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The paranoid idiocy here, of course, is in viewing 1,000,000,000+ "Muslims" as some sort of monolith, when in fact, they fight each other as much as anyone else. When in fact, plenty of them are Muslim the way Bill Clinton is Southern Baptist--in name only. Your Manichean worldview is about as sensible as calling the West "Christian" and using the word to describe everyone from Jane Fonda to Eric Rudolph. The mark of an immature worldview is seeing one's own side as it really is, and one's adversaries as a cartoon, and that's what we have in your posts.
So are you a hypocrite or just self-contradictory?
If Clinton announces that he is no longer a Southern Baptist or has converted to some other faith, he won't be killed.
You ever read about what happened to Germans and German collaborators after WW2? Check it out.
I am familiar, perhaps you could expand on it. How many millions were killed?
444 days. When it was all done the Iranians lived under an Islamic totalitarian theocracy that went to war with its neighbor causing 1.2 million young people to loose their lives. Since then, two avoidable wars with Iraq have been fought because of his refusal to install a government in 1979 because that wouldn't be nice. Today they are a terrorist state developing nuclear weapons that they have sworn to use against Israel and will certainly pass along to terrorist who will be glad to blackmail us with them. When that day comes, 9/11 will be a footnote in history. That's Carter's legacy. Millions killed so he can say he's a nice guy. Sometimes you have to do what is in the greater interest of the entire world even if they don't like it. Look at the end result of Carter's inaction and do-goodery. Nixon would have put in a new government and people in Europe would get really PO-ed and Al Jazeera would say bad things about us, but those millions of teenagers and even younger people who dies in those wars would be alive and we wouldn't be looking at invading Iran again today.
444 days - that's many fewer days than we have spent in an unnecessary war in Iraq; which our Decider, George W. Bush decided was a necessary war.
The Iran - Iraq hostilities began many centuries ago; Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979 and it was only a matter of time before he attacked Iran. Hussein had the complete support of the Reagan Administration during the War (including special envoy Donald Rumsfeld).
The Middle East has been a mess for centuries; Jimmy Carter actually deserves credit for the Camp David Peace Accords. To lay blame on Carter for the actions of Saddam Husein in invading Iran and Kuwait makes very little sense.
Nixon ? Look at what he did in Chile. He decided to overthrow a man who was elected by the people of Chile and then installed a dictator who killed and tortured thousands of innocent people. Nice going Dick !!!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by VerBoston
444 days - that's many fewer days than we have spent in an unnecessary war in Iraq; which our Decider, George W. Bush decided was a necessary war.
The Iran - Iraq hostilities began many centuries ago; Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979 and it was only a matter of time before he attacked Iran. Hussein had the complete support of the Reagan Administration during the War (including special envoy Donald Rumsfeld).
The Middle East has been a mess for centuries; Jimmy Carter actually deserves credit for the Camp David Peace Accords. To lay blame on Carter for the actions of Saddam Husein in invading Iran and Kuwait makes very little sense.
Nixon ? Look at what he did in Chile. He decided to overthrow a man who was elected by the people of Chile and then installed a dictator who killed and tortured thousands of innocent people. Nice going Dick !!!
Good post VB,but sadly you are wasting your time by trying to educate blind, deaf and dumb neoCON sheeple....They are going to blame EVERYTHING on a dem prez while Rome falls around them due to repuke incompetence.I applaud your efforts tho'.
There was nothing stated about the Iranian Revolution that isn't common knowledge. A quick google would have confirmed all of it. Khomeini's rule was established on February 11, when the military formally declared itself neutral. That date has been celebrated as the national holiday of Victory Day ever since. The referendum that overwhelmingly established Iran as an Islamic Republic was conducted on April 1. You could look it up.
Re present day Iran, see the IAEA and CIA assessments of their weapons programs. Ask yourself which sovereign nations Iran has invaded without provocation. Look into our funding of terrorist activity both inside Iran and elsewhere. Read some actual analysis of Iran's current political and economic situation, needs, and objectives. Simply painting them as some caricature of Islamic menace is a fool's errand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by momonkey
I said a new government. We do it all the time. BTW the generals were on board. You must be too young to remember the discussion that was taking place at the time. Notice the two weeks when the iron was hot.
We don't do it all the time, and it typically comes to bad end when we do. And I'm old enough to have been reading the cable traffic at the time of the Iranian Revolution. The only guy who believed as you seem to would have been Gen. Huyser, the military show-of-support guy who flew into Tehran for ten days in January of 1979 and basically hobnobbed with the top brass. His mission was to explain that the Shah would shortly be leaving, that Bakhtiar would then be the man, and that if things started to get dicey for him, the military were to stage a coup, impose martial law, and rule via brute force for as long as it took to quiet the streets. Huyser's reports back to DOD and then on to Brzezinski at the NSC were that his team was on board on that score. Meanwhile Ambassador Sullivan and Special Assistant Ball are trying to explain through State that all of this is simply an illusion. The actual military had lost thousands of defectors, half the line officers were Islamists themselves, and there was simply no way that any sort of coup was going to be supported by down-the-line elements over Khomeini. But by that point, it really didn't matter whose story you believed. Millions of Iranians were on the side of the revolution, and there was no longer any way to stop it. The point where that would have been possible had been passed by a long, long time prior to your supposed "hot-iron" fortnight of opportunity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by momonkey
"This year, Brzezinski (who is now a foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential challenger Barack Obama) visited Damascus and met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He then visited one of the private universities in Syria and spoke to students of the Faculty of International Relations. Most of them asked questions about the Carter era. They wanted to know why was it that America's number one ally in the region, Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, had been toppled by the Islamic revolution of 1979, despite assurances of support from the Carter White House?"
He would be the one to ask, as virtually all of the grandiose assurances of backing the Shah to the hilt came from Brzezinski himself. There was no US plan or policy to support the Shah with anything more than advice, arms, and rhetoric. Carter's bilateral objectives were to support the idea of a "special relationship" between the US and Iran, to be sure that Iran's military needs were fully met, and to keep Iran as a moderating voice within OPEC, which throughout the 1970's was a far more threatening force than it is today. Brzezinski saw Iran as he saw everything else, through his anti-Soviet lens. His primary concern was protecting the two listening posts the CIA was operating along Iran's northern border through which we were getting large amounts of high-value intelligence on Soviet military and space operations. We essentially had to ransom a couple of dozen "technicians" when one of those posts was overrun, and the eventual loss of both of them would lead us into getting all chummy with Pakistan as a second-best option. Brzezinski at the time was a member of one of two erroneous schools of thought on Iran, namely that the clerics were a front being manipulated by the Communists. It was the latter he was talking to with his sabre-rattling, and if the Communists had actually been behind the clerics, his words might have had some effect. But there was no actual audience to hear those words. They had no effect at all on the clerics or on the growing masses who sided with them. Your article (which is actually about Carter today) doesn't note how Brzezinski answered questions about Iran in 1978-79, but he might as well have simply said, "I was quite wrong, and George Ball was quite right."
I vote this the #1 post in this thread...it says it all perfectly.
I would second the motion. A case could be made on many fronts for Reagan having been the worst President prior to 2000, but there would have been competition, and the case could not have been taken as conclusive. By 2008, all that is moot. Bush has gone well beyond Reagan in terms of overall disgrace and failure, his only hope for any sort of historical redemption now lying in the probably remote possibility that some of the dumb things he did will, by quirk of fate, turn out to have had some unanticipated positive downstream effect. This has been eight years of misguided assumptions leading to bad policy that was poorly implemented. It just doesn't get much worse than that...
I wasn't around for that so I'll go with Carter. He thought he could negotiate with Iranians.
He did? Is that why he supported the Shah against the will of the Iranian people?
It's truly amazing how little Americans actually know about the 43 Presidents of these United States
I believe either of the Presidents next to Lincoln (Buchanan or Johnson) would qualify as one of the worst Presidents, along with the economic policies of Hoover, who basically accelerated our freefall into a Depression.
But, in looking at any singular characteristic of all 43 Presidents, there is no doubt in my mind that George W. Bush, if averaging in the scores in any categories of your choosing, would statistically lead all of them as the worst President in United States history
I witnessed it all, Carter is by far the worst. Most of what GWB is blamed for today started with Carters incompetence. Millions of lives could have been saved and both Iraq wars plus the Iran/Iraq war could have been avoided if Carter had installed a government in Iran in 1979. Millions of young people needlessly killed, a totalitarian theocracy in power in terrorist state Iran and we may still have to invade Iran to neutralize their nuclear weapons program. That is the Carter legacy.
How fitting the dumbest statement of 2008 squeaked in on Dec. 31st, 2008.
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