War in Iraq, is there a point?

The heart of the Islamist movement, its ideology, and the source of its funds and major training centres, was Afghanistan - bin laden's base - and is still other points in the islamic world.I explained why Iraq, and would rather not repeat myself.

Interesting but that has nothing to do with the question I asked.What does Iraq have to do with 9-11?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Please read my post carefully. I explain why defeating hussein ties into 9/11.

If there was anything in my post that raised a doubt about my support of our troops or our action in Iraq let me quell it. Not being behind Bush's hope of establishing democracy doesn't mean I don't support the war in general. In fact I think we should probably have been more forceful in various ways.Yes, the terrorists take any lack of support for our actions as weakness, but then they take even civilized restraint as weakness. That's one good reason to hit them hard if we want to discourage terrorism.

What name calling? Your post is about as low as it's gotten I'd say. There's a big difference between criticism and ideological hate and I made that distinction so spare me your self-righteous lecture.

I apologise. I don't know why I linked it to your post. I just meant it as a general statement and I should have posted it that way. It wasn't a reflection on anything that you posted.

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That was a response to why we did not put more forces in Afghanistan to get Ben Laden.

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But why start a huge war in Iraq when Bin Laden, the person who actually hurt us, was our target?

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More propaganda about pulling resources out of Afghanistan. FYI, we are still fighting in Afghanistan. The US military is capable of fighting in more than one theater of operation at the same time.

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No, it's really not capable.All the generals say we need more troops on the ground, every other TV commercial is a US military recruitment ad, soldiers are doing three or more tours of duty, and we have soldiers who are trained as file clerks pressed into duty as military prison guards because there were not enough soldiers with the correct training.Iraq, after two years, is still not secure, and Afghanistan is showing signs of becoming insecure as well.

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We have not given up the hunt for bin Laden, he has gone to ground, sir. He's hiding out like the snake that he is. In the meantime, we have bigger fish to fry, bigger terrorists to hunt down & kill than him. He has been neutralized, even though we haven't yet gotten our hands on him.

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It looks to me like we have very much given up the fight for the perpetrator of the larges terror attack on US soil in history.We don't have our best people trying to find him, they are all in Iraq.And how do you know he's been neutralized? Just because we don't know where he is means that he can operate in a clandestine fashion, doesn't it?And what "bigger fish" is there other than the mastermind behind 9/11, which is Osama Bin Laden?Osms Bin Laden hurt us, not Sadam Hussein.Why do you find that so diffucult to remember?

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All you liberals can talk about is bin Laden, as if he's the whole war on terror. Get a grip, he isn't even close to being the whole war.

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No, he isn't.However, he was behind 9/11. We liberals haven't forgotten that, unlike many conservatives.He was the one responsible, and there isn't much reason he couldn't do something like that again as long as he is at large.And you still haven't explained to me how Iraq was an immediate threat to the US before we invaded.You have also not explained how the radical Islamic presence is much greater in Iraq now compared to when Hussein was in power.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 08-23-2005 08:54 AM

I did read the op-ed piece you posted, and I found the following interesting.What ever happened with this lead? Do you even know? Oh, and you neglected to respond to the other part of my message:

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They want to impose their religion on all peoples throughout the world. Any & all of us who oppose them are to be killed. We, the American people, choose to defend ourselves & our way of life.

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And I thank God we have it and not them because whatever our faults we ARE the good guys and always have been.

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Japanese internment camps.The Trail of Tears.200 years of slavery, lynchings, hatred and racism until the present.The KKK in the whitehouse.The School of the AmericasMaking nice with Saddam Hussein while he gassed his own people.Torture in military prisons.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 08-23-2005 09:11 AM

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You sound like a page straight out of the New Left Handbook for Blaming America First.

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Well, I am a communist after all. What did you expect?

This kinda crap.It's the underlying assumptionn that the guy on the other side of the argument is some sort of Anti-American communist hippy who needs "to have sense shaken into them".or: The underlying assumption that people on the left are ruining this country. Or some other unsoported, ideological bull crap.This is not what this thread was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about both sides laying out why the war was necessary, why it has a point?Don't you think that people on both sides of the issue has thought long and hard about what this war is about?I like some of the articles Tal and Monk have posted. I think they paint a good portrait of the conservative viewpoint. Do I agree, no. But I also don't think that the right are a bunch of brain dead idiots "out to basterdize our institutions" or some other idiocy.

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It doesn't even seem to occur to some that whereas maybe the Iraq war is not worth it for us, getting rid of Saddam could be a good thing for Iraq.

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Yes, but is the US the world's policeman now?Is it our job to invade every country with a cruel dictator?Why aren't we invading Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea, Syria, Indonesia, Iraq, Sudan, Burundi, and a dozen other countries with cruel dictatorships or militant Islamic governments to help the people of those nations?They chop people's heads off and stone adulterous women to death in Saudi Arabia, you know.

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Of course, if Iraqis vote in an Islamic type of government, they are just hurting themselves, and it will have been somewhat in vain, but in some ways that's not our fault.

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Of course it will be our fault. We got rid of Hussein, who mainained a secular government in the region and suppressed the militant Islamicists. There was a power vacuum left in it's place and since we didn't think there would even be an insurgency and don't have enough troops on the ground we haven't secured the country.The military Islamicists have won the hearts and minds of the people, not us.

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The people have to want freedom bad enough to get rid of the mullahs and their extremist rhetoric.

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Yeah, we see how that worked for the Iranians, the Indonesians, the people who live in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of radical Islam.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 08-23-2005 09:21 AM

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Much of the western world resents American success and power.

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I don't think that is true.Much of the western world resents a childish bully, which is what the US has become.

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It does seem to me that there must be a good reason for the success and power of the US, and one of the reasons is the degree of freedom that Americans have.

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We have a lot of success and power now because of our very large size (aquired by imperialistic means, often violent), copious coastlines, and abundant natural resources and farmland. We used a lot of slave labor to produce agricultural products. Later, during the industrial age, we also took in large numbers of poor europeans to work for pennies in our factories and sweatshops (this was before the LIBERALS enacted things like child labor, minimum wage, and worker's rights laws) and which created a lot of centralised wealth. Now we have large multinational corporations which have continued the centralised wealth.

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Many Americans, Canadians and Brits etc have died for the freedom of others. Freedom is worth fighting and dying for whether it be for our own freedom or for the freedom of others.

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But Iraq was not a war that was forced upon us. It was purely a war of choice. There was no imminent threat to the US from Iraq.I completely supported the war in Afghanistan (as did the rest of the world, including Europe) and was dismayed that we did not finish the job there.

There is evidence that funding & training for the 9/11 hijackers was provided by Iraq. Meetings took place between Iraqi intelligence officials & Mohammed Atta, the training camp known as Salman Pak, southwest of Baghdad trained hijackers in the EXACT METHODS used on 9/11, & at least 5 of the hijackers trained in that camp. That is not a coincidence, that is a direct link to 9/11.