Read_Neck, december, and John Mace are giving an excellent tutorial in the hypocrisy of the right when it claims to uphold liberty.
Unless, of course, you actually have the balls to disagree with the government when it’s engaged in conquest. Then, you’re a traitor.
The military should be reduced to a small core, suitable to defense and the occasional need to go overseas to deliver retribution for things like 9/11. The military we have now is the military of an empire. This will ruin us and destroy our freedom, if we don’t rid ourselves of it in time.
Hopefully, I got this into the right thread this time.
pantom - Normally your post would not merit acknowledgement,much less a reply. But after backtracking to where you initially dropped your load. I can’t decide whether it was sheer genius or the biggest boner I’ve seen ever.
Not sure what you are refering to here. If it is the scientist guy who had some stuff buryed in his garden, then I don’t see how that makes it clear that “Iraq still harboured nuclear ambitions”. He buryed some stuff in 1991. No-one ever mentioned it again. Doesn’t sound very ambitious to me…
Don’t forget, december, that plenty of anti-war types opposed the war because they believed it would be harmful to the US. For example, before the war, Saddam Hussein was nicely contained and provided a stable political situation in Iraq that largely prevented the rise of other anti-US groups. Now our other enemies in Iraq (be they al-Qaa:ada, Shi’ah extremists, or what have you) are free to step into the power vacuum created by the fall of Saddam.
I wouldn’t make a comparison between the present condition of Iraq and the war in Vietnam. I do, however, notice a few disturbing parallels between our young experience in Iraq and the Soviets’ early experience in Afghanistan. It’s really too soon to tell what direction Iraq is going to take, and I don’t believe the conditions are right for a full repeat of the Afghan fiasco, but I do worry that we’ve committed the same set of fatal errors the Soviets did in underestimating the challenges of military occupation in what was not supposed to be a particularly hostile environment.
We should not have based our plan for postwar reconstruction on dreams of grateful, liberated Iraqis. The fact that the current Iraqi anger towards the US seems to come largely as a shock to our troops is shocking in itself.
I mark the beginning of Moscow’s real Afghan nightmare with a 1980 anti-Soviet demonstration in Kabul that turned into a riot, leaving 300 people dead and serving as a convenient spark to inflame what had been growing but small-scale Afghan guerrilla activity. God forbid such a thing should happen in Baghdad or Fallujah.
Read_Neck: biggest boner. I think it’s a warning never to post, drink, and read totally whacked out threads (the other one, not this one) at the same time.
As to the quality of the message, chew on this from the debates of the Constitutional Convention:
Your posts are a tutorial in the danger they apprehended. Get enough armed men together with the viewpoint that anyone who opposes them are traitors, and the danger to our liberty is unlimited. Thankfully we’re not there yet, but every day we keep a massive military on the march is a day closer to the destruction of our liberty.
Seems the founding fathers didn’t agree with Madison or you. Since they had to have a motion and second to even bring it to a vote the 9-2 speaks for itself.
On that clause. If you look, there is this clause in the Constitution, in the same section, which was drawn the way it was specifically to prevent an oversized standing army:
“To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”
The idea being that each Congress would have to reconfirm the need for a standing army, and what the size would be. There is no such qualification in the case of the Navy, in the immediately following clause:
To provide and maintain a Navy;
This is because there was a general consensus at the time that standing armies were dangerous to liberty. They also thought that a permanent war footing, which is what we’ve been on since 1950, more or less, would increase the power of the Executive at the expense of the legislative branch in military matters. As no President has found it necessary to formally declare war during that time, and as the above clause re standing armies has been repealed in all but name, they were right about that too.