Bush: "We've never been for 'Stay the course'"

Politics International Politics
1

onlinepokercenter.com/poker- … the-course

[quote]To be fair, I sort of understand what Bush is saying.

He is saying: “Look, of course we’re going to keep fighting, but we are going to keep adjusting our strategy. We’re staying the course in terms of keeping the same goals (i.e. not leaving until the job is done) but I’m open to new ideas.”

So is it unfair to criticize Bush then if I perfectly understand what he is trying to say? No. Hell no. For too long Bush has coarsened the political debate with his idiotic, simplified slogans. Instead of actual reasoning and arguments, he throws out nuggets like “cut and run” and “stay the course.”

[b]Mr. President, you cannot have it both ways. When you want to vilify your opponents and marginalize free speech, you resort to your little caveman catchphrases. When you want to drum up support for a complicated war, you stifled dissent with your cowboy-isms.

Now when the going gets tough, you want to engage in the same type of nuanced debate as John “voted for before voted against” Kerry?[/b] [/quote]

2

At the time of the 2004 elections, there was a lot of debate about flip-flopping, and at that time many people were seeing both the hypocrisy and the folly of the Bush election spin. Now it has caught up to them. Firstly, Bush has flip-flopped on issues, but for the spin, the flip-flops are not that at all, and flip-flops are to be condemned. The second problem is when you refuse to change your stance even when it’s wrong, that is, you “stay the course” even when the course is wrong and even when top brass is saying that, then you’re on a wrong course. The kind of idiot that stays a course like that is someone who is getting something out of it: whether it is money, money for cronies, political favors, or something else.

So for now it’s “stay the course”, but if you’ll vote Republican if it’s not a big issue, then Bush will actually flip-flop at this time for the vote.

3

[quote] During an interview today on ABC’s This Week, President Bush tried to distance himself from what has been his core strategy in Iraq for the last three years. George Stephanopoulos asked about James Baker’s plan to develop a strategy for Iraq that is “between ’stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’”

Bush responded, ‘We’ve never been stay the course, George!’

And also these:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04][/quote]

digbysblog.blogspot.com/

Now is it okay to call him a liar?

4

Somebody already beat you to it.

“Somehow, the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country. Somehow, this is tolerated. Somehow, nobody is accountable for this.”
– Kevin Tillman, ex-Army Ranger, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Pat Tillman’s brother

5

Another way of interpreting the Presidents remarks:

[quote]Stay the course by changing course

President Bush has always said his administering of the war in Iraq would be dictated by what his generals on the ground thought about things. And now his generals on the ground are telling him what they think about things, and they’re already on the record with their views that things are pretty lousy at the moment.

This October has been the worst single period our fighting forces have seen in a long time. Which is not altogether unexpected, the enemy knowing full well that an important U.S. election is just weeks away and that it serves his interests to kick up as much momentary hell as he possibly can, the better to steadily fray the American resolve as day by day more and more flag-draped boxes come home.

We are at what is being called Iraq’s “Tet moment,” and even Bush thinks he agrees. Tet - the big Communist offensive in South Vietnam in early 1968 - was, of course, a huge defeat for the Reds. Not that you’d have particularly known that here at home, where the savagely bloody battle in the faraway combat zone effectively marked the end of the American people’s patience with the Vietnam War. From which point there was thereafter no rallying of public support. And Bush’s Tet moment does very much seem close at hand.

Notably Tetlike - in the sense that the enemy keeps throwing in waves of fighters no matter how many you stomp out - were yesterday’s catastrophic militia assaults upon Balad and Amara, two cities recently handed off by the allies to local Iraqi control. But if it was possible in some quarters to view these attacks as dead-sure evidence of the overwhelming hopelessness of containing full-blown civil war, well, one top British commander thought otherwise: The clashes, he said, represented “the first really major test the Iraqi security forces have faced.” And “they’ve passed,” he said. “Just.”

Still, the Iraqis have been too slow about standing up to defend themselves, and whatever course the allies are, as the expression has it, staying has not been discernibly successful. Bush’s generals perhaps have specific changes, of course, in mind. Let’s hope.
nydailynews.com/news/ideas_o … 0179c.html[/quote]
War is not a static situation. Analyze, improvise and adapt are the rules of battle.
If the Generals recommend a change or adaptation of tactics that is what should be considered.

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[quote=“TainanCowboy”]War is not a static situation. Analyze, improvise and adapt are the rules of battle.
If the Generals recommend a change or adaptation of tactics that is what should be considered.[/quote]

Unfortunately, Bush never seemed to realized this until now, constantly remaining firm to his convictions.

That perhaps is a general difference between Republicans and Democrats: Republicans cling to their decisions even when they go disastrously wrong, while Democrats change their strategies as new information arises (and get labeled “flip-floppers” in the process).

7

[quote=“Vay”]http://www.onlinepokercenter.com/poker-laureate/weve-never-been-for-stay-the-course

[quote]To be fair, I sort of understand what Bush is saying.

He is saying: “Look, of course we’re going to keep fighting, but we are going to keep adjusting our strategy. We’re staying the course in terms of keeping the same goals (i.e. not leaving until the job is done) but I’m open to new ideas.”

So is it unfair to criticize Bush then if I perfectly understand what he is trying to say? No. Hell no. For too long Bush has coarsened the political debate with his idiotic, simplified slogans. Instead of actual reasoning and arguments, he throws out nuggets like “cut and run” and “stay the course.”

[b]Mr. President, you cannot have it both ways. When you want to vilify your opponents and marginalize free speech, you resort to your little caveman catchphrases. When you want to drum up support for a complicated war, you stifled dissent with your cowboy-isms.

Now when the going gets tough, you want to engage in the same type of nuanced debate as John “voted for before voted against” Kerry?[/b] [/quote][/quote]

Vay, please add content of your own. Cut-and-paste posts bring little value to the forums. Thank you.

Maoman

8

[quote=“Chris”][quote=“TainanCowboy”]War is not a static situation. Analyze, improvise and adapt are the rules of battle.
If the Generals recommend a change or adaptation of tactics that is what should be considered.[/quote]Unfortunately, Bush never seemed to realized this until now, constantly remaining firm to his convictions.[/quote]The reality is that Pres Bush has let the Generals run the war so far. Needs have been quickly recognized and met due to the war in Afghanistan & Iraq not being ran from the White House. This is a continuation of the procedure.

[quote=“Chris”]That perhaps is a general difference between Republicans and Democrats: Republicans cling to their decisions even when they go disastrously wrong, while Democrats change their strategies as new information arises (and get labeled “flip-floppers” in the process).[/quote]If this is your opinion I certainly won’t be the one to bust your balloon.
But I think its a generalization that just doesn’t hold water.

9

:roflmao:

You don’t get out much do you, listen to the news, read a newspaper?

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Maybe on Planet Zord but on Planet Earth the reality has been is a bit different:

Officially, he is Tommy Franks’s superior, head of the United States army, a member of the mighty joint chiefs, and two months away from what ought to be honoured retirement at the end of a military career stretching back to the Vietnam war.

But for the past two years Gen Shinseki has been in total eclipse after what appears to have been the most spectacular bust-up with his civilian bosses, in particular Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.

Hardly any of this the reached public domain until last month when Gen Shinseki told a congressional committee that he thought an occupying force in the hundreds of thousands would be required to police postwar Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld publicly repudiated him, saying he was “far off the mark”.

In semi-private, the Pentagon’s civilian leadership was far more scathing. A “senior administration official” told the Village Voice newspaper that Gen Shinseki’s remark was “bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars”.

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So by this statement, which of the following assumptions can we make…

  1. You think that more troops would be the answer and therefore would support sending another 200,000 troops to Iraq.

  2. While you have called for an end to the occupation of Iraq, what you really mean is that we should be occupying Iraq with even more troops.

  3. You believe that more forces (boots on the ground) is the best way to defeat an insurgency and have the historical evidence to justify your view.

  4. You would like to see more troops sent to Iraq to support a war that you did not support just so that you would be able to get those who did support the war to support their own support by sending more support.

There, how did I do?

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So by this statement, which of the following assumptions can we make…

  1. You think that more troops would be the answer and therefore would support sending another 200,000 troops to Iraq.

  2. While you have called for an end to the occupation of Iraq, what you really mean is that we should be occupying Iraq with even more troops.

  3. You believe that more forces (boots on the ground) is the best way to defeat an insurgency and have the historical evidence to justify your view.

  4. You would like to see more troops sent to Iraq to support a war that you did not support just so that you would be able to get those who did support the war to support their own support by sending more support.

There, how did I do?[/quote]

I believe the strategy was stupid but the tactics to implement that strategy don’t have to be stupid too, making a bad situation worse. It’s like walking into an ill-advised gunfight underarmed.

My view is that now that we’re in Iraq and we’ve all but dismantled it, walking away (‘cut and run’) is equally ill-advised. At this point we need a wholesale change of leadership and new leadership in place whose first act would be to go before the Iraqi people and admit our errors and clearly state that we won’t occupy Iraq, we only want to put Humpty Dumpty back together again for everyone’s sake.

As long as the Iraqi people suspect our true motivation is eternal domination of their country, more soldiers will only inflame their sense of grievance. If we can convince them and the world community that we’ve gotten rid of the bad apples in U.S. policy making and our only motivation at this point is what’s best for the Iraqi people, then more soldiers will be like sending more policeman to a riot situation.

At this point though it may not matter what we do as the window of opportunity may well have closed and the situation is beyond our control no matter what we do.

My fall-back strategy after making our intentions clear before the Iraqi people would be to pull back to Kurdish Iraq and try to keep that area from breaking out into war between the Kurds and Turks. That’s actually the greatest strategic threat in the region currently and the most amenable to our influence because both the Turks and Kurds are ‘our friends.’