Redstate

Peace Studies are governed by the law of unintended consequences.

Subscribing to its revisionist form of history, which refuses to recognize evil and rejects the legitimacy of war will, in fact, make war more likely.

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“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan

it will ignore the legitimacy or necessity of military action. And bad war studies ignores the effectiveness of non-violent strategies.

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“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan

like studying the culture and providing water and electricity go a long way.

give me three examples of your strategy working. Where studying the culture an providing water and electricity has produced the same political result as military action.

It is the price of your continued participation.

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

I think you guys are all over this guy over connotations associated with the word "peace". It doesn't have to be about 16 unwashed hippes sat cross legged around a campfire smoking pot and singing kumbayah!

That the Marshall Plan held Europe back. Nor, I think, is it an example of what streiff is asking.

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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.

that the Marshall Plan worked independent of military action? How do you account for the period 1939-45? Or the military occupation of Germany that didn't end until 1955 (or in Berlin until 1989)?

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

I'm suggesting that war is a permanant state of affairs in the absence of peace (albeit in differing levels of intensity).

Peace is something to be cherished and not just in the aftermath of war.

And as it relates to the here and now: we easily militarily defeated the enemy of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party, but we have miserably failed to create a peaceful outcome. Should we blame the failure on a lack of knowledge of flanking moves or should we blame it on a lack of other types of knowledge?

Your next post will either tell me what the number is, or it will feature an apology for pretending to be able to read the future, or it will be your last post. Your call.

:clatter:

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

I mean, you could have rolled percentile...

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The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

But then again, I had a d100 in high school. It didn't work well, but it'd work for this, heh.

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(Formerly known as bee) / Internet member since 1987
Member of the Surreality-Based Community

and given your rep on these things around here, I was thinking it was a d1.

I thought the idea was to make it HARD to guess, not easy...

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I was implying that if Moe rolls a 1 on the die the loser gets blammed.

I have read these blogs for a number of years and have no doubt that I will be booted since although I have apologized in the past I can see no reason to do so in this instance.

(For those that care the reason that I apologized in the past was for linking to a MSM ignored true fact that stated that the majority of Iraq's parliament would have voted for a US force withdrawal date had the leader of the parliament allowed such a vote. In order to link to the story I unknowingly used what was apparently a left leaning website. However, the same story could also have been found in numerous Iraqi publications.)

If the moderators here at Redstate are not prepared to allow open discussion on mistakes that have surely been made in the implementation of peace in the Iraq theater and the rest of the middle east then that is surely their perogative. Personally I don't find it either helpful or stimulating just to slap each other on the back and ignore uncomfotable information.

To each his own.

to the beginning of your tragic self-beclowning on this thread.

You still owe an answer of how the Marshall Plan relates to "peace studies". I would even enquire why peace is necessarily to be cherished. Should the Czechs cherish the period between 1938 and 1939? How about Eastern Europe? Was the period from 1945 to circa 1990 to be cherished?

"Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, etc"

BTW, it is a pretty cheap shot to claim that challenging your fairly malformed opinions is some kind of mutual backslapping. You'll find we take serious people, regardless of their politics, seriously.

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

You wanted a poster to come up with examples of something that HE HADN'T SUGGESTED! The original poster had clearly stated that peace was something meritorous. It was you who built the strawman that made the leap that peace could take the place of militaristic action.

My opinions may well be misinformed (I won't take it personally), and I welcome all to deconstruct them. What i was referring to in that instance is the habbit of announcing "" to a previous posting.

is crap. If you had thought that was the case you'd have said so at the beginning before jumping in and revealing a profound ignorance of fairly recent history.

We were talking about 'peace studies' and he clearly says that providing electricty and knowing the culture are as efficacious a warfare.

You aren't flyerhawk. You don't get a pass on this type of meretricious nonsense.

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

We were talking about 'peace studies' and he clearly says that providing electricty and knowing the culture are as efficacious a warfare.

I brought up providing electricity as a tool for reducing conflict. If the goal is to continue a war for war's sake, then relying on warfare alone is great. If the goal is to reduce conflict, other strategies are needed. Our military understands this. They use "peace studies" concepts, such as understanding their counterpart's culture. They don't only use bullets.

I first heard about the importance of electricity in Iraq from the State Department's prewar report Future of Iraq Project.

Of the times war was averted by offers of free electricity.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

Just so you know grinder, this statement:

1. I have read these blogs for a number of years...

doesn't compute when given this statement:

2. If the moderators here at Redstate are not prepared to allow open discussion on mistakes that have surely been made in the implementation of peace in the Iraq theater...

Because what it points to is that you're either lying about number 1., your reading comprehension doesn't reach room temperature level IQ status (vis-a-vis number 2), or both.

Oh, and is that the ka-click of Moe's BoomStick™ I hear in the background...

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

that tag line is great!

" in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."
Abe Lincoln

But I can't.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

And we're fine with open discussions on the war. When you feel like having one, contact us. Nothing personal, but I don't particularly feel like having us cater to your delusion that the war is already lost; frankly, we'd rather have you waking up screaming at night at what you've become.

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

If he rolled a 1 would you have banned him regardless of his answer? :-)

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...for his arrogance of trying to force us to hold an argument on his terms. No member of the antiwar movement is going to get anywhere here as long as they refuse to accept that there is a dispute on core assumptions between us and them.

Yeah, I know: four years and counting.

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

You just make me nostalgic is all. You and all the D&D comics you keep exposing me to.

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The Marshall Plan was adopted because of a gross miscalculation of the Russian military's strength and the lack of resolve by Allied Forces, the US in particular, to confront the Soviet Union during the after mass immediately following World War II.

The Marshall Plan enabled the Soviet Union and gave rise to the Cold War:

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan

If we take seriously E. H. Carr’s dictum that history is not a single, well-defined narrative but a terrain of contestation between competing and evolving interpretations whose influence is as much shaped by time and place as by any given set of facts, it should come as no great shock to discover that the past is constantly being reassessed or, to use the more familiar term, “revised” by successive generations of historians. The post-1945 period in general, and the Cold War conflict in particular, has been no exception to this simple but important historiographic rule. After all, for the better part of forty years, the East-West confrontation divided nations, shaped people’s political choices, justified repression in the East, gave rise to the new national security state in the West, distorted the economies of both capitalism and Communism, inserted itself into the culture of the two sides, led to the death of nearly twenty million people, and came close to destroying tens of millions more in October 1962. Little wonder that the Cold War has been studied in such minute and acrimonious detail. Arguably, it was the most important period in world history.

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“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan

I'm missing something or this is attempting to tell me that the USSR would not have emerged were it not for the Marshall plan????

I fail to see even the slightest grasp of logic in this leap.

You suggested that the Marshall Plan was an example of "Peace Studies."

I beg to differ.

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“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan

I think a mere one should suffice. He'll have a hard enough time with that.

Everybody was scared [synonym for and ryhmes with wasteless, but unacceptable on this board] that nobody would suvive the next big one. Unfortunately this truth is being overshadowed by another one spoken by Merlin in Exalibur:

For it is the doom of men that they forget.

came AFTER the war. First, Germany was bombed into rubble. Germany's _ability_ to fight was destroyed, only then did the allies focus on rebuilding the country.

See this article on the bombing of Hamburg. This doesn't give comparative figures, but I believe the USAAF/RAF dropped more bombs on Hamburg in six days than the Luftwaffe dropped on London in six years. The firestorms were even worse than the bombing. Temperatures seem to have exceeded 1,000 degrees (from a UK source, so probably Celsius) and the flames were driven by gale force winds.

Incidentally, are you under the impression that the Coalition is not spending money on rebuilding Iraq? Who is it you think IS putting money into Iraq's infrastructure? And who do you think is blowing it up?

The difference between Germany and Iraq is not the absence of an Iraqi Marshall plan. It is the huge difference in what went before.

Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net

International Editor of