That's how the discussion progressed to that very loooong comment.

This, “For those who espouse the domino theory a la Vietnam, look at that country today and our warming relations with them. ” is a non sequitor. Domino Theory had nothing to do with warming relations wih Vietnam. It was about communist influences spreading, it was a sub-set of the Truman doctrine.

And didn't it actually prove true? Look at the troubles of SE Asia. How much of it is from the communist revolutionaries that ran or tried to overthrow those countries> Cambodia. Laos. Thailand(which has Moslem and communist insurgents), Malaya, etc. Look, i know Domino Theory isn't popular because of its connection to Nixon, but come on. 30 years of woe for SE Asia only to have warming relations right now doesn't invalidate someone saying in 1962 that bad things would happen if we didn't try to actually enforce the Truman Doctrine—which JFK did.

Iraq and the school of realism. It's easy to dismiss Barnett and his branch school of 5GW as idealists. But you're looking past their reasoning. Why does Barnett say 'go big' instead of places like Iraq and even justify even doing something like Iraq? Ideology to save the rest of the world? Not likely. That's a side benefit. It serves our economic and security interests. It flows from Boyd: don't be contradictory, say what you mean and do what you say you mean. It's the 'a rising tide raises all boats' of economic Realism taken just a step farther.

Terrorism causes are many. change the rule sets and you see a disappearance of not only the causes but the tolerance thereof. More markets interconnected(helps our economy) stems from the rule set reset, and so does the increase in our security(fewer jackalopes seeking to poke the great satan in the eye).

I don't point to Europe under the Marshall Plan for a reason to stay in Iraq. I don't think any serious commentor on the issue does. The reason to stay is more of what we got out of Grenada and Panama. They aren't really analogous are they, at first glance. But the analogy is that doing both stemmed a tide and caused a movement a real reversal for at least a decade. Communism in the case of the New Jewel movement in Grenada and strongman-ism in Panama(which was then followed by stiff arming Pinochet out of power a few years later). The results of those had far ranging effects. The payoff from them was huge, even if you don't compare the costs of not having gone.

Let's not forget that the ME was a Mexican Standoff prior to Iraq. Sure, Iran and Iraq helped each other a bit during GW1, but just before that they'd gassed the hell out of each other, and now we've denied Iran one of their greatest claims for a need of nuclear arms: a belligerent neighbor next door. Syria and Iraq though both Baathist weren't on the greatest of terms. Wahabi from Saudi? Well, where haven't they tried to penetrate? We've altered that calculus. They cannot go back to that. For that reason it was worth it. A major Arab/Moslem conflict in that region would've started a major global recession(China is utterly dependent on ME oil, the US less than a 5th. But it would drive prices well above $60/brl). How is that not in our interests?

Don't confuse the sales job for the grande strategy is what I'm saying. That's a fair bit of real politik.

It doesn't take a Democrat or a Republican to be an idealist, but I think that people are retracting some of the grandiose rhetoric that spewed out in the last five years to something more realistic; that we should only commit our forces when our national security is at stake, and even then we need to define “forces.” Does it always have to be ten divisions? Can it be special operations forces, or some of the other clandestine assets? I'm not advocating isolationism, which is one of the first accusations hurled at “realists,” but I think we need to take a hard look at how we make decisions to put forces into harm's way. Williamson Murray noted that our successful foray into nation building at the end of WWII was a result of years of post-war planning that started before the war had barely started. We cannot, then, point to our success in Europe as some sort of reason as to why we should persevere in Iraq when we have so disastrously mucked it up. For those who espouse the domino theory a la Vietnam, look at that country today and our warming relations with them. While Iraq is a different animal because of its neighbors, there is no reason to think that when we leave that the Islamists won't return to squabbling among themselves over the scraps, returning to that Iraqi parable, “Me and my brother against my cousin, me, my brother and my cousin against the world.”

Thank you for the excellent comment. I upgraded it to a full post [1], and it's already getting a lot of response (like most of what you write does). Thanks for your contribution over at the Open Thread [2], too.

Ry,

And excellent contribution from you, as well. I'm looking forward to how he'll respond!

And thanks for the link over at Castle Argghhh! [3]

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/03/14/comment-upgrade-patriotism-and-the-iraq-war.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/03/12/open-thread-iv.html#c1494272
[3] http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/03/hi_fires_14_mar.html

“Neither pride nor sense of duty to one's nation is wrong. Jingoism is.”

Half-agreed. The idea that one ought to be proud of his country I think is not a good definition of patriotism. I think wanting to progress, however, is. If I were to say “this war is B.S. we're neglecting real terrorists, real threats, real issues” I'm saying our current course of action is wrong. I'd probably be labeled soft or even a terrorist sympathizer by Msrs. Savage and O'Reilly. But blind devotion to your football club even when they get caught smashing up the hotel is ridiculous. I was very proud of my country up until Bush got elected by suggesting John McCain consorted with a woman who didn't share his skin color. Since then, I've been let down time and time again. Please see Dan's upgraded post for a better idea of what I sort of meant

In addition, I'd really like to hear what put you in your camp. While I don't think the right is 100% wrong or really even 70% wrong, I didn't become a Democrat by chance or convenience. I come from a split family, half Sierra Club and half NRA. There are things my party does that drive me up a wall, so it'd be nice to hear the same (hopefully) from someone across the aisle.

Aaron

“I was very proud of my country up until Bush got elected by suggesting John McCain consorted with a woman who didn't share his skin color.”

It's interesting how an event that never happened, nor was ever reported, can cause such a profound change.

Or does Bush supporter == Bush. If so, then i take it that you're willing to describe Kerry as having accused Bush of cocaine use, because some Kerry supporters did?

Last: a reminder that this discussion continues both at the “comment upgrade” post [1] and over at Dreaming 5th Generation War [2].

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/03/14/comment-upgrade-patriotism-and-the-iraq-war.html
[2] http://www.fifthgeneration.phaticcommunion.com/archives/2007/03/patriotism_and_stumblingblocks.php

1)1) Vietnam and Communism. I grew up in Orange County, CA—behind the Orange Curtain as some say. Lots of Vietnamese moved there, and continue to flee there from Vietnam. I spent a lot of my youth in homes listening to little old ladies in black aodai and smelling of hoc nam tell stories of how their oldest son or their brother or some relative was slaughtered by the forces of Ho Chi Minh, often times for wearing glasses or owning a book or simply refusing to give up food grown on the family estate. Yet most on the left, and quite a few democrats, think of the ending of US involvement in Vietnam as un-alloyed good. Something they pump their fist about. ‘We got Nixon and ended that damn war.’

That tended to be true of people I knew who fled communist countries: their governments flat out abused them. But most democrats couldn’t bring themselves, despite all the evidence, to flat out denounce communism. Leftists on the other hand always made excuses for guys like Ceausescu and the Soviet Union, often singing praises to them.

Seeing the damage they did, the intentional damage as opposed to the un-intended consequences, I couldn’t agree with them. I simply couldn’t. For communism to succeed it required some truly heinous acts to be intentionally done and these people couldn’t bring themselves to admit that such was required and often denied that they happened (Duranty and his Pulitzer for example, but the number of examples is legion).

I understand that they didn’t want to fight a war or thought that more could be gained thru diplomacy, but that they couldn’t, not even for a moment, find serious fault with communism. And often sang the praises of guys like Ceausescu or Gorbachov who were party to things that made Abu Ghraib and Gitmo seem like Disneyland. The blatant wrongness and dishonesty on this issue kind of pushed me away from progressivism/American liberalism even though, like Dan, being Catholic made me open emotionally to some of what they espoused (help the poor, fair and just society, caring for fellow man).

2) Defense.
Like I said, I grew up in OC and more or less equidistant from El Toro MCAS, Seal Beach NWS, and NAS Tustin. My Aunt worked for the Navy Dept so I also wound up meeting a lot of service people. My family was desperately poor. Dad was an alcoholic who Mom threw out leaving us on welfare. I met those service people so often because while Aunt Betty was working at SBNWS sailors would often come by in junker cars and give us food or money(same for the local parish, I don’t think I’d have survived if it wasn’t for Monsignor Scanal), and once tickets to Disneyland on a day they closed the park to civilians because I’d never been. Liberals were always talking about how we paid too much for defense. Yet I saw how little the rank and file actually made. These people were often only a day ahead of us against the bank and collections agencies and they were bailing us out? Yeah, we were paying way too much on defense when it came to paying the individual Sailor, Soldier, Marine, and Airman all right.

Because my Aunt worked for the Navy I also got to see things that most people didn’t on things like Meet the Press or other talking heads shows. I got actual data on Soviet/Warsaw Pact capabilities compared to our own. Not simple cannon counting. What I saw scared the hell out of me.

And yet people were screaming that Reagan was crazy, we were spending too much on defense, and we had to get rid of nuclear arms (which, had we not had them, would’ve lead quite possibly to another major land war in Europe based on the disparity in numbers and capabilities—you kind of have to look at TN Dupuy’s QJMA to get what I’m talking about. Bare bones: the combination of capabilities of individual systems and numbers gave them a serious advantage.)

We needed to upgrade and expand to maintain status quo. We needed even more than what Reagan was giving to give servicemen a decent wage. But because of 1 above, I assume, seeing the need made me a closet fascist and a warmonger in the eyes of much of the American political left. Because I didn’t embrace diplomacy as the One True Way(part of a way, but definitely not the sole route) to peace there was something definitely wrong about me, which they tried to diagnose by calling conservatism a mental disease a few years ago or simply called evil with the Port Huron Statement back with the rise of The New Left.

An example: In ’02 I was in Oregon visiting the In-Laws. My BIL was in his senior year of hs and writing essays for college admissions. He chose to write about how we spent too much on defense and not enough on education. So I asked him what missions and commitments the military had. He had no idea. I pushed so he brought in my FIL. Who had no idea either, but since he was older insisted I should defer to his judgment on the issue. A man who doesn’t know anything about costs for the military and commitments and admits he could never vote for a republican for so much as dog-catcher and I am supposed to just take his word for it? Not likely.
They had no idea of what ‘teeth to tail ratio’ meant. And now they’re pissed off about Walter Reed AMC and trying to shove that issue in my face along with most of my friends from my UC Davis days, even though I was telling them there were budget shortfalls back before we were at war in Afghanistan.

Now there are democrats/liberals who do know. But there aren’t that many. Noah Schatman seems to be one over at Wired’s Danger Room. And most of them in my experience, but not all (as J over at ArmchairGeneralist and the august personage of TPM Barnett exemplify), are ones who work at reducing the military as much as possible because they want to force people to use diplomacy or because they abhor violence.
3) I grew up in OC, behind the Orange Curtain as the jokers in SanFran would say. That means both more and less than people think. The idea that it was just this factory turning out Alex P. Keaton clones is patently untrue. But growing up in proximity to the military left its mark. So too did that when republicans/conservatives were in power locally and nationally my family and our brown skinned neighbors(mostly Hispanic and Vietnamese) moved up the socio-economic ladder and when dems/liberals were in power we fell back closer to being on welfare.

Which bring us to 4)
4) Fundamental disagreement how to get to a mutually desired destination.
Many of my experiences have lead me to accept certain assumptions as being true and many of the assumptions by progressivism/liberalism, and much of a political or philosophical ideology is assumption IMO, to be untrue. Both ideologies really do want much of the same on the grand scale of things. They just assume very different things which tell you which path to take to get there.

Example: I grew up on welfare between 3 and 7. Many liberals, like Teddy Kennedy, had grand ideas, proposals and plans for how to help us. Most of them really didn’t work that well. They closed loopholes in the system we used to get by too. Ruined services for us often too—-don’t forget that TK was the guy who gave us the HMO, that ruined doctor care for us poor folk because HMOs are so cost conscious, with Medicare and Medical paying on avg. 40 cents on the dollar, that they tied the hands of doctors. Thanks a lot TK. Basically, the assumptions about how to help the poor liberals made simply didn’t hold to be true. They have made fine arguments on the Hill and in the Ivory Tower, but when it came to the real test of whether or not it fed the bulldog they failed(miserably).

At the end of the day, much of their proposals really only worked to make us more dependent on the system instead of moving us toward self sufficiency which was the stated goal. My family is originally from Wisconsin, farmer and Irish stock. Self sufficiency is a major defining trait. It really grated on me to see my Mom working so hard to get off welfare, being home only to wake me up in the morning, to have TKs plans seem to rob her of every advantage and hedge against unforeseen circumstances she worked for.

At the end of the day most liberals/progressives and I wanted the same things, but they simply refused to accept that how they intended to solve the problems didn’t work at the street level. Whether it was welfare or their ideas about how to create an egalitarian society or how to provide for the common defense or whether to oppose certain govt’s they simply seemed to come up wrong.

And that’s just your garden variety democrat or left of center independent. The hard core socialist types(and you can’t be into punk rock in Orange County without spending more than a decent amount of time listening to and debating them) who really do hate much of what we’re about.

But I can’t get too mad. We want the same things by and large which is why I hate the hyper-partisanship inherent to calling a democrat unpatriotic and things along those lines being tossed into debates. Democrats want terrorism to end too. They just have different ideas about how to do it—ideas I think are bassackwards having seen this pattern before in the 80s when we were spending so much on defense we couldn’t face the Warsaw Pact and deal with foreign terrorism at the same time. Not unpatriotic, just wanting to go in a direction I believe is wrong based on experience, scholarship, and the assumptions about human nature I have. And saying someone is wrong is pretty strong IMO.
(And now Dan realizes why John keeps a pretty tight leash on me. I get pretty wordy. One of my X-country coaches once remarked in an annual: “How quiet Ryan was at the beginning of the year. Not being able to keep him quiet at the end of the year.”)
ry

On the bit of patriotism. This may be reduction to absurdity, but then what classification isn't racism sans the pigmentation? Wouldn't a constituency then amount to the same thing? It is self selecting, but so is the US(nobody has to be a citizen who doesn't want to). So serving someone's goals, whatever group, becomes some form of hatred then?

Mostly I see this as sloppy thinking that's trying to say something without saying it. Let's not define words down to duck the hullaballo their use would cause. Don't start making patriotism take the place of the word jingoism just to duck someone daring you to prove it or yelling at you dor calling them that. Neither pride nor sense of duty to one's nation is wrong. Jingoism is. There was a difference between your avg. Wehrmacht joker and an SS trooper. One stood on the line to serve his country. The other sought to make what his country was about the norm for everyone. It's a difference of degree but one is acceptable and the other is not.

On republicans vs. democrats. One can be utterly wrong while operating with the greatest of intentions. Real harm can be done. Being wrong can do damage. America First comes to mind. Lindberg. Man was definitely a patriot—went out of his way to find a way to fight for his country and help his countrymen—but his preferences weren't for the best of the country or the world when it came to wanting to sit WW2 out.
I'm a conservative. I think 70% of the democrats and leftists are simply wrong. THe remaining 30% run the gamut from wrong to self-hating. But most of the left is simply wanting to go in a direction I believe is wrong. Hyper-partisanship needs to be put down. You can say you think someone is 100% flat out wrong without making moral questions of someone's character.

So I don't think Aaron is out of line here. Someone called those he, I assume, self identifies with and mounted a defense—possibly going further than he wished in returning fire. I just think the man is wrong.

Feel free to smack me upside the head (particularly Aaron).
ry