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2012-06-14 Syria-Lebanon-Iran

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Posted by tipper 2012-06-14 06:48|| || Front Page|| [11128 views ] Top

#1 Bolton is a national treasure. Thanks Tipper.

Posted by Besoeker 2012-06-14 08:01|| 2012-06-14 08:01|| Front Page Top

#2 Good summary of the situation, but he lost me at this point: find Syrian rebel leaders who are truly secular and who oppose radical Islam; who will disavow al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups; and who will reject Russian and Iranian hegemony over their country. We will need some reason to believe that this opposition can prevail against not only the Assad regime but also the terrorists and fanatics who also oppose Assad. This must be not a faith-based judgment but a clear-eyed assessment of reality. If such opposition exists, it is marginal.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2012-06-14 08:30|| 2012-06-14 08:30|| Front Page Top

#3 Such an opposition exists. Its called the Kurds.

Posted by phil_b 2012-06-14 08:45|| 2012-06-14 08:45|| Front Page Top

#4 Too bad nobody in the Obama administration thinks that clearly.

Posted by Ebbang Uluque6305 2012-06-14 12:05|| 2012-06-14 12:05|| Front Page Top

#5 Don't know about you, Mr Bolton---but I'm stocking extra popcorn.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2012-06-14 13:22|| 2012-06-14 13:22|| Front Page Top

#6 I like Bolton, but he's been a disaster for American foreign policy. Neo-conservatism is not only a contradiction in terms, it's a bust. We have gone out into the world looking for monsters to slay, and have discovered that these monsters include not just the leadership but the vast majority of the population we have gone over to liberate. And in so doing, we have lost 7,000 men to date, not counting the lives of allied troops, and spent $1T which, while a relative pittance compared to Vietnam War expenditures, was much more than the American public was prepared to spend.

The problem with neo-conservatism is that it tries to apply the lessons of post-WWII Allied governance of Germany, Italy and Japan to nations that were

much less developed,
non-homogeneous,
religious fanatics (even in Iraq, where a thin veneer of secular Baathism convinced neo-cons that inside every Iraqi was a modern cosmopolite waiting to jump out),
not completely defeated (unlike Japan and Germany, which lost 5% and 10% of their populations, respectively),
in the "modern" era, not susceptible to decades of dictatorial oversight the way the defeated Axis Powers were, which is why Iraq and Afghanistan are now sharia states

If Romney is elected and jumps into these pointless foreign policy quagmires the way Bolton recommends, he will be a one-term president who paves the way for yet another Democratic landslide and god-knows-what new laundry list of welfare state programs and environmental nuttiness. The issue has never been whether we can win these wars - it's whether we can win them at what the electorate considers a reasonable cost and whether the outcome is better than what existed before, from a national interest standpoint. So far, the Arab Spring has converted three neutral or allied regimes to semi-hostile or hostile regimes.

The real lesson of WWII is that nation smashing must precede nation building. During WWII, Bomber Harris said "We shall destroy Germany's will to fight. Now that we have the planes and crews, in 1943 and 1944 we shall drop one and a quarter million tons of bombs, render 25 million Germans homeless, kill 900,000 and seriously injure one million." The German public screamed defiance but was so shell-shocked at the war's conclusion that they submitted tamely to Allied rule on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-06-14 14:30|| 2012-06-14 14:30|| Front Page Top

#7 Such an opposition exists. Its called the Kurds.

If we could simply pick some dictator to back, things would be just peachy. In reality, we are required by human rights groups and the State Department to back the amorphous will of the people which, in Syria, means the will of the troglodyte Sunni Arab majority. Which translates to an Ikhwan regime.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-06-14 14:39|| 2012-06-14 14:39|| Front Page Top

#8 If we had pursued these kinds of policies after Saddam Husseins overthrow in 2003....

So...why didn't we John? C'mon now...think.

Posted by DepotGuy 2012-06-14 21:08|| 2012-06-14 21:08|| Front Page Top

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