But he invaded Iraq, which makes him a criminal in your book...High command and all...Hermit wrote:The person you refer to as "some brigade commander" was in fact a four star general who in charge of the US activities in Iraq by virtue of being the commander of United States Central Command from 7 July 2003 to 16 March 2007. He had planned to retire in 2006, but at the urging of Donald Rumsfeld postponed his retirement for about a year. That indicates a few things: He was presumably competent at what he was doing. He was well connected. The people he knew trusted him. So he'd have been privy to a lot of information the movers and shakers tried to prevent from becoming public knowledge. So, yes, I'd give his opinion more credence than yours or Galaxian's.piscator wrote:Not only are they rank arguments from specious authority, but Alan Greenspan and some brigade commander are not in a position to even make those arguments. (They're not even arguments as much as off-the-cuff opinions.)
Not that I disagree with him, but his off the cuff sentence filtered through a cub journalist looking to slant liberal is not authoritative.
Like the general, foreign policy and strategy not his area of expertise, or what he was paid to do. Moreover, "The Fed" is not a government agency, and he would be no more privy to goings on in the Oval Office than Norman Swartzkopff.Similarly, but coming from a more purely financial angle, Alan Greenspan would have been privy to inside knowledge about the motivations and actions by the powers that be by virtue of having been the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 that you or I have no first hand knowledge of.
That's where you fucked up. They're not privy to foreign policy strategy, and you shouldn't make out like they are.Yes, both were men with authority, but I do not defer to their opinions because of their authority as such, but on grounds of their privileged position in regard to how much and what kind of information they had access to.
But they were All ok with it...And it's only a "misadventure" from the perspective of the Short Game (and your vapid political opportunism).If the rest of your post is supposed to be a rebuttal of the assertion that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, please let me know how so. Personally, I would love to see the end of all feudal, theocratic and dictatorial governments, by military means if necessary, but let's not kid ourselves about why Iraq was invaded. And let's face the fact that the cure turned out to be a lot worse than the disease - which "the Coalition of the Willing" was warned about several times before entering into that particular misadventure.piscator wrote:Moreover, like you say, oil has been a valid reason to kill lots of would-be middlemen for a long time. ...
My remarks were meant to point out a few things a gentleman of leisure like yourself isn't comfortable admitting. You sit over your polystyrene American laqptop and hurl "It was for oil!!", like that's supposed to be some sort of insult.
It's not. It's part of the unvarnished truth, just like the terms of the Gulf War cease fire agreement (and Korean cease fire too).
Tsk tsk at America all you want, from the high peanut gallery of political opportunism. We'll do what we perceive as our best interests, and you'll continue to reap the benefits when it comes time to ship your wool to market.
BTW, your Diggers will be right beside us the whole time. You're not all a bunch of effete parlor pinks out to impose your personal peacetime morality on the geopolitical schoolyard...
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