RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Energy policy, wherefore art thou?

Steve Brenneis responds to Behethland B. Clark:

I guess that's why I'm not a liberal. My opinions usually have to be based on evidence, even if somewhat circumstantial. I'm not comfortable with forming opinions in a vacuum based on my feelings. They don't generally stand up to scrutiny very well.

If a puppet government is what we're after, this has to be one of the most hilariously inept attempts at such in the history of the world. Let's see. We held free elections in which our man was ousted. We put no restrictions on candidates, knowing full well that the Shiites and Kurds would loggerhead. By the way, the answer to why there is no government is right there. If you got your news from somewhere besides ABCCBSNBCCNNNYTWAP, you would know that the Shiites and the Kurds are at a temporary impasse, something eerily familiar to anyone who observes the US Senate, by the way. They have adopted a Parliamentary form of government, one which will be largely resistant to outside intervention given the triumvirate of factions. Yep, if I wanted to write a treatise on how to fail at setting up a puppet government, those are some of the steps I would include.

With regard to Clinton's nation-building attempts, have you ever heard of Somalia? As well, nation-building is exactly what he was after in Serbo-Croatia. Just because he failed miserably doesn't mean he didn't make the attempt. In fact, no attempt at nation-building undertaken by us has ever been completely successful and most are dismal failures. Be aware as well that the most disastrous of our nation-building forays were all but one initiated by Democrats. This is what makes Bush's foray into Iraq so hypocritical: during the 2000 election he took Clinton to task repeatedly for his use of US troops in nation-building efforts, specifically with regard to Somalia. He said using troops for humanitarian efforts was fine (which is wrong, by the way), but using them for nation-building was something he didn't approve of.

We don't really agree. We are both opposed to the war, but my opposition is based on the fact that it is a violation of the constitutional separation of powers, that it is undertaken for nation-building, and that it was unnecessary. In my opinion, if we had evidence that Hussein was a serious threat, we should have bombed Iraq into the stone age and taken whatever means necessary to separate his molecules from one another permanently. We should have let the power vacuum fill as it would and if there was a further threat, deal with it similarly. We should have, at the same time, done the same thing with North Korea. Failing our ability to produce sound evidence that Hussein was an immediate or near future threat to us, we should have left him alone or removed him using clandestine means. That doesn't mean we needed to convince the Washington Post or the New York Times, they can burn to the ground for all I care. That means we needed enough evidence to convince the Congress that a declaration of War was necessary. After that, the executive would have carte blanche to conduct the war as necessary.