- #36
TheStatutoryApe
- 296
- 4
edward said:I agree completely. We support monsters and then have to go back and kill them. The Taliban is one of those monsters.
Wasn't Saddam aswell?
edward said:I agree completely. We support monsters and then have to go back and kill them. The Taliban is one of those monsters.
TheStatutoryApe said:Wasn't Saddam aswell?
edward said:He was definitely a monster and we definitely did support him for a number of years.
TheStatutoryApe said:The US is still in Afghanistan. And the situation is not so rosy.
Ugh. You completely missed the point. We are the monsters.edward said:I agree completely. We support monsters and then have to go back and kill them. The Taliban is one of those monsters.
kyleb said:He did issue with our bases in Saudi Arabia, but in the text of your link he also puts our involvement in Israel's occupation of Palestine right up there with it:
Clinton didn't say he wanted to go to war with Iraq there, but rather that he still held hope for a diplomatic solution:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. We want to seriously reduce his capacity to threaten his neighbors.
I am quite confident, from the briefing I have just received from our military leaders, that we can achieve the objective and secure our vital strategic interests. (Was he receiving a briefing about further diplomatic efforts?)
Let me be clear: A military operation cannot destroy all the weapons of mass destruction capacity. But it can and will leave him significantly worse off than he is now in terms of the ability to threaten the world with these weapons or to attack his neighbors.
And he will know that the international community continues to have a will to act if and when he threatens again. Following any strike, we will carefully monitor Iraq's activities with all the means at our disposal. If he seeks to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction, we will be prepared to strike him again.
There was never any proof that the threat had been removed. Clinton initiated military strikes in hopes of destroying any in places suspected of having them. The military strike resulted in Saddam kicking out all of the UN inspectors and there was no information indicating that anything had been destroyed or if anything had even been there in the first place.Regardless, that was back when Iraq actually had weapons capable of causing mass destruction, while Bush attacked Iraq after the threat had been removed.
quadraphonics said:... The (naive, even ridiculous) hope was that if you keep Saddam weak enough, the people of Iraq would rise up and handle this all themselves. Of course, the sanctions weren't effective at weakening Saddam vis-a-vis the Iraqi population (far from it), and the Iraqi people were far too fragmented, sectionalized and tribalized to ever mount a systemic challenge to the Baathist apparatus in the first place. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16jburns.html?pagewanted=2John Burns said:...reporters, too, may wish to make an accounting. If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq in the run-up to the war, with its charnel houses and mass graves, we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.
... from the exhaustive reporting in the years since, Americans now know how deeply traumatized Iraqis were by the brutality of Saddam, and how deep was the poison of fear and distrust. They also know, in detail, through the protracted trials of Mr. Hussein and his senior henchmen, of the inner workings of the merciless machinery that transported victims to the torture chambers and mass graves.
TheStatutoryApe said:Wasn't Saddam aswell?
cristo said:This question is an impossible question to answer, since no one on this forum is privy to the necessary intelligence. Whilst I'm all for questioning some of the decisions made by world leaders, it should not be forgotten that the United States is not a dictatorship- George Bush was elected by your people as the best person to lead your country. This point seems to go out of the window all too much recently, and seemingly no one agrees with his policy decisions. Well, that begs the question, why is he there?
WarPhalange said:They don't appeal to the hardcore evangelicals, but let's be serious, libs and evangelicals are polar opposites.
DaveC426913 said:It is naive to start the 'what should he have done' clock on the day of 9/11. The clock should be started on the first day of his inauguration, and move forward asking what, if anything, the president did to make peace with the Middle East.
epkid08 said:A war with Iran - Should we go to war with Iran? The benefits would be great, but maybe not apparent for the next fifteen years...
Taking over Iran's oil production will help both of those needs. If Bush did this, I'd say he did the right thing.
jaap de vries said:It really scares me that someone who is (I assume) born and raised in a democracy which the US still is, would think it is OK to unilatirally attack another country purely to steel it's resources.
Who are you with, the East Indy Trading Company?
I wonder which percentage of the US thinks this way. If it is more then 5% we have a serious problem in this country.
jaap de vries said:It really scares me that someone who is (I assume) born and raised in a democracy which the US still is, would think it is OK to unilatirally attack another country purely to steel it's resources.
Who are you with, the East Indy Trading Company?
I wonder which percentage of the US thinks this way. If it is more then 5% we have a serious problem in this country.
jaap de vries said:It really scares me ...
DaveC426913 said:You're not the only one who's scared. And yes, it's a serious problem...
Not true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_strike#Historical_backgroundBobG said:A little over 5 years ago, it was unthinkable that the US would attack a country that hadn't initiated some kind of hostile action first.
BobG said:A little over 5 years ago, it was unthinkable that the US would attack a country that hadn't initiated some kind of hostile action first. Now, ruling out the option of being the attacking country is seen as weakness in national security.
I wonder how long that Bush legacy will last.
russ_watters said:
Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did … During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike …
Yeah, that's the part that wasn't true: our nuclear policy does not and never has completely and unconditionally ruled-out first strike. Yeah, I also doubt that we ever would have done it, but that's not the point. The point is that we don't take such things off the table because leaving them on the table has deterrence value. It also avoids the potential problem of painting yourself into a corner.BobG said:My post wasn't specific, but I meant unthinkable to Americans.
DaveC426913 said:You're not the only one who's scared. And yes, it's a serious problem.
We still go to war over resources. Might as well face that fact that, as world society, we are not as civilized as we like to think we are.
russ_watters said:Yeah, that's the part that wasn't true: our nuclear policy does not and never has completely and unconditionally ruled-out first strike. Yeah, I also doubt that we ever would have done it, but that's not the point. The point is that we don't take such things off the table because leaving them on the table has deterrence value. It also avoids the potential problem of painting yourself into a corner.
The world likes to condemn unilateral aggressive action of any kind and does not make value judgements regarding the actions themselves. They should. Such actions are sometimes the right thing to do. Israel's attack on the Isirak reactor complex in Iraq in the early 80s was the right thing to do. If Iran continues to violate the NPT and a few years down the road gets close to having a nuclear bomb, taking it out will be the right thing to do.
What faith based initiatives did President Bush implement? I believe the answer is none.Herodotus said:It might not all be because of all the international mistakes that Bush has made, but also from domestic failures. He certainly expanded the gap between the rich and the poor with his "faith based initiatives"...
Believe again.mheslep said:What faith based initiatives did President Bush implement? I believe the answer is none.
mheslep said:What faith based initiatives did President Bush implement? I believe the answer is none.
Only the first post discusses any money, only $1M, dispensed under the 'faith based initiatives' program. To stay on point: that initiative was about giving federal money to religious based institutions doing humanitarian or educational work, and not the broader umbrella issue of the division between church and state.Gokul43201 said:Believe again.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/rightsandfreedoms/a/bushchurch.htm
http://www.rockinst.org/publications/religion_policy/default.aspx?id=374
http://www.jewishpublicaffairs.org/action/recent/Community-Solutions-Act-7-03-01.html
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,361521,00.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3944/is_200303/ai_n9170697
mheslep said:only $1M,
That's very nearly 0.3 cents .WarPhalange said:You might not think that's a big sum, but my taxes went to that. What ever happened to "small government", by the way?
So what? We can convert into a theocracy tomorrow with no additional taxpayer cost!mheslep said:Only the first post discusses any money, only $1M, dispensed under the 'faith based initiatives' program.
I don't agree, but ok...Ivan Seeking said:A nuclear first strike was effectively ruled out by the MAD policy. In fact that was the point, so by default we did agree to a no first-strike policy.
I'm just trying to get people to acknowledge that the line exists.Also, a full-scale nuclear war cannot be compared to the invasion of another country. And one can hardly compare the threat of 20,000 nuclear warheads to the threat from terrorism; even if Saddam had been involved in 911, which he wasn't. The scale of the two situations are many orders of magnitude apart.
No one said anything about attacking the wrong country, so nothing. Whoops.What does this have to do with attacking the wrong country, which, if we assume that Bush isn't lying, is what we did? Whoops.
I only mentioned this to point out the flaw in Herotodus statement:Gokul43201 said:So what? We can convert into a theocracy tomorrow with no additional taxpayer cost!
since the government did not do anything of significance with the latter that could effect the former (the gap)....He certainly expanded the gap between the rich and the poor with his "faith based initiatives"