You keep telling yourself, that, John, evidently its working for ya.
The funny thing is, you and I have exactly the same position on whether or not we should have gone to war in Iraq. Unless, that is, you’ve changed your mind and are now a pro-war poster…?
I have to think that Rudy Giuliani’s speech on Monday was somehow transmorphed in many peoples’ mindsets as being W’s speech, copletely ignoring what W actually said on Thursday.
Be true to that logic. The next time you hear about a house that burns and the firemen show up, put out the fire and save the people trapped inside, be sure and make a point of admonishing the firemen. Tell them that houses are still burning down, and people still die in them. God forbid they should ever look on the bright side or take pride in an accomplishment.
And here’s another take on the same issue:
Bush: “We saved the Iraqis from torture and death at the hands of an evil dictator.”
Greek Chorus: “He counts not the most recent 10,000.”
BTW, aren’t the occupiers supposed to be keeping a record of that? Amnesty International says they the Pentagon isn’t making those figures public. Anyone know for sure?
Who’s in charge of this mess?
Oh yeah! That guy who’s so much fun at backyard barbecues…
If Hitler* was so obviously bad, how did he ascend to power? And it’s not like the German public was ignorant of his ideas, he wrote them down in Mein Kampf. If the ideas of the Nazis were SO terrible, how did they managed to gain a plurality of the vote?
If Nixon was a scumbag like the McGovern people were saying all along, how come Nixon got re-elected in 1972?
If it was so obvious that Iraq was not a threat to the United States, how come a solid majority of people thought that it was?
*Before you invoke Godwins law on me, I’m not comparing Bush to Hitler. I’m just saying that you are arguing with a logical fallacy called Argumentum Ad Populum.
I’ll try to split the difference here between you and Stoid. I agree that one does not necessarily need to deal with all problems, such as repressive regimes, in order to deal with one. However, when you are selective, you rightfully open yourself up for people questioning what your motives really are, for asking whether it might not be more “cost effective” to use your resources in other ways, and for considering you to be hypocritical or deceitful about your reasons for doing something.
Then, of course, there is the issue of whether military intervention is the best way to achieve the objective and whether it might not cause as much harm as good. And, I think the danger of this being the case is particularly high when one’s real motives have little to do with actually freeing people from oppression. It is very hard to achieve a nobel objective as a side-benefit because you are only partially committed to that nobel objective amongst many other objectives, some presumably more important to you. Eventually, those objectives are going to conflict.
Can you describe a real world situation in which it is possible NOT to be selective, especially when taking about the application of force?
Mr. RickJay brought this little factoid up…
Query from a curious SPOOFE: Are you trying to contend that only Republicans believe stupid things? I’m sure you’re not; however, clarification would be appreciated… because, if you’re not contending that, what does it prove?
The stupid Democrats and the stupid Republicans balance out. I’m sure there’re a LOT of Kerry supporters that hate Bush because they believe that Bush was personally responsible for 9/11, or somesuch.
Good to see that, after your long absence, you are still twisting opponents’ words into a strawman to knock down.
I read Stoid as saying that comparing one thing with another and prioritizing is part of any sensible person’s toolkit - and definitely ought to be assumed to be part of any sensible Presidential administration’s toolkit.
If our foreign policy goal was to save the weak from the depredations of the strong and ruthless, certainly intervening in the Sudan, where it’s estimated that 300,000 people may be killed or starved to death this year alone, seems to rank well above intervening in Iraq, where a comparable number of people have been killed by Saddam & Sons over the past three or four decades.
If protecting the US against ‘grave and gathering’ threats was our goal, then surely in 2002 and early 2003, the danger or nuclear proliferation was at the top of the list (with its subsidiary bullet points of Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, poor controls on Russian nuclear material) and next was surely al-Qaeda directly, along with ensuring that Afghanistan didn’t return to a state of being a hospitable host to al-Qaeda. Iraq was somewhere down the list from those items - and would make it harder to achieve the social and political isolation of al-Qaeda in the Islamic world, which is a necessary precondition to its defeat, pushing it further down on the list than if it were neutral with respect to the WoT. (At this point, thanks to Bush & Co., I don’t see much progress being made towards that precondition for the next decade or two.)
If this war was about ensuring that a friendly nation would be available to supply us with oil if the House of Saud were overthrown, then they at least chose the right place. But I keep being told that that’s tinfoil-hat territory, which is a shame, because it’s the one standard by which the Bushies actually chose the right place to go to war, assuming war was needed to accomplish that end.
Well, yeah, sure. I guess choosing to invade any country under a pretext (among other pretexts) of freeing its people opens you up for questions on your selectivity. However, as RTFirefly points out, part of the problem here is that it is so obvious to just about everyone that this is just a pretext because the selection is such a poor one from the point of view of accomplishing humanitarian ends…and because we chose to be buddy-buddy to Saddam at a time when some of his worst crimes were much more recent.
And, as I pointed out before, when using as blunt an instrument as war, it is hard enough to do the right thing even when you are doing it for the right reasons; it is even more difficult to end up fortuitously doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Or to put it another way, not only is it not necessarily true that the ends justify the means (and the motive) but it is also true that the wrong means and motive make it unlikely that “the ends” will turn out very well.
I’m not arguing about the Iraq war. I’ve always said that I thought it was a mistake. I am simply saying that the implication of Stoid’s statement is a non sequitur, and would be a terrible way to determine policy since its consistent application would force one to never do anything, ever*. No amount of argument about the Iraq war changes that.
*although given my libertarian bent, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad a result 
It’s good to be back RTF, but in point of fact, if anybody’s twisting words here. It’s you. I’m not the one taking Stoid’s three words and creating four paragraphs out of them. You are.
She may mean what you say. I dunno. I just have the three words.
If someone says “We saved the Iraqis from torture and death at the hands of an evil dictator,” that is not to say that that was our sole or even primary reason. I don’t know anybody who’s saying that, now, or before the war.
Unless you have a cite where someone in the administration said that was the totality of our reason for going to war with Iraq, then you’ve simply produced a strawman. Who made that argument as the rationale? Who said that was our foreign policy goal? May I have a cite?
Yes, I suppose that if one was using your strawman as the rationale this would make sense. Who said that this our rationale?
I think your analysis is flawed, and I can’t imagine how you read this into Stoid’s three words.
Well, RT putting aside these Strawmen of yours (and for somebody accusing me of strawmen, you sure have produced quite a few with this post of yours) you and I both know that the stated reasons for going to war with Iraq were complex and multifaceted. There was not one simple bullet point sentence to play with.
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Saddam was in defiance of UN resolutions that had been put in place the last time we had to intervene to undo what he had done.
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He had had and used WMD and many beleived in good faith that based on history he still had them.
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He was a tyrant hurting his people.
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We had quite an investment in enforcing the no fly zones to stop him pogrom of genocide against the Kurds, and had been in the analysis of Bob Woodward in “Plan of Attack” been in a state of undeclared war with Iraq for several years. Despite your previous arguments to the contrary Woodward makes it clear why the then current situation was untenable.
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In any clash in the region we was a wildcard. The war on terrorism would require cooperation and military action in the middle east, and an unneutralized Saddam presented an unacceptable risk.
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After 9/11 the world had changed and the likes of Saddam could no longer be tolerated. We would no longer wait for self-declared hostile nations who clearly stated their intent to attack us and our allies to act first. If you say you are going to try to kill us and kill our allies, and you applaud those that do, and you have a history of attacking us or our allies, you are now officially in season.
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There were terrorist camps in Iraq, and ties to terrorism.
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The war is against militant fundamentalist Islam and it serves our purposes to wipe it out, wipe out its allies, and it’s potential allies, and free the people who it has enslaved, so that in time and not without difficulty, they may thrive and aid us.
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Saddam was a symbol of defiance, that you could defy the US. attack us or our allies, thwart the UN and survive by politicking and gamesmanship. We destroyed the symbol and sent the message that we are not playing games.
I think that about covers it. Now you may in good faith disagree with those points, or object to them, and I can accept that in listen and we can debate in good faith about it. On the other side of the coin you can play the strawman game and hold up one single thing and pretend that that was all there was, and maybe some people will support you in it. We both know however, that this single point simplistic viewpoint is not what was said or argued.
However, feel free to go ahead and back up what you said. Prove me wrong. Get me that cite from a high ranking official like Rumsfeld, Powell, Bush, or somebody else where they tell us that the whole reason for going to war was to free the Iraqis from a dictator and I will gladly apologize, concede your point, denounce the administration and vote for Kerry.
Hey…Scylla has picked up the Administration’s technique of what SimonX has brilliantly called a “not lie”. He didn’t lie one bit here. After all, there was a terrorist camp in Iraq; however, it was not in the part of Iraq that Saddam controlled. And, in fact, we could have taken it out in a much more self-contained operation if we had wanted to. But there was certainly a terrorist camp. Scylla did not lie here.
And, indeed, Iraq did have “ties to terrorism.” How could they not? Saudi Arabia sure as hell does…Should we start listing the names? Hell, I think Florida had ties to terrorism. I understand that some guys who launched a pretty big terrorist attack a few years ago lived down there for a while. (I propose that we take out Jeb Bush…and Katherine Harris while we’re in the neighborhood.)
Scylla, in all honesty, I do understand your logic in arguing that a combination of reasons might make an invasion of Iraq a good idea even if any one reason does not. However, when all the reasons have so little merit…and when the downsides are considerable, they still don’t add up to a heck of a lot. And, of course, we are paying the price now.
Gracias. I’m glad you see my point. Personally, I hate this technique that goes around when people act obtuse and deny every single bit of your argument in knee-jerk fashion.
I’m glad you see what I’m saying and it’s fine if you disagree with me and don’t beleive the multiple points cited add up to a responsible decision for invasion. I beleive you can in good faith simply disagree.
On the same note, I disagree with you about paying the price. Personally, I think things in Iraq are going positively swimmingly. Better than I hoped for. I mean that truly and sincerely. I thought for sure that we would basically have to take the country inch by inch and destroy it in siege to oust Saddam. I did not think that the actual invasion would proceed as fast and relatively bloodlessly as it did.
I did not think we would just be able to walk in. I didn’t think the country would be basically intact afterwards. I thought it would cost a lot more lives. A year and change out, the country is relatively stable. We are fighting terrorists and guerrillas on their home ground. We haven’t had an attack on the homeland yet, and only about a thousand of our soldiers have died. It could have been a lot worse. It should have been a lot worse. I think things will slowly continue to get better, but that there will be continued terrorist incidents and guerrilla fighting that we will have to contend with for the next two years or so. Afterwards I expect the Iraqis themselves to be up to the task of handling what remains though they’ll be facing difficulties for the next decade at least as they gradually get to their feet and build a country.
When you say things are going badly, it makes me wonder what your expectations are, or what you would have thought “good” was. Did you think we would take the country bloodlessly and without casualty and hardship and leave behind a utopia 3 months later.
Seriously. If things are bad, and it didn’t go well, what would you have thought a favorable or good outcome would look like?
…back to the OP…
In my travels, I find that the most sure-thing single issue that Bush supporters continually return to is taxes. For them Bush=Lower Taxes, Democrats=Higher Taxes. And that’s money out of my pocket, baby! All of the rest is just noise.
SPOOFE, you shock me. I know you don’t believe this for a second. (Unless you define “A LOT” as a couple dozen people, vs. the hundreds of thousands, if not milllions, who believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.)
BTW: thank you RT and jshore, it’s much appreciated to have you flesh out my thoughts. Carry on.
That’s very reassuring. Could you issue a press release soonest, and advise the media? They haven’t gotten the message, keep putting out stuff that makes it look about as stable as Malaria, Nicaragua, during the Earthquake Festival.