Sigh. What a thread. I could also chime in and ask why lying to a Grand Jury is now just “bullshitting” in NewSpeak[sup]TM[/sup] as well, but there’s no point, really. :rolleyes:
What really is needed to have a universally acceptable “commission on energy policy”? Which exact people would be included on this commission? Why would they be selected over others? How many would be selected? I would like to see some real names put forward by people here - real names of people who could provide opinions from all sides of the debate. People who have either scientific credentials, energy industry credentials, international and domestic relations credentials, economic credentials, etc.
Who exactly would make up this fair and unbiased commission? I sure don’t know. I would have liked to be on it, but I seriously doubt that many people would like my ideas. I do personally know one person who was on it, but nobody else.
And Congress is often no more accountable to the general public than any given presidential administration. They’ve passed all sorts of laws and bills that the general public has strongly opposed; if the process were democratic those laws wouldn’t have been passed in the first place.
OK, so the US justifies its invasion of Afghanistan with the tragedy of September 11th, 2001. Where is the similar atrocity against American civilians that justifies an invasion of Iraq?
Here is a recent article from the Asia Times that spells out a lot of the US position on an Afghan pipeline. Yes, Unocal pulled out in the late 90s after Clinton ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan, but it’s quite apparent that they haven’t given up the project for dead, nor is the US government entirely indifferent on the matter, either.
If those were both isolated incidents I’ll eat my hat. Especially where Vietnam is concerned. The US military was stuck in a war where there was tremendous forceful opposition from the native populace. The Viet Cong had serious support, and Vietnamese were willing to risk their lives to fight for that cause. “The VC could be anywhere”, the US military reasoned, “so we have to fight everywhere.” Civilians became enemy combatants whether they actually were or not, and thus civilians became targets.
Things aren’t much different in Afghanistan or Iraq. “Al Qaeda could be anywhere! Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction could be anywhere! We have to bomb everywhere to make sure we eliminate the fighters. We have to cut off imports to prevent more weapons from being built.” Thus, civilians get caught in the crosshairs and die. It’s as simple as that.
Re: “planning to kill innocents” is simply stating plainly what happens in war. You plan war, you plan bombing and shooting where civilians are located, you have, in effect, planned to kill innocent people. It may not be the goal, but it is definitely part of the plan. You can regret it, you can be sad about it. I never accused anyone of being happy about it. But planning to make war, and making war itself, by its very nature will include the death of innocent persons and that makes it an accurate statement. I know everyone would prefer to use euphemisms, and claim ignorance, and insist that we have such incredibly clever technology that we could never harm a hair on an innocent person’s head, but that’s a lie. Unless, of course, we can get hussein & co. to agree to meet us out on the ocean, perhaps, where we can do battle only with soldiers and be relatively certain of not including innocent persons in our killing. But I’m thinkin’ not.
And how do my attacks on Bush resemble the attacks on Clinton? What were the supposed overriding considerations that affected all of his decision-making, or what was he being accused of, deciding everything based on how it would help him get more blowjobs? Sorry, I don’t see the connection.
And so long as Hussein keeps attacking his own folks, I don’t see how he can be credibly called a threat to anyone else. He can amass all the mustard gas he likes, I don’t see him using it on much of anyone outside his borders. And I think the transparancy and weakness of the administration’s entire argument was revealed by Koko being unable to distinguish between Saddam and Al Queda. Do they think we are a nation of morons? Or just racists?
As to your last question…are you serious? If my politics were shaped by self-interest, I’d be in love with Bush. He poses no threat of any kind to my business legally* and my tax bracket is closer to that of the folks he favors.
I have listed my reasons for hating Bush many times, I’m not going to go into them all again here except to say that every fear I ever had about him is coming true.
Since you brought it up: rhetoric aside, this administration is never going to make any real dent in pornography, and even if they did, my site is guaranteed to be the very last site on earth they would ever come after. If ever a sexually oriented entertainment site passed the legal test for NOT being obscene, it’s mine.
Congress isn’t accountable to the general public? What’s that thingy we have coming up in November? Oh yeah. An election.
Plus, the process is open and democratic. Proposed bills are public information. So are any amendments. So are committee hearings and debates on the floor of Congress. **
You miss the point. It would have been acceptable to invade Afghanistan prior to Sept. 11 in order to dismantle Al Qaeda, but before that date is was politically impossible to do so.
It may well have been justified to pursue Saddam earlier. So what? Past inaction is no excuse for failing to act now. **
Nothing in that article suggests that the US government had anything to do with the pipeline itself. At most, it says that the US activity in Afghanistan might help revive the pipeline project. Well, so what? There was sufficient reason to go into Afghanistan entirely independent of any oil interests. So what if Unocal, et al, stand to benefit?
The pipeline will almost certainly never happen – security concerns alone will kill it. But why is the pipeline a bad thing? Azerbajin, et al, are poor countries. They benefit from selling oil rights. Afghanistan is a poor country. It benefits from selling pipeline rights (presumably, a fee per gallon shipped). The citizens of the countries involved also benefit from increased employment. And oil companies (and their shareholders) benefit from another revenue source. Everyone wins, no one loses.
Hell, if you really cared about the poor countries of the world, you’d be agitating for the pipeline to be built.**
Kindly prepare a hat sandwich, unless you’ve got proof to back up your accusations. Intuition – especially intuition as whacked out as yours – is not sufficient grounds for making the kind of accusation you are making.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was “six months away” from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist.
"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said yesterday....
Not that I’m the biggest fan of Olentzero’s warped economic views, I have never heard him (read him?) express policies that are anti-democratic, milroyj. Indeed, so far as I can tell, Olent’s main premise seems to be that if democratic institutions and education were universally expanded, people would vote into place socialist reforms ala post-war Europe. Of course, I could be wrong, but that’s just my experience. No need to add onto Olent’s other failings by calling him anti-democratic
-Except, of course, that Big Oil Companies are all evil, mean, heartless corporations that rape the planet and leave wakes of death and barren, fouled wasteland behind, and that oil itself is a vile, horrible poison that should be banned, because no one at all except Big Oil fat-cats benefit from it, and even that at the poor working-man’s expense.
… dammit, where’s the “Sarcasm Disable” button on this keyboard…
Sure, we get to choose who represents us in Congress every two years. But there’s nothing compelling them to keep their campaign promises, or to listen to their constituencies, for the duration of their term.
But we don’t have any direct input into the matter. Sure, we can vote a guy out in the next election if he’s passed enough bad policies, but there’s no effective measures to keep him from passing bad policies in the first place.
Acceptable to whom? It’s OK for the US to invade Afghanistan if they finally figure out they don’t like the ruling government, but it’s not OK for Iraq to invade Kuwait for that or any other reason? I smell a double standard.
It’s not so much past inaction, as past action. The US wasn’t neutral towards Saddam for the decade or so before 1991; they actively supported his regime. For example, the US sold Saddam Hussein several Apache helicopters in 1984, which were used to deliver nerve gas against the Kurds in 1988. The sale of those Apaches resulted from a visit from a US delegation to Baghdad, led by Donald Rumsfeld, that succeeded in normalizing relations with Iraq less than a week after the UN issued proof positive that Saddam had used nerve gas against Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war. And even after the Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam was faced with an uprising of Kurds in the north and Shi’a Muslims in the south, the US allowed him to violate the ‘no-fly’ zones in order to crush those rebellions - which stood a good chance of toppling Saddam’s regime. Why didn’t the US think a regime change was acceptable then?
A few lines from the article:
Do you mean to say that US oil companies will be responsible for insuring avoidance of Russian intervention?
Oh, the Vice-President of the United States is a veteran oil man with years of industry experience in Central Asia. But surely he’s put all that aside for the sake of national interests, even though the oil companies agree that an Afghanistan pipeline would be the safest option for all that oil and natural gas in the former Soviet republics, and that the Taliban just wasn’t up to playing ball on the issue.
Face it, Dewey. The government energy policy, written by energy and oil company executives, is indissolubly bound up with the generation of oil profits and the current US administration, with oil ties that make a spiderweb look like a child’s drawing, has that goal at the heart of its foreign policy.
Considering it’s been revealed that the US had war plans for Afghanistan months before September 2001, I’m interested in hearing what reasons you think the US had to go into Afghanistan. The plans were there; the attacks were an excuse, not a reason. What other reasons did the US see for going in?
The only way the people of Azerbaijan and Afghanistan would benefit directly from the sale of oil is if the oil were nationalized, and the profits from the sale of the oil itself (rather than sale of rights and pipeline fees) were invested directly into the country’s economy. Selliing rights and collecting fees means that a foreign company (like Unocal) owns the oil, and the profits from the sale of oil (which is far more lucrative than the sale of rights) accrue to a private company - with some of the larger crumbs going to some of the selling country’s oilmen. But a quick read of the career of Mossadegh in Iran will show quite clearly how the US feels about nationalizing such a profitable resource like oil.
It’s not intuition, it’s called “reading the newspapers”. Here is an article from CNN detailing the human cost of cluster bombs, used heavily in the war in Afghanistan. Sure, the US’ stated goal was the ouster of Al Qaeda, but it’s quite clear that the cost in human lives extended far beyond those who were actively fighting the war. Sanctions in Iraq have slowly starved non-combatant men, women, and children for the past ten years. Depleted uranium shells have spread radioactive dust across Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, prompting a spike in the cancer rate and respiratory ailments in the regions they were used. Napalm. carpet bombing, and Agent Orange ruined or shortened the lives of thousands of non-combatant Vietnamese.
Much as I’m interested in seeing how my hat would taste with verious garnishes and condiments, Dewey, I’m afraid it’s going to remain firmly on my head. US military intervention carries the unavoidable cost of civilian deaths, whether a commanding general overtly states “Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out” or not.
-Other than the desire for reelection. Congresspersons, unlike Presidents, can serve for an essentially unlimited time, IF they keep being reelected.
Congressmen who don’t listen to their constituents tend to have short careers in Congress.
-I take it you have never contacted your Representative or Congressman. If the majority of ones’ constituents are against something you’re doing, and you do it anyway… well, that takes us right back to Point #1 above.
-I have no solid reply to that, but if you can’t differentiate from a Dictatorship and a Democracy, any reply would likely fall upon deaf ears anyway.
-Perhaps because those that would have most likely seized power with Saddam out of the way, would not have been much of an improvement. Contrary to popular belief, even if we “invade” we would probably not be “installing a puppet government”. If the local populace does not “believe” in the new leader- example given, Karzai in Afghanistan, who weilds little power outside his office door, because he’s seen as a “US puppet”- then that leader has no power, and will probably be toppled by another military junta.
-Face it Olentzero, people need oil. Besides cars and trucks and heat and electricity, we get plastics, synthetics and far too much more to name from oil. You use it, I use it, the Administration uses it, the Russians use it, the Japanese use it. You physically cannot make it through a day without coming into direct contact with something made from a substance brought up originally from an oil well.
When the Government wants to discuss energy policy, who should they talk to? Energy-company people, or the kid making lattes at the Starbucks? The assumption and insinuation I get from you is that “energy company execs” are evil and interested only in raw greed. Enron et al notwithstanding, one makes a profit by locating a resource people need, delivering it to those people, and doing it well enough the end customer is reasonably happy and continues to purchase your product.
Yes, they’re out to make money- one presumes you are similarly gainfully employed, differing only on scale- but why is producing a product in immense and worldwide demand, and cheaply enough we can have disposable razors and soda bottles so cheap they’re literally not worth recycling, an evil or even just-kinda-bad thing?
-It was probably more like years. We very likely had fully-drafted plans (they’re called “contingency” plans, for just-in-case scenarios) for various levels of invasion of Afghanistan probably from the earliest days of the Soviet invasion.
There are entire departments in our Government that do nothing BUT generate warplans to cover any concievable contingency, ranging from limited to global nuclear exchanges with anyone from Russia to Pakistan to Israel, to invasions of Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia or Egypt or even France, England or Norway. We have plans that cover what do do in cases of possible biowarfare or chemical attacks, we have plans that cover war with Japan or China or Korea or Vietnam, we have plans that cover police actions, peacekeeping missions, ‘brush fire’ wars or full-scale division-on-division artillery exchanges. We have plans that cover escalations from police actions into full shooting wars, and we have plans that cover escalations of shooting wars into nuclear exchanges.
But because some flunky could go to a huge bank of filing cabinets, sift through the drawer labelled “Afghanistan” and pull out a handful of documents that were probably typed up a decade before, this is naturally evidence that we had troops and materiel emplaced and were just awaiting the catalyst to open the gates.
All, of course, so we can plunder the area’s oil.
-You don’t know how this sort of thing works, do you? Take, for example, BP- they no more “own” Alaska’s oil than I do. They pay the State of Alaska on a per-barrel basis for production. Similar arrangements are in place in Texas and Pennsylvania, and even Kuwait.
You think the Afghani government- even such as it is- would sit around and not take something for the oil?
In any case, even if EvilOilCo showed up and started drilling, you think they’ll ONLY hire white Texas boys they flew over to work the fields? Sure, they’ll have American (and English, etc) supervisors and technicians, but they’d hire hundreds or even thousands of Afghani- ditches need to be dug, pipes need to be unloaded and welded, parts need to be hauled… Even oil refineries need occasional unskilled labor.
And those employees, American and Afghani, would spend their wages, at least some of it, locally. This is part of the much-derided “trickle down” theory; derided but it works, it happens.
British Petroleum, an English-owned company, pumps billions into our Alaskan economy, both directly in the form of payments and taxes, and indirectly in wages, paid services and infrastructure.
To the Afghani, a “mere” few hundred million would be a massive influx of badly-needed wealth. This is a bad thing?
-Agreed. But the “human cost” of things like amputations from not attending prayer at the correct time, or daring to expose an eyebrow if you’re a woman, and sowing land mines to harass the neighboring warlords and growing some 70% of the worlds’ opium are all irrelevant and not worth the possible death from an errant shell?
This is NOT a black-and-white issue.
-Sanctions emplaced against Saddam Hussein, who continues to sell oil in violation of those sanctions, and who uses that oil wealth to build entire private lakes, palaces and estates, monuments to himself and stock private zoos with exotic game, all while those women and children starve.
And if we lifted those sanctions, do you assume Hussein would then immediately start handing out food and medicine to his people? :rolleyes:
He HAS food and medicine. If he can afford to have a gold-gilt roof put on a “summer home” palace built next to it’s own artifical lake, he can afford to help feed the populace… but he doesn’t. More income and greater access to goods will change this?
Olentzero, I would first like to say that Doc Nickel’s excellent post encompasses most of the points I would like to make in response to your last post. Thus, I won’t reinvent the wheel here. I do have a few additional points, though:**
We didn’t invade Afghanistan because we just “didn’t like the ruling government;” we invaded Afghanistan because they were harboring the bulk of a terrorist network that had the demonstrated capacity to do this nation harm. If you can’t see the difference between that and a invasion solely to expand your territorial boundaries then you really are a moral idiot. **
So what? In 1945, Stalin was our ally. A year later, we were in the beginning of the Cold War. The international stage is not a static one. For many years, it seemed that supporting Iraq was the lesser of two evils vis-a-vis Iran. As the history of the region has unfolded, now Saddam is the greater threat. Whatever we have done in the past (and it is certainly debatable as to whether our support for Iraq was the right thing to do at the time, given our lack of a crystal ball) should not be used as an excuse to prevent action in the future.**
Now you’re just being deliberately obtuse. By this standard, any military action “targets civilians” because inevitably combat results in some civilian casualties. But that’s a ridiculous standard. There is a HUGE difference between the U.S. military and, say, Hamas. The former selects targets based on its stated military objectives, with civilian casualties a regrettable but sometimes necessary consequence. The latter deliberately selects defenseless civilian targets for no other reason than instilling terror in the civilian populace.
True, but how does that help in overturning the unpopular policies they’ve enacted?
Let’s take an example - the governor of a state (whose position is subject to the same electoral constraints you’ve outlined above) and an issue that is fairly divisive - say a car tax.
So, John Doe runs for governor, opposing the car tax. Most of the people in the state don’t want the car tax, and he’s elected on a solid majority. Six months into his term, he announces, “I’ve looked at the budget numbers and we just can’t raise the funds we need without a car tax.” Now he’s unpopular, but the recall effort is a complete hassle (when was the last time a governor was successfully recalled? That fellow from Arizona ca. 1985, wasn’t it?) so the state populace gets three years of a car tax shoved down their throats.
Election time again. Jane Roe runs on the opposing party’s ticket, vowing to repeal the car tax. She wins in a landslide, but six months later she says “We’re just not able to repeal the car tax.” So the populace gets another three years of the car tax.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Voting someone from office once every couple of years doesn’t imply the overturn of the policies they enacted that made them unpopular. Being able to choose our candidates is a fine thing, but it’s not enough. There needs to be more direct accountability.
So a Democracy is entitled to directly involve itself in the affairs of another nation at the expense of that nation’s populace while a Dictatorship is not?
sigh I hate the end of the fiscal year. I got work piling up like mad - so I’m going to have to leave it here for this morning and come back later when things have slowed down.
If a policy is overwhelmingly opposed by substantial majorities of the voting population – by which I mean, they don’t just passively dislike it, but will actually vote on that issue – then the law will be changed.
Your John Doe example is a bit silly. After all, governors do not unilaterally impose taxes on their states; the legislature must act. For such a tax to pass in the first place, it must have some support among the population.
Or, more to the point, it must not be actively opposed. A legislator’s job is not to rubber-stamp public opinion; Gallup polls are not supposed to dictate policy. Legislators are not potted plants; they are elected to use their judgment as to what policies are best for their constituents and the state/nation overall. Good legislators will sometimes stand against the shifting winds of public opinion.
The election process and a politician’s desire to be reelected is a bulwark against poor use of that discretion. If the public thinks a politician has used particularly poor judgment, he will be voted out of office and someone more amenable to the public’s view will replace him.
Consider foriegn aid. If every member of Congress merely rubber-stamped public opinion from their home districts, we wouldn’t give one dime to any developing nations. Foriegn policy considerations and a longer view arguably justify those expenditures, and so Congress votes to make them.
We don’t live in a pure democracy, nor would we want to. Our system is designed to bring cool reflection on problems rather than catering to the latest whims of the mob. It fails in that goal sometimes, true, but more often than not it works. **
The U.S. presence in Afghanistan, unlike Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, does not represent an attempt by the U.S. to expand its territorial possessions. It is an attempt to eradicate a security threat to the U.S. Big difference.
Tell you what: if Kuwait had had missiles pointed at Baghdad, or was crashing planes into Iraqi skyscrapers, or was sending in suicide bombers into the cafes and discos of Iraq’s allies, then it may have been justified for Saddam to invade in order to eliminate those threats. But they didn’t and weren’t, so Saddam’s invasion was not justified.
The fact that Iraq is a dictatorship and the U.S. a democracy has nothing to do with answering the particular, very-narrow question of “when is invasion OK”? The fact that an Iraqi invasion may ultimately replace a brutal dictatorship with a democracy is just a nice bonus.
"The world’s biggest oil bonanza in recent memory may be just around the corner, giving U.S. oil companies huge profits and American consumers cheap gasoline for decades to come.
And it all may come courtesy of a war with Iraq.
While debate intensifies about the Bush administration’s policy, oil analysts and Iraqi exile leaders believe a new, pro-Western government – assuming it were to replace Saddam Hussein’s regime – would prompt U.S. and multinational petroleum giants to rush into Iraq, dramatically increasing the output of a nation whose oil reserves are second only to that of Saudi Arabia.
“There already is a stampede, with the Russians, French and Italians already lined up,” said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a New York think tank funded by large oil companies…"
Got news for you, Dewey. I’m opposed to any country invading another country, period. By questioning the US’ motives for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, I am by no means supporting the other side here. The Taliban are a bunch of scum. Saddam Hussein is a bloody despot. Unlike Stalin, however, the US supported these people materially and financially for years before they bit the hand that fed them.
The US’ claims that it’s going in purely for humanitarian reasons and the defense of democracy is bullshit. There’s money to be made from the oil there. And if you guys really think the US building a pipeline and buying rights to the oil will enrich the countries’ populations as a whole, take a long, hard look at the huge disparities in wealth in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The vast majority of the wealth generated from those sales is concentrated in the hands of the ruling families and some of the more powerful businessmen. Hell, the US has a major pipeline in Colombia and it’s painfully clear not everybody got rich off of it. It’ll be the same story for Iraq and Afghanistan.
That’s pretty freaking elitist for someone who comes on a board dedicated to the principle of fighting ignorance. You ever considered it possible that the more well-informed people are about a subject, the less likely they’ll act like an unthinking mob?
Yes. Doc, the world needs oil. There are probably plenty of chemically safer and equally viable lubricants available, too. There are probably also much safer methods of oil extraction, both environmentally and from the perspective of human health. But the former don’t seem to be profitable enough, and the latter just seem to cost too much. I’m not against oil and petroleum, I’m against a system that’s predicated on making a profit off its extraction and production before it can be used. The drive to profit engenders competition first between businesses and then between countries. Economic competition at the international level all too quickly becomes military competition, leading to the scenario you outlined where a superpower has miles of files detailing any and all possible scenarios of war between that country and the rest of the world - a thought which I find, at the very least, to be greatly unsettling. A world that accepts the possibility of a universally destructive conflict as an occupational hazard is one which, in my opinion, could stand to be greatly improved through drastically radical change.
It amazes me that there are people who actually believe this. You really think that all the weapons inspection avoiding by Iraq, hostile action by Saddam against his own people, refusal to obey UN security council resolutions, starting wars of conquest with his neighbors, using poison gas against his own people, attempting to build more WOMD to use against us…etc, etc…
You really think that all of this is just a smokescreen for Bush to invade Iraq for the oil? The US is the richest nation on earth. We can afford to buy the oil from other places just fine.
If Bush is so money hungry than why wouldn’t he just invade Switzerland and take all the money from the Swiss banks? Him wanting to invade Iraq for the oil is equally laughable.
