Originally Posted by: scarface84

Originally Posted by: RaskolnikovAs did Russia, France, Germany, North Korea, China and virtually anybody else who was in the arms business.[/QUOTE]
Does that make it right then?[/quote]
No.

But does removing it from context and distorting the truth somehow make all that happened better? Can we really expect all the world's nations to learn the correct lessons from went on here if we remove the blame from the nations who sold Saddam his VX nerve gas, most of his biological weapons, his nuclear reactor, his state of the art jet fighters, his artillery, his tanks, his Scuds (etc, etc, etc), and place the blame solely on the United States?

Originally Posted by: scarface84no one helped saddam more than the US back then, ask rumsfeld, saddams best friend in the 80's. :p

1. Saddam had far better friends back then than the US; some of whom continued to sells arms to Iraq illegally after the first Gulf War (Russia) and others who were already negotiating post-sanctions arms sales (France).

Whatever our fault here, we at least had the sense to cut our support for Saddam after Halabja. Most of the rest of the international community seems to have prefered to profit as much as possible from the conflict no matter how many people died, how they died or what the long term consequences may be.

2. Reagan gave that Anthrax sample to Saddam against the advice of most of his government including -- if my memory serves me correctly -- Donald Rumsfeld. I'll have to double-check this, but as far as I know, he's just the poor bastard who had to go shake hands with Saddam (or was it one of his body-doubles?).


[QUOTE=scarface84][QUOTE=Raskolnikov]Correction:

The CIA funneled money into Afghanistan by giving it to the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis picked who the money went to.

I really fail to see how giving money to a people who truely are fighting for their freedom is a bad thing. Our sin here was not standing by them for the rebuilding process (and thus allowing the events that gave the Talaban control to take place).

So it's ok to just give money to anyone who says they're fighting for freedom? Alot of the "freedom fighters" were criminals, warlords,, taleban etc. back then. During the US-afghan war, the people paid by the US to fight the taleban and al-qaeda were criminals, warlords, rapists, drug barons, u name it.

Unfortunately, in situations like these your choices are not usually "bad" and "good" but rather "bad" and "worse." It's pretty easy to say "man, that was dumb" in hindsight (Iraq vs. Iran is a great example) but in the moment and in the context telling which choice is which is rarely easy -- you'll note that after the defeat of the Taliban, we've subsequently had to turn around and fight many of those "warlords, rapists, drug barons, u name it" types.

Was the better alternative really to do nothing? To continue to allow a regime to give bin Laden and his kind a base to train terrorists and to launch attacks against us?


I can look back at many of the decisions Bush has made about the war against terrorism and how he's carried it out and disagree. I think he should be doing much more on the "hearts and minds" side of things, but the fact is that some people's hearts and minds will never be changed and so their actions against us will only be stopped by violent force or the credible threat of violent force.