[Vision2020] Re: Cope with a diversity of political views.....

[Andreas Schou]

> As far as the cold war is concerned.....  "WE" did not win it, Andrea.
> Conservatives won it in spite of the efforts of your ilk who aided the
> Soviets at every turn for over half a century.

You mean conservatives like Douglas McArthur, who nearly ignited a
nuclear war with China after gross insubordination against Truman? Or
do you mean conservatives like Kissinger and McNamara, whose idiotic
embrace of communist propaganda about its own unstoppable advance led
to a disastrous war in Southeast Asia? Or do you mean conservatives
like Gen. Curtis LeMay and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, whose belief that a
nuclear war could be "won" nearly dragged us into global nuclear
holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis? Or do you mean Paul Nitze's
"Team B," who drew us into a costly arms race with the Soviets by
overestimating Soviet missile capability by a factor of three?

Or do you not know what you're talking about, as usual?

> Let's not rewrite history my
> dear.  It was not openness that caused the implosion of the Soviet Union,
> but a massive expenditure on arms which the Soviets simply did not have the
> resources to counter.  If you wish to celebrate the fall of the Soviet
> Union, you might start by thanking the Lord for Ronald Reagan.  (I know that
> will be tough.  Just envision him as Jerry Garcia)

The Soviet command economy was massively inefficient, but that wasn't
the biggest problem with it, since the absolute control of the
government over the economy allowed the government to chain the
economy's output to their foreign policy. That is, the Soviets could
use their economy to produce whatever material output their foreign
policy needed. That's the brittle strength of command economies: you
can turn out much more of what you want /right now/, and let the other
outputs of your economy (products for domestic consumption, for
instance) be ignored. The biggest problem is that, in any system where
every part is tied to every other part, there's no predicting the
outcomes of your economic decisions. The entire system is clogged with
bizarre outcomes (bread less expensive per pound than wheat), massive
corruption feeds off of idiot inefficiencies, and small mistakes can,
and eventually do, run your national economy into the ground.

We had much more money to buy weapons with than the Soviets because we
had a better, more open economic system. But that doesn't really
matter. We had enough weapons, in 1969, to maintain the principle of
MAD. If there were a nuclear war, both ourselves and the Soviets
(lunatics like Doug McArthur and Ed Teller notwithstanding) understood
that there would functionally be no United States or Soviet Union to
continue it. Past the point where you hit MAD, there is no reason --
none whatsoever -- to continue to purchase weapons, unless you believe
that the Soviet Union was going to be coerced into a less belligerent
foreign policy by our newly-added capacity to nuke Eritrea flat.

It's not just the number of widgets we could buy that was an
advantage: it was the openness of our society. While our military and
foreign-policy thinking has always been poisoned with people who start
with a theory and invent evidence to justify it (see also: "Domino
Theory," "Plan for a New American Century"), Americans have always
resisted that sort of hidebound ideological conformity, and -- when we
have punished deviance from it -- it's always been with temporary
exile from the halls of power, not execution and forced labor. Until
the government recently decided that policy could overwrite reality on
issues like the effectiveness of abstinence education and human
influence on global warming, we didn't interfere with private science,
either.

I'm willing to buy that Reagan's arms buildup hastened the end of the
Soviet Union, because the Russians irrationally decided that they had
to enter into an arms race with us to beat a phantom "Star Wars"
initiative. That's the Soviets' idiocy, not our genius: long before
Reagan was President, we were both standing waist-deep in gasoline,
them with three matches and us with five.

The Soviets' fate was already sealed by the beginning of the 1980s:
they were, and always had been, a paper tiger. It had an economy that
didn't work driven by a rigid ideology that couldn't fix its mistakes.
And we were better. America was simply a more open, better-functioning
nation than the Soviet Union, and we liberals always believed that.
Whomever filled that chair in the Oval Office in 1980, there wouldn't
be a Soviet Union in 2006.

> As for torture:  You say that we made it through WW11 without any cases of
> torture.  Andrea, please!  We carpet bombed cities in Germany into rubble!
> We dropped the A-bomb on 2 cities resulting in the death of thousands of
> innocents!

We did.

In 1949, we signed the additional protocols of the Geneva Convention,
banning as a matter of course many of the things we had done in World
War II. Previously, in 1929, we had signed and implemented the Third
Geneva Convention, making it the policy of the United States military
that we would not mistreat prisoners of war. With limited exceptions,
none reflected in the official policy of our military, we did not.

If you can find any example of us using torture, or confessions
obtained through coercive investigation, as part of World War II -- a
period which has been more thoroughly studied in retrospect than
anything we are aware of today -- I'd be quite interested.

> Modern warfare involves FAR FEWER examples of collateral damage
> than in past conflicts.  Plus, there is NO EVIDENCE that such activities in
> Iraq were at any time officially sanctioned or anything other than the out
> of control actions of a few renegades.

We have always tried to, or always at least pretended to try to make
progress in making humanity's least humane practive more humane. Since
2000, we have abandoned even the pretense.

Yesterday, the DOD made changes to the Army Field Manual to edit out
references to the third Geneva Convention, which governs permissible
conduct toward prisoners of war. It specifically edited out references
to "inhumane or degrading treatment" of prisoners of war. This does
not simply allow the US military the discretion to treat detainees
inhumanely or degrade them: it allows the individual soldier, unless
ordered otherwise by his commanding officer, to treat detainees in an
inhumane or degrading manner.

At Guantanamo Bay, interrogators' own documents record chaining a
detainee to the floor of a lightless, air-conditioned cell in a stress
position, repeatedly dousing him with water, and leaving him there
while he pissed and shit himself for forty-eight hours. Rumsfeld
personally approved the use of waterboarding, stress positions,
idolation, extremes of hot and  cold,  and threats of murder toward
third parties. This is not the "liberal media" that is reporting this.
These are primary documents.

In 2002, the President commissioned a memo from the Office of Legal
Council defining the boundaries of interrogation tactics. The memo
argued that to be considered torture, the standard is that the
interrogator himself must intend to cause physical pain equal to that
of organ failure, or cause psychological trauma over the period of
months or years, and that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment"
was specifically *not* torture. The memo was publically disavowed in
2004. The memo that superceded it ended with these words: "[w]hile we
have identified various disagreements with the August 2002 Memorandum,
we have reviewed this Office's prior opinions addressing issues
involving treatment of detainees and do not believe that any of their
conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this
memorandum."

President Bush himself threatened to veto a law clarifying US policy
toward torture. When he did sign it, he included a signing statement
stating that he would interpret it with an eye toward his inherent
powers as Commander in Chief. When taking in conjunction with what
Bush believes is his inherent right as Commander in Chief to set aside
statutes as he sees fit (see also: Bush ignoring the FISA court), I
can see no other meaning to this statement than that the President
intends to set it aside whenever, and however, he pleases. This does
not tell me that he intends to. This does not tell me that Bush is an
active participant in the torture of detainees, or has ordered
torture, simply that he condones torture committed by US troops.

In the case of torture in particular, there is no question that our
government has, while not condoning the worst excesses of Abu Ghraib,
at least created an attitude of moral confusion in our military. While
the military's complicity in the Haditha massacre appears to be
restricted to an after-the-fact cover-up of events, Abu Ghraib can be
laid directly at the feet of the policies our President has authorized
in the pursuit of the War on Terror.

We did this. We authorized torture.

> I most certainly DO have sufficient standing to call your patriotism into
> question, Andrea, and I DO!  While you may not be a willful conspirator,
> your bumbling post indicates that you certainly qualify as a useful idiot.

Useful idiot -- useful to whom? Is al-Qaida reading Vision 2020, ready
to spring if only one more liberal's faith in the infallability of his
country's actions falters? Am I privy to information that the
government does not want disclosed? And, like I asked, what definition
of "traitor" is not punishable by death, Tony?

-- ACS