Yesterday I spent some quality time with my best friend. We knocked around LA a bit, settled on giggling through the Simpson's Movie again, and got into a fairly heated debate in which our worldviews clashed over the war in Iraq and something called the Unitary Executive.
We covered about three dozen points and our basic disagreements over the War were as follows.
He says that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, that stability could have been achieved through containment and that we should not be in a two front war. He says if we would have just worked in Afghanistan, we would have achieved stability in the Middle East.
I said Afghanistan is not the Middle East. I say that the timing of the invasion is irrelevant, that military conflict with Iraq was inevitable and that in the end our long term commitment doesn't have to be cost-effective.
He says that Iran is stronger and that Hezbollah would not have fought Israel from Southern Lebanon if we weren't in Iraq.
I say Iran is weaker because of Ahmandinejad and that he's screwing up his economy, and that we wouldn't have busted up AQ Khan's network nor gotten Libyan concessions unless we put boots on the ground in Iraq.
Unfortuntaely we spent no time talking about Al Qaeda or radical islam. And we quit that discussion after I realized I couldn't nail him down to a good figure for the size of the invasion or occupation force - he wouldn't cop to Shinseki's view, and we basically hadn't read the same books. Since he has clearances, he claimed some inside dirt but I think he was shitting me, but it was time to watch the movie.
In our basic disagreement over Impeachment:
He says Congress must impeach or the Imperial Presidency will become a permanent feature of American democracy and that this is a very dangerous thing.
I say that Unitary Executive theory is a strawman, that people just don't like Bush and still for all his stonewalling nobody has found a smoking gun. Plame game being the prime example of a frustrated witch hunt.
He says that the President's end-around FISA is a prima facia case for high crimes and misdemeanors.
I say where's the beef and who died? Nobody has been harmed and he has no idea how many times this end-around was taken.
He says that's not the point. That Cheney could be an axe-murderer but we could never find out so long as the President tells his subordinates to ignore Congressional subpoenas thwarting their investigative powers.
I say we prosecute axe-murderers all the time and we don't need to change the system or change the Executive because we suspect somebody might do something wrong in the future - we will react to the axe murder when we have an axe-murder, crippling the executive is prior restraint.
So as you can see, we had a wonderful time. The fact that we have so much to say proves that we haven't been sharing resources, which is a bad thing for long-distance friendships. So now that he's finally finished his tenure package, he'll have time to return my calls and we can work all that out.
In reviewing some cases I've done on assimilation, I recognize quite painfully that I am way too hermetic in my own little bloggy world. And I resist putting myself into the mix, but break that barrier anyway. So what I'm trying to say is that I very much appreciate all of the tart dialog that we have here and would much prefer to do it in person. It is simply impossible to sustain the bandwidth and complexity of the subjects I like to talk about in the context of a written blog. And yesterday helped point out to me the effect that my writing is having on my ability to communicate these subjects face to face. I can't tell whether I should try to improve my writing or give up altogether. I'm not going to decide any time soon.
Another thing that I noticed is that my orientation is towards solving the big problems ahead of you, and I give a lot of props to people who make commitments of time, money, blood, sweat and tears. My philosophy is oriented towards iterative improvements and long-term organization building. So when I look at the goal of stabilizing the Middle East, I lean fundamentally towards nation-building. That's why I'm a neocon. I want a solution. I don't need a solution now, I need a commitment now. I expect you to fail your way to success. And that's always the way progress happens, unless you can buy progress off the shelf.
Anyway, that's one of the reasons I look to the HOW of the GWOT and am not ready to call it quits. I'm looking for methods, which is why I am impressed with Petraeus in terms of lessons learned. I'm also of the notion that an early start beats fast running. A half-assed player *in* the game is better than a smug expert *out* of the game.
I write too much and I ought to video more, because when I video I am able to express myself without the stridency that my quest for unambiguous clarity forces in my writing.
One more thing. I tend to amble up to topics and chew vigorously on one corner of them. What I rarely do is give a thesis-style overview and framework. I think those are good when they're funded, but I prefer to write from the bottom up. So the Internal Black Culture Wars, was a change for me, a top-down overview. As it stands we only got into the political troika debate, which was healthy for what it was worth.
I still want to get better at this. So.. aluta continua.
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