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Author | Topic: Is there a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
On the otherhand, regardless of how bad (and I mean bad) the president tries to justify the Iraq war, it was, in the long run, a very good thing to do. Even if that's true, and I think the jury is very much out on that, don't you think that it's possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons? And if so, don't you think that's a bad habit, because it's pretty easy to head right to the next step - doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons? I'm no left-wing nut or anything. I've always been on the fence about Iraq. But if you can look at our conduct there - at the prosecution of this war and occupation - with no unease whatsoever, then you've either been bamboozled by the administration or are too credulous to have a legitimate opinion. There's absolutely nothing to be proud of here. We took down the bully on the block, yes, but we became the bully to do so.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
He pissed off enough nations to have the U.N. actually do something about it for once, and they passed 16 resolutions to get him to act. He did not. He did, though. He let inspectors back into the country and provided documentation that he had disarmed. We played chicken, and he blinked. That was supposed to be it - that's how chicken works. But we found the pretense to pull the plug on inspections and go in anyway.
Kerry's plan is just a shadow of Bush's already active plan. What's Bush's plan, exactly? Do you even know? There's not a general on the ground who doesn't realize that there's only three options here: 1) Change nothing and lose a war of attrition with disasterous consequences for the Iraqi people and our own foreign policy goals. What we're doing is not enough to quell the insurgency.2) Commit new troops. Since we don't have any new troops, that means a draft, with disasterous political consequences for whoever proposes it. 3) Withdraw. Iraq will almost certainly be split into three ethnic nations. That's it. Which one of those is Bush's plan? Since you're so proud of his "consistency", I guess you think it's the first plan?
What's the problem here? What Bush is doing isn't working. That's because nobody in the Administration thought it would take this long. They thought we would be greeted as liberators, and that we would be out of there in six weeks. Why do I say that? Because that's what Administration officials said in the run-up to war.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Train the Iraqis to fight and police, get elections going to get legitimacy in the eyes of many Iraqis, and get out. The administration can't even decide if we're going to have elections everywhere, or just somewhere. As for training police:
quote: What do I have to show you to convince you that Bush is doing a poor job? Tell me, and I'll try to find it.
Have you seen any polling data from Iraq on how the citizens feel about our plan for their future? Apparently polls show that only 2 percent of Iraqis think of us as liberators, and a vast, vast majority favor immediate withdrawl of all our forces. Draw your own conclusions, I guess. How do you think they feel about our plan for their future?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The U.N. called on him to *disarm his nation*, and let inspectors back in. He did not. How quickly they forget... think back to Sept. 17th, 2002. Still fuzzy? Maybe this article will refresh your memory:
quote: Of course, the inspectors were pulled out in March 2003. Why? Because we were about to invade:
quote: This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-04-2004 05:20 PM
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
It's like pointing a gun to an unarmed person and say, "drop the machine gun now or I'll shoot." The question is how the hell is the unarmed person supposed to respond? Why am I reminded of that scene in Robocop?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Do you believe that Hussein's response was any different than ours would be, if Canada decided to mandate inspectors for our missing WMD's?
I mean, there's a limit to how far you can take your argument. Did anyone expect Saddam to drop his pants and give inspectors free reign of the country? Is that something we would have expected anyone to do, including ourselves? It's not surprising that Hussein would have tried to play it in such a way as to maintain some clandestine weapons program; whether or not he actually had one, or was just told he had one, is up in the air. After all, the US only invades if you're working on WMD's; if you already have them, you're safe. At this point, from the lesson of our actions, getting WMD's as soon as possible is in the best interest of every country that doesn't already have them. That doesn't seem like a positive outcome to me.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Well, in point of fact, yeah. Most of us DID expect Hussein to "drop his pants". I don't understand why that's a reasonable expectation for a man running a country through fear in a culture where men must save face. Saddam wouldn't have done anything different even if he had been weaponless (which he may very well have been), because he had a country to rule and face to save. He wouldn't have totally capitulated to the Great Satan under any circumstances, because he would have lost face. He would have done what it turns out he did do - capitulate, but defiantly.
Those damn Canadians. Always sticking their noses into other people's business. Yeah. Don't you think we would resist them, on principle, even if we had nothing to hide? Don't you think our national pride extends that far?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The situations are not even close to analogous. The countries and cultures aren't even remotely similar. So, you think that there's less of a cultural sense of defiance, national pride, and insistence on self-rule in the Middle East? You think that in the Middle East, capitulation to superior force is recognized as right and proper? I don't understand the argument that you're making, here. We're not talking about aliens on Pluto, with inscrutable motivations and feelings. If you want to know how folks feel about national soveriegnty in the Middle East, you can just turn on your TV. I asked a simple question. Do you really think we know so little about people in the Middle East that it can't be answered? This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-05-2004 11:33 PM
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I've never said that or implied it. You could have fooled me. What else did you mean in your previous post?
We're talking about Hussein, yes? No, we're talking about everybody. We're talking about Hussein, his advisors, his people, the leaders of the neighboring nations in whose eyes he would have had to save face or appeared weak.
We're talking about a megalomaniac Yes, we are. And what do meglomaniacs do? Anything, to save face and avoid the appearance of weakness or capitulation.
He had quite a definite objective - getting the sanctions lifted - and saw this as an opportunity to try to have his cake and eat it at the same time. That's one interpretation. Another, possibly simultaneous, is that he felt absolute capitulation would have embarassed him, cost him esteem and face. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I can understand why you think my interpretation isn't a possibility, as well.
He quite simply miscalculated Bush's desire to go fight a war somewhere. Not somewhere, Iraq. Iraq at all costs. Again, I'm not sure what we're arguing about. Can you lay out your points of contention for me?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
You seem to be fixated on thinking that Hussein's primary motivation is some kind of nationalism. No, his primary motviation was his big fuckin' ego. Or at the very least, his egomania was not a factor that could be ignored, and that it was highly unreasonable to expect him not to resist, even if he had nothing to hide. But instead, the adminstration styled his resistance as evidence of perfidy, which they used as justification for war. When in fact, Hussein did exactly what one would have expected a weaponless-but-defiant leader to do.
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