War in Iraq

What scares me is the new Bush Doctrine, the doctrine of attacking countries that support, harbor, or facilitate terrorism. I was watching the Daily Show on Comedy Central last night and John Stewart had a good point. To paraphrase "I am thinking of a country that supports terrorism, has WMD's, is torturing its own people, and is run by a despot. Can you tell me which country I am talking about?" The answer is no, not specifically. You could insert Sudan, Syria, Iran, N. Korea. If you took out the WMD's, you could list off several African countries.The scariest part is that the Bush Doctrine could be used to support the invasion of America. Who has the largest stock piles of WMD's? The US. In which country did the 9/11 terrorists learn to fly commercial jets? US. Which country openly allows anti-American, fundamental Islamic hate speech meant to incite violence? The US, although I don't think this is a bad thing, I do support free speech.What the US should have done is taken Iraq up on their offer to bring inspectors back in. This offer was made weeks prior to the invasion, and was an unconditional offer. If we were worried about WMD's, this was the perfect chance to neutralize this threat. During the search for WMD's, we could have also searched out the torture chambers and put international pressure on Saddam to step down. How fast do you think UN peacekeepers would have flooded in at the slightest hint of a popular uprising against the Baath part? Pretty damn quick. At the time, war was not necessary. Bush claims that it was the last option he had, but this is just plain wrong. I am not a dove, but I am not a bully either. Unfortunately, Bush has shown himself to be the bully that we feared after his inauguration in 2001.

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This is like arguing moral equivalence between the police and the Mafia because both have automatic weapons. IOW, it makes no sense.

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True. No matter if you are the police or the Mafia, it is in how you implement the weapons that matters. But at some point, national soveriegnty has to mean something or it will end up meaning nothing irregardless of what state you live in. I could point to the fact that the US is the only nation to use nuclear weapons to kill an enemy, but that is a totally different time and different conditions. What I was trying to relate is that the mere presence of WMD's is a poor excuse. Instead, we should look at the propensity to use them. In Saddam's case the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.

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Did [the UN step in] when the Shia had an uprising ?

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Nope, because the US was already helping out. This was right after the first Gulf War. What did the US do? We left them holding their dicks in their hands.

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Did it happen when the Kurds had an uprising ? Both brutally crushed by Saddam, including use of WMDs he did in fact have at the time.

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Very true. If I remember correctly there was pressure from Turkey to let Iraq wipe them out. In fact, Turkey set up border police to stop the Kurds from fleeing Iraq. Needless to say, the Kurds are a complex problem, but the UN should have stepped in long ago. Although, we did have the northern No-Fly Zone which did help but the solution will be more difficult than simply flying planes over N. Iraq. The real solution in the long run is to split up the country into three provinces (Shia's in the south and Kurds in the north) and split the oil money between the three provinces according to population density. The borders of Iraq are really just a contrivance that was put into place after British occupation (1910's IIRC).

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Sometimes life forces one to choose the less suboptimal of two suboptimal choices. One could always not vote, I suppose.

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Just to briefly go off topic, this is something I talk about with people all the time (ie not voting). They feel that none of the candidates interest them, or would make good leaders so they just don't go to the polls. My solution is for them to register at the polls but not to vote on a candidate for president. In this way the political establishment will realize that it isn't voter apathy but voter frustration due to the limited number of candidates for president. This tactic might actually birth a strong third party in the US. Who knows.