This is from Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s blog, back on May 18, 2006 when he was stationed in Europe training for deployment:
I know that NOT participating in a war (and such a misguided one at that) should be considered better than wanting to be in one just to write a book...but you know, maybe id rather be a good man than a good artist...be both? Some can and some cant...i guess it all depends on how great an artist, or how great a man they want to be. Sometimes it feels like i have to choose between being totally loyal to thoughts of my future family OR totally loayl to chasing down the muse. must find a middle ground.
Also from his blog, under the heading “what defeats people is a double confession”:
"I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think that if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have to put another government in its place. What kind of government. Should it be a Sunni government or a Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or a Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic Fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the the government once the US forces withdrew? How many casualities should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a president to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the president got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq." - Dick Cheney, the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, April 29th, 1991.
I miss political arguments. There seems to be a consensus with all the boys overseas...we laugh harder at CSPAN than comedy central. Silly republicans.
I highly recomment you read the whole blog. It's not a lot of reading, and it will shed a lot of light on both what TNR and Beauchamp wanted out of their shared mission.
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