Here's my response to some of the comments on the blog below.
My post about my trip is below this post.

H (your 11/04/04 comments):
1. Status quo goes back to the 1970s. This one was a bipartisan problem, and Reagan is at fault, too.
2. What kind of 'more effective international efforts'? The UN is massively corrupt via the oil-for-food scandal. (This is 10 times bigger than Enron - why is the media suppressing stories about it?)
We have allies, unless the only allies that count are Germany and France. What is your basis for the sentence "The more the terrorists know that the US will defy the UN and just barrel ahead with bombing countries that didn't attack us, the more likely they are to attack us." When we defied the UN and bombed Kosovo (which didn't attack us), did that make terrorists more likely to attack us too?
3. You could just as easily say "We all know the two ARE connected".
4. Kerry suggested using law enforcement techniques in the war on terror - i.e., sending the FBI in to analyze explosive types and blast trajectories after the fact. He didn't give the impression he would take the fight to the enemy.
5. The PATRIOT act mostly just sorts out, clarifies and enhances laws passed by Clinton and by Reagan and GHWB. There have been no reported abuses of the PATRIOT act. Regarding supreme court etc., these issues were overshadowed by me by WW IV. Secrecy is mostly bad, but I never heard from Kerry that he would have been more transparent. (That doesn't mean I love the PATRIOT act, but I think it is a red herring.)

JP: (your 11/05/04 comments):
I'd like to see citations that "Bush admin announced there was GOING TO BE an attack on the country". I didn't hear about them guaranteeing one.
Regarding shipping containers, funding the military, etc., if the Democrats were serious about this, they would be strongly pushing for laws being passed to remedy this. If they are not strongly pushing for laws addressing these issues, their comments seem like pure politics to me, with no real feeling behind it. Kerry is still a senator, I am waiting for his bill proposals on these issues.
I do agree that we need to increase our spending on the military, especially supplying troops with more ammo and protection. Kerry badly hurt himself by voting against supplying the troops ("I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it").

H: (your 11/06/04 comments):
It would be interesting to see the Democrats with the Greens, but remember that Germany has a parliamentary systems where one builds governing coalitions with multiple parties involved. The USA, for better or for worse, is a 2-party system. Nader, of course, is trying to change that (and Perot did a good job, capturing 19% of the vote in 1992.)

JP: (your 11/09/04 comments):
I personally think euthanasia should be legal, but I understand why some people have problems with it. H has pointed some issues out (11/10/04 comments).
Fallujah is not revenge. This town should have been taken over by coalition forces in March of 2004, but the Bush administration caved in to political pressures. On the other hand, I read that the insurgents had booby-trapped much of the old city, which is the only part we didn't take over in 3/2004. The tactic of pulling back the take-over of the city, in hind-sight, seems to have worked, however, as there are many reports of Fallujahns rising up against the insurgents, who were making themselves very unwelcome. The locals were starting to execute the insurgents (some of the foreigners were beating Iraqi women who did not fully cover themselves, etc.). Fallujah is a smuggler's town - its population increased from approx. 10,000 a few decades ago to more than 300,000 - most of this growth is attributed to the smuggling business coming in over the desert to the west. The second battle of Fallujah was no surprise - there were weeks of advance notice of the battle, enough time for the civilian population to evacuate.
I agree that we should make allies with the terrorists' neighbors, however, we pursued this strategy under the old "status quo" that I like to talk about - look at Saudi Arabia, etc. It can't be the exclusive way to approach things.
There is a blogger who has a keen grasp on these kinds of issues - he calls himself Wretchard and his blog is Belmont Club at http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/
He has been analyzing Fallujah since the beginning and most of his predictions have been spot on. He is a Filipino living in Australia, and seems to have worked for the Filipino government in the 1980s in their relations with Muslim insurgency groups in the Philippines.
He does a very good job of looking at the bigger picture of Fallujah.

C

- posted by Christoph Roggenkamp @ 11/16/2004 07:22:00 PM