I know… Steve get on it and add some new features!!!!

Every once in a while I look into a preview button. Since I know nothing of Java (I’ll crack that book open someday, so swears Doom), I am reduced to trawling the Internets for one, and I ain’t found one that works with my platform yet.

Now the reason I bring this up, is that there is no proxy force, or really even agreed upon laws when it come to nations. I wish there were. So any action taken against another nation ends up being done by individuals instead of a sanctioned force. And what passed for sanctioning is the number of nations taking part, as opposed to a standing force that enforces the laws regardless of individual nations interests.

However, it didn’t stop in Afghanistan and Iraq’s a different story. Which I think speaks to the quote saying this administration is trigger happy and takes pride in it (not exactly what it said, but you get the point). Even if we win and the world is better off it doesn’t mean we went in for the right reasons (as has been stated by you earlier).

I can’t provide you specifics of how long I would wait or what specifically would have to happen for war to have been inevitable. I don’t know enough, but I don’t get the feeling all possible options were exhausted to avoid the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

I am curious as to the amount of time that would have had to have passed, and the level of concessions you would offer before you felt it became neccessary?

It was and they are. Just because a war in Afghanistan may have been justifiable does not mean it was necessary. This administration seems a little too anxious to go to war because it’s a sexy show of strength. I think that’s what the quote was getting at. Republicans can’t run their campaigns saying 3,000 Americans were killed and we retaliated with some of the meanest trade sanctions the world has ever seen.

But I agree with what your saying. I just felt like that quote was being put up to say . See here is another way that this Administration are failures…..

St00pid lack of a preview button.

North Korea comes to mind. If/when we deal with the situation there, here we are with an impossible government making demands that may very well lead us to war. Foreign Policy, in this case, seems to be failing. The US (along with many other nations) has made several attempts to make it work…unfortunately due to our own national interests, there are certain demands we cannot back down from…and North Korea being run by a crazy man means they won’t back down from their own. So war may be the outcome. Is it N. Korea’s failure or the US’s failure? Does it matter? Foreign Policy failed and war may very well be the result.

At the end of the war, the victor gets to dictate who was wrong at the onset…but foreign policy failed to prevent the war. Therefore, War is the result of foreign policy failing.

Now that I think about it, I don’t this particular quote is all that insightful. What the fuck, Steve? You going to post something from Lewis Lapham next?

Yes, everyone pays a price for foreign policy failure. But absolutely it matters whos policy failed. If you cannot have good faith negotitions if one or both sides are unwilling to move. And on somethings which are sometimes moral absolutes, one side cannot move no matter where the other side will meet them. But that doesn’t make the absolutist wrong. Abolitionist would never be happy with any compromise that left slavery legal, does that make them wrong or failures for having the position?

But what would be the price be if we had nothing? In the case of Chamberlain wasn’t the price paid anyway, and that only the different outcome would have allowed one side to bear the the full burden (IE Britain surrendor completely and allow the Germans to take them over). In the case of Afghanistan, no one but Al Qaeda would have paid a price if the Taliban had agreed to hand them over.

I kind of feel that the foreign policy failed arguement is not fair, because it implies that there was some alternative that would achieved a desired state and avoided the conflict. I think there are some things that can only be reached through a price of blood. I am not saying these cases are examples of them, but there are throughout history examples of this.

But yeah. Foreign Policy can fail on either side of the equation. Chamberlain made deals with Hitler until war happened anyway. No amount of foreign policy could have stopped that war…was it Britain’s failure or Germany’s failure. I don’t think it matters as much, since I think we can both agree that in that case, foreign policy failed, right?

So by extension, any war is a result of foreign policy’s failure. And going a bit further, I think Steve and I are both thinking that, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US bears the price of that failure. Regardless of who failed, we’re still at war, no?

We gave the Taliban 4 weeks to hand over Osama Bin Laden and others. I am not sure how long you negiotate with people on things like that. We weren’t discussing water rights. We wanted a man who was responsible in some form for 3000 murders in our country.

Now if you want to talk about the wars, again this is a seperate arguement. You can absolutely judge those things based on the outcome. However, by your defintion everything is a failure until the point in time that it isn’t. The Civil War was failure until the Union won. WW2 was a failure until D-Day.

I will reserve my judgement of failure and success untilwe are no longer attempting the mission.

So where are the successes? That’s all I’m asking. I judge, with my limited knowledge, Afghanistan and Iraq as failures. Much like I think Vietnam was a failure. We went to war to accomplish some sort of task and we have not achieved them….and in the case of Iraq, we seem further away from a stable Middle East than we were five years ago.

As for the ends validates the means, like anything else, it’s shades of gray. I’m not against war, but I do see it as a failure of foreign policy. On occasion, with every peaceful avenue exhausted, a country has got to do something. I don’t think the invasion of Afghanistan was entirely necessary, nor was I against it based on the goals the adminstration had presented to me. We’ve yet to achieve any of them, so I see the war as a failure. Is that clear?