[DanaC]

You're also pointing out that the justifications for the Balkan deal were similar and the left needs to quit pretending to be antiwar.

I am not 'antiwar', I am anti- the Iraq war. Are you suggesting that anyone who objects to one war whilst supporting another is a hypocrite? Surely that depends upon the grounds for their objection. Right now, I am all for the UN sending a task force into Darfur. If that doesn't work I'm all for a coalition marching in there and enforcing a solution. Why? because right now, whilst we sit here Genocide is being perpetrated. I'd have been all for us going in to Rwanda. Why? because genocide was being committed.

There is a reason that International law does not allow for military intervention except under certain proscribed circumstances. Just because America believes itself to be above that law and ultimately trustworthy, does not make that law a bad idea imo. You may trust yourselves not to abuse your power and you may have faith in the fact that nobody can beat you in a war. But you are not the only country in the world. If you set aside International law and say that it needn't apply to you, sooner or later that law will be abandoned altogether. In the twentieth century, 160 million people died in wars. The stakes are very, very high.

Why did we not attempt to do something about Iraq when they were engaging in ethnic cleansing? Why did we not attempt to do something about Iraq when the opposition within the country tried to overthrow their dictator on the understanding that we would all help?

Can you think of an event between those difficult and terrible situations, and 2003, that might have changed the global response to such things?

Think hard.

So in that period you think the world wasn't really interested in getting involved? Approx. 18 years passed since the gassing of the kurds. Do you really think 9/11 made the whole world sit up and notice what was going on around them? I would counter that the world was already very aware and already engaged in attempting to deal with those things. The bombing of Belgrade was in that period. It was not desirable for America to go to war with Iraq at the time of the Halabja attacks. It was desirable for America to go to war with iraq in 2003. That is the only consideration that your administration has made. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the 'global response' being altered by 9/11, because it had nothing to do with the so-called 'war on terror'. It pure opportunism. It was desirable for that administration at that particular time to take that action and 9/11 gave it a set of circumstances which could be sufficiently manipulated in order to carry out that desire.


From wikipedia (though with a warning of possible bias):

An investigation into responsibility for the Halabja massacre, by Dr Jean Pascal Zanders, Project Leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) concluded that Iraq was the culprit, and not Iran. Some debate existed, however, over the question of whether Iraq was really the responsible party. The U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame.[citation needed]

A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time concluded, apparently by determining the chemicals used by looking at images of the victims, that it was in fact Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war [2] which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before the 2003 invasion. [3]

And as for this

and if someone were concerned with European civilization they might entertain some doubts about supporting a Moslem enclave...

What the fuck is that all about? Those people were Europeans. the fact that they were Moslem did not stop them being Europeans. Nor did it stop them being the victims of ethnic cleansing. They had every right to expect the rest of Europe to give a shit. Do you consider American moslems your enemy?