quote:Though in Iraq, the perception may be different. In the case of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. Maybe. No way all of those prisoners were zealots who would happily die for the faith.
...or dignity, or any of those words that no small amount of Americans signed up for the military to pick up. We don't need all the prisoners to be zealots who would happily die for faith, just one.
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Be fair - I derailed the thread as much as anybody. The 2000 election is an obvious counter to my contention that there is a qualitative difference between the U.S. and former Iraqi governments. Not a valid counter, but obvious.
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I personally find it somewhat irritating the way the President- not this particular President, but Presidents in general- get the credit, or the blame, for whatever happens to be coming down the pike. The President is neither dictator nor omnipotent, people. Everything bad that happens is not his fault; everything good that happens was not his doing.
The economy, for example, is almost totally out of the President's control. To that extent that he *does* have any influence, it is shared by Congress, the Fed, and a gaggle of unelected Federal officials sitting in cubicles in really ugly Downton D.C. buildings. The same thing goes for the war or anything else. The President makes a good target because he is obviously the most powerful man in the system, but that does not mean he has all the power or even a majority of it.
Truman may have said that, "The buck stops here!", and it was classy, but not entirely true. The buck is divided to the point where you can get ha'pennies out of it.
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