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Two legs bad, Four legs good!
by Monolycus on Sep 24, 2002 - 02:29 AM
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I know that I said that I was going to chip in my two cents and leave, but fret not, there is still no doubt that you will get in the last word. Just skip ahead to picking out one or two words that I have written and post your disagreement if it will save time.
Xaos, you have very efficiently parroted back the party rhetoric regarding the new foreign policy, but let's look a little beyond that. What the pre-emptive policy we have just adopted says is this: "Even if another country has made no overt aggressive acts towards the United States or its neighbours, we are obliged to step in with our military if we think that they might, at some point in the future, pose a threat." The reductio ad absurdum of this policy is this: "Every sovereign nation on this globe is hereby held hostage by the United States because we only need to say that we suspect that you will, in future, do something wrong before we invade you and hand over your country to a regime that will do what WE tell them to". Not one month ago, we were telling Pakistan not to make a first strike against India... and we could not understand why we had no moral credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world. We like to think of ourselves as the "leader of the free world". We just refuse to lead by example.
Since this administration feels that it cramps their style too badly to account for their actions, the people of the US and the world are only given whatever "facts" the administration wishes to share to justify the degree of "threat" that is present. Not big fans of democracy up there on Capitol Hill these days... but if anyone recalls the 2000 presidential election, that is already a given.
In the particular case of Iraq, I recall that they used weapons on their own people (when did they use them on US troops? The Iraqis fell over themselves surrendering at us during Desert Storm... the only casualties we had were from friendly fire. Maybe if we ever picked on a country that stood a chance of defending itself, we would know what it meant to have casualties. Of course, that is why we never went to war with the Soviet Union. They might have smacked us back) and I also remember that the weapons that were used were US weaponry that was given to them to use against the Iranians by members of the Reagan administration in the 80's. Now they are using soviet-era weapons supplied by their allies. Iraq has never, in any documented case, used weapons of their own manufacture. There is as much proof that Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons as there was that the poor soul our government recently disappeared was going to, at some point in the future, make a "dirty nuclear bomb". These nuclear weapons exist nowhere except in the imaginations of the people who invoke them to panic the public into supporting their indefensible actions. There is a name for groups who try to get their way by terrorising people... It might come to me later.
As for the "war on terrorism" (biggest misnomer since the "war on drugs"), who, precisely, is responsible for that...? the second tower was still teetering on September 11th when the press starting using bin Laden's name. Nobody has claimed credit for it, but I see a small group of people with sagging approval ratings and a hostile congress who have seen a whole lot of benefit from it (it would be the most hypocritical thing in the world for Bush <the Elder or Junior>, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or even squeaky little Ashecroft to bemoan the loss of life on 11th September... it was the best thing that ever happened to them and their agenda!)
No, what I see is a group of murderous swine who have no regard for human life and no priorities beyond their own personal gain manipulating a fear-ridden public to achieve their ends. And the terrorists aren't nice guys, either.
~Monolycus.
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Re: Iraq
by bettie_x (strangersangel@hotmail.com)
on Sep 28, 2002 - 09:26 AM
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http://bettie_x.tripod.com/strangeasangels/
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Should we invade Iraq? Absolutely NOT.
Saddam is more determined than ever to make sure that this is full on war. He outright stated the he will never again do desert combat. Any action over there will be urban combat, which means zillions of troops and lots of blood. Lots of deaths. Lots of sons and daughters that won't come home. His troops specialise in urban warfare...and they're pissed. He may be a dictator, and an asshole, but he's not an idiot. And if we attempt to invade Iraq WE'LL be the dipshits...and we'll pay with the lives of our enlisted.
Iraq recently did a major trade with russia. Oil for RUSSIAN TANKS. Russian tanks are frighteningly efficient, brutal, and effective. They're some of the best tanks on the market, really. When the soviet union fell, russia began a sort of technological revolution and one of their best assets are tanks. Now Iraq has them. Not fun.
This is over oil and power, nothing more. This is George's way of redeeming himself for fucking up the terrorist situation. He can't find the enemy easily so he's focusing on an age old favorite that everyone knows the location of. I'm not fighting a rich man's war. I'm not sending my husband off to a rich man's war. If they really wanted saddam dead years ago, we'd have done it one way or another. We missed our chance and are paying for it now.
No that I don't think he and the taliban don't deserve a kick in the balls....we're just not going about it the right way.
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