Originally Posted by: schmange> What about the 500,000 people who would have starved to death waiting
> for UNMOVIC to give the go-ahead for the lifting of sactions? (Somewhere
> between 1 and 1.5 million Iraqis died as a direct result of UN sanctions
> durring Clinton's "quiet" eight years in office, by the way.)
>
> Or Saddam's political prisoners? Or their family members who were often
> tortured and exicuted along with them? Or the women who had to live with
> the shame of being gang-raped in front of their husbands?
>
> Should this have been allowed to continue indefinitely?

Maybe not, but why does the U.S. have to play big brother and stick their noses where they don't belong?[/quote]
We were asked by the Saudis and Kuwait's [then] exiled royal family and then were given UN approval fourteen years ago. A cease-fire was signed, detailing certain obligations out of Iraq's government that it never lived up to, and in fact, did everything within its power to ignore. Coalition aircraft patroling the no-fly zones were targeted and/or fired upon by Iraqi anti-aircraft positions every day for twelve years straight (this in and of itself ads up to over 4,000 acts of war).

Just on these conditions alone, the Second Gulf War should have been over and done with years ago.

I'm not going to be obnoxious and re-list all of the information from my last big post, but that's all a factor, too.

Originally Posted by: schmangeThe reason we have terrorists is because they're pissed off that the U.S. is constantly assuming that their responsible for running the whole world.[/quote]
Not that I don't think US foreign policy couldn't be improved substantially, but we both know that terrorism and its causes are a lot more complicated than that. Al Queda, Ba'athism and our current problems associated with them can be traced back about 80 years to Amin Al Husseini and even the Nazi party.

Originally Posted by: schmangePut it this way, if the Mayor of Toronto was torturing people and holding people hostage here, hell yeah, I'd be pissed off.
But if Russia suddenly came over here without being asked and bombed the hell out of Toronto and stuck soldiers on all of our streets and they were still occupying my city 10 years later, how do you think I'd react.
I'd be pissed off at Russia for sticking their noses where they don't belong. No matter what their intent was or what reason they were here, they weren't invited or asked to be here.

First off, Hussein's ideology and ambitions made him a threat to his neighbors and so the problem he presented was much, much more than just an internal one.

Second, be it do to incompetence, negligence, impotance, or indifference, the UN monitoring body designated to disarm Iraq of WMD under all manner of UN resolutions was ready to leave Iraq with all the machinery and production facillities to make any kind of bomb or missle that Saddam could dream up. ("Hey, Hans! The Iraqis haven't [u]used this stuff lately[/u]... tell the Security Council that they're cooperating!") Meanwhile, he UN Security Councel responsible for enforcing those resolutions had three sitting members with veto power taking bribes from Saddam Hussein; two of which (France and Russia) were respectively negotiating post-sanctions arms sales and actively selling arms to Iraq. All of this as the Food For Oil program syphoned money into Iraq's military rather than into food and medicine for its people, furthering a humanitarian crisis that was already a gigantic propogandic bonanza for the bin Ladens of the world.

Personally, I believe in the idea behind the UN but to trust these sort of monitoring and enforcement duties to an organization whos idea of "Peacekeeping" is for their troops to lend their blue helmets to Serbian troops on their way to massacre Albanian civilians is rediculous.

We were party to a ceasefire that Iraq never honored, Iraq under Saddam was presenting huge stragetic problems for us, people were already dying at an unconsionable rate and we had the power to do something about it -- enough's enough.


[QUOTE=schmange]I'd be telling them to get the hell out of our city and mind their own business and stop trying to push their way of life down everybody's throats.
And if they didn't get out I'd do anything in my power to get them out.
If that meant sneaking people into their country to destroy their way of life just to make a point because it was the only way to fight back, then so be it.
That's when you get terrorists.

It sounds a lot like how we got the Klan, too.



[QUOTE=schmange]Sorry dude, but politics, love and life are what rock and roll are all about.
You've gotta be willing to debate and discuss topics that you don't like so that you can learn enough life lessons to write songs about.