DebateGate

This can't be good.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071103/ap_on_re_as/pakistan

Pakistan's Musharraf declares emergency

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - President Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan on Saturday ahead of a crucial Supreme Court decision on whether to overturn his recent election win and amid rising Islamic militant violence.

Eight Supreme Court judges immediately rejected the emergency, which suspended the current constitution. The government blocked transmissions of private news channels in several cities and telephone services in the capital, Islamabad, were cut.

"The chief of army staff has proclaimed a state of emergency and issued a provisional constitutional order," a newscaster on state Pakistan TV said, adding that Musharraf, who took power in 1999 coup, would address the nation later Saturday.

Dozens of police blocked the road in front of the Supreme Court building, with the judges believed inside.

The state TV report gave no reason for the emergency but it follows weeks of speculation that he could take the step. Military vehicles patrolled and troops blocked roads in the administrative heart of the capital.

The U.S. and other Western allies urged him this week not to take steps that would jeopardize the country's transition to democracy.

During previous emergencies in Pakistan, a provisional constitutional order has led to the suspension of some basic rights of citizens and for judges to take a fresh oath of office.

"This is the most condemnable act," said Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for the opposition PML-N party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Sharif was barred by Musharraf from returning to exile to Pakistan in September to mount a campaign against military rule.

"The whole nation will resist this extra-constitutional measure," he said.

Private Geo TV network reported the eight judges rejected the declaration of emergency and ordered top officials, including the prime minister, and military officers not to comply.

Geo reported that the army had entered the court building, but the report could not immediately be confirmed.

Shahzad Iqbal, an official at a cable TV news provider in Islamabad said authorities were blocking transmissions of private news channels in Islamabad and neighboring Rawalpindi. State TV was still on the air.

"The government has done it," he said.

Residents of Karachi said their cable TV was also off the air.

THAT'S fighting?  Let's keep this argument in the real world, OK?

Killing law enforcement officers is fighting.  But, of course, that was my whole point.  The Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan.  The fact that they are still attempting to get the land back, only a few years after their defeat, is no more significant than the fact that Canadian Indians are still having to fight for their land.  The Seminoles have done nothing I am aware of in two hundred years, but still proudly point to their lack of acquiescence.  The Taliban do mount attacks, and they get killed en masse each time they do.  This will go on for a while, but eventually they will fade into complete insignificance - as the Canadian Indians have as a fighting force.

 

Indian resistance in Canada, Catholic resistance in Northern Ireland and Seminole Resistance in Florida all together don't add up to a tiny fraction of the daily violence in Iraq.   

Not any more.  The Irish got tired of constantly dying, but it took about 80 years.  The IRA violence prior to about the 1990's was as bad as anything we see in the middle east today.  That, again, is my point.  Resistance will continue for decades, in some cases centuries.  The military situation in Iraq is very touchy because of the potential (indeed I would say the probability) of a large scale civil war when we leave.    Afghanistan less so, but neither country is what anyone would call stable.  That does not equate to the US getting their "asss kicked."  It equates to people resisting an occupying army.  That's a fact of life.  Again, if we use the schoolyard metaphor, we may take a few punches, but you should see the other guy.

My conclusion is that wars are fought nation-to-nation, not nation-to-regime.  My conclusion is that you are incapable of making the distinction.  For some reason you want to consider a victory over the regime as a victory over the nation, probably because you know you will never be able to claim the latter.  What's particularly ludicrous is that when the nation finally ends up victorious and expels or kills the invaders and all their collaborators, the regime that you now claim was "toppled" may very well be reinstalled.

Actually, it is you that is incapabble of making the distinction between conquering a nation and conquering a government.  Both objectives have historical precedent.  But again, your military knowledge is lacking.  So I suppose we failed in Panama because we only toppled Noriega and didn't actually make Panama our "19th Province."  Come to think of it, the whole American Revolution was an abject failure because we failed to conquer England.  Well, God save the Queen. Conquest is not always the aim of war.  The Arabs in the middle east want to conquer and retake Israel.  We had no desire to own Iraq, only to depose the Ba'athist regime.  The chances of that regime returning are extremely slim.  The chances of Saddam returning are right up there with that 12th Imam. 

You deliberately chose to ignore the argument that the U.S.A. failed in Iraq by failing to achieve its objectives and focused instead on the tone of the argument, the BWAHAHAHAHA in particular.  A matter of no substance whatever.

I did no such thing.  You deliberately choose to ignore any response I give that does not fit your theory. 

Bullshit.  Again you are pulling your old trick of ignoring the substance and focusing on the style, then blithely asserting that (presumably because you failed to address it) the substance was lacking from the outset.  Fooling no one, I might add.

I cannot ignore substance that does not exist.  As to fooling no one, that comment betrays a lot about your ego.

You accuse me, perhaps appropriately, of an ad hominem attack. >>

Not even. 

So when you said "Nice smear attempt"  that was not an accusation of an ad hominem attack?  You're whining because I am calling you out for acting like a child.  It's the way you debate when you start to lose.  Now you complain about my ignoring the substance of your argument.  Nonsense.  i have addressed all of your points ad naseum. 

Oh, PLEASE show me one instance in which I "mischaracterized or misinterpreted" any of your responses.

I'll be damned it I am going to waste my time going back and rehashing the arguments I have just made again and again.  I have to continually clarify what should be simple points because you take them to mean something completely differnt from what I intended.  Then you base a response on your interpretation rather than my intent.  Foremost among those sorts of things (of which there have been numerous in this thread) was your assertion that I did not understand the unity of the Iranian people and how that differed from the factionalism in Iraq even though I had pointed exactly that out in the post to which you were responding. 

moi??

Oui, vous! 

Oh for God's sake. 

How about ROTFL?  Is ROTFL OK?  How about ROTFLMFAO?  Is that sane enough for you?

Actually, the "little but crazy" part was intended to be humorous.   

Geeze, I'll try to watch myself in the future.  What's a nice way to say "fucking war criminals?"

"having sex with Hitler and Saddam?" 

These debates are a little rougher than the ones I normally engage in, but there's an anonymity here which is liberating in the sense that the normal civilities of daily life exercised between people who know one another are dispensed with, but I think a more honest exchange results.  For example, there is an emotional component here - - anger, which IMHO is fully justified by the scope of the atrocities, killings, suffering and misery unleashed by one powerful and wealthy country for absolutely no good reason on a tiny country not even one-tenth its size which has the God-awful misfortune to rest upon the world's second biggest proven oil reserves.  I hope if you get even a tiny smidgen of the anger that I and millions of others feel at the depredations of American power all over the world, the lawlessness, the defiance of established international order, the contempt for the UN's efforts to build a system of international justice, then you will have learned much more from the debate here than if you had read a dozen closely reasoned, politely worded essays about the topic.  You'd do a lot better to focus on what's behind the cuss words, the sarcasm, etc. and pick up on the underlying emotions.  And ask yourself, if this is coming from a bystander, a guy who basically doesn't give a shit, has no relatives or family on the receiving end of the shit-storm, what kind of anger is coming at us from people whose country has been invaded, whose kids have been blown to bits, or who hear about this every fucking day in their mosque in Jakarta or Tirana or Istanbul or even Los Angeles?

So effectively, you think it is perfectly OK to call me a "fucking war criminal" and act like a kid instead of choosing a rational debatge style (which, apparently, you DO choose to do when faced with a possible personal response) because of your anonymity.  We fucking war criminals call that cowardice.  It takes little courage to call someone a name over the internet.  It takes more to call them something to their face.  But what takes more courage than either is to engage someone courteously even when you are angry, to treat other human beings with the decency you demand when there is no other motivation for it than decency and to look - as you advice - to the motivation behind someone else's actions.  I could go on about the fiasco that is the United Nations.  I could talk about how much the US has done for the world in the twentieth century and how much good will, blood and treasure of ours has been wasted in the effort.  If millions are angry at American actions, millions of Americans are fed up with third world nations that scream for our foreign aid, beg us to solve their problems and then bitch when we get involved (or when we stay uninvolved).  I don't really care about your opinion of America.  I don't buy your rationalizations, based on personal bigotry, about your warped perception of American actions.  I give you the courtesy of debate because I am here, and you are here, and I have an interest in the topics you engage.  When you choose to debate rationally, it is a pleasure to exchange views with you.  I disagree with much of what you say, but it is a learning experience and an interesting discussion nonetheless.  Your intellectual capabilities are not in question.  When we disagree it is ususally, as I have pointed out, because we have different experiences.  (You denied that point, but you make basically the same point when you say i ought to consider the perspective of the people who are affected by US actions.)  But when you choose a style that devolves into schoolyard brawling, then you call for respectful consideration of your points, it is a waste of my time.  Worse, it often brings me down to the same level.  That's not only a waste of time, it is a waste of spirit.

Wow, talk about misrepresenting responses.  I defy you to find one word of moral outrage in what I wrote.  I was laughing at you for being as stupid as the Nazis and in exactly the same way - - feeling that you had solved the problem represented by a deadly and determined enemy by laughing them off as vermin, with a pejorative name to go with.  It's a common failing of authoritarian militaristic personalities that cannot accept the equality of their opponent.  Psychologically, the opponent must be dehumanized and belittled, calling them "roaches" or "desert rats" is the tell-tale sign of the mindset.

If you want to characterize your response as ridicule rather than outrage, i will concede the point.  Beyond that, your response is nonetheless exactly what I said it was.  You had no objection to my use of the metaphor over several posts, then you jumped on it - and misrepresented it - as an example of dehumanizing the opposition, rather than making a metaphor. 

The reason being, the metaphor was immaterial to the argument until now.  At this point, you failed to deal with my argument that you did NOT have the situation on the ground in Afghanistan under control or that you had not "toppled" the now-resurgent Taliban.  You pointed to the "disarray" of the Taliban as proof that you did, and when I attempted to show that the disarray you were citing actually signified nothing more than a wise choice of tactics, you then chose, not to acnowledge or counter the point, but to compare the tactics to vermin and predict that, just as vermin would be exterminated despite the tactic, so too was the Taliban.  Your argument was just as foolish as Rommel's and your belief in ultimate victory over those whom you chose to characterize as "cockroaches" was bound to follow the fate of your fellow fascist's prediction of victory over the "desert rats."  That is why at this point in the thread, I chose to call attention to the cockroach metaphor - - just to show similar thinking on the part of the Nazi general, equally deluded, equally misguided, equally doomed to failure.

Wrong.  I used the metaphor in a post to which you responded.  I said it was LIKE roaches.  You cannot kill all of them, but you can CONTROL them.  You responded DIRECTLY to that metaphor.  You said that we had not CONTROLLED them.  You raised  no objection at that time to the metaphor itself.   I CLARIFIED the METAPHOR by saying that by"control" I simply meant that while you might see an occasional flare up of activity, to which a remedial response is required, the problem was under control (those weren't the exact words, but that was the gist).  I was pointing out that complete annihilation of the Taliban was not possible and that there were bound to be flare ups of activity, but that did not mean that the Taliban was not defeated.  The Nazis were defeated, but there are still Nazis in German to this day - and some are up to their old tricks.  So, like roaches, some will survive and you will have to deal with them, but you can keep them under control.  (Just ask any restaraunt owner about pest control.)  That is not - to use your words - "characterizing them as roaches."  That is only choosing a metaphor to which some might, understandably object.  But if you found the metaphor ridiculous, it was no less ridiculous when I introduced it than when I clarified it.  You just had to ignore my direct response to your point by ridiculing the metaphor.

That's total bullshit.  They want you out of their face and off their land, but they don't want to kill you unless you don't want to stop interfering in their affairs and occupying their lands.  As far as enslaving their own people, that's a huge laugh.  You could not be more hypocritical if you tried.  It is Amerikkka that enslaves those people through corrupt puppet governments all over the Middle East and also through supporting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.  At best you are rival slave-masters to the Taliban and the Iraqi Resistance, but in fact these people want an Islamic Republic or a Caliphate which leaves them more freedom than they presently have and in addition leaves them as sole owners of their own oil. 

That, sir, is bullshit.  But of course the Taliban denies their women education and destroys ancient artifacts of a rival religion because of US interference in their lives.  Iran executes gays because of those damned Americans,  Saddam gassed the Kurds because of that bastard Bush.  It's amazing how you whine about the US and blame them for the world's ills.  But you completely ignore what those poor innocents Muslim fanactics are up to. 

Tell us about it.  And yet you wonder why they have no problem killing your kind of human being.  Unbelievable. 

I don't wonder why.  I don't care.  Any more than I care why a rapist feels the need to control his victim or a serial killer is so angry.  The fact that there are millions of people in the world, including in the US, who object to US policy and actions is a matter of concern.  When thousands protest in the streets, someone should be listening to what they have to say and deciding whether it has merit, or warrants a change in policy.  But when people fly planes into buildings, strap on bombs and walk into discos or takeover schools and murder children - we should respond in kind.  I don't like Muslims oppressing women - millions object to it including millions of Islamic women.  But I wouldn't have the slightest objection to executing any who condoned suicide bombing Mosques to end that oppression.  The fact that many choose to murder because they feel their opinions are not getting through does not mean we should acquiese to their demands. 

They beat an organized retreat is more like it.  Back to their homeland.  Which Bush Sr. never dared to attack.

 

Yes, that road out of Kuwait was a beautiful example of an organized retreat.  So were the thousands of white-flagged waving surrendering conscripts. 

Now it's YOUR turn to come off it, Pooch.  You didn't "break anyone's back" in "the current war." 

No, since you claim that the insurgency is all just dispersed elements of the Iraqi army.  Of course, Canada has never actually defeated the Original Inhabitants since there are still Indian warriors fighting against Canadian incursions on their soil.  Thank goodness for that, 'cuz from everything I've seen the Indians appeared to have pretty much been whipped.

You are grasping at logical straws.  If you want to say that the US has not subdued the Iraqis sufficiently to guarantee security in that country, nobody with eyes is going to disagree with you.  If you want to suggest that the Iranian (or for that matter the Iraqi) military is a threat to defeat a US military force, you are simply stating a wish, not a fact.

You're drawing meaningless and overly technical distinctions to cover up your abject failure.  Your objective was to conquer Iraq.  The country's first line of defence was the regular armed forces, and they have morphed into the Iraqi Resistance.  You STILL haven't achieved your objectives after four years of trying.  Don't you realize what a bunch of punks you really are?  You are the laughingstock of the world.  You think your pathetic excuses for failure (well we BEAT 'em and now we're fighting something entirely different) are going to paper over this collossal fuckup?  BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This is an example of mature debate?  As it happens, I'm a soldier talking about military history and doctrine.  You are trying to support a position of bigotry and turning to middle school tactics to do so.  I suppose a rational analysis is overly technical when compared to BWAHAHAHAHA or name calling, but I'll take the chance.

You lost the entire context of this thread, Pooch.  The context being, what your miserable failure in Iraq says about your ability to invade and conquer Iran.  Of course, if you are more interested in excuses than results, as seems to be the case, Iraq shows that you're never at a loss for excuses.  When you fuck up in Iran, you can always claim, "Well we really SMASHED their armed forces, but now, four years later, what we're really fighting is an insurgency."  Great.  That will explain everything.  But IMHO, excuses like that are exponentially lamer the second time around.

I haven't lost anything.  My response to this thread was to give a REALISTIC assessment of the risks of a US invasion of Iran.  The Iranian military threat is minimal.  The political threat is real and far greater.  Your wild-eyed ranting about the US getting it's "ass kicked" and having the world "laugh at them" is just so much sibling rivalry.  We're used to it from you.  But it doesn't substitute for substantive debate.

LMFAO.  Yeah, you're sure "controlling" them alright.  They strike, disperse, and come together to strike again.  Is that what Bush and Cheney are telling them to do?

That's pretty much what roaches do.  You have to kill a lot of them and then they go crawl into holes.  After a while they start to show up again and you have to kill some more. 

Uh, in actual fact, I believe it was from the Yalu River to the 38th Parallel.  You can tell it to 2nd ID.  Better yet, you can tell it to the Marines.  First time in their history they ever retreated en masse.  Nothing wrong with my hyperbole, Pooch.  But the hour is clearly affecting your factual recall.

My factual recall is perfectly functional.  The Chinese whipped us so badly that we are still there half a century later.  The section of the peninsula we control is a functional, viable nation.  The section the Chinese control is a "workers paradise" of economic insignificance.   With more "ass-whippings" like that, we might just take over the world after all.

That's the way it is in a People's War, Pooch.  No great victories.  Dienbienphu was an exception.  No great battles.  Just an endless succession of mosquito bites, a gradual accumulation of body bags, lie after lie and empty promise after empty promise until finally the American people get sick to their collective stomach of the criminal fascist enterprise and the last lie is told before the plug is pulled on the longest-running bad comedy in the American repertoire - - till the next one.

People's war.  There ya go.   You have a world view that is interesting to watch. 

It's not as good as Juan Cole's, obviously, but I happen to think it's pretty good.  I hope you are wrong, but of course I'm always willing to learn.  Please feel free to point out any mistakes you think I've made.  I'd regard it as a favour.

I have been, but your mind is so closed to any opposite viewpoint that a lesson on middle eastern geopolitics is impossible. 

Well it's absolutely ludicrous to claim that the religious enmity between Sunnis and Shi'ites was the fault of the Ba'athist regime.  It pre-dates the founding of the Iraqi nation by several centuries.

The religious enmity between the Shi'ites in Iraq and the Sunni's in Iraq is different from the general interfactional rivalry.  The Ba'athists persecuted, indeed slaughtered the Shi'ites during their decades in power.  When the Ba'athists were toppled the Shi'ites wanted the Sunnis dead and the Sunnis wanted to retain their power over the Shi'ites.  Your deflection of that reality is very much like saying that racial strife existed long before the US was founded, so blacks and whites in America aren't concerned about slavery and Jim Crow at all.

The Ba'athist campaign was not directed against all Shi'ites indiscriminately.  It targeted the religious elements of the Shi'a community who were trying to divide Iraqis along religious lines. 

Yeah.  And the KKK only targetted the uppity niggers for trying to destroy the Natch'l Order o' things.  The darkies that knew their place was perfectly fine.

Nice smear attempt, but it won't wash.  I spent years in Amnesty International campaigning against Saddam and his Ba'athist regime trying to stop the torture and execution of Saddam's opponents, some of them Shi'ites.  I obviously DON'T "accept" that kind of order.  The fact is, you had accused the Ba'athists of dividing the country along religious lines, which as I pointed out, is ludicrous.

I did no such thing.  I said that the years of Ba'athist rule created a far deeper interfactional rivalry than would otherwise be the case and that it exploded when the Ba'athists were toppled.  Incidentally, you can add the Kurds to that mix as well, though they have been less of a problem.  Now to be fair, the entire colonial period that predated the artificial borders of the present had a lot to do with creating that situation in the first place.  But you try to minimalize the repression of the regime that you then claim you fought against with AI.  Further, you miss the point.  Whatever the cause, the Iraqi people are a far more divided group than the Iranians.  Oddly enough, we agree on that, b ut apparently the point is only properly made when you make it.

Moreover, the factionalism and religious infighting, which you also claim the Ba'ath was responsible for, was SUPPRESSED by the Ba'athists. 

Yeah, like Iran suppresses homosexuality.  Murdering people for trying to assert their freedoms is an effective method of suppression, but most people - given the choice - would rather live under a Bush wiretap than a Saddam noose.   Even if I were to accept (and I do not) the "pure" motives of the Ba'athists in quelling religious zealotry, the question is whether the Iraqi Shi'ites as a group did.  Obviously they did not.  The US invasion of Iraq did not create the intense animosity between the religious factions in Iraq.  The injustices of the Saddam regime did.

I remember that in Desert Storm, Bush Sr. was content to chase the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.  That's about as far as it went.  He didn't dare invade Iraq (with good reason as it turned out.)  The analysis of military strength given to the Iraqi army before Desert Storm was never tested in an invasion of the country.

Oh, come on, Mike.  We chased the ones we didn't capture or outright kill out of Kuwait in a matter of days.  Then we broke their backs in the current war in about as much time.  The insurgency is the military problem in Iraq, the Iraqi military never was.  That's just a completely unrealistic analysis.   Bush stopped when we got them out of Kuwait because that was the stated objective of the war and the reason why the coalition was so united.  Entering Iraq had the strong potential of doing exactly what it has done - touching off sectarian infighting and creating a power vacuum that (at the time) we thought Iran would try to fill.  (That has happened to some extent, but Al Quaeda has been added to the mix.)

so in fact you HAVEN'T driven out the Taliban.  They are resurgent.  The majority of Afghans polled want the Afghan government to enter into talks with the Taliban.  They know, even if you don't, that the Taliban are there to stay.  They can't be driven out of Afghanistan because they ARE Afghanistan.

Rhetoric, not reality.  Of course there will always be factions that battle each other, and the Taliban will be one of many.  But we did drive them from power and largely out of the country.  You can't kill all of them any more than you can kill all of the cockroaches.  But you can control them.

There are sound military AND economic reasons why you will fail, but the biggest reason of all is in the lack of stomach that the American people have for this pointless, senseless slaughter.  One day, one year, some milestone casualty figure will be reached - - 5,000 American dead?  10,000? and still nothing to show for it but the empty promises of whatever lying bastards happen to own the White House at the time, the 135th "turning point" or the 2,389th "major al Qaeda leader" killed or captured, some point of no return coupled with the financial disaster that this crap is inevitably leading to, and finally somebody will come to his senses and the tents will be folded up and removed. 

There is some merit in that argument.  The biggest problems that we have as a superpower is the lack of resolve to REALLY prosecute a war - in the truest sense of that word.  If we were lead by the kind of person you on the left portray Bush as being we would have long ago nuked the Taliban/Al Quaeda strongholds in Pakistan, popped off Tehran and Qom and dared the Russians or Chinese to respond.  But that isn't going to hapopen because the people of the US would never (in this age) stand for that kind of mass slaughter.  That's a good thing, of course, because we OUGHT to have that mindset.  But you and Osama are quite correct in reading the lack of resolve on the part of the US people to wage cruel war over the long haul.  

Who are you kidding?  The Chinese whipped your ass in the Korean War when you had every possible technological advantage and next time you'll be sorry you even thought about fucking with them.

Yeah, the Chinese drove us right off the Korean peninsula.  Tell that to 2nd ID.  Your hyperbole is getting worse.  Must be getting late.

For a nation of 300 million whose army can't even subdue 23 million Iraqis, that is some tough talking.  Your army and its performance are pathetic.

The Iraqi army, OTOH, has acquitted itself admirably.   Why think of their great victory at . . . oh, wait.  There were none.   

I'm sure there are plenty of Iranians not happy with the theocracy.  Just as there were millions of Americans who weren't too crazy about FDR.  Pearl Harbor changed all that in a day.  I really would LOVE to see your theories put into practice.  One of us is right and  one of us is wrong, but if I'm right, I would get the see the biggest and best-deserved ass-kicking administered to the U.S. and its military since the last helicopter left the Embassy roof in Saigon.

Your Pearl Harbor point agrees with mine.  I am concerned that a US invasion of Iran could easily unite the people in a very PH type way.  

You don't get it, do you?  Iran is 73 million people.  That's more than THREE TIMES the size of Iraq and you can't even handle Iraq.  They don't need the support of their "Arab Muslim brethren."  The U.S. is in for the biggest military humiliation of its life if it attempts to attack Iran on the ground. 

I think you have a poor understanding of the situation in the middle east.  

No, of course not.  Iran is much more homogeneous than Iraq.   Instead of faction fighting faction, they could all concentrate in a unified front against the invader.  This is not a good thing for the invader, but a bad thing, which you don't seem to realize.

Considering that is exactly what I said I find it hard to understand why you don't think I reallize it.   

You're kidding, right?  The Ba'athist regime created the mess of domestic terrorism in Iraq?  The Ba'athists created Shi'ite Muslims?  I think you must be mistaken.  Under the Ba'athists, Iraq was a purely secular state and private religious-affiliated militias did not exist.  The mess that exists in Iraq today results from the U.S. "taking out" Saddam and failing to replace him with anyone capable of maintaining order.  The Ba'athist regime, contrary to your claim that it created a mess, was the one unifying force in the country.

The "mess" I refer to is the hatred of the Sunni minority by the Shi'ite majprity who were brutalized under the Ba'athist regime.  It is absolutely true that the Ba'athists kept order in Iraq.  It is also true that Hitler made the trains run on time and the slaves were perfectly orderly under the Confederacy.  If that kind of order is acceptable to you, you have bigger problems than anti-Americanism.

Sounds likely, but the U.S. would use a puppet government and puppet army to try crush it.  The war would go on forever.  It would be another Viet Nam.  And at the same time, Iranian army units would be conducting guerrilla warfare operations against the occupiers.  In the long run, the failure of the Sunni neighbours to help the Shi'ite victims of U.S. aggression would (hopefully) spark a pan-Arab Ba'athist revival by demonstrating the utter moral bankruptcy of Sunni religious and political leadership.

And when that failed Bush would fly another plane into a skyscraper.  The most charitable thing I can say is that your analysis is badly skewed.

"and the vac king, Hoover would not be happy!  Whoof!

Ooh, that pun sucked :-D

Nice to see ya, Cynthia.

This is clearly an SEP -Someone Elses' Problem.

WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP - - - DOUG ADAMS ALERT - - - WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!

I have no idea.

I always thought it, but I never thought you'd admit it. 

Are you saying that I want to subjugate women?

No.  You want to subjugate theists.

Are you saying that I want Church and State combined?

No. You want the church abolished and the state supreme.

Are you saying that I want everyone to worship my god?

No.  you want everyone who worships God forced into hiding.

And while Pat Robertson (who an awful lot of Christians including me think is an idiot) blames liberals for 9-11 that is not any different from you blaming the neo-cons.  It's not that you are in any way more tolerant, you just have a different set of targets for your bigotry.

Effectively, to continue your metaphor, you are a Atheo-fascist.  The only difference between you,  al-Sistani and James Dobson is that the theists you hate want the world to follow the will of their God.  You want the world to follow the your will.  There is no other difference in the mindset.  I guess if you just had a turban and a beard . . .