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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The thing with Iraq was that a lot of people who were working against Saddam in the country were against the war, because they felt that he was on the brink of getting taken down anyway. Now, "on the brink" can mean that they were at least a decade away but, well, isn't it usually better if a revolution happens from within?
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It actualy is quite similar, and they are right that the exact same thing would have happened but still be going.
Saddam was left in power because for all the horrible things he did, for which there was no excuse. The stability he brought to the region was seen as valuable.
The reality is that middle eastern politics never gets a chance to stabilize because every time it does either the United States, Russians, or the British go and break it up agian.
It has caused the death of countless thousands.... and it is easy to understand why it is wanted, the region is very.... poor on the human rights front, but armed intervention has failed time and time agian.
This is not a situation that guns can rule the day at the end of it.
...
And this is coming from some one who supports strong military.... guns cant solve the middle east, and never could.
Edit: Its similar to the situation with North Korea, only less flashy, the reason that the Kim regime is left in power isn't because they would put up that much of a military fight, but because the people that would die in the result of military intervention outnumber the people that are already dieing.
Sometimes reality has situations where no mater what you do people will die. :/
It depends, there is still decent odds you would be getting all the insurgent groups like you have now, this is one of those situations that can only really be solved by soft power, and changing peoples ideals... to create a lasting reform
Things violence is not exactly the best at.
Edited by Imca on Dec 1st 2018 at 1:57:27 AM
Saddam Hussein did NOT fall on his own and did in fact grow even stronger in his absolute control over the region with the humanitarian crisis in Iraq increasing many times over, especially as the region which had previously been a secular tyranny became much much more overtly oppressed.
Again, the myth that "only a strong leader like Saddam" can keep the peace is one of the most terribad ideas of the region. It's also things that allowed Assad and others to stay in power as well as was used to crush the Arab Spring.
No one believing in democracy or that Arabs might want it and freedom too.
Mind you, its a conveinant excuse for the mishandling of Iraq's rebuilding. "Oh, it was all because only Saddam and brutality can keep the region stable. We never should fight dictatorships or go against crimes against humanity."
Mind you, I think literally the situation in Iraq would not have happened if not for:
1. The dissolution of the Iraqi army 2. The mass embezzlement and corruption of the rebuilding efforts. 3. The attempts by the USA to dictate the Iraq government's form completely. 4. The complete lack of internatinal support.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Dec 1st 2018 at 2:02:21 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters."Not dipsosing of" is not the same as "Not fighting"
Its a war you cant win with bullets, you have to change the region through politics and soft power.
That you cant understand that is kind of telling.
It is not an excuse, it is not whitewashing, or saying nothing should be done, it is saying that it is not a simple issue that you can solve in two weeks by shooting some one in the head.
Edited by Imca on Dec 1st 2018 at 2:07:12 AM
I’ll point everyone to Gen. Mc Chrystal’s famous “terrorist math”, which is sort of emblematic of the situation. It’s a problem you quite literally cannot shoot your way out of.
They should have sent a poet.I think they can - the troop surge in Iraq worked pretty well, combined with hiring the old Republican Guard as a US military auxiliary. The problem is that you can't commit a modern democracy to a generation-long project like this unless you can be sure that the population is and will stay consistently behind it. If we'd made Iraq into the next West Germany, democracy would probably have taken root and avoided a sectarian collapse.
Problem is, the country that we need to demolish and rebuild is Saudi Arabia (the source of terrorist and Wahhabi money), and for some reason American leaders have never been willing to take a hard approach to Saudi money.
Edited by Ramidel on Dec 1st 2018 at 1:18:35 AM
Look, I am not an Iraq expert. I am just repeating what was actually said back during the whole discussion if Germany should join the US or not. There were basically three big arguments. One was the usual reluctance of Germany to get involved anywhere. Another was the question if the proof the US provided was actually convincing (and that it wasn't was the main aspect which overruled the fact that up to this point, Germany was pretty much in a "hail US" mind-set). But another aspect was that a lot of people thought that exactly because Saddam got more brutal and oppressive, he laid the ground for some sort of revolt from within - and I am not talking about Civil war. That's what was said back then by people who actually knew the country, some of which being people who had sought political asylum in Germany. and maybe they were wrong and it was wishful thinking. But I wouldn't outright dismiss them either. Not that we will ever know now.
West Germany at the end of the day was a political solution, not a military one.
The politics were entrenched, the money was spent, and it was build up as a bastion of Anti-Communism.
That is a completely different approach to what happened in Iraq where it was treated as a military endevor, a fortification of arms, not a fortification of ideals.
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Well, the thing is, the surge didn’t really work all that well. Outside of rhetoric from Mc Cain it really didn’t work at all. What were effective were all the other political initiatives undertaken at the time.
Edited by archonspeaks on Dec 1st 2018 at 2:22:05 AM
They should have sent a poet.Millions of innocent people died because of the lack of a finishing to the situation and that's the heads of those who left Saddam in power. It also weakened the global authority of the alliance of world nations.
All of which would have been different in 1991...why?
The US in 1991 got a political mandate for an intervention in Kuwait that involved a purely defensive war. To go on the offensive and dethrone Saddam Hussein would have been a violation of that international mandate, causing an actual weakening of global authorities in the same vein that the US intervention in Iraq in 2003 actually did.
Whenever anyone else on the Security Council (looking at you Russia, China) get into an 'internal policing action' or an actual, honest-to-God war against another power without a mandate from the Council, they can just point to the US invasion of Iraq and go 'we're just playing the game everyone else is playing.' It would have been, as the 2003 invasion was, a nakedly imperialist act that everyone could use as a cudgel to beat the US over the head with the next time it tried to exercise military power without a UN mandate.
What would make the US of 1991 magically more capable of sustaining a reform of the Iraqi state than the United States of 2003, which utterly failed in its attempt to do any kind of empire-building in the region?
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.So in that election in the 9th congressional district of North Carolina it's increasingly looking like electoral fraud by a group affiliated with the Republican candidate
. Shocked, shocked, I tell you.
Again, I'm trying to even figure out how 1991 is remotely similar. Not how they're different.
You have to have massive-massive-massive fraud and incompetance at every level (Which we did) to fail the way it was. Also, you know, an entire other war occupying the United States military.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Who's that creature? Why do I feel they are not quite evil enough for a comparison to McConnell?
Otherwise, a few articles on the crushing defeat - lost 7 seats out of 14 - Republicans suffered in California:
- This one article suggests that Kevin McCarthy - one survivor and future minority leader - basically sacrificed his colleagues for his own ambitions
. Another similar article
- This one discusses how changes in election/ballot laws paved the way and how the Republicans were caught off guard
.
- A more general discussion
- Another more general thing
The problem is your assuming things go right by default (the requirement for fraud at every level), which is not how reality works.
The reality is its the opposite, and you have to work hard to make them go right.
...
The military itself which you are pushing here could tell you that.
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Even if we focused on Afghanistan and Iraq in detail, they still would have been doomed to fail. And as for massive corruption, that's true, but you can't just conjure an honest political class out of thin air.
The most pernicious and dangerous of the right-wing whining isn't the baseless conspiracies of voter fraud, but the delegitimizing of legal voting practices.
Instead, Steel complains, California has changed its voting laws to allow more voters to vote. Taking Steel’s particulars from the top, they are:
1. Noncitizens voting. Steel wrote, “Some California communities allow even illegal immigrants to vote.” That’s true, but it’s not relevant to the House outcome, since noncitizens can’t vote for congressional candidates in California or anywhere else in the country. Noncitizens are permitted in some jurisdictions to vote in local elections. Is this a big issue? Steel’s lone example is San Francisco, where a tide of 49 noncitizens were registered to vote in a school board election.
2. Criminals voting. Steel is exercised about California rules allowing “convicted criminals” in county jails or on various forms of probation or supervised release to vote. But he’s talking mostly about those with misdemeanor convictions, who are allowed to vote nationwide, or those who have served their sentences. “Just about the only criminals barred from voting in California are felons in prison or on parole,” he writes, but he doesn’t explain what’s wrong with that.
Steel grouses that California actually does allow “felon voting,” but that’s just gaslighting. He’s referring to the downgrading of some felonies to misdemeanors under Proposition 47 of 2014, which passed by an overwhelming 60%-40% vote. The measure reduced some cannabis possession and petty theft counts, including shoplifting and check kiting, to misdemeanors, and allowed anyone previously convicted of felony counts for those offenses to petition to change their records. But by definition, the charges no longer were felonies; in other words, this isn’t “felon voting.”
3. ‘Motor voter’ problems. Steel goes to town on this one, and he’s got something of a point — just not as much as he claims. There’s no evidence of “fraud,” as he calls it, as opposed to technical glitches. As my colleague John Myers reported in September, the system allowing Californians to register to vote at the DMV was something of a mess, affecting 23,000 of the 1.4 million voter registration files sent to elections offices between the inception in late April and early August.
About 1,600 of these errors involved people who did not intend to register to vote. No illegal immigrants were mistakenly registered to vote, officials say. Some errors involved changes to voters’ party preferences, but there’s no evidence that the errors favored Republicans or Democrats, and in any case such errors wouldn’t even affect California primaries, since party preference is no longer a factor in those votes, much less the general election.
4. Teen preregistration. The state has begun registering 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, in preparation for their casting ballots after they turn 18. Steel calls this “a thinly veiled effort to capture voters while they’re young and more likely to identify as liberal Democrats” and notes that “of the nearly 89,000 minors that participated in the program, only 10 percent registered as Republicans.”
There’s an obvious solution to this for Republicans: Start advocating policies that young persons find appealing, rather than the racist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ pap that the GOP has become identified with. Maybe then more young people will register as Republicans.
5. Absentee and conditional ballots. Steel complains that absentee ballots were mailed to every voter in some counties, a system that will be expanded statewide in 2020. So what? Steel also observes that absentee ballots have to be postmarked by election day, but are valid if they’re received within a given number of days. Again, so what? If your interest is in making sure that all valid votes are counted, then by definition a vote cast by election day — and verified by a postmark — should be valid and given a grace period to arrive at the election office.
Re: Voter fraud in NC: What's interesting to me about this is that it's total Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat territory- the apparent fraud probably changed ~500 votes, and the Republican candidate won by ~900 votes.
Which sounds like it wouldn't have mattered, but the Election board has the authority to call for a new vote if there's evidence of voter fraud- and in a race that close, there's no way a candidate could survive a scandal like that.
So he would've won if he'd played fair, but getting caught cheating means likely to lose. And it's not like the cheating was subtle; the statical anomaly was pretty glaring.
Edited by Gilphon on Dec 1st 2018 at 8:16:19 AM
So apparently, there's a lot more to the Cohen Court Filing
, that I mentioned above
than I gave it credit for. (This is going to be a while)
1/ Late on Friday night, Michael Cohen's attorneys filed his sentencing submission. It is really worth a read
2/ A sentencing memorandum is a document that defense attorneys write and submit to a court before a client is sentenced so that the judge can consider all of the facts and circumstances surrounding their client and his conduct when he is sentenced.
3/ Judges are required to consider the "history and characteristics" of the defendant as well as the "nature and circumstances" of the offense, so the types of information provided in a sentencing memorandum can be extensive.
5. In many cases, there are disputes between the prosecutors and defense about what the defendant did, what sentencing guidelines apply to the defendant, or what the sentence should be. In the case of a cooperator like Cohen, I expect the only disagreement to be the sentence.
5/ It's important to note that if a cooperator like Cohen made a false factual assertion about his cooperation or his criminal activity, the prosecutors would make that known to the judge. You can be confident that this document is consistent with Mueller's knowledge.
6/ It is carefully written by an attorney who was a former high-ranking federal prosecutor in New York who knows that if he said something false or misleading, the New York federal prosecutors would make the judge aware of the falsehood and he would be very much worse off.
7/ I give you this background because there is very interesting information in this document, and part of what makes it interesting is that the info is specific and is made in the context where we can feel confident in its accuracy, even though it's written by an advocate.
8/ The most interesting thing in the document, by far, is Cohen's discussion of his false statements to Congress. His attorneys carefully discuss the false statements, his motivation to make the false statement, and the involvement of Trump's staff and attorneys.
9/ Because the precision of their words is important, I'm going to type out their exact words here. They refer to Trump as "Client-1" throughout but I've changed that to "Trump" here for clarity:
"Michael's false statements to Congress likewise sprung regrettably from Michael's effort, as a loyal ally and then champion of Trump, to support and advance Trump's political messaging. At the time that he was requested to appear before the [House and Senate Intel Committees], Michael was serving as personal attorney to the President, and followed daily the political messages that both Trump and his staff and supporters repeatedly and forcefully broadcast."
"Furthermore, in the weeks during which his then-counsel prepared his written response to the Congressional Committees, Michael remained in close and regular contact with White House based-staff and legal counsel to Trump."
13/ That last sentence is extremely important and interesting. It is also very carefully worded. The sentence strongly implies that White House staff and Trump's attorneys knew in advance that Cohen would lie to Congress and were involved in crafting his statements. But it does *not* come out and say that. It is important to note that Cohen's attorney does not allege that Cohen was *directed* to lie to Congress. Yet Cohen's lawyer has not been shy about having him say that Trump directed him to commit the campaign finance violations.
15/ If he could truthfully say that Cohen was *directed* to lie, I believe he would be obligated to do so because it would be a mitigating fact that the judge should consider. But Cohen's attorney suggests that Cohen felt pressure to lie and that Trump's staff and attorneys knew.
16/ Essentially what Cohen's attorney is saying is that Cohen read Trump's anti-Mueller messaging (discussed at length in the memorandum), knew that he was supposed to be consistent with Trump's lies, and did so.
17/ He was also in "close and regular contact" with White House staff and Trump's lawyers about what he would say. The implication is that they knew the testimony he was going to provide to Congress was false and let him go forward and lie, or at least didn't correct the record.
18/ So do Trump's staff members and attorneys have any liability? Possibly, although it appears that they tried to be careful to mislead Congress and the public in a manner that would not create personal liability.
19/ Specifically, it sounds like they knew Cohen would lie to Congress and didn’t stop him or correct the record. But they didn’t tell him what lies to say or direct him to lie because *they didn’t have to.” Cohen read Trump’s lies and knew he was supposed to repeat them. Depending on what Trump’s staff and attorneys knew, this could very well be a conspiracy to lie to Congress, which is a crime. (A conspiracy is just an agreement to commit a crime.) But it may be extremely difficult to prove based on what Cohen’s attorney said.
21/ What it would take to prove a conspiracy of that nature is testimony from another co-conspirator (a Trump attorney or staffer) that their conversations with Cohen were a way for him to run his lies past them for approval, and they approved the lies. Emails or other documentation proving that point would also potentially prove a conspiracy along those lines. I suspect that Mueller and House Democrats will try to find out what evidence exists of knowledge, approval, or coordination of Cohen’s lies.
23/ If all that happened is that Cohen told them he would lie and they didn’t stop him, that is not a crime, which is why they may have just listened. Their silence and failure to stop him was their approval, but also makes it hard to prove they were aware of his lies. Their defense would be that Cohen testified about many matters and that they weren’t focused on these specific portions of his testimony, and/or that they didn’t even know those portions of his testimony were false at the time. Prosecutors would have to prove otherwise.
25/ That is why emails or testimony from some of them would likely be needed to support a conviction.
I’ll break this up.
Edited by megaeliz on Dec 1st 2018 at 10:23:13 AM
I tried to edit it a bit, but the way he writes doesn’t leave room for a ton of natural places to combine paragraphs
(Cont’)
26/ First, the sentencing memorandum repeats the statement Cohen made under oath that Trump directed Cohen to commit the campaign finance violations, and provides important context to help the judge understand those violations and Trump's involvement in them. Specifically, Cohen "kept his client [Trump] contemporaneously informed and acted on his client's instructions. This is not an excuse, and Michael accepts that he acted wrongfully ..... Nevertheless, we respectfully request that the Court consider that as personal counsel to Trump, Michael felt obligated to assist Trump, on Trump's instruction, to attempt to prevent Woman-1 and Woman-2 from disseminating narratives that would adversely affect the Campaign *and* cause personal embarrassment to Trump and his family."
That last line is an attempt by Cohen's attorney to suggest that the offense is less serious than if the payments were just meant to influence the election.
30/ That is *not* a legal defense. It's a crime nonetheless, and Cohen acknowledges that. His attorney minimizes the conduct because his job is to provide context that would reduce Cohen's sentence. He's doing his job.
31/ That's also why he is pointing to the extent to which Cohen kept Trump informed of his actions at the time—more detail on that is given in the memorandum—and acted on his orders. It's not an excuse but it helps provide context that explains why he committed the crimes.
32/ The next interesting part of his memorandum is its description of Trump's legal and PR strategy. This is quite a statement to make on behalf of the president's former personal lawyer: Cohen was "personally aware of Trump's repeated disavowals of commercial and political ties between himself and Russia, as well as the strongly voiced mantra of Trump that investigations of such ties were politically motivated and without evidentiary support."
34/ What Cohen's lawyer carefully does not say is whether those statements are true or false. But he immediately follows that statement by focusing on the specific falsehood at issue here and noting that it was also part of Trump's false messaging.
35/ Part of what is going on here is that Cohen's attorney is explaining that Trump's extreme strategy of casting the entire investigation of him as false is a mitigating circumstance the judge should consider when taking into account his own crime of lying to Congress.
36/ But the description itself is quite an acknowledgement on his part.
The last part of Cohen's sentencing memorandum that is worth discussing here is his description of his cooperation. Cohen described in detail his cooperation with Mueller and other prosecutors.
37/ Cohen said that he participated in seven separate interviews with Mueller and that he met with representatives of the New York Attorney General concerning their civil lawsuit against the Trump Foundation and provided documents to them. Cohen also said that he met with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance and has complied with numerous requests for information from them. Also, Cohen claims that the decision to push forward without a traditional cooperation deal was his own decision.
39/ He claims he is eager not to delay his sentencing, and wants to be sentenced now before his cooperation is completed, even though he intends to cooperate further. This is a very unusual and risky strategy by Cohen. The judge can't be sure that he will continue cooperating.
40/ Once he is sentenced, the leverage that prosecutors have over him is reduced although it still exists and he has done a good job of demonstrating to the judge that he has fully cooperated, intends to continue to cooperate, and merits a low sentence.
41/ And that brings me to the last point. After disputing how the sentencing guidelines are calculated—Cohen believes the guidelines range should be 46 to 57 months—he asks for time served. I don't believe he will receive a sentence of time served.
42/ That said, based on my experience prosecuting and defending federal criminal tax and fraud violations, I expect Cohen to receive a sentence well below the guidelines range. He will get some prison time but it may be less than some uninformed or disingenuous observers predict.
Edited by megaeliz on Dec 1st 2018 at 10:26:04 AM

Cohen seeks ‘time served’ prison sentence, says again his crimes were meant to protect Trump
In a late-night court filing, lawyers for the onetime Trump loyalist wrote that their client was a changed man who was eager to share his knowledge with law enforcement and mindful that he would have to “begin his life virtually anew.”
Their filing detailed what they said was Cohen’s already extensive cooperation, including seven voluntary interviews with the team of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, as well as meetings with federal prosecutors in New York, representatives of the New York State Attorney General’s office and officials with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which are conducting wide ranging probes into Trump’s campaign and his charitable foundation.
Friday’s filing directly connected Cohen’s wrongdoing to Trump. Cohen’s lawyers asserted, for example, that Cohen paid off women to keep quiet about alleged affairs with the president to stop them from “disseminating narratives that would adversely affect the Campaign and cause personal embarrassment.” And they said Cohen lied about efforts to finalize a Trump business project in Moscow during the heart of the campaign because he knew it was Trump’s “strongly voiced mantra” to minimize the investigation into connections between his campaign and the Kremlin.
Trump has repeatedly said he had no business dealings in Russia, tweeting in July 2016, “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia,” and telling reporters in January 2017 that he had no deals there because he had “stayed away.”
In fact, lawyers for Cohen alleged that Cohen talked with a Russian official about a project there in January 2016 and had other, unspecified communications that continued as late as June 2016. They alleged Cohen kept Trump in the loop, and Trump and Cohen discussed the possibility of travel to Russia in the summer of 2016, with Cohen even taking steps to clear dates. That would have been just as Trump was clinching his party’s presidential nomination.
A lawyer for Trump and a White House spokesman did not return messages seeking comment Saturday. Trump this week accused Cohen of lying to spare himself time in prison — an allegation that is sure to be fueled by Cohen’s request for a punishment that includes no time behind bars.
Cohen, unlike most defendants, did not enter into a traditional cooperation agreement so his sentencing would not be delayed, though he nonetheless met — and expected he would continue to meet — with law enforcement agencies that wanted to talk to him, his lawyers wrote. And he did so mindful of “regular public reports referring to the President’s consideration of pardons” and as Trump launched a “raw, full-bore attack” on the investigations which Cohen was aiding, they wrote.
“He could have fought the government and continued to hold to the party line, positioning himself perhaps for a pardon or clemency, but, instead — for himself, his family, and his country — he took personal responsibility for his own wrongdoing and contributed, and is prepared to continue to contribute, to an investigation that he views as thoroughly legitimate and vital,” Cohen’s lawyers wrote.
The sentencing submission traced Cohen’s background and sought to play down the non-Trump related charges to which Cohen pleaded guilty. But more notable than that were the allegations it leveled against the president.
Cohen’s lawyers argued both the campaign finance violations and the lies to Congress were a product of his “fierce loyalty” to Trump, whom they at times referred to as “Client-1.” They said Cohen’s conduct was “intended to benefit Client-1, in accordance with Client-1’s directives.”
“Michael regrets that his vigor in promoting Client-1’s interests in the heat of political battle led him to abandon good judgment and cross legal lines,” Cohen’s lawyers wrote.
Edited by megaeliz on Dec 1st 2018 at 4:54:56 AM