Lost Posts from "War: Triumph or Folly" thread

[Jnyusa]

Friends, yov saved the lost posts before they disappeared and has sent them to me in a text file. I don't know if this will work or not ... and I'm not sure quite how to set it up ... but I thought I would create a thread for the posts from each particular thread, in the forum where it belongs, and just past up the text of what people had posted. You can copy it and restore quote functions, etc., and repost it to the thread if you wish.

The posts will no longer be in order, but you can always put a little note at the top that it is reposted from previous, and add new quote functions if you think that will help, and we'll be able to figure out the sense of it. Jn
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solicitr

Quote:
Freedom of every person to worship in his own way


I'm afraid that for many people, perhaps most worldwide, and certainly most historically, what they want is "freedom of every person to worship MY way." It's a bitter pill that the Karzai gov't in Afghanistan, which owes its very existence to Western troops running off the Taliban, nonetheless considers apostasy from Islam to be a capital crime.

Quote:
I think that the root of neoconservatism is the belief that We Are Right in
all circumstances, and must spread our Rightness to the rest of the
Uncultured World. I don't see it so much as a popularity complex.


It's a complex complex. They want(ed) to make friends at gunpoint- or rather to be 'welcomed as liberators.' You're correct in that it's basically a
"Might for Right" strategy- but it's informed by fuzzy memories of Paris '44 and the Marshall Plan, and the sort of smugness (derived from
neoconservatism's liberal roots) that Our Way is just self-evidently Best,
and who could disagree?

(Another echo of the neocons' JFK and LBJ-administration ancestry was the ridiculous strategy of launching the invasion on the cheap, with minimum force, which has led to failure at a far higher cost than a reasonable chance of success at lower cost, had Bush listened to Shinsheki and the Powell Doctrine. You can't drive a nail by pushing on it: an essential axiom of military science.)