What was that thing signed by both countries, and approved by the U.N called? Something along the lines of a treaty? Is that the word I’m looking for? You know, that document that was an official end to the hostilities?
Iraq, being the one to surrender, had to agree to certain terms to stop the shitstorm raining from the F-16’s. In effect, the war didn’t actually end then. It was kind of on pause while Saddam got his shit together and tried to straighten up to better perform for the millions of people he held total control over.
He failed. Repeatedly. He AGREED to certain conditions to end the war, and then repeatedly failed to live up to them. I’d say breach of contract in lay terms. Once the conditions weren’t met, deal was off.
No mention of the person I’m alluding to, but how did that Versailles Treaty work out for Europe? Seems a pre-emptive attack at some point would have warded off a lot of suffering.
I mentioned it in another thread. Why is this all Bush’s fault? Al-Queda is the one constant in all of this. It’s not about countries, or leaders, or political parties. Cite how Bush had anything to do with the first WTC bombings and I’ll listen.
Otherwise you’re bringing nothing in your arsenal other than Bush is Bad.
So, what you’re saying is that we all share in the responsibility of all actions, since we conceiveabley have done something to prevent any given action. I think that is a meaningless statement.
Let’s look at the people who chose to place the bombs in London. Did they or did they not do so as a conscious choice? Did anyone in any way force them to take the actions they took? Did they or did they not have other options for expressing their outrage (assuming that is what they were doing)?
No. This was an act fully thought out, fully understood, and in no way coerced by any other human being. The bombers could have stopped at any time. They chose not to.
How on God’s earth do you or I share responisbility for an action freely chosen?
Diogenes: We, ourselves, are responsible for our actions in Iraq. We made the decision, and we executed.
Why can’t we also say that the bombers today are responsible for their actions?
You don’t need to justify the Iraq invassion in order to hold today’s bombers accountable for their actions. Those are two separate acts.
To turn this around… Suppose that Britain decided to retaliate for today’s terrorist act by carpet bombing Baghdad. Would you jump in and say that the London bombers shared responsibility for that act of retaliation? Of course not. A random act of violence cannot be rationalized.
You seem to be stuck in a mindset that because the invasion of Iraq was illegal (in your mind) that we deserve some sort of retribution. That simply isn’t so. Each act must be judged by itself. Otherwise, we are doomed to neverending cylce of revenge and counter-revenge.
Can’t we agree that the invasion of Iraq was wrong and the bombing of London was wrong and that neither justifies the other?
I know you’re not able to respond to everyone who comments on your OP, but I really am curious about your answer to the question I posed in my first post.
Again: If I sell a gun to someone I know to be thief, and he winds up using it to shoot someone in the course of a robbery – don’t I bear some responsibility for the bad consequences of his actions (i.e., death)? It’s not an analogous situation to the London bombings, but it’s a clearer illustration of the same principle, I think.
Actually, yes, to an extent. To use a more realistic example, Al Qaeda bears a great deal of responsibility for the Iraq war, and all of the resultant deaths. Their acts made Western aggression against Muslim countries much more likely, and this was predictable; therefore they are partially responsible for any such aggression.
I don’t think that even Dio is talking about one bad act justifying another. It’s a matter of bad acts causing other bad acts.
You say that we only bear responsibility for our own actions, which is true. However, that includes taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions as well, to the extent that they can be foreseen.
I’m not entirely sure what counts as ‘moral responsibility’ in such a situation. If a parent leaves their child to wander a public park unsupervised, and that child is attacked or injured by someone else, I guess one could argue that the moral responsibility for the attack itself adheres solely to the attacker, since obviously the parent didn’t coerce them to attack the child. But does this absolve the parent of blame, or invalidate the responsibility to anticipate threats to their child and plan accordingly?
Yes in that the invasion served to continue to inflame Muslim feelings and thereby breed terrorists. I know from personal experience how this act and blair’s lap-dog act inflamed young muslims, drove them from western dress to traditional gear, turned friendship to emnity. Going after OBL in Afghanistan was considered okay, attacking a country on palpable false pretences and inflicting massive civilian casualties was not.
And it will be partially responsible for future atrocities caused by terrorists who pick up training in Iraq and bring the skills back home. It’s called ‘blow back’.
But the overwhelming responsibility is on those who actually did it or provided material support.
Actions have consequences and individuals and governments have to accept them. I really don’t see what’s so difficult about that. The UK and the USA simply do not get a free pass on attacking a country on false pretences and killing large numbers of civilians. Those deaths are on Bush and Blair’s conscience.
The US and Britain are allies in the war against terror. If you wish not to blame Al-Quida, then I suggest blaming Spain, as they set the precedent that if you get hit by terrorists you will do what the terrorist want.
I agreed with half of your thread title. I don’t blame ‘the US,’ but I do blame the US administration, and I do think they share the blame. As I said in the thread you’re quoting, I blame:
The actual perpetrators
Those who funded them
Bush and his administration
Blair and some of his colleagues
In no particular order.
I don’t blame OSB for the war in Iraq. I blame him (shared blame) for 9/11, but he’s not from Iraq, or funded by Iraq, or anything much to do with Iraq. 9/11 was an excuse to invade a country that wasn’t involved.
Remember, after the WTC attack there was no attack on London. If we hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, these bombings are very unlikely to have happened. Does anyone seriously disagree with this?
Are you saying that a pre-emptive attack against the Weimar Republic would have prevented the Nazis from gaining power?
That makes no sense at all.
You know, the French occupied the Ruhr valley and that didn’t do squat to prevent the Nazis from gaining power, in fact it probably made things worse. Are you saying the British and the French should have marched on Berlin in 1929 (at the height of hyper inflation) and deposed Herman Müller (the chancellor at the time, and a socialist to boot)? What would be the point, not to mention the justification?
All in all, that was a really stupid thing to post.
You can’t possibly have misunderstood his post that badly.
Just in case you actually didn’t understand, though, he was referring to Hitler’s repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, and the Allies’ failure to hold Germany accountable.
How about this… Had the United States not diverted a good deal of its forces from Afghanistan to fight in Iraq, when it was unnecessary to do so, they could have concentraited on the real job at hand since 9/11 and hunt down and destroy the terroist leadership. That would have sent the message that no one is immune from punishment. That we can and will win out in the end.
Instead, they opened a new front and ignored the real problem. They showed that despite all of their might they can not do a thing against Al Queda. They were unwilling to use their full force to go from mountain top to mountain top and hunt them down. They used others to do the dirty work and showed reluctance to take the risks the enemy does.
Empowered with this knowledge the many other groups however loosely connected to the group feel they can strike any where without fear of capture.
All the tough talk coming from the west sounds like nothing but hot air to them.
Well, I did misunderstand it that badly, because Hitler was not the first person to repudiate the Versailles Treaty. The French occupied the Ruhr valley because the Germans weren’t sending enough coal. In other words the Germans were in violation of the Versailles Treaty, but did the French occupation prevent the Third Reich? The time that action should have been taken against Hitler was when he annexed the Sudetenland (compare that to Saddam attacking Kuwait for instance), not when he repudiated the Versailles Treaty.
Also, this part of duffer’s post:
sounds like he’s blaming the Versailles Treaty for the rise of fascism in Europe. That is an awful over-simplification.
But I do blame AQ, trouble is the US is doing more harm in the ‘war on terror’ than good
We are most certainly involved in a struggle against a group of people that want something and we need to realise who we are up against.
The enemy are indeed muslims, fundamentalist muslims. That is an important distinction, we are not up against ‘Islam’, against ‘The Muslim World’. But that might very well happen if we are not careful.
‘The Terrorists’ (the real ones, AQ et al, not the Iraqi resistance) are fundamentalists, they want Islam to rule their world and ideally the entire world should become Islamic.
As yet the number of people who are that radical in their views are reasonably small but they are growing. Radical Islam is growing. That is what must be stopped.
Yes they ‘hate our freedoms’ to put it simply. They resent how our mores are being exported to their countries. They resent their women dressing up as whores and doing ‘men’s things’. They resent that it is okay to be gay. They resent it’s okay to indulge in drugs and let yourself go, listening to perverted music.They hate how westernised people rule and islam is ‘opressed’ and regarded as backwards.
Problem is, these are real actual grudges…The radicals have these arguments and they work to radicalise previously disinterested muslims. They argue for them to be better muslims. That’s the first step, to say you are better than these vile westerners.
They are actively preaching this and have been for decades, slowly growing and growing and we’ve let them do this, even in our own countries. I’m afraid that the community, that at least lends a willing ear to these preachers, is bigger than we think. From this ‘reborn muslim’ community stem the more radical elements that believe the roles can be reversed, that it is possible to create an islamic world revolution.
The next step up is arguing that it is okay to use violence in making this happen. Which is easy as there are examples aplenty to show how ‘the other side’ is using violence to opress muslims. Muslims are only starting to fight back after a long time of letting themselves be opressed.
Yes they are in a war. A war that is only just beginning, A war that needs to be escalated until there is a worldwide war of muslims against infidels, where we literally are at each other’s throats, neighbour against neighbour. This is their goal. What ‘the terrorists’ hope to achieve.
The first step is the idea that it’s all about us vs them that there already is a large confrontation of Islam vs Infidel and that people need to start taking sides.
Question for us is how do we react to this threat?
We (should) know how wrong it is to apply brute force. This only serves the purpose of the recruiters. ‘See, we were right!! They are opressing us. The struggle is upon us. Choose what side you are on.’
Frankly this is exactly what the allies tried to do in WWII, create [del]terrorist[/del] resistance movements where there were none. Like in Tsjechia [del]terrorist[/del] secret agents were dropped into the country from England and [del]murdered[/del] asassinated the German gouvernor, the Germans responded with brute force, killing innocents. Hey presto… resistance movement.
There is no quick way for us to win by engaging them in their war, on their terms. This is how they want us to respond, it will escalate and radicalise everybody until we indeed will be engaged in an armageddon style struggle.
This is why I regard the invasion of Iraq as a fuck-up of such enormous proportions.
Apart from it being a blatant war of agression, bad enough in itself, this war was timed totally wrong while involved in this struggle against fundamentalist terrorists. At a time when we have to make friends with friendly muslims not create more radical enemy muslims.
What effect do you think this war had on the numerous muslims who were on the fence, who had not yet made the step that the preachers are right and the West is the enemy.
Worse still is that the insurgents are seen to be winning. The US has stomped around like a dumb giant crushing innocent muslims but are being beaten by brave Mujahedeen.
Wow, what a set-back this invasion is in the struggle against Islamist terror.
Stupid, stupid stupid stupid
Well, the patented European methods didn’t work either–oh wait–what methods? At least you haven’t gone to war with each other for hundreds of years now–oh wait again…
You can’t beat something with nothing. We tried nothing. After 9/11, we simply got tired of trying nothing.
Are you saying that the R.A.F., the IRA and the ETA are still as a large a threat as they were in the '70s and '80s? Because they aren’t. And why is that? Because the European methods ::gasp:: worked. At least we had methods.
Before 9/11 there never had been a successful large scale terrorist attack on U.S. territority (if you discount locally bred terrorists like McVeigh), so there really were no methods in place. The methods that are now in place are not working and are wrong. Please explain to me how invading Iraq has made the U.S. and the rest of the world safer from terrorism?
Also, mentioning the various wars in Europe of the last century is just a little bit too ingenious.
Well, there are more than a few Europeans who seem to feel they have a position of moral superiority simply because they are rich and happy and peaceful–at the moment. They don’t. Within living memory millions of them blindly followed ideologies as destructive as al-Qaeda’s. And Americans have too many of our people in graves on their soil to let that go. As for the ETA and IRA, at least they had leaders you could negotiate with. Much, much easier to deal with.
I’m not sure that invading Iraq was the right thing to dol but do you agree or not that regimes like Saddam’s are the main reason for the discontent that afflicts the Muslim world? Do you agree that the West should continue to support said regimes and look the other way as long as the oil keeps coming?
