull out again quick because the next bad guy found out how to make some IED’s. It’s pretty simple logic, fight them now, show them that we aren’t scared, that we will fight them no matter what, and we’ll win.

Well that’s my two cents. I will not vote for RP, i think the man is a mental case. I will vote for a man that will protect this country, and hiding in a shell and apeasement wont’ work.

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Aaah…I forgot all about my original “sloganeering” (read words at the top, under the blog title):

“Those who give up security for liberty deserve neither.” -wordsmith

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I think you are aware that this is a poor line of argument. Just as many are concerned about the security of their fellow Americans (and themselves) despite not personally having been victims of a terrorist attack, others worry about lost liberties even if they have not personally been hurt.

The point is…who has it affected negatively? Give me numbers. Because the question that needs to be asked is, do the benefits and gains outweigh the potential/actual instances of abuse?

How many lawsuits have been filed due to abuse under the Patriot Act? There is a provision in there for compensation, for anyone who had his rights abused.

Then compare the numbers to that of instances where law enforcement has abused their priveleges in weapons carry (such as tasering) or abuse of other powers. I bet the number is far, far greater….yet we do not call for the powers we give to law enforcement to be abandoned, because we recognize that the benefits of their “encroachments”, potential and actual, upon our civil liberties far outweigh the negative consequences.

Romney says something similar in his campaigning.

He gets a plus, then. Perhaps he has been reading FA?

I’m afraid I don’t get it. Without security, there is no … security. You still have liberty, just with an increased risk of death.

Then you do get it. Just nitpicking the semantics of it.

If we had no military or law enforcement to safeguard our freedom, kiss liberty goodbye. It is because of our strong military, that we enjoy the benefits of freedom. That we are able to prosper.

Overall though I think the sloganeering just obscures the point that there is a tradeoff, and that different people are comfortable at different points on the risk/liberty curve.

That’s well-stated; and I’m just answering one sloganeering with a slogan of my own.

At the risk of spending time on what might be a rhetorical question: we should be able to can most of the stupid airport security theater. Seal cockpit doors to avoid plane takeover, or mandate whatever other measure are necessary to avoid a hijacking if that’s insufficient somehow. For the rest, let the airlines decide how much effort they want to spend stopping someone from blowing their planes out of the sky.

I think the initial TSA laws were an over-reaction response. Perhaps it was needed initially, right away. But really…banning nail clippers? I could just as well stab someone through the eyesocket or subclavian artery with a ballpoint pen than I could snip his carotid artery with nailclippers.

I’m all for the efficiency of profiling.

Things not needed: warrantless wiretaps, suspension of habeas corpus, ‘enhanced interrogation’, RealID, and probably a bunch of other things that don’t come to mind right now.

The only ones who really need to worry about those things, are “the bad guys”. Not ordinary citizens.

Ultimately, though, the best, cheapest, and most proactive defense against terrorism is to make it clear that it won’t achieve anything. One big drawback of our security reaction after 9-11 is that it gave our enemies the impression that they’d really hurt us, when in reality all they had done was make us angry.

I see your point here. (Of course, they really did hurt us- not just the lives lost, but also the economic blow). It’s related to how every IED that goes off and soldier that dies in Iraq, sends us into hysterics of “run away! Run away!”

How much less likely would those attacks continue, if we showed a warface on, that those actions on their part only make us more determined to win, not less? That rather than weep over the soldiers, we celebrate their heroism and steel ourselves to ensure that their sacrifice won’t have been in vain?

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how you, personally, have been affected

I think you are aware that this is a poor line of argument. Just as many are concerned about the security of their fellow Americans (and themselves) despite not personally having been victims of a terrorist attack, others worry about lost liberties even if they have not personally been hurt.

Without security, there is no liberty

Romney says something similar in his campaigning. I’m afraid I don’t get it. Without security, there is no … security. You still have liberty, just with an increased risk of death. Overall though I think the sloganeering just obscures the point that there is a tradeoff, and that different people are comfortable at different points on the risk/liberty curve.

How do you propose we go about preserving and protecting our liberties

At the risk of spending time on what might be a rhetorical question: we should be able to can most of the stupid airport security theater. Seal cockpit doors to avoid plane takeover, or mandate whatever other measure are necessary to avoid a hijacking if that’s insufficient somehow. For the rest, let the airlines decide how much effort they want to spend stopping someone from blowing their planes out of the sky.
Concentrate anti-WMD measures on detection of radioactive substances (for example, deploy a network of detectors on the borders and in major cities). Chemical weapons sound scary but historically haven’t been very effective for small scale terrorism. Biological weapons appear to be very difficult to create and use (for large effect, anyway), but a rapid-response quarantine plan in case of an infectious bioweapon would a good thing to have.
Plain old bombs can be dealt with the same way as we’ve been dealing with them for a century: don’t worry about them too much (not many people are killed by bombs), find and prosecute the perpetrators afterwards if they’re still alive.
Things not needed: warrantless wiretaps, suspension of habeas corpus, ‘enhanced interrogation’, RealID, and probably a bunch of other things that don’t come to mind right now.

Ultimately, though, the best, cheapest, and most proactive defense against terrorism is to make it clear that it won’t achieve anything. One big drawback of our security reaction after 9-11 is that it gave our enemies the impression that they’d really hurt us, when in reality all they had done was make us angry.

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How many liberties are we willing to give up to obtain safety?

What liberties of yours have been taken away, Michael Bass? Please do tell me how you, personally, have been affected by the Patriot Act and the NSA surveillance programs.

Benjamin Franklin stated that “those who sacrafice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Wow…that is just so…profound. I’ve never heard that quote before. Do you realize that you’re the very first Ron Paul supporter who has ever cited that one, before? Ever?!

[/sarcasm]

Look, I can do it too: “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” -Benjamin Franklin

So how exactly are we sacrificing liberty? Without security, there is no liberty.

How do you propose we go about preserving and protecting our liberties?

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