For the poster formerly known as Doberman

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Schmika @ Dec 8 2006, 05:38 PM) [snapback]359576[/snapback]</div>

What on earth is YMMV? (I can't stand all this webspeak - it's an antique idea, I know, but I still wish people who are attempting to communicate would make a TINY effort to be clear and stop trying to be clever but only winding up opaque).

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Schmika @ Dec 8 2006, 05:38 PM) [snapback]359576[/snapback]</div>

Karl, I can't resist: How did Jesus alter history? Two thousand years after his (alleged) existence, mankind still wreaks horrific obscenities against his fellows, still refuses to universally acknowledge "one true god", is still just as much captive to his biological instincts. As far as I know, Jesus didn't even found a religion - it was latter day believers in the legend of Jesus who established the christian sects. How was history shifted in any degree whatsoever two thousand years ago by this man, if he existed? Huge swaths of mankind even today have never heard of the guy, and large swaths who have heard of him disregard him as a myth.

Meanwhile, there is one man who alone catalyzed the whole of direction of modern physics: Einstein. Doubtless mankind would have eventually produced a mind capable of imagining relativity theory from nothing, but there's no denying that that single mind made an ENORMOUS shift in our history: it recast our fundamental understanding of nature.

Mark Baird
Alameda CA

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Schmika @ Dec 8 2006, 05:38 PM) [snapback]359576[/snapback]</div>

On the contrary. Proof that the FSM is the one true god has been posted many times, in many forms right here on PC. And if the FSM is the one true god, then Jesus is just a guy. QED.

 

Then there's the whole classic time travel paradox. If you went back in time an killed Hitler when he was little, he wouldn't have grown up to be the Hitler we all know and love. But if he never grew up to do that, you wouldn't know to travel back in time to kill him, so he WOULD have grown up, etc.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hitler @ Dec 8 2006, 09:16 PM) [snapback]359601[/snapback]</div>

I found this stray tonight.

For some reason I thought it might be yours.

If this one is not yours, then maybe one of these might be..

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Stev0 @ Dec 8 2006, 11:54 AM) [snapback]359437[/snapback]</div>

Well, he really "stole" power rather than getting it legitimately. But there is a school of thought that people tend towards strong leaders and easy scapegoats when times are tough and they feel down trodden. And the conventional wisdom I've always heard is that Germany felt down trodden due to the demands placed on them after the first World War.

So the goal with WWII was unconditional surrender which led to complete devastation of the country and a long occupation period with insurgents still fighting us. How long did we stay there? Oh yeah, at least 40 years; in fact we're still there. But we killed many of the Nazis, then we hunted them down and killed or jailed the rest. That's how we dealt with the underlying "cause".

 

Cancer not cured:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Dec 9 2006, 01:52 AM) [snapback]359637[/snapback]</div>

fshagan,

I think you should win the anti-Hitler award for unconsciously taking a thread back on topic. This is precisely the sort of thing that was being discussed in the Another Kind of Pearl Harbor thread before dbermanmd turned it into a killing Hitler fest and we tried to divert that discussion into this thread.

 

Man cant you just feeeeeeeeeel the love for our posters here on PC

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Delta Flyer @ Dec 8 2006, 08:42 PM) [snapback]359617[/snapback]</div>

Which just goes to show that the liklihood of something appearing on the internet is directly proportional to how ridiculous it is. Cats that look like Hitler, indeed!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dbermanmd @ Dec 8 2006, 11:40 AM) [snapback]359424[/snapback]</div>

I hate non-sequators too!

The least we could do is to follow the rules of sequating, as the good doctor has laid them out for so long. The first is to follow the maxim that "the truth will set you free." Berman follows this religiously, as should we all. And never, EVER! call somebody a name. Follow his lead of only a day or so ago when he bravely resisted the urge to call somebody a "liar" who, at worst, might have made a simple mistake. (But he retains the option, he reminds us.) Such restraint!

But I digress and probably am guilty of non-sequating too. I just think we should try hard to stay on the good side of a guy who publicly advocated the nuking of California by North Korea because we were weak in backing Star Wars. Let sleeping Dobermans lie, I say, instead of running around shouting, "who let the dog out?" It'll bite you in the end.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Dec 9 2006, 12:52 AM) [snapback]359637[/snapback]</div>

We weren't there 40 years in case any Nazis suddenly sprang into power again; we were there because Germany is closer to the Russkies than the U.S. is. Now that the cold war is over, we're still there because... oh, I don't know. Tradition?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MegansPrius @ Dec 9 2006, 08:09 AM) [snapback]359714[/snapback]</div>

Just trying to put things in a context where my comments wouldn't get misconstrued as support for Nazis. I've been accused of similar things here ...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Stev0 @ Dec 9 2006, 10:48 AM) [snapback]359783[/snapback]</div>

True, for the majority of that time we were there because of the godless communists. "Strategic interests" is the term, right? I think we had rooted out the German resistance within 10 years.

I always considered our coming 40-year stay in Afghanistan and Iraq to be similar to that; because the Saudi's are friendly rulers of a very unfriendly people, the more westernized Iraqis would be a much better ally in the region. Of course, we haven't quelled the uprisings in Iraq, and there is still some very serious questions about whether a people so enamored of sectarian violence would embrace democracy as "quickly" as the Germans who ... how did you put it ... were in "... an ugly enough mood that they put someone like him in power in the first place."

Why do you think the Germans so quickly adapted to representative democracy? Do you think the Iraqis are incapable of it? "Learning from history" is complicated, because in reality no two situations are the same.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Dec 9 2006, 03:00 PM) [snapback]359788[/snapback]</div>

I think, as I was trying to argue in the earlier thread, that our level of committment was wholly different. Going into Iraq with so few troops at the beginning I think is the essential mistake that has turned an opportunity to a disaster. That we have maintained this inadequate troop level, which is totally insufficient to protect the Iraqi population, has, in my mind, really said to the insurgents that we aren't serious. The Iraqis haven't had a chance to consider democracy. The order has never existed.

But again, this goes back to the way we got into the war. We were lied to about the reason (WMD), lied to about the difficulty (it will be easy), the cost (paid for by oil), and the duration.

There's an interesting discussion of troop levels at http://www.node707.com/archives/000963.shtml

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MegansPrius @ Dec 9 2006, 12:51 PM) [snapback]359827[/snapback]</div>

I think the "war" part was "easy" ... we overran Baghdad in record time. Most of us expected up to 25,000 American soldiers killed in the "Battle of Baghdad", but we had relatively few casualties. The difficulty came from not treating the occupation like an occupation.

If we had simply turned and withdrawn without regard to the Iraqi people, we could have declared a great military victory. In that scenario, the Shia majority would have quickly risen up with the help of Iran, and taken over, and Iraq as a client state of Iran would not have helped us in the future. Back to the status quo. But staying and trying to build a democracy is not an easy thing to do. I thought it would take 10 years, and the American people would be able to stomach only about 5 years. I was wrong. The American people can not stomach it any longer, and its been only 3 years.

"Nation building" rarely works. We look at Japan and Germany as successes, but in those cases the countries were completely devastated after long, hard-fought wars, and in the case of Germany, we can at least say that they had shared Western values that helped. The occupation in both countries was done with an "iron fist", something that I don't think our current sensibilities would allow us to do. Japan is really the miracle, because they were a culture without any history of democratic rule, and yet today they are one of the world's strongest constitutional monarchies.

The military did their jobs, but the terrorists know we have little patience. We will tire and walk away, even if it means millions of Iraqis are massacred. We will hand them over to the Shia and Sunni in Iran and Syria, and let them destroy the country, its culture and its people. And the terrorists will be back, when we have complained enough about having to stand in line at the airport screening, and protested enough that someone named Khalid Muhammad is "singled out" for extra questioning. And then they will strike again, and many more innocent men, women and children will die. They are patient. But we are not.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Dec 9 2006, 02:00 PM) [snapback]359788[/snapback]</div>

We've tried that before. The Shah of Iran LOVED the U.S. (and vice-versa). Unfortunately, since the people of Iran thought (correctly) he was placed there by the U.S., when he went away... well, we all know the rest of the story.

Iraq, even if they stabilize to our liking, will be the exact same powerderkeg. The Germans like us; if we had left in the early 90s they still would have liked us. Iraqis can't stand us. Even if we put in a "friendly" government and troops to protect it for 50 years, one day that government will go away and we'll be right back to 2006 and/or Iran in the late 1970s.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Dec 9 2006, 09:44 AM) [snapback]359753[/snapback]</div>

How about this cat? What were the twins doing down in Argentina, anyhow? Family visit?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Alnilam @ Dec 10 2006, 09:46 AM) [snapback]360056[/snapback]</div>

Perhaps that was a little unkind. Here's a more recent photo.

 

The resemblance between Bush and Hitler is scary. But the resemblance between Bush and Alfred E. Newman is scarier!

 

And then there's this classic.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Stev0 @ Dec 10 2006, 06:55 AM) [snapback]360010[/snapback]</div>

I don't know any Iraqis, but I know a fair amount of Iranians. They liked America; so much so that they moved here when the Shah fell. Withdrawing support for him was one of President Carter's biggest mistakes, and I think it led to acceptance of the fundamentalist movement in the middle east.

Opinion polling a while back in Iraq shows a majority want us to remain there for a while, and a majority wants a representative government, but they are in a region where iron fisted minorities tend to rule. The Iraqi Study Group looks like its saying "stability" is the main goal, and they wouldn't mind the dictatorships like Syria and the religious governments like Iran controlling the people with an iron fist. James Baker was always a "friend" to dictators and despots, and I'm surprised to see the left embrace his commission's report that seems to simply repeat those adages. He does hate Isreal, and so does the left today, so maybe that's the attraction.