Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 14, 2010

GT implies, dubiously, that the ISF is no less venal than the Afghan security forces we’re training. But so far, at least, he hasn’t pretended that our withdrawal from Iraq resembles our loss in Vietnam. Only a neo-lib would draw that strained parallel, and GT remains an old liberal with a sense of history.

The word “venal” is an adjective meaning “showing or motivated by susceptibility to bribery”. There is no indication that the ISF guy is soliciting a bribe. The Afghan guy on the other hand is a different story. If you had been paying attention to Joe, the Estimated Prophet, you would know that we didn’t lose in Vietnam, because it wasn’t a real war.

Gotta disagree with you Sheik, I know about declarations of congress & all that, but in Vietnam, real people died real deaths. That’s close enough to “real” for me & too close for them.

Sheik—-If he’s not asking for a bribe, the ISF guy must be talking about Estimated Profit.

(I’m not sure casual posters will recognize Joe. He seems to have erased all ties with GoComics. In any case, change “our loss in Vietnam” to “our quitting Vietnam.” That war is best defined for history by The Wall and—-on Doonesbury—-by NOLA’s citations two days ago.)

What does it TAKE to make someone understand it isn’t about money?

We withdrew from Vietnam with a peace treaty in place 2 years before the North broke the treaty and re-invaded the South. There were no US units in Vietnam (other than embassy staff) for the North to fight against. It was the double-dealing US politicians, who will never miss a chance to back-stab a soldier, who caused it with the refusal to provide adequate military support to the South, when the North was supplied by both Russia and Red China.

The US military was undefeated in Vietnam. I was there, fought the war, and was still in uniform when congress let the South fall without so much as a whimper, thereby turning their backs on their solemn promises to the South Vietnamese.

Someone’s daring to talk about “neo-libs” here?

Ahem. After we’ve flushed hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilet and had thousands of our brave soldiers die in the desert for NOTHING, put there by neo-con wannabe warriors to look for WMDs that Iraq NEVER HAD, what I want the right wing moonbats to do in this situation is have the decency to sit down and shut the hell up. We have had quite enough of YOU.

@Justice22 Not about the money????

What are you, some sort of NeoCommieLiberalFascistSocioMonarchist?

(Joke! Obviously.)

Amen, Ravenswing. Amen.

Funny, NebulousRikulau. Also correct. Justice22 is right in saying the comment wasn’t about money – it’s just a note of frustration.

I think that the commander is thinking of how much it would cost to hire local militia to man the checkpoint. Remember the protection payments to the thugs? That was what brought the peace and not the surge. Of course, since the ISF have taken over, those payments have since stopped.

Tell it, GT!!! The step-and-fetchits of 2010…….

Replying to yesterday’s comments:

Thanks, Freeholder, for that brief visit down Memory Lane. I am younger than Lew & you, but not by much. I turned 51 this year, so I recall the 1960s fairly well & the ‘70s VERY well. I recall gasoline at $0.35, and I distinctly recall when it shot up to over a dollar. It was right around when I was getting my driver’s license, and I resented that the price numbers were now turning faster than the gallons were. I cut my teeth on the heyday of MAD magazine and then moved on to Doonesbury, and I still recall the highwater mark of THE NEW REPUBLIC, with its early ‘70s “Nixon Watch”. I love explaining the 1970s to young folk.

As to Vietnam, I thank you, Lew, & Coot for your service to our country, the same as I would—and do—thank public-school teachers, Peace Corps workers, war resisters, and volunteers of all sorts. I am glad that I was spared the choice during the Vietnam years and after, but I exhort all to stand up for what they believe. Those who have supported Bush-Dick’s invasions should enlist. Supporting a war w/out enlisting (presuming that you are of age & health, of course) is disgraceful cowardice. I was against the Vietnam War & began speaking out against it from the age of ten. I have spoken out against all the U.S.A.’s military engagements since.

Lew, I mentioned your wife many months ago only to say that I found it unseemly for you to disparage her in these forums, which you had done more than once. I may have mentioned that she had a job, and you do not, but I never stated that she “worked to support” you. There are many kinds of support, and I would not presume on your arrangement with your wife, except to state that you should not disparage her here.

As to Henry David Thoreau, your remarks are incoherent and, as far as I can tell, inaccurate. There are many good books about Thoreau. I suggest that you read one. He did not “evate” his taxes, as you put it. He simply refused to pay a tax that supported the Mexican War. He was jailed for the matter. His jailing shocked his family, so his aunt paid the tax for him. He was forced out of jail & did not attend to the matter again, choosing, instead, to write brilliantly, to speak courageously, and to live nobly. He is a model for us all.

Freeholder, if you are correct about Harry Truman & Israel, then that is another argument against Truman’s presidency, since Israel was one of the great & continuingly bloody mistakes of the post-war era.

Drome, I respect Kant, but I do not see any sense to your terms “Islamism” & “demonic evil”. War has no moral purpose, because it causes pain, violence, & death, and humanity should use peaceful & rational means to solve its problems. Do you disagree?

Coot, thanks for your piddly stuff.

In re today’s cartoon:

Sheik, the Iraqi captain is implying that more money, more greasing of the palms, would make things happen. You can call it a bribe, or you can call it practicality. I do not dispute Drome’s use of “venal”.

Haw, the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. It is all right. Thanks for fighting. Remember: it was not a war of South vs. North. It was a war of a small, corrupt government propped up by the U.S. & the majority of the Vietnamese, who wanted unification & independence. Unification & independence almost always wins, eventually. I would love to see unification happen in Korea. That would immensely benefit the North Korean people.

Nebulous,, According to my right wing friends, Yes.

Dubya’s entire run for the presidency, the Iraqi War and execution of Hussein was all to avenge the attempt on H.W’s life. Andy Rooney on 60 minutes had it right when he appealed to the President to not invade Iraq.

Ponder: How many Christian Iraqis are in Iraq at the moment compared to before the war? ; How many Iraqis civilians have been killed since we “won” the war compared to Sadam’s reign of terror? ; How many terrorists are in Iraq now compared to before the war?

Ravenswing, I’m assuming that you’re not including in your diatribe all the neo-con Democrats (Clinton, Pelsosi, Kerry, Gore, Kennedy, etc.) etc. who cited the imminant threat posed by those weapons of mass destruction long before Bush got into office. It’s an impressive list:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1051684/posts

Anyway, don’t worry, the neo-cons (Reagan converts) are gone, and this is the era of the “Hope and Change” neo-lib. I agree it’s a confusing label (as was neo-con), especially since today’s “progressive” philosophy has more roots in 1967 than it does in the 21st century, which makes it largely irrelvant but at least it’s a good excuse to deliberately destroy the economy while spending boatloads of money on your friends.

Today’s war scenario is interesting, as our current president has pretty much continued Bush’s policiies in Iraq (and has even re-appointed his general), while escalating his stand in Afghanistan. Almost as many Americans have died in Afghanistan under 2 years of war-mongering neo-con Obama than during all the Bush years combined, and the silence from the left is deafening. Rhetoric aside, nothing could be a greater validation of Bush’s neo-con policies than having Obama continue and expand upon them.

Freeholder was surely wrong in this assertion, if we’re critiquing yesterdays stuff:

And Europe would be starving. ….And they provide 1/4 of the food for all Europe.

Sure they made the desert blossom but that’s simply not credible.

Now, when Britain did still need food shipments from the US, after the end of WWII, do you have any idea what happened? The British were trying to maintain the balance in Palestine (my uncle was in the Palestine police, with a Jewish and an Arab sergeant under him, they were all getting along amicably enough). The US wanted more Jews to be allowed entry into Palestine than the British felt could be absorbed without upsetting the balance. So, blackmail - you need food, you do as we say. Result, imbalance, rise of the terrorists (some of whom became Israeli leaders), King David’s hotel bombing etc etc.

RAVRNWING I am sure the Kurds and the Iranians would love to hear your views on WMD that Iraq never had” I’m sure many a grieving mother or wife will be comforted to know The innocent dead cry for revenge and you are a Holocaust denier. Go look at the graves. Go look at the crippled survivors. You need a smoking gun?

Brian I am happy for your noble beliefs for yourself and other conscientious objectors to war. Our military respects the right of a man who doesn’t believe in ANY war. It isn’t pick and choose, it’s any war. If the US were attacked and they were raping and killing your grandmother/mother/wife/daughter, By definition a conscientious objector would put his hands in his pocket, walk the other way whistling “Thy Will be Done.’ This is why they exempt members of such religions as the Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses. They don’t exempt too many others.

I was I proud when Cassius Clay said he was a conscientious objector because of Islam. He stated (swore) he didn’t believe in fighting. Hmmmm Changed his name to Mohamed Alli and became “The Greatest”.

Thank you for your opinion of Thoreau. Were Bonnie and Clyde your other childhood heroes. Let’s see YOU said he committed a crime. YOU said he did not take responsibility for this crime but relied on others (family) to bail him out’. YOU said he refused to meet his responsibilities, but rather hid out to write his spacy philosophy. I said, well at least the Peace, Love, and Dope crowd in the 60’s liked him.Excuse me, I said drug, not dope, that cool “mind expanding” substances that caused so many psychological problems. Do you use them? Peace, Man.

War has no moral purpose, because it causes pain, violence, & death, and humanity should use peaceful & rational means to solve its problems.

Of course. ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’. So said Churchill, so surely says any rational person. When faced with a Hitler, the rational and moral stance becomes ‘we will fight them on the beaches….we will never surrender’.

The catch is that the rights and wrongs, Good Guys and Bad Guys are rarely as clearcut as WW2.

@Brian

Who would be so politically incorrect as to disagree with your banal proposition that “humanity should use peaceful & rational means to solve its problems”?

It’s that “should” that makes me think you live in the never-never land of the neo-libs (neo-cons have their own, contrasting dream world).

From the age of ten, you say, you’ve been philosophically preoccupied with the world of “should.” That’s why you’re so ready to dismiss the practical world of actual, historical experience.

Kant, who founded modern liberalism, also warned against the tendency of the liberal mindset to deny evil (this denial leads to the moral confusion that I called “demonism’). A Kantian liberal who ignores historical evil because it’s “irrational” will soon learn to dismiss all the “irrational” values associated with war, such as obedience, self-sacrifice and courageous endurance.

Instead of averting your eyes from irrational reality, you and the neo-libs “should” (!) ponder Hegel’s dictum that “war is the slaughterbench of history.”

Even during President Bush’s years, the casualty rate in Afghanistan was higher than in Iraq when taking into consideration the number of troops involved. (You had a greater opportunity of becoming a casualty in Afghanistan than in Iraq if you were deployed there.) Remember that we gave Iraq WMD to use against the Iranians. HUH?

Very true, Grimma. It’s especially difficult to be objective or find answers to the right and wrong question when the wrongs of war itself are still sensitive even decades later. Perspective requires unnatural effort.

The long-range lens of history is sharper than our personal fish-eyed close-up, but even so I suspect that there are those who feel that the war and battle of Tours was meaningless, or even that of Thermopylae, loss though it was. Even the US Civil War was considered meaningless to many of the time, and if not for Gettysburg the anti-war movement would have likely prevailed, and the history of the world and all the individuals within it will have changed.

Were the outcomes worth the bloodiest chapter in US history? Are they ever? Or, as in medicine, does there just come a time when all the reasoning, therapies, and carefully balanced non-invasive interventions fall short and the surgeon’s bloody knife is required to remove the cancers? Is it the knife who is the enemy, or is it the cancer?

I believe the point GT is making is that the Afghans don’t care about Afghanistan. They only care about their tribe and money. And not necessarily in that order.

Nemesys, you should try to gather quotes from a reliable source. You should also read them before you post the link. Many of them do NOT state, as Bush-Dick stated, that Saddam Hussein HAD weapons of mass destruction. Others are based on the faulty, cherry-picked spy reports that Bush-Dick used to lie to congress & to us in order to invade a harmless country.

As to the reaction toward President Obama’s continuation of Bush-Dick’s occupations: Many on the left & right are against it, but few have a better proposal. Bush-Dick, being one of our history’s worst presidents (a claim that you have never denied), left Obama with HUGE MESSES. In eighteen months, he has tried to clean them, but some will just take longer. At least, Obama has set dates for beginning to end the occupations. With Bush-Dick or his follower, Senator McCain, we would still be in never-ending fiascos. If you have better solutions for cleaning up Bush-dick’s messes, then I would love to read them.

Lew, you cannot argue against Ravenswing’s accurate claim that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction in 2002, so instead you invoke the Holocaust? Thanks for supporting, with your hysteria, Ravenswing.

Moreover, again, in writing to me, you invoke your fantasy of raping grandmothers. Yesterday, you proposed that you wanted to be my lover. Today, you bring back your Rape of Grandma fantasy. Please keep your lusts to yourself. They add nothing to your comment. Your need to see a grandmother raped hardly justifies enlisting in the Vietnam War.

Your mention of Muhammad Ali is irrelevant. He refused to join the military. You hardly equate boxing with war, do you?

As for Henry David Thoreau, he took responsibility for his crime. He was jailed. He did not see that the refusal to pay for an imperialistic war to get more slave territory was a crime, however. You really should read about him & read his work. He was a great thinker & a brilliant writer.

Thanks, Grimma. I am glad that we agree.

Drome, I am glad that you agree with me, too. I hope that you will continue to work for peace & rationality and that you will dispose of vague, meaningless labels as “demonism”. If you want to define “demonism”, then I would be happy to continue to discuss with you.

I must work. I may get back this evening, but I may go dancing, instead. In the meantime, have a good July 14th, all. Where I sit, in the St. Louis suburbs, the air temperature is quite high & the air is sticky, but I refuse to go in quite yet. Today, by the way, is the 221st anniversary of Bastille Day along with being the 176th birthday of James Whistler, the 92nd birthday of Ingmar Bergman, and the 98th birthday of Northrop Frye—worthy creators & thinkers.

@hawgowar: Haha, yeah, and remember the time we colonized Mars, but then got bored and left? Good times.

pirate, you have to admit that those guys playing soccer were smart enough not to be around when that bomb went off at the gate.

To your point, when you live in small communities surrounded by huge mountains, hostile terrain, and bad guys, it’s easy enough to understand the tribal interests over that of the state. Meanwhile in our own country, we’ve created our own “tribal special interests” that supercede the interests of our nation, but without the valid reasons the Afghanistans have.

However, the depiction of hands out in order to enable basic government functions can be universally applied in either country. In Afghanstan, they call it “greasing the palm”. In the US, we call it “The Stimulus Package”.

A deal, Brian. I’ll desist from using “demonism” and “moral confusion” for neo-libs who dance away from reality if you’ll stop reducing history to a list of neatly ordered, selective dates.

BrianCrook, you’re simply wrong. Many of those quotes occured well before Bush went into office, so blaming him (I understand that it’s part of the disease) implies time travel on GWB’s part. Cheney was good, but not THAT good. Those that we delivered after Bush went into office speak to the same data., and this was the Democratic position for years… why blame Bush again when Clinton told them otherwise during his whole second term? This wasn’t anything new. A simple example:

“The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow.” – Bill Clinton in 1998

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0f5u_0ytUs

Please clarify - are you saying that Clinton didn’t say it, or that he doesn’t state that Iraq has WMD’s, or that Bush/Cheney fed him the lie? Please get back to me.

By the way, you’d have more credibility dismissing the source if you could discredit the actual quotes… they’re valid, so you can’t. You wasted a perfectly good straw man for nothing.

It’s not surprising that you see Obama’s public announcements of withdrawal timetables as a positlve. I wonder if the troops on the ground do? Not that it matters… he simply made those announcements to make people like you happy, when all the rest of us understand that they’re about as truthful as his promise to close Club Gitmo within a year. Guess what? We’re still in a never-ending fiasco, and your feelings against Bush don’t make that any less true. I’m no McCain supporter, but at least he was truthful about it, which is probably why you don’t like him either.

If I recall correctly, B-C used the THREAT of war to get the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq. Maybe a bit of questionable policy, but it worked and nobody got hurt THEN.

But then the inspectors found nothing and B-C used their ‘Superior Intelligence’ and the evidence of missing paperwork as their excuse to actually invade.

That’s where I have the problem. Why not use that ‘Intelligence’ to help the weapons inspectors? Other than the fact that if they still found nothing then there would have been no reason to invade.

And mostly, why not finish securing Afghanistan BEFORE going and invading somewhere else?!!

Pay for what you get or get what you play for…something.

Chuck Colson would tell you about “Just Wars” and quote Augustine who he’d never follow in some of his other doctrines, but THIS one…Chuck recently said we shouldn’t be in Afghan. as “nation builders” since the country is historically anti-centralist and we are trying to make a centralist government out of it. (Nation building was all right in Iraq, a country with as many divisions which was only held together by a strong man dictator and his oppressive regime, I guess because he had forced centralism on them to begin with. ) A “just War” has to be to give power to the people as they were when we invaded.

Actually, our “Just War” was supposed to get BIN LADEN who ACTUALLY ATTACKED US. Instead, we sprayed billions in borrowed revenue, bankrupted any moral revenue we had with our allies and FAILED miserably. I don’t care how many countries we “nation build” be haven’t gotten the real bad guy and, thanks to the idiocy of the Bush AND Obama administrations, we likely NEVER WILL.! (How come This comic place has yet to recognize the spelling of our PRESIDENT’S NAME? It’s been nearly 2 YEARS!!!!)

Lew, You forgot Mormons and Bahai as COs. And many have served in the med corps over the years with real unarmed bravery. Please don’t pretend that not fighting the war doesn’t mean not supporting those who do or the country.

On neo-liberalism:

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376

@Nebulous

Anybody choosing a cartoon forum to discuss past events will automatically be suspected of trying to rewrite history. GT’s example brings out the political rhetorician in many of his commenters.

That being understood, I’ll join you in this clownish little game of reconstructing America’s motives for invading Iraq. (The game has been played by some pretty big guns from both ends of the political spectrum, including Senators Kerry and Clinton who both sought to justify their having approved an invasion they later deplored.)

Bush and Cheney, with the help of evidence supplied by Tony Blair, convinced even the skeptical Colin Powell that Saddam Hussein had enough uranium and toxic chemicals to “assemble a bomb in 45 minutes,” as Blair so graphically put it.

These hypothetical WMDs, however, were not—-as many like to pretend—-the true “casus belli” (justification of war). The “casus belli” was stated in the resolution that Bush got from the U.N. after addressing them in Sept. 2002. The resolution empowered us to attack Saddam if he failed to permit thorough inspections.

Here’s where historical explanation gets murky. On the one side are the neo-cons who argue that Saddam had to be removed because sooner or later he would provide Islamist terrorists with the means for another attack like 9/11—-a success that Saddam gloated over as if it had been his own doing.

On the other side, the neo-libs (especially those who, like Illinois Senator Obama, had argued against the U.N. resolution) insisted that Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. They said that by leaving al-Qaeda free in Afghanistan and shifting our main effort to Iraq, we were “taking our eye off the ball.”

As one might expect, both neo-parties missed and continue to miss the historical truth, which was too complex to be reduced to WMDs and belligerent tyrants (or vice-presidents). I don’t pretend to know the truth myself, but I think I know better than either neo-group does where to look for it.

We attacked Saddam because his army was the only vulnerable member of the trinity or “axis of evil” (Bush’s label for Iran, North Korea, and Iraq) that posed a threat to the “pax Americana” which, at the time, was holding our late-20th-century world together in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

9/11 proved that we were vulnerable. Our attacker, Osama bin Laden, was of course not one of the evil trinity. But he was an ARAB Islamist, and that was enough to justify avenging 9/11 upon Iraq, the only Arab military power.

In refusing to allow humiliating inspections, Saddam dug his own grave. Although not himself an Islamist (bin Laden despised him for a heretic), Saddam enjoyed his hegemony as caliph or sultan of the Arab world. He very likely believed his scientists DID have WMDs hidden somewhere among the stockpile of arms that, according to one of our generals, is the largest the world has ever known (clearing Iraq of weapons at the rate of 10,000 per day would take at least fifty years).

In this sense, then, the neo-libs can argue that we invaded Iraq out of paranoia exacerbated by the delusions of an Arab megalomaniac. At the same time, the neo-cons can plausibly argue that the foe that wounded us on 9/11 and declared war on us—-just like Pearl Harbor sixty years before—-was not the lone renegade bin Laden but the chief Arab military power that backed his Islamism.

(This last part of the neo-con argument was false. The power that backed Islamism was Saudi Arabia, who paid al Qaeda to divert its hostility from the tyrannical House of Saud to the U.S. But Bush-Cheney chose to protect visiting Arabs from America’s wrath after 9/11, instead of holding them accountable as the administration ought to have done. B-C probably calculated that Americans would be unwilling to forgo their gasoline in order to avenge 9/11.)

I offer this imperfect historical account with the guarantee that it’s no more foolish than the stories you’ll hear from the neo-groups.

Wow, I remember way back in the old days, when these comments were actually used to talk about the comic strip.

“all the neo-con Democrats (Clinton, Pelsosi, Kerry, Gore, Kennedy, etc.) ” ?????

The Earth is flat and moon is made of green cheese.

Or expensive socialist cheese.

SuperGriz,

I think Nemesys is trying to say that tne neo-cons, just like their opposites the neo-libs, took over certain policies from Reagan democrats—-who, as their name implies, had already compromised liberalism in an economically conservative direction.