Hmmm... Bloodbath in South East Asia where we had no real national interest. Bloodbath in the Middle East where the vast majority of the World's 'easy access' oil is. A place where 'friendly' governments can quickly be toppled and the spigot shut off. Think about that for a few minutes.
I'm just saying . . . we're there and there's a bloodbath going on daily. How's this different then if we leave them to their bloodbath?
Hmmm... Bloodbath in South East Asia where we had no real national interest.
Our national interest was to keep yet another country from falling into the evil clutches of communism. This may seem like a somewhat silly national interest now, but then again oil may seem like a silly national interest thirty years from now. It's hard to tell.
I didn't say we didn't have motive; I merely pointed out that if we leave Iraq and there's a bloodbath (your point I think though perhaps I misread) it may not change the situation as it is right now. The only difference would be a shift from covert civil war to open civil war I'd imagine.
The levees in NO were fatally flawed long before Bush took office. He was the latest in a line of presidents who ignored them.
Other people's neglect doesn't let him off the hook.
He will always be associated with Katrina. It is a shining example of how he just doesn't care about anyone who is not a millionaire.
. . . I merely pointed out that if we leave Iraq and there's a bloodbath (your point I think though perhaps I misread) it may not change the situation as it is right now. The only difference would be a shift from covert civil war to open civil war I'd imagine.
There are many instances of bloodbaths occurring after an occupation. There was somewhat of a bloodbath after Union troops left some southern areas during Reconstruction. There was a bloodbath when we left Lebanon. There was a bloodbath when we left Somalia. And yet, we always eventually leave.
Is it now going to be our policy that, once the U.S. Army occupies a region, it can never leave?
. . . and are regulated by the federal government. The Utah mine probably wouldn't have been allowed to operate in the first place if the regulators had been doing their job.
No amount of regulation is going to stop a mountain from collapsing. The assumption that the government could better sense when a cave-in would occur than the private owner is kind of ludicrous. Mining is an inherently dangerous business no matter how much red tape is involved. There is no way to child-proof it.
As for your assertion that the president will take the brunt of Congress' poor decisions, I'll buy that premise, but I think it's horribly unfair.
What happens when they cash in their chips?
Cash in what chips? The trade deficit isn't us borrowing money. It's us buying more from them than they buy from us. It's exports vs. imports. We're not talking about the national debt. That a whole other animal.
China recycles trade surplus into US Treasury bonds American companies may have forgotten what Henry Ford propounded when he first built his Model T: If you do not pay high enough wages to your workers, they can't afford to buy your product. One simple basis for that Bush boom is that China is recycling its US$100 billion-plus trade surplus with the US back into dollars, and especially into US Treasury bonds. Almost half of the US Treasury bonds are now owned in Asia. So China is financing Bush's bold economic experiment: running two or more wars simultaneously with a huge budget and trade deficit, and equally huge tax handouts for the richest Americans.
We Are All in It Together, by Michael Spence, Commentary, WSJ: In 2005, the People's Bank of China ... accumulated $200 billion of additional reserves and is well on its way to holding $1 trillion of reserves... The accumulation ... was the policy action that caused the value of the yuan to remain stable relative to the dollar.
Casual conversation and commentary lead most Americans to think that this accumulation of reserves corresponds to a large trade surplus in China, achieved by holding the value of their currency down. In fact, the Chinese trade surplus is not that large. It is well under 5% of GDP, smaller in percentage terms than the U.S. trade deficit.
The accumulation of reserves in China is not primarily a trade-surplus issue. In 2005, China's trade surplus was $50 billion. Net inbound foreign direct investment was another $50 billion. And then, notwithstanding capital controls, there was an additional, largely unwanted net capital inflow of $100 billion. ...
The combination ... (adding up to $200 billion) would have put strong upward pressure on the value of the currency, risking a sudden and steep loss of competitiveness. To prevent this China bought foreign and largely dollar-denominated assets. ...
The trade balance we have been discussing measures the difference between a nation’s exports and its imports with the rest of the world. Sometimes you might hear in the media a report on a nation’s trade balance with a specific other nation. This called a bilateral trade balance. For example, the U.S. bilateral trade balance with China equals exports that the United States sells to China minus imports that the United States buys from China.
The overall trade balance is, as we have seen, inextricably linked to a nation’s saving and investment. That is not true of a bilateral trade balance. Indeed, a nation can have large trade deficits and surpluses with specific trading partners, while having balanced trade overall.
For example, suppose the world has three countries: the United States, China, and Australia. The United States sells $100 billion in machine tools to Australia, Australia sells $100 billion in wheat to China, and China sells $100 billion in toys to the United States. In this case, the United States has a bilateral trade deficit with China, China has a bilateral trade deficit with Australia, and Australia has a bilateral trade deficit with the United States. But each of the three nations has balanced trade overall, exporting and importing $100 billion in goods.
Bilateral trade deficits receive more attention in the political arena than they deserve. This is in part because international relations are conducted country to country, so politicians and diplomats are naturally drawn to statistics measuring county-to-country economic transactions. Most economists, however, believe that bilateral trade balances are not very meaningful. From a macroeconomic standpoint, it is a nation’s trade balance with all foreign nations put together that matters.
The United States sells $100 billion in machine tools to Australia, Australia sells $100 billion in wheat to China, and China sells $100 billion in toys to the United States. In this case, the United States has a bilateral trade deficit with China, China has a bilateral trade deficit with Australia, and Australia has a bilateral trade deficit with the United States. But each of the three nations has balanced trade overall, exporting and importing $100 billion in goods.
All well and good, but when was the last time the U.S. actually made machine tools anyone wanted to buy? For that matter, when was the last time the U.S. actually made anything that wasn't entertainment, legal, banking, or food service industry related?
Find me a country we're actually selling more goods to than we're buying from, and I might feel better.
All well and good, but when was the last time the U.S. actually made machine tools? For that matter, when was the last time the U.S. actually made anything that wasn't entertainment or food service industry related?What does that matter? Advanced societies evolve past the need for manufacture-based economies just as we evolved past the need for steam power, or the need for plantations, or the need for cash crops. Now we export ideas. Britain is following a similar trend, all but abandoning its once-great manufacturing empire in exchange for banking. We're not an industrial nation anymore. Time to emerge from the cocoon.
Of course, it might all be propaganda. There's no denying there are several very vehement camps debating the issue, and it can be argued that economics is more of an art form than a science in a vacuum of perfect information.
All cars are built from ideas. People buy cars because they have superior engineering, better safety standards, better gas efficiency, and -- most importantly -- better advertising.
EDIT: US commodity exports as percentage of GDP (from the CIA factbook): Agricultural products (soybeans, fruit, corn) 9.2%, industrial supplies (organic chemicals) 26.8%, capital goods (transistors, aircraft, motor vehicle parts, computers, telecommunications equipment) 49.0%, consumer goods (automobiles, medicines) 15.0% (2003)
Here's another train of thought: Shoving aside the political and nationalist perspective, should America continue to dominate the global economy? Don't you think that negative balances of trade are extremely ethical, as they export jobs and resources to underdeveloped nations with low standards of living? Don't we have an ethical obligation to close the gap between the richest country in the world and the most impoverished? Should we continue an imbalanced trade with China to reduce poverty there?
The problem with evolving into a nation that exports ideas is what happens when the other countries in the world ignore the protections you put in place to safeguard those ideas in the marketplace (copyright/patent)?
I'm surprised the libs are not jumping on the admission of guilt GWB made during his speech. You know, the bit where he compared how we got into the Vietnam war to how we got into Iraq!
In dragging out the neocon’s favorite myth that a premature withdrawal from Vietnam is the source of our foreign policy failures, the President is revealing his and the neocon’s dirtiest secret: that they are nothing more than a bunch of delusional warmongers who keep invading non-threatening countries and are willing to kill other people’s children by the thousands merely to prove that they really are manly men, even though they all had “other priorities†that kept them from fighting when it was their turn.
This article makes the apt comparison that GWB addressing veterans of foreign wars is like an atheist preaching to the choir.
And please - staying in Iraq just because it would "cost" to leave is a classic Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Lastly, please read this brief article about GWB's distortions of history.
Sorry Joe but HuffingtonePost, Slate and ThinkProgress are all far left mouthpiece sites. You might as well link to an article on moveon.org for all the credibility you expect to receive by linking to them! I would expect the same reaction from you if I was defending GWB by linking to FoxNews or LittleGreenFootballs.
This from someone who cited this source as proof of his fantasy of a society that killed their kings every four years and this source to prove his faulty memory about worries that Clinton had dictatorial aspirations. Brilliant.
It says a lot about a person's intelligence when they dismiss arguments without reading them merely because they don't like the source. I actually listened to Chimpy yesterday and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I was willing to agree with him if he made some rational point. However, he said we should still be in Vietnam.
If you're so confident that these sources must be instantly wrong, then read them and respond. It should be easy for you to argue against them since their sources are so unbelievable. Dismissing them simply because you don't like where they came from is like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "La La La, I can't hear you."
Yes. From the first hand accounts and histories I have read we did not need to retreat from Vietnam. What I have also gathered is that main problem in Vietnam was that the brass screwed up royaly by begining a policy of trying to show the NVA we were in control but instead showed the American public back home that the people in charge did not care about the soldiers.
CIP: It became a common practice to take a piece of real estate, losing many good men in the process, only to abandon it for the enemy to reclaim. The brass thought this would show the NVA that they had no safety anywhere. The NVA surely got this message but the greater message was received back in the USA that said, "we kill US soldiers to win a battle and then walk away from our gains only having to fight the same battle next month."
What first hand accounts and histories have you actually read? Were they of the "some book I read once" variety?
Don't you think that negative balances of trade are extremely ethical, as they export jobs and resources to underdeveloped nations with low standards of living? Don't we have an ethical obligation to close the gap between the richest country in the world and the most impoverished? Should we continue an imbalanced trade with China to reduce poverty there?
Are you kidding? You're kidding, right? I won't even ask about why you would worry about the poor in China, even for a second, when there's plenty of poor here because I'm pretty sure you must be kidding.
How many is "not enough" for any war? According to this site about 15M people died as a result of the first World War. If we quit/retreated/surrendered at 14,999,999 dead would those deaths have been worth it?
No one wants to die during a war but it is far better to die knowing the job will be completed than to have died in vain.
No one wants to die during a war but it is far better to die knowing the job will be completed than to have died in vain.
Nice bumper sticker. It has all the intellectual import and relevance of your basic Lee Greenwood song. You could probably fit it onto one of those yellow ribbon magnets. What are you going to say next? "Freedom isn't Free"?
Leaving aside the fallacy that The Great War has any comparison to Vietnam and/or Iraq whatsoever except possibly for the stupidity of the leaders, what constitutes "the job being completed" in Vietnam and/or Iraq? If you can tell us, you must be some sort of genius because Nixon, Kissinger, and McNamara together couldn't figure out what constituted "completing the job" in Vietnam, just as Bush, Rumsfeld, and Petraeus can't seem to get on the same page as to what constitutes "completing the job" in Iraq.
Both Senator John Warner (R - Virginia) and the latest NIE Report seem to agree that there is no way to "complete the job" in Iraq. Will you read a CNN link or is CNN too "lib" for you?
So much for compassionate liberals. I guess you're just selfish.
Well, you should like me then. Don't libertarians make a virtue out of sefishness?
Some of those "first hand accounts" came from Vietnam era vets I served with in the US Army. They do not have websites and as such can not be documented via a source link. I'll check my bookshelf tonight and find some ISBN numbers on books though.
Some of those "first hand accounts" came from Vietnam era vets I served with in the US Army. They do not have websites and as such can not be documented via a source link.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. This speaks for itself. Your argument fails. That's all I'm going to say.
The Washington Post piece - Shifting goals? The only goal I know of in Iraq has been the goal of creating an ally in the Middle East that will do something to stop terrorism. The Saudis are not very interested in stopping terrorism or Wahhabi's in their land other than to keep the oil flowing out and the money flowing in.
As for Republicans abandoning him and his platform that is politics and those who leave just because things are getting tough should not be re-elected. Either you have core principles or you do not. By jumping it either says you are abandoning your core principles now or you abandoned them when you first jumped on.
Time - I detect no real substance in this article.
NYT - The fourth paragraph contradicts the previous two articles.
But the American drawdown from Vietnam was hardly abrupt, and it lasted much longer than many people remember. The withdrawal actually began in 1968, after the Tet offensive, which was a military defeat for the Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors. But it also illustrated the vulnerability of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies.
That paragraph holds the essence of what so many Vietnam vets told me about leaving Vietnam. We left just as victory was in our hands.
Even though Vietnam is fine now can we let the same thing that happened there (after we left) happen in the Middle East where so much of the world's oil supply is tied up? We have broken the pot that is Iraq, we can not put the pieces back together with a little bit of glue and then walk away. Besides, if we leave in defeat, who wins?
Comments
I didn't say we didn't have motive; I merely pointed out that if we leave Iraq and there's a bloodbath (your point I think though perhaps I misread) it may not change the situation as it is right now. The only difference would be a shift from covert civil war to open civil war I'd imagine.
He will always be associated with Katrina. It is a shining example of how he just doesn't care about anyone who is not a millionaire. There are many instances of bloodbaths occurring after an occupation. There was somewhat of a bloodbath after Union troops left some southern areas during Reconstruction. There was a bloodbath when we left Lebanon. There was a bloodbath when we left Somalia. And yet, we always eventually leave.
Is it now going to be our policy that, once the U.S. Army occupies a region, it can never leave?
As for your assertion that the president will take the brunt of Congress' poor decisions, I'll buy that premise, but I think it's horribly unfair. Cash in what chips? The trade deficit isn't us borrowing money. It's us buying more from them than they buy from us. It's exports vs. imports. We're not talking about the national debt. That a whole other animal.
Double Bubble - China/U.S. Economy Article
From article:
*snip*
China recycles trade surplus into US Treasury bonds
American companies may have forgotten what Henry Ford propounded when he first built his Model T: If you do not pay high enough wages to your workers, they can't afford to buy your product. One simple basis for that Bush boom is that China is recycling its US$100 billion-plus trade surplus with the US back into dollars, and especially into US Treasury bonds. Almost half of the US Treasury bonds are now owned in Asia. So China is financing Bush's bold economic experiment: running two or more wars simultaneously with a huge budget and trade deficit, and equally huge tax handouts for the richest Americans.
* snip *
What would happen if they decided to cash in the chips?
Find me a country we're actually selling more goods to than we're buying from, and I might feel better.
Congressional testimony about the trade deficit
The Globalist's analysis of that testimony
Congressional Budget Office report on how trade deficits raise the standard of living
Of course, it might all be propaganda. There's no denying there are several very vehement camps debating the issue, and it can be argued that economics is more of an art form than a science in a vacuum of perfect information.
EDIT: US commodity exports as percentage of GDP (from the CIA factbook):
Agricultural products (soybeans, fruit, corn) 9.2%, industrial supplies (organic chemicals) 26.8%, capital goods (transistors, aircraft, motor vehicle parts, computers, telecommunications equipment) 49.0%, consumer goods (automobiles, medicines) 15.0% (2003)
I'm surprised the libs are not jumping on the admission of guilt GWB made during his speech. You know, the bit where he compared how we got into the Vietnam war to how we got into Iraq!
In dragging out the neocon’s favorite myth that a premature withdrawal from Vietnam is the source of our foreign policy failures, the President is revealing his and the neocon’s dirtiest secret: that they are nothing more than a bunch of delusional warmongers who keep invading non-threatening countries and are willing to kill other people’s children by the thousands merely to prove that they really are manly men, even though they all had “other priorities†that kept them from fighting when it was their turn.
This article makes the apt comparison that GWB addressing veterans of foreign wars is like an atheist preaching to the choir.
And please - staying in Iraq just because it would "cost" to leave is a classic Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Lastly, please read this brief article about GWB's distortions of history.
It says a lot about a person's intelligence when they dismiss arguments without reading them merely because they don't like the source. I actually listened to Chimpy yesterday and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I was willing to agree with him if he made some rational point. However, he said we should still be in Vietnam.
If you're so confident that these sources must be instantly wrong, then read them and respond. It should be easy for you to argue against them since their sources are so unbelievable. Dismissing them simply because you don't like where they came from is like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "La La La, I can't hear you."
I agree with Jason and second ArtBoy's comment.
CIP: It became a common practice to take a piece of real estate, losing many good men in the process, only to abandon it for the enemy to reclaim. The brass thought this would show the NVA that they had no safety anywhere. The NVA surely got this message but the greater message was received back in the USA that said, "we kill US soldiers to win a battle and then walk away from our gains only having to fight the same battle next month."
What first hand accounts and histories have you actually read? Were they of the "some book I read once" variety? Are you kidding? You're kidding, right? I won't even ask about why you would worry about the poor in China, even for a second, when there's plenty of poor here because I'm pretty sure you must be kidding.
No one wants to die during a war but it is far better to die knowing the job will be completed than to have died in vain.
Leaving aside the fallacy that The Great War has any comparison to Vietnam and/or Iraq whatsoever except possibly for the stupidity of the leaders, what constitutes "the job being completed" in Vietnam and/or Iraq? If you can tell us, you must be some sort of genius because Nixon, Kissinger, and McNamara together couldn't figure out what constituted "completing the job" in Vietnam, just as Bush, Rumsfeld, and Petraeus can't seem to get on the same page as to what constitutes "completing the job" in Iraq.
Both Senator John Warner (R - Virginia) and the latest NIE Report seem to agree that there is no way to "complete the job" in Iraq. Will you read a CNN link or is CNN too "lib" for you? Well, you should like me then. Don't libertarians make a virtue out of sefishness?
One final note: Bonzai!!!!1111!!!!
Andrew Ryan is my homeboy.
As for Republicans abandoning him and his platform that is politics and those who leave just because things are getting tough should not be re-elected. Either you have core principles or you do not. By jumping it either says you are abandoning your core principles now or you abandoned them when you first jumped on.
Time - I detect no real substance in this article.
NYT - The fourth paragraph contradicts the previous two articles. That paragraph holds the essence of what so many Vietnam vets told me about leaving Vietnam. We left just as victory was in our hands.
Even though Vietnam is fine now can we let the same thing that happened there (after we left) happen in the Middle East where so much of the world's oil supply is tied up? We have broken the pot that is Iraq, we can not put the pieces back together with a little bit of glue and then walk away. Besides, if we leave in defeat, who wins?