First off, I’m not sure where this post belongs, so if this isn’t GQ materiel, please move it. I would like to point out that I do have some questions that have factual answers, so that’s why I’m here.
I normally don’t buy into a lot of this conspiracy garbage, but this smells funny…
I was watching CNN a few hours ago, and there was a segment about a shipment of 35lbs of Uranium bound for Iraq which was intercepted by authorities.
Umm…
1> Is it just a coincidence that we’ve been hounding Iraq about ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and suddenly POOF, “Look! Uranium bound for Iraq one day before the president has to sell his war to congress”?
2> Where’s my voice in this? I concede that I could be very wrong, but I smell another “Gulf of Tonkin” (sp?) here, designed to thrust us into another war. Who can I complain to and be heard? It’s just frustrating to passively watch something like this go unchecked.
3> Didn’t Iraq already agree to ‘unfettered’ access to anywhere the inspectors desired? Why stoke the flames? This didn’t make much American news, but Iraq took journalists on unrestricted tours of sites mentioned in Blair’s dossier.
I don’t know. I could be wrong, but I think this Iraq thing is bullshit.
Ever even think of writing your Congressional/Senatorial representatives or is that too much work for you?
Iraq has played the whole “Sure, we’ll allow unrestricted access to anywhere you want to go,” game innumerable times and every single time they renege on their promises, which is a damn good indication that they A) Are lying through their teeth about not having any bio/chem weapons and B) They have something to hide.
WSLer, living in Japan makes me feel like I have no voice: I pay no US taxes, and don’t even know who my representitives are. Home of record? It’s an address in Illinois. Nobody’s home. Anyway, I’m so far removed from US politics that I normally don’t care, however people have complained to ME about Bush’s warmongering. He’s making ME look bad!
I agree something should be done, but I’m siding with the Russians on this one.
3waygeek: Thanks for the link. At least I’m not the only maniac out there…
I’m so sorry that the President of the United States is making YOU look bad. Normally YOU don’t care enough about the US to bother to stay current on events here, but now that YOU look bad, YOU want to know what to do? After all everything is about YOU, right?
It’s not necessarliy an indication of either at all. It could be a result of the simple fact, which was extremely widely reported in the mainstream press in 1999, that the “U.N. weapons inspection teams” that Hussein kicked out of his country were staffed by CIA agents who used the intelligence they gathered to try to engineer a coup against him in 1996, while they were still in the country. How can that not be a justification for kicking the inspectors out, when they were represented as being there for an entirely different purpose? In my opinion, sovereign countries have an inalienable right to kick out covert CIA agents that are trying to overthrow their governments, and the ubiquitous argument about Hussein kicking weapons inspectors out of his country has no validity whatsoever in light of this.
At school, we ordered a new musical instrument amplifier. On the box was a chart listing various voltages (US, Japan, two different Europes, etc.) and identifying the contents as being designed for US voltage.
A high school student saw the box and remarked “How can we all agree on going to war or keeping the peace when we can’t even agree on what voltage to use?”
Problem is Iraq isn’t really a sovereign country with a legitamite government. It’s a collection of dirt-poor peasants controlled by a group of murdering criminal scumbags.
And because of 9/11 our sovereignty is now much more legitamite than theirs.
I think that description can apply to any country in the world…
I agree with the OP that Bush’s actions look pretty bad to other countries. Well OK, I’m in the same country as he, but I don’t think there is a single country in the world (including the US) that overwhelmingly supports his actions. I really don’t understand why this is happening.
So, you think Saddam should be allowed to continue on his merry way and it wouldn’t bother you in the slightest if one day in the near future you woke to the news that 125,000 Americans were dead asa result of a chemical weapons attack, which Saddam helped with.
Apart from moral and ethical problems concerning the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would suffer (they are in fact people), on a political level it is a question of
a) fighting against the right enemy at the right time. Saudi Arabia, for example, has had closer ties to last year’s perpetrators of last year than has Iraq, as far as anyone can say anyway.
b) not heating up the situation with added hatred and aggression. The fact that anyone would single out the U.S. as a target reflects the very policies that are the question of the OP. An all-out attack against any Arab or Islamic state, as undesirable and hideous that state’s regime may well be, will only lead to an even stronger negative reaction in the Arab and non-Arab world.
and c) (on a more Machiavelian or realpolitical note) finding other short-term solutions than war. Even if this means the type of cold-war situation we learned to live with throughout much of the second half of the 20th century. Making clear that attacks will be retaliated against is probably sounder policy in the long run than attacking first and then being ostracized and hated by the rest of the world. The U.S. had the complete support of almost all of the world right after last year’s attacks and could then retaliate at will (Afghanistan). This may sound horribly close to accepting the loss of American lives, but it would mean the loss of fewer lives in the long run.
Attacking Iraq will definitely NOT lessen the chance of terrorist retaliation. Learn from Israel!