:: Get Them Out Of That Hell ::

Originally Posted by: 6strngs_2hmbkrsI'm sorry, I completely disagree. I'm in support of the war... have you forgotten what happened on 9/11? .....

What has 9/11 got to do with Iraq?

Originally Posted by: DalronWhat has 9/11 got to do with Iraq?

9/11 proved that ignoring threats does not make them go away.

Originally Posted by: Raskolnikov9/11 proved that ignoring threats does not make them go away.

So Iraqi civilians gets punished for what bin Laden did to NY? You still haven't said what the connection is between 9/11 and Iraq!

Originally Posted by: DalronSo Iraqi civilians gets punished for what bin Laden did to NY? You still haven't said what the connection is between 9/11 and Iraq!

There is little-to-none (Saddam Hussein did to a degree support terrorism and harbor terrorists, though), nor does there need to be; Iraq's threat to the United States was totally separate from 9/11 and I dare you to find a single word in any of my previous posts that say otherwise.

Finally, bringing up Iraqi civillians in a debate such as this as a reason not to invade is a gigantic mistake: UN sanctions were killing Iraqi civilians at a rate of 45,000 - 48,000 PER MONTH (a key point of al Qaeda propoganda, by the way). That means that if you allow UNMOVIC two years to declare Iraq WMD free*, that means an approximate 17:1 ratio of lives saved to lost in favor of war. Even if you take the "Howard Zinn" approach and count Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed because of the war (approximately 100,000), the ratio is still 4:1 more lives saved than lost.


*Two years is probably an entirely too optomistic estimate: It took the US two years with THOUSANDS of inspectors able to inspect when and where they pleased while UNMOVIC had only around fifty and had to mask their movements from the Iraqi government and military.

I pasted your phrase, "Iraq's threat to the United States", into Google and did some reading.

The only threat to the US by Iran was the one manufactured by the 'coalition of the willing' which includes my government.

Thankfully there must be some sensible people in the govts concerned combined with the opposition to the war by the US, British and Australian people which has stopped Iraq becoming another Vietnam. Let's hope this sense prevails on the future of Iran.

I guess we have to agree to disagree on this one.

Originally Posted by: AkiraGo pester the Bush administration about that, not Rask.

That's unfair: this is a discussion on Iraq and Rask joined in.

Originally Posted by: DalronI pasted your phrase, "Iraq's threat to the United States", into Google and did some reading.

The only threat to the US by Iran was the one manufactured by the 'coalition of the willing' which includes my government.[/quote]
Iran? Typo?

Fieldable WMD systems at the time we invaded or not, Iraq had active WMD programs with the ultimate goal of taking over the entire region which includes several US allies, most notably Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. That's a big long-term stragetic problem for the US -- even if Saddam (or years to come, his sons) would have never tried to attack the US directly (not that anybody can reasonably say that they definitely wouldn't).

Originally Posted by: DalronThankfully there must be some sensible people in the govts concerned combined with the opposition to the war by the US, British and Australian people which has stopped Iraq becoming another Vietnam. Let's hope this sense prevails on the future of Iran.

I think Iraq never having had the potential to become another Vietnam has had more to do with Iraq not becoming one. Saddam's power base was a minority and the insurgency proves this first by largely being composed of non-Iraqis and second by making Iraqis their primary targets.



[QUOTE=Dalron]I guess we have to agree to disagree on this one.

That's usually how these threads end up.

.... Hm... My stance on the war is the same as most every other controversial topic... I am neutral. I whole-heatredly support our American troops and I respect every single one of them... I respect the Bush administration even though sometimes I question their motives... you know what all that is called.... patriotism. Try it out sometime. If you question the motives of your country so bad and you think the choices our government makes are so bad... then get the hell out. I know I won't miss you. This country is filled with too many people that expect us to keep our hands to ourselves when it comes to foreign affairs... We are AMERICA... THE world superpower... If we stay out of this war it's not us that's suffering... If you're the biggest kid in your high school and you never once bash someones skull in... people will stop taking you for a hardass and start walking all over you... and eventually a bunch of kids will get together and gang up on you and take you down... that's a little analogy of why it's important for a country to remain active in military issues. If we put someone in there place like we did Saddam... it makes a lot of other countries think twice....besides it's the little countries around them that will suffer if we don't do something about it. Saddam wasn't planning a US attack. He was trying to control the oil supply to the rest of the world... The general public (all of us) are never given the full details of war... it's called censorship... They give you a death count every now and then... and you hear about a helicopter crashing here and there... but that's all heirsay. I just suggest that everyone supports our troops and the decisions of our government. We all have freedom of choice, speech, and thought... and the right to our opinions... I respect that.. and I respect people that are against war and stand up for it... but don't be naive.... The world isn't a fairy tale... war isn't a fairy tale. Sometimes people have to die... I love being an American... so I think I might just support the country that I love... As for everyone else on the forums that aren't from America... and think that what our country is doing is wrong... I don't know what to tell you besides the fact that you better hope that the US is on your side when all the bombs start falling from the sky...

"I'm proud to be an American... where atleast I know I'm free... and I won't forget the men who died... and gave that right to me and I'll proudly stand up! next to her today... for there ain't no doubt I love this land... god bless the USA...."

Being patriotic does [u]not[/u] mean supporting everything your country does.

....must...resist....urge....to....get....sucked....in....to...a.....political....argument.....when....it's.....not....even....an....election....year......

Originally Posted by: PonyOneto use the "big guy on campus" analogy... what if there was a guy in the high school who took a sucker punch at you, so you beat him down... and when he ran away, instead of chasing him, you grabbed some guy who was cheering him on by the neck, kneed him in the groin, drop kicked him, and gave him an even more severe beat down? so the guy didn't like you, and maybe he even would have liked to have beaten you up, but regardless he wasn't the one that sucker punched you.

now to everyone on the sidelines you look like an overly aggressive jerk, and all it does is lend more validity to you needing to be "taken down." and the guy that sucker punched you is still nowhere to be found.

Though the commonly accepted view on this situation, this analogy is flawed and to explain it, let me just use the names we are making analogies about to keep thinks simple:

You see, we had previously stomped Iraq for beating up our friend Kuwait and stealing all his lunch money. When we were done, we (and everybody else) told Iraq that if he kept planning on beating up our friends like Kuwait and trying to buy himself some brass knuckles that we'd kick the snot out of him again and this time, it would REALLY hurt.

Now, while Iraq was cheering when Osama sucker punched us (and sheltering some of Osama's goons), the real reason Iraq got beat up again was because he was still trying to get a pair of brass knuckles (and some other nasty implements).

However, due to a horrible speach impediment and a total inability to let our friend England do all of the talking, it LOOKS like we beat up Iraq for no reason simply because we can't communicate properly.

> the real reason Iraq got beat up again was because he was still trying
> to get a pair of brass knuckles (and some other nasty implements).

There was never any real proof that Iraq was trying to get any 'nasty implements'. Bush 'claimed' that they were trying. But he also said there were WMD's in Iraq too which was either an unforgivable error, or a purposeful lie.
Bush lost any credibility he had when the so called 'WMD's' never materialized.

I sometimes wonder how people would feel if the situation was reversed.
For instance... Iraq claims that the U.S. is stockpiling weapons so they bomb the Whitehouse and arrest the President. Then they take over Washington with armed patrols and stay there for the next ten years pretending to look for weapons that never existed in the first place.

What would make that any different than what the U.S. is doing right now?

Originally Posted by: schmange
I sometimes wonder how people would feel if the situation was reversed.
For instance... Iraq claims that the U.S. is stockpiling weapons so they bomb the Whitehouse and arrest the President. Then they take over Washington with armed patrols and stay there for the next ten years pretending to look for weapons that never existed in the first place.

What would make that any different than what the U.S. is doing right now?

I've told people who support the war the same thing, unfortunately they never stop and think about it long enough.

As for everyone else on the forums that aren't from America...

I'm Iranian :mad:

What would make that any different than what the U.S. is doing right now?

Lots of things. For example, Bush isn't guilty of genocide while S.H. is.

Originally Posted by: schmange> the real reason Iraq got beat up again was because he was still trying
> to get a pair of brass knuckles (and some other nasty implements).

There was never any real proof that Iraq was trying to get any 'nasty implements'. Bush 'claimed' that they were trying. But he also said there were WMD's in Iraq too which was either an unforgivable error, or a purposeful lie.
Bush lost any credibility he had when the so called 'WMD's' never materialized.[/quote]
Bush definitely lost credibility, however Iraq did have WMD programs and Bush's inability to communicate this is easily his single greatest failing as President.


First (and this is a doozie), documents seized after the fall of Baghdad proved that Saddam had been secretly negotiating to buy missle systems from North Korea as recently as the spring of 2003. [David Kay Report, New York Times]

Also, since the fall of Baghdad, it has become apparent that Iraq wasn't in fact trying to aquire a gas centerfuge for Uranium enrichment as Colin Powell had claimed at the UN because they already had one. It was burried in a barrel with weapons plans in head Iraqi weapons scientist, Mahdi Obeidi's back yard so that it could be hidden from UN inspectors while the inspections process went on. [Mahdi's book on the subject]

Finally, we come to a lot of really shady goings-on ranging from SA-2 rocket motors with UN inspection tags and radioactive scrap metal suspiciously turning up then disapearing from Middle Eastern and European scrap yards [UNMOVIC report] to "organized looting" of equipment used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons [New York Times] to Russian military units destroying or removing incriminating documents and arms from Iraq [Washington Times] -- It's really no wonder it seems to most peole that Iraq was WMD program free; in the last few weeks before and just after the start of the invaision, the infrastructure behind Saddam's missle, nuclear, biological and chemical programs was scattered all across the Middle East and Europe. And the only way to find this out is to trudge around the jerkwater PDF archives of the UN website or to scour conservative newsgroups looking for those precious few magic mushrooms atop that steaming heap of cow manuer... because you're certainly not going to find it on the TV.

So, yes, Iraq probably didn't have WMDs at the time we invaded. But they had all of the machinery they needed to start production just as soon as the UN, influenced by bribed officials and member nations, lifted sanctions and turned it's back for good. Since Saddam never once abandoned his especially militaristic take on Arab Nationalism, the stragetic implications of this are just as bad as if he was ready to push the button at any time he chose. VX artillery shells and nuclear tipped missles would have made for a great [u]propogandic[/u] victory, but in the end it's just that; I'll take "saving (at the least) 400,000 lives but looking bad" over "doing nothing and well-liked" any day.



[QUOTE=schmange]I sometimes wonder how people would feel if the situation was reversed.
For instance... Iraq claims that the U.S. is stockpiling weapons so they bomb the Whitehouse and arrest the President. Then they take over Washington with armed patrols and stay there for the next ten years pretending to look for weapons that never existed in the first place.

What would make that any different than what the U.S. is doing right now?

If the American Government ever truely conducted itself as Saddam's regime did, I hope somebody would step in like the US did in Iraq. Imagine if the international community had stopped Germany from re-arming after World War I or Japan had been prevented from embarking on its conquest of the Pacific.

That would be something like 30 or 40 MILLION deaths that would have been prevented.

> Bush isn't guilty of genocide

Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses and is guilty of murdering thousands of people. How is that not genocide?

Originally Posted by: schmange> Bush isn't guilty of genocide

Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses and is guilty of murdering thousands of people. How is that not genocide?

1. In an interview, I once heard Hillary Clinton describe Bush's 'false pretenses' as "totally consistant" with the intelligence information the Clinton administration was getting.

2. Look up the definition of "genocide."

gen·o·cide n.
The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.

What gives the U.S. the right to dictate the terms of other governments?
The U.S. probably has more WMD's than any other country on the planet. The only reason they want to stop other countries from developing weapons is because they don't want to lose their world domination.

As far as documents etc... sorry but I don't buy any of it.
Bush is a habitual liar and it's well within his ability to manufacture or forge any documents that would favour his position.

I'll be the first to admit I probably don't know all the facts.
I just go on gut instinct and that 'feeling' you get when you know something's not right.
Bush gives me that feeling big time. My bull*** meter redlines every time that guy talks. I kinda see things in a simple way.
We had 10 years of nice quiet peace with Clinton as President.
The guy was a bit of a perve but so what... who isn't.
Bush becomes president... suddenly we've got the twin towers destroyed, war with Iraq and terrorists coming out of the woodwork.
Meanwhile, privacy is being eroded all in the name of 'safety'.

The conspiracy theory is just as credible as anything else I've heard.
Bush invades Iraq to get even for his dads failure. At the same time he trumps up documents and evidence that show Iraq was trying to build nuclear bombs. The twin towers come down. "Oh goody" Bush says... now everybody is going to be so scared, I can do anything I want.
Armed guards at airports, cameras everywhere, satellite survelience, hell even chips embeded in people to keep track of everybody in the world eventually.. the sky's the limit....
First I'll dominate the U.S.
Next thing on the list is to manufacture so much fear of terrorists that I can dominate the whole world.
Meantime the guy who was actually responsible for 9/11 is still free.
Billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops and they can't find one guy??
I mean, Bush even flew the rest of the Bin Laden family out of the U.S. just after 9/11.
Isn't it sort of police policy to interogate and imprison people who are suspected of involvement in a crime, rather than give them a free flight out of the country?

Originally Posted by: schmangeWhat gives the U.S. the right to dictate the terms of other governments?[/quote]
In the case of Iraq?

The cease-fire Iraq signed after the first Gulf War that they never lived up to.

Originally Posted by: schmangeThe U.S. probably has more WMD's than any other country on the planet. The only reason they want to stop other countries from developing weapons is because they don't want to lose their world domination.[/quote]
And yet, in spite of all of this "domination," very little seems to go our way lately.

Originally Posted by: schmangeAs far as documents etc... sorry but I don't buy any of it.
Bush is a habitual liar and it's well within his ability to manufacture or forge any documents that would favour his position.[/quote]
If he was going to the effort of fabricating something, why not fabricate some chemical shells and leave them someplace where UNMOVIC was going to find them? Wouldn't that get us a lot further than some documents the press could easily (and largely did) ignore?

Why did Hillary Clinton at least tacitly support his case for war before the invaision?

How is it that Bush can cause UN officials to give reports to the Security Council that show evidence of covert WMD programs they didn't actually give?

For Christ's sakes, we're talking about a President who couldn't identify a forged purchase order for Nigerian Yellowcake Uranium and went public with it -- when he could have proven the same point with British and Italian intelligence sources that have to this day remained unimpeachable.

Originally Posted by: schmangeI'll be the first to admit I probably don't know all the facts.
I just go on gut instinct and that 'feeling' you get when you know something's not right.
Bush gives me that feeling big time. My bull*** meter redlines every time that guy talks. I kinda see things in a simple way.[/quote]
I don't like the guy either (I wrote in John McCain in 2000 and would have again in 2004 had I requested my absentee ballot in time), but I've been keeping up on this a lot longer than he's been President.

Originally Posted by: schmangeWe had 10 years of nice quiet peace with Clinton as President.
The guy was a bit of a perve but so what... who isn't.

The first WTC bombing... attacks against our troops who were enforcing the cease-fire and training the Saudis... embassy bombings... the USS Cole attack... 99.99% of the planning and preparations that went into the 9/11 attacks... Not to mention Somolia and Kosovo...

Yeah, real quiet.


[QUOTE=schmange]Bush becomes president... suddenly we've got the twin towers destroyed, war with Iraq and terrorists coming out of the woodwork.
Meanwhile, privacy is being eroded all in the name of 'safety'.

The conspiracy theory is just as credible as anything else I've heard.
Bush invades Iraq to get even for his dads failure. At the same time he trumps up documents and evidence that show Iraq was trying to build nuclear bombs. The twin towers come down. "Oh goody" Bush says... now everybody is going to be so scared, I can do anything I want.
Armed guards at airports, cameras everywhere, satellite survelience, hell even chips embeded in people to keep track of everybody in the world eventually.. the sky's the limit....
First I'll dominate the U.S.
Next thing on the list is to manufacture so much fear of terrorists that I can dominate the whole world.

How? He can't even keep his daughters from embarassing him.

Hell, even if he could acheive this world dominance, he'd have to give it up in 2008. What's the point in that?


[QUOTE=schmange]Meantime the guy who was actually responsible for 9/11 is still free.
Billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops and they can't find one guy??

Why go out of your way to make a martyr out of one man when you can do so much more to cripple his ability to hurt you?

Look at how long some serial killers operate before they're caught (some without ever being caught); even in spite of going out of their way to taunt the police, or that Japanese soldier who manned his post on a remote Pacific island for 50 years. If one man with the wits, means and know-how doesn't want to be found, he probably won't be found. Especially when he's surrounded by sympathetic Pakistani radicals in the middle of bum-fudge-nowhere.


[QUOTE=schmange]I mean, Bush even flew the rest of the Bin Laden family out of the U.S. just after 9/11.

Actually, Richard Clarke did, and why the Hell not? Most of bin Laden's family doesn't even really know him (he's his mother's only son) and people who were guilty of nothing more than being "Arab-looking" and working at gas stations were being shot at. Imagine what having the name "bin Laden" suddenly meant for a few young college students -- mostly concerned with Beer Pong and getting laid -- as well as some other relatives who the FBI cleared of any connection to Osama... other than sharing some of his father's DNA.



[QUOTE=schmange]Isn't it sort of police policy to interogate and imprison people who are suspected of involvement in a crime, rather than give them a free flight out of the country?

So, when my brother got his DUI, I should have been detained and questioned even though I was 1,600+ miles away in another state?

Afterall, I could have mailed him my ID and debit card to buy the beer with.