Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Hammers, Nails and "State-Sponsored Terrorism"
While everybody's getting excited about silly little Cheney lies from last night, there's one great big lie I haven't seen brought up anywhere. At least the biggest lie since the crap that "everything changed on 9-11."
Here's the quote. It's only the second question, Edwards has just slammed one Big Lie ("Sadaam=Al Qaida") and one Big Inconvenient Fact, that we turned away from finishing the job in Afghanistan to go after the neocon wet dream of Iraq. Here's the quote I think is important:
(via debate transcript)
You know the saying that, when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? This is the problem BushCheneyCo is stuck in. To them, states are everything. If it doesn't have a border, and a capital, and a governmental structure of some kind, they haven't the slightest clue what to do with it.
What was it Rumsfeld said before the attack on Afghanistan even started? It "didn't have enough targets." Here we have all these exceedingly cool (not to mention extremely expensive) weapons like smart bombs, cruise missles, satellite targeting systems et al. It would be crazy to waste them, as somebody sneered, blowing up a $10 tent and a donkey or two.
This is true. These systems were designed to fight a Cold War era battle against Russian tanks on the plains of Poland (see, we remembered Poland!) and East Germany.
But alas...East Germany is no more, Poland is our ever so valued ally in Iraq, and we've got all these weapons just sitting there which are no damn use at all against a non-state-based entity like Al Qaida.
The solution? Turn away from the hard fight, that would require re-thinking and complete redesign of at least a portion of "US military forces"--or might not require military forces at all to produce the desired results. It might require translators more than tanks, linguists more than lasers, bribes more than bombs, historians more than helicopters.
It might take an acknowledgement that a country that couldn't be conquered by either Alexander the Great or Mikhael Gorbachev is going to have to be tackled by something other than conventional military means.
They really thought it would be easier to conquer Iraq. It had borders, it had a capital, all that stuff. It was a game they knew how to play.
They had the biggest damn hammers ever invented. Afghanistan looked like a crooked little bent-up thumbtack while Iraq looked like a nice big fat railroad spike.
Fact: We need to learn the rules of a whole new game called non-state-sponsored terrorism.
It was a fact clear to everybody in America by about noon Eastern on September 11, 2001. We've now lost three critical years refusing to even look at the manual, because it was easier to drag out the board for another round of "Dungeons & Dragons" and we already had all the pieces anyway.
When we are hit by another attack we will regret wasting this time. But that attack will be as much the fault of Bush and Cheney as the first one was.
Here's the quote. It's only the second question, Edwards has just slammed one Big Lie ("Sadaam=Al Qaida") and one Big Inconvenient Fact, that we turned away from finishing the job in Afghanistan to go after the neocon wet dream of Iraq. Here's the quote I think is important:
(via debate transcript)
CHENEY: The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there's clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror.Ol' Crashcart Dick accidentally let slip a very big truth there. I'm sure he didn't mean to, but he revealed just how the ones who are "practicing pre-Sept. 11 thinking" here are him and his cronies.
And the point is that that's the place where you're most likely to see the terrorists come together with weapons of mass destruction, the deadly technologies that Saddam Hussein had developed and used over the years.
Now, the fact of the matter is, the big difference here, Gwen, is they are not prepared to deal with states that sponsor terror. They've got a very limited view about how to use U.S. military forces to defend America.
You know the saying that, when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? This is the problem BushCheneyCo is stuck in. To them, states are everything. If it doesn't have a border, and a capital, and a governmental structure of some kind, they haven't the slightest clue what to do with it.
What was it Rumsfeld said before the attack on Afghanistan even started? It "didn't have enough targets." Here we have all these exceedingly cool (not to mention extremely expensive) weapons like smart bombs, cruise missles, satellite targeting systems et al. It would be crazy to waste them, as somebody sneered, blowing up a $10 tent and a donkey or two.
This is true. These systems were designed to fight a Cold War era battle against Russian tanks on the plains of Poland (see, we remembered Poland!) and East Germany.
But alas...East Germany is no more, Poland is our ever so valued ally in Iraq, and we've got all these weapons just sitting there which are no damn use at all against a non-state-based entity like Al Qaida.
The solution? Turn away from the hard fight, that would require re-thinking and complete redesign of at least a portion of "US military forces"--or might not require military forces at all to produce the desired results. It might require translators more than tanks, linguists more than lasers, bribes more than bombs, historians more than helicopters.
It might take an acknowledgement that a country that couldn't be conquered by either Alexander the Great or Mikhael Gorbachev is going to have to be tackled by something other than conventional military means.
They really thought it would be easier to conquer Iraq. It had borders, it had a capital, all that stuff. It was a game they knew how to play.
They had the biggest damn hammers ever invented. Afghanistan looked like a crooked little bent-up thumbtack while Iraq looked like a nice big fat railroad spike.
Fact: We need to learn the rules of a whole new game called non-state-sponsored terrorism.
It was a fact clear to everybody in America by about noon Eastern on September 11, 2001. We've now lost three critical years refusing to even look at the manual, because it was easier to drag out the board for another round of "Dungeons & Dragons" and we already had all the pieces anyway.
When we are hit by another attack we will regret wasting this time. But that attack will be as much the fault of Bush and Cheney as the first one was.
