Right... so,
anyways, regardless of cavils about the meaning of the word "viable" or which acronym to use to describe Iraq's pre-war missile technology that they probably developed at least partially with funding from the United States,
it is firmly established there was no WMD program present in Iraq to justify setting a 21st-century precedent for preemptive war.
mheslep said:
No, there was no such government in 2003. Even so, the Hamas jihadists suicide bombers were funded by Saddam, the government or lack there of in Palestine is irrelevant.
Okay, you're seriously advancing, as a benefit of the U.S. action of bombing and invading Iraq and
definitely killing a
minimum of 40,000-50,000 civilians to use the lowest estimates (I can't cite the U.S. military estimate, of course, because for
some strange reason the U.S. policy has been to not try to estimate how many civilians in total were killed) that
maybe Hamas received a little bit less funding and consequently
maybe a handful fewer people were killed in the Israeli-Palestine conflict?
Dude, you're utterly scraping at the bottom of the barrel to come up with anything at all. There's just no rational way to deny that avoiding things like the Iraq War happening in the future is
by far in the best interest of both the United States and the entire world.
And if that seems somehow unrelated to the rest of this discussion about why there was a great deal of overseas interest in Obama becoming president I would say that it's
you who are spiraling off on tangents here.
mheslep said:
Dozens? I said Rwanda, not Chicago, Il.
Okay... so, at a point when dozens of decapitated bodies a day were being found in Baghdad, heavily armed factions controlled various regions of the city, Sunni death squads killing Shia and Shia death squads killing Sunni, an enormous percentage of the population had fled or was fleeing to avoid the violence, people were changing their names to avoid being the "wrong" ethnicity, people were getting shot if their cell phone rang and it had a distinctively Sunni or Shia ringtone... you're saying that sort of environment is more like Chicago than Rwanda?
CaptainQuasar said:
Iraq is not the "stable and peaceful country" that McCain declared it to be a couple of months ago.
mheslep said:
Oh, really? You want to
hear him say it? Here, at
0:50. And here's the http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1836909,00.html it came from.
And by the way - declaring that to be misinformation out of hand because it conflicts with your view of the situation instead of simply requesting a citation or making sure of the facts? That would be the kind of thing that got us into this mess in Iraq. (Both of those links are in the first hit for a Google search of "stable and peaceful country mccain". And the rest of the first twenty hits
at least are on this topic.)
(And I'm not saying that
I'm not guilty of this kind of thing - once the war actually started I gave in and stopped arguing against it and I never should have.)
mheslep said:
Yes, there are obviously many terrible consequences to the war. Again, as Hurkyl pointed out, these points are not useful unless they're are weighed against the consequences of leaving S. Hussein in place.
That simply is not true. We leave dictators in place
all the time. We sold arms and anthrax
to Saddam Hussein himself. It absolutely is not necessary to ask hypothetical questions about what would have happened if Iraq had officiated over a deadlocked UN committee, or any of the other hypotheticals you're bringing up, to figure out whether the exceptional military measure of invading and occupying a country against international convention and consensus in an action that removed a stable government from the Middle East was morally justified nor even whether it was at all a very good idea.
mheslep said:
As I mentioned above, Iraq is hardly the first precedent for either a pre-emptive or preventative attack. Only Imperial Japan qualifies otherwise for the US in the last 100 years. I reject comparisons of Iraq under Hussein with the Turks/Kurds or Russia/Georgia unless and until the Turks/Russia show where the Kurds/Georgia: 1) invaded or annexed two countries, 2) committed genocide on their own inhabitants, 3) started a WMD program, 4) have dozens of UN resolutions and sanctions against them.
Uh, you realize that the United States itself qualifies for being preemptively invaded under your list of criteria there, right?
So yeah, basically it's impossible for us to take the high ground here and say things like "In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations."
mheslep said:
Could you show how the wannabe terrorists would not see their efforts as a failure, how their techniques were 'proven successful' given that AQI was utterly destroyed as a coherent force? Rather, it must be seen now that if an independent actor in early post Saddam Iraq wanted a path to some self-empowerment, the only possible way to do it was to get involved in the democratic process, that joining AQI will gain you nothing in the end, instead it will surely get you dead.
Wow, so we've shown a bunch of suicide bombers that they'll die only having hit the U.S. for the lives of five thousand soldiers, a trillion dollars, contributing to eroding the international reputation and political clout of the U.S., and in giving people all over Iraq and the rest of the Muslim world more excuses to blindly hate us. What a deterrent. What kind of suicidal terrorist would pursue such a small gain? They'd have to be
crazy.
mheslep said:
I do not condone the US/Western path to the Iraq war. I do reject fallacious parallels to it and pretense that there would have been zero consequences for doing nothing except to continue the NFZ and the corrupt Oil for Food program.
Ahem, Mr. "2007 Baghdad was more like Chicago than Rwanda" rejects fallacious parallels? What an indictment.
No one in this thread said anything similar to "nothing bad would have ever happened if Saddam remained in power" so I find your intimation that opposing such a notion is your main objective here to be disingenuous.
And besides that, you're doing two further and rather underhanded things: 1) you're setting up a false dichotomy there that opposing Saddam meant either an invasion or no change at all, and 2) it's implicit in your statements that there even
was some kind of catalyst that provided any reason to draw our attention away from the War on Terror.
It's great that you don't condone the "path to war" - but that implies that you condone the invasion itself, which I just about find monstrous. There aren't any pretty, clean ways to invade and occupy a country larger than Germany or Japan with thirty million people in it. In all likelihood hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the course of this and your primary justification is that we "got" Saddam?
War is not the way we deal with these things. You don't see us doing anything remotely like this in response to the genocide in Darfur or the military junta ruling Myanmar that kills protesting citizens by the hundreds and thousands, uses the military to extract forced labor from the populace, and impeded the distribution of aid to survivors of the cyclone earlier this year to protect its political position.
If another dictator just like Saddam ends up in control of Iraq ten years after we leave we aren't going to be invading again and we wouldn't have been disposed to even if McCain had won the election and the country remained on that more hawkish track politically. Condoning taking the certain path of widespread death and misery in war, for the reason of deposing Saddam or the other reasons you have listed, when no self-defense was involved and any implied concern for the Iraqi people is spurious, is condoning an immoral act.
And an act against the best interests of the United States, as I've demonstrated above. It's in denunciation of that and of anyone who might be in favor of that sort of thing that people around the world advocated for Obama.
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