The Draft

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by Undertoad
The war will be the wrong decision if the country does not become a successful and (fairly) Democratic nation.

At any cost to us, right?

[Undertoad]

It's a good point, but what's the cost of cleaning up a major city after a suitcase nuke detonation?

What's the cost of what the public will be willing to do after the next terrorist act? How threatened will they feel, and what sort of reaction will they demand?

For all the WMDs not found in Iraq, there's Libya. Libya was on the Pakistani nukes client list and DID have those aluminum tubes, so you have to consider this a 2-for-1 deal in any case.

(Please, the notion that Libya would have gone this direction anyway is silly. Khadafi SAID it was due to the US approach to Iraq, and any salesman understands that you need a closer to finish off any deal.)

[DanaC]

For all the WMDs not found in Iraq, there's Libya. Libya was on the Pakistani nukes client list and DID have those aluminum tubes, so you have to consider this a 2-for-1 deal in any case.

Now truly we have abandoned all semblance of international law.

[DanaC]

And didn't you see the rape rooms? I did. Did you see the other torture videos? Did you see the guy getting his tongue cut out with pliers and diagonal cutters? Maybe your sources aren't really paying attention.

By that logic there are many countries we should be marching into. The Sudan? Zimabwe? .......Nobody seemed to have this much of a problem when the Hutus were slaughtering a million Tutsis...Not mention Israel's legally sanctioned and openly spoken of policy of systematic torture of suspects in custody.

Would you be kurdish(sp) in Turkey? How bout poor or female in Saudi Arabia? Have you even noticed what is being done to ordinary people in Kashmir? Even in Britain we hold people in a very dubious prison, indefinately and without charge. Everybody here knows the police conduct fishing expeditions amongst moslem population.....arresting and detaining hundreds of men in a storm of media interest , most of whom are then released quietly to go about their ordinary busniess. They had no leads to those men. Only a wide lead to that mosque, or that town. If I were a moslem man in Britain today I would feel the glare of the authorities regardless of my innocence or lack of invovement in anything other than ordinariness.

Oh....and pictures can be misleading as can testimony. Like the young lady who testified to the world of Saddam's soldiers tossing babies out of incubators with glee....An ordinary nurse she purported to be, but the world then learned she was the daughter of a prominent member of the Kuwaiti royal family. In the middle ages people told stories of Jewish kabbalas crucifying a little Christian boy. Later in the first world war we get stories ranging from bayonetting babies to the crucifiction of a wounded soldier. Most of these stories turn out to be a lot less factual than one might expect.

Nonetheless I do believe much of what has been reported regarding the excesses of Saddam and his sons against a proportion of the Iraqi population. Their's was a particularly distasteful brand of power and cruelty. But the majority of the people in Iraq did not want us to rescue them. Really they just wanted us to stop starving them out of any ability to oppose and maybe who knows, not sell him weapons when our politcal landscape swung back around that way.

We talk so much in the west about how awful it must be for women in some Islamic countries where they are in wesern eyes degraded and humiliated by enforced domesticity and the covering of themselves in public....Iraq was a secular moslem state. For the much of the population, life in Iraq was stable, predictable and secular. Lets remind ourselves that the Baath (sp) party were a communist , socialist organisation. They werent always saddam's plaything. Saddam himself was a secularist. Under Saddam Hussein women worked and engaged fully in the economy. ....Now they are taking up the veil in droves. For many its an expression of their disdain for the invasion which has so offended their sense of nationhood....for others its a form of security.

So.....we have had a dictator in Iraq who made life impossibly miserable for some but made a liberated life possible for others....and now we have an occupation force who make life impossibly miserable for many and send the liberated women scattering for cover.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally posted by tw
They asked George Jr the same type of question in his news conference. Could he cite one point where he made a mistake? After a long and painful minute, he decided he could not even cite one. [snip] George Jr cannot think of one mistake!!!!

I can understand George Jr not being able to admit he was wrong.

From the USA Today transcript of the 4/23 Press Conference (emphasis mine)

I hope — I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't — you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

Where in that does he not admit to making mistakes?

He may not be able to say "this is where I messed up" but he DOES admit to it. At least be fair in your rants.

[DanaC]

maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

The leader of the most powerful nation that has ever existed and he cant think on his feet?

I must admit I am bemused. In Europe we anticpate our politicians will be the best and most able of our people not the ones we'd feel most comfortable drinking with in a bar......Of course we're often disappointed in this.....But really any politician that claimed he wasnt a fast enough thinker to answer a question off the cuff would not be considered valid material for high office in most European countries.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally posted by DanaC

Oh....and pictures can be misleading as can testimony.

(Unaltered) Pictures themselves do not lie. Only interpretations of the picture can differ.

When we see pictures of rape rooms and people getting their tongues cut out, those pictures don't lie. We see video of a man being beheaded. It doesn't lie. The whys and the wherefores may differ from one interpretation to the next, but the fact that it happen has not changed. Your opinion might change, but the picture remains the same.

[DanaC]

As I said, pictures can be misleading as in they can be used to mislead. I didnt say they lied.

[Undertoad]

Yeeeeahhh... I guess in my world, what a dictator actually does is part of the equation, and how deeply you respect his sovereignty as a result is part of the equation, and the nature of the people and their desires, all part of the equation. To throw all those considerations out seems inhuman.

[richlevy]

Originally posted by OnyxCougar



Where in that does he not admit to making mistakes?

He may not be able to say "this is where I messed up" but he DOES admit to it. At least be fair in your rants.

Actually, it's an almost useless statement. The implication is that there were no mistakes serious enough to be remarkable. It's like a car salesman saying "I'm sure theres some tiny flaw in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find one."

He is either the stupidest man in office, or a much better politician and liar than I have given him credit for.

[DanaC]

I understand that point of view Undertoad. To a degree I agree with you. But.....The world is and always has been full of dictators of various levels of brutality. If we went marching into every country whose people were being brutalised by oppressive regimes we would never have had time to even look at Iraq because there are soo many more deserving candidates for regime change.

Our natural outrage at the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein's regime has been used to manipulate us into approving action which breaks out of the bonds of international law and leaves those bonds frayed.

Instead of making the world a safer place for the loss of one of its great dictators, we have made the world infinately more dangerous in the precedent we have set .....So you may trust your government's motives in this....can you be sure of the motives of tomorrow's government? When the invasion of a soveriegn nation requires no first strike or percievable danger to the agressor we have strayed into very very dangerous waters.

[xoxoxoBruce]

But really any politician that claimed he wasnt a fast enough thinker to answer a question off the cuff would not be considered valid material for high office in most European countries

If he had made that statement before taking office. What would "most European countries" do if he had?

[Undertoad]

Precedent: well it's certainly the first time a UN resolution was actually enforced.

[DanaC]

*chuckles* forgive my innapropriate generalisation. I am just so constantly amazed at the apparent stupidity and lack of any mental alacrity displayed by the man who sits at the head of the most powerful nation on earth.

I have seen politicians say stupid things in the UK. Stupidity is no guarantee of failure in our political system either....But I really do believe an admission of slowness of thinking would be the end of any British politician's career.

[DanaC]

Precedent: well it's certainly the first time a UN resolution was actually enforced.

Tell that to your president who just helped Israel flip the bird at all the UN resolutions regarding their illegal occupation and brutalisation of the Palestinian people

Besides, the UN resolution didnt allow for an invasion without further recourse to the UN.....we just marched in regardless.