D’oh! That first sentence should’ve read “better than the alternative”. Curse my poor proofreading skills!
Jeff
Oh how neat. Your clever beliefs. While your fellow man suffers and dies in a hole.
…mmmmmmm… starfish…
Oh, and Milum is being sanctimonious and irrational.
You’re either not getting it, or not reading my posts properly: it might be a positive byproduct of something else. Liberating people is not wrong. But misrepresenting the motives for doing so is incorrect.
The proof december requires is staring him in the face: there are no other humanitarian actions going on, despite the capability to do so.
And if the by-product of the military action - such as massive recruitment to Islamist terror groups, further attacks on the US, attacks on Europe, destabilization of the region, overthrow of western-friendly regimes by fundamentalist regimes, WMD attacks on Israel, possible retaliation for said WMD attacks by Israeli WMD attacks - is worse than peaceful means of disarming Saddam, then peaceful intervention might just be “better than the alternative”.
DrDeth of course Saddam is not a good guy! :rolleyes: I’d love to see him dead, or in exile, who cares, as long as he and his murderous, shitty cronies are out of power? As would most of the peace campaigners. Simplistic misrepesentation of your opponent’s position is counterproductive to intelligent discussion of the issues.
Milum, do you support similar ‘humanitarian’ action in Palestine, or any of the other states I mentioned? When can we expect to see these campaigns begin?
Oh how clever of you Ekers, to decare santimonium and irrationalism. Do you cuss often?
“Milum, do you support similar ‘humanitarian’ action in Palestine, or any of the other states I mentioned? When can we expect to see these campaigns begin” ~ jjimm
Hey jjimm, humanitarism is a bull-shiting tip. The only game in town is love. Tough shit that Christianity has a monoply.
I’m sorry, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Are you here to debate, or to throw out obscure aphorisms?
FTR, I do not accuse the US of directly using torture, but of training client states in the use of such methods and looking the other way when they are employed – which in my mind is just as bad. Perhaps I am being charitable, however, as a number of these thugs have been on the CIA payroll.
OK, so where is the example of torture being used in these countries to prevent a nuclear attack or similar? Is that why all those reporters and union leaders had to die in Latin America?
Well, Ace, the link you posted doesn’t cite specific examples of which people were taught which techniques, so I’ll have to speculate. For example, let’s assume that we taught torture and assassination techniques to the Contras, for use in their uprising against the Sandinistas. (I’m not sure if this happened, I’m just using it as a random example.) The belief at the time was that even though the Contras weren’t exactly a troop of Mr. Rogers’s, they were better than the Sandinistas. The removal of the Sandinistas was better in the long run, and would result in fewer lives lost, overall. (I don’t want to argue whether or not this was really the case, I’m just stating that it was the belief at the time, by those who were responsible for the Contras’ funding.) So, we know the types of tactics that the Contras are likely to use, and we want them to be successful, so what do we do? Well, we train them in the relevent skills - namely, torture, assassination, guerrilla warfare, and the like. Nasty skills to be sure, but (it was believed) necessary means to a desireable end. And I maintain that teaching people these skills in order to achieve a net gain of lives is vastly better than torturing some guy who had the misfortune to be heard uttering “Gee, I don’t really care for the way this government is run.”
Jeff
I have no idea what this statement means. The US donates almost 60% of the world’s food aid. It gives a lot of money to the Palestians, to Israel and to other countries. It promotes human rights in its trade agreements. The US has done enormous humanitarian good in Afghanistan. Before the war, some organizations predicted that hundreds of thousands would starve. This problem has been averted by a rapid US victory and the dellivery of food. Also, civil liberties are much greater than they had been under the Taliban rule.
So, jjimm, can you explain what your quoted comment means? I’m not getting it.
I think that the point jjimm is trying to make is that the humanitarian angle for invading Iraq is a cynical lie by the administration to raise support for an obviously self-interested war. The evidence he presents is the repeated lack of military intervention in a host of other suitable situations where U.S. self-interest was lacking.
Observing this doesn’t lessen the humanitarian case for action in Iraq. It’s a statement that the anti-war crowd should refuse to allow itself to be manipulated into a supporting a very avoidable war.
I’m trying to debate what to post here. I have two articles with me, both of which address the points raised, but neither of which have any online references. They are both about 1,000 words each, which means I’m loathe to post them both.
Ahh, what the hell. OK, I appreciate I’m new and this might be considered Spam, because it is very long. However, you are completely free to skip the post if you want to.
First, to address the OP>
If you happened to see young child stumbling, in that innocent way they have, into the path of an oncoming train, I imagine that you, like most people, would feel a pressing need to do something about it. The problem is obvious; the child, if struck by the train, will die or be seriously injured. And so, most of us would recognise that pulling out a shotgun and shooting the child in the head, although probably stopping the child stumbling onto the tracks, would fail, in a somewhat spectacular manner, to solve the problem at hand.
For this reason, I find I am always sceptical of a claim that we are waging war on a people in order to save them from a tyrant. Recently, I have watched, somewhat amazed, as people have justified “Operation Shock And Awe” by claiming that it is a good thing, because it will result in the eventual removal of Saddam Hussein. Those of us who marched for peace last Saturday, they claim, were fooling ourselves if we thought we were marching on behalf of the Iraqi people, who all want to see Saddam toppled.
It would be nice, the argument runs on, if a perfect army were available and willing to invade and depose Saddam, but this isn’t a perfect world, and there isn’t a perfect army. What there is, however, is America, who, despite all her flaws, is literally champing at the bit to wade in there and slap Saddam silly, whatever the cost to themselves. Why oppose them, when the end result is likely to be an improved situation for everybody?
Unfortunately for us peacenik marchers, the argument makes a lot of sense. As a society, we in the West are no longer content to let bad things happen to other people simply because their skin is a different colour, or they worship a different God. We have been weaned off such stuff of yesteryear by a combination of our exposure to human tragedy by the ever more efficient news media, and the inevitable fallout from the liberalisation of our own society. However, and this is especially true in Europe, the thought of being the people - again! - who actually cause that suffering in another land makes us desperate to avoid war. One banner at the march summed it up perfectly: “War? That’s so last century!” The governments of the West waged plenty of wars in the last hundred years, thanks. Why not change the record to something less Wagnerian now?
All this points to a deep cultural schizophrenia. Just as we finally seem to have reached a point where we can justify war in the cause of genuine democratic freedom or others, rather than an imperialistic desire to rule them, we have lost our stomach for it. We have stuck ourselves between a rock and a hard place.
The trouble is, we really are still living in the past. Back in the 20th Century, the choices on offer were simple: leave well alone, trade, or invade. The world has shrunk dramatically, though, as we jet propelled ourselves out of the last hundred years in a fireball of globalisation; global trade, multinational industries, fast and cheap global travel, the global reach of the internet, global news reporting. Suddenly, we find that the affairs of a bunch of Arabs on the other side of the world isn’t something we can just ignore any more, even if we want to. Their lives have somehow become intertwined with ours. According to the strange, and often sadistic, works of Fate, we spent the last century confidently predicting how technology would turn everyone in the world into locals, then it went ahead and did it and caught us off guard. We found we really weren’t prepared to stop treating people like foreigners, so we try and merge our new found intimacy with our tried and tested, if rather stand-offish, methods of dealing with people. We invented Compassionate Warfare.
No wonder we’re so confused.
This peculiar bastardisation of values really doesn’t cut the mustard. We’ve created a false dilemma for ourselves: a Cake or Death situation. We still think that, despite our new 21st Century mindset, we still have those limited 20th Century options available to us. Either we leave Saddam’s regime in place, to wreak havoc on the Iraqi people, or we try and get rid of it by, er, wreaking havoc on the Iraqi people. Sanctions have left the Iraqi infrastructures crippled and the people starving, while Saddam manages to buy the same shoes as George Bush. Operation Shock And Awe, with its payload of 800 cruise missiles over 48 hours, promises to finish the job, promising to leave the population free of local tyranny, but entirely dependent upon our help to prevent it rising again, a job we have admirably paid ever so slightly more than lip service to in Afghanistan. Slightly more, but not enough to, for example, prevent the Taliban regrouping with the help of Pakistani hardliners and threatening to retake control of some of the territories outside Karzai’s limited sphere of influence.
What we need, it seems, is a new way of thinking that breaks this dilemma and stops the situation in Iraq looking like a contest to see which side can beat up the Iraqis the hardest. We need some new ideas; ones that aren’t “leave them to their own devices” or “fight a bloody and destructive war”.
The human race has shown remarkable capacity for creativity and invention in the past, it stands to reason we can think our way out of this problem. It would be a shame if we let lack of new ideas keep us stuck in the past, killing people to save their lives because of a lack of creativity.
OK, now, to address ElJeffe’s posts about why the USA should be allowed to use torture and Saddam shouldn’t, an article from a good while back now.
There are some things that really should make you stop and think, but can appear so reasonable and innocuous that they don’t. When people talk about the “slippery slope” phenomenon, it’s often about the fear about what will happen if we make change X, Y or Z, not about things they see happening around them now.
I noticed something the other day that made me wonder if we’ve already gone some way down a very slippery and precarious slope. The Economist ran an article entitled “Is Torture Ever Justified?” OK, so that in itself wasn’t so big a deal. We need to ask these questions of ourselves, as a society, so that we can understand why we maintain the values that we do, or decide if we need to change them. Especially, as was pointed out, if we are dealing with a world in which we take the threat of terrorism seriously, and even more so if it looks as if some of the people on “our side” might be starting to bend the rules, just a teeny tiny bit. As the article itself said, “America… seems already to be allowing its frustrations to lead it to bend, and probably break, the law.” No, the problem wasn’t that the article existed, but that the conclusions drawn weren’t quite “absolutely not.”
I don’t know about you, but I find that very worrying indeed. People will claim “knee-jerk” at this point, or claim I’m being paranoid, but I have reason to believe that the moment we start calling torture anything other than completely wrong, even with the most noble of justifications, our society has to tread very carefully to avoid becoming something none of us want it to be.
The Economist article centred around a key moral hypothetical: If we have a terrorist in custody, and he knows the location of a bomb, but the only way to get the information out of him is to torture him, do we do it? This is, to my mind, a question which is very neatly designed to imply a moral predicament where there is none. The implication of “the only way to get the question out of him is to torture him” is that you will get the information out of him if you torture him.
The trouble is, we have no basis to make this assumption. As a friend of mine said when faced with this question “Torture is unacceptable primarily because it’s stupid.” You might get the information you want out of your torture victim, but you probably won’t. The person will lie, this is almost guaranteed. He’ll lie because he hates us and (or why else would he be bombing us?) and he therefore doesn’t want us to have the truth. He’ll lie because he gave us the truth and we didn’t believe him. (“Are you sure the bomb’s on the High Street?” twist “OK, it’s on King Street!”) He’ll lie because we’re hurting him so badly that he’ll tell us whatever we want to hear. Most worryingly of all, he might even lie because he doesn’t know what the truth is.
If The Inquisition taught us anything at all, it’s that a skilled torturer can extract a confession of guilt from perfectly innocent people. He can then skillfully extract the names of the others involved in the plot, even if they had nothing to do with it (especially if the plot didn’t exist). He can, in short, ensure that someone tells him exactly what he wants to hear, but as a means of gathering fresh information, it’s fundamentally useless.
Some have suggested that this is too broad, that just because there is a point at which anyone will tell anything, it does not necessarily hold that we will never get true information out of someone if we torture them. This much I am willing to concede. What I am not willing to concede, however, is that we have a way of telling whether the torture victim is saying “I don’t know” because he really doesn’t know, or because he’s lying, or that when he changes his tune and sings like a canary it’s because he knows the truth and is telling us, or because he knows the truth and is lying to us, or because he doesn’t know the truth and is lying to us. From the torturer’s point of view, if we have information available to us that allows us to tell the difference, we have no need to torture the victim. As we don’t, torture is useless.
Actually, let me rephrase that. It’s not quite useless. Useless at gathering information, yes, but that’s not the only thing torture has been used for. Oh, that’s how it always starts off, the Inquisition needed to root out the Heretics who were undermining the fabric of their society with their evil lies, after all. However, however useless it was at finding real Heretics, it was remarkably useful at convincing the general population that being a Heretic was a bad idea. It’s a fantastic tool for enforcing your political will on a population, better than execution, in fact, because you can bring people out and get them to publicly recant their evil ways. They only had to show Gallileo the instruments they might use to torture him to get him to deny the existence of a Heliocentric universe. Torture, in short, is too useful a tool to any government for this reason to ever let them have it for another.
Bearing all this in mind, there is still one more reason why we cannot possibly justify using torture. We said we wouldn’t. We signed all kinds of treaties saying that we agreed torture was unacceptable in any instance. Many of the problems we have with “terrorist nations” spring from their refusal to acknowledge these “rights” which we have agreed to. We cannot break these treaties, even if we claim we have a moral superiority to do so in order to protect our own people, because it is only from our adherence to these treaties that we gain our moral superiority. They are the constraints we place on ourselves in order to prevent us becoming the very thing that we fight against. I, personally, do not want to live in a society that condones torture for any reason. If our only hope of “victory” in the war against terror is to use torture, then we have no hope of winning. Our enemies are not defined by their geographic location, but by their actions - Saddam isn’t evil because he lives in Baghdad, he’s evil because he uses the torture and the threat of torture (among other things) on the other people living in Baghdad.
The article in the Economist ended rather politely, I thought. “Hard though the choice is,” they lamented, “it would be good if America stopped.” Yes, it would be, but it lacks the kind of necessary urgency that is inherent in any situation where you believe that your government or its allies is using torture.
The choice is not hard, it is not even ours to make. It is imperative not only that we do not move further down this slippery slope, but that we acknowledge that we are already some way down it and get back up to the top. The west can on no account afford to ignore the huge, neon-lit hint that countless millennia of history is trying to give us, or we will be doomed to repeat it
Sorry this is a bit of a brainfuck. There’s a lot of information to cover, that’s all.
Actually, we probably didn’t have to teach them, as many were former members of Somoza’s Gaurdia, and well acquainted the most sadistic forms of torture. This bears directly on the OP, because Reagan declared the Contras to be “moral equivalents of the founding fathers.”
“Better” in the sense that they would return Nicaragua to its client state status. Not better in terms of “saving lives” – this was never the objective.
So you honestly think the reason we organized and supported a terrorist army of former Gaurdia members was to “achieve a net gain of lives?” Sounds a lot like destroying a village in order to save it.
Regarding the second half of you statement – you need to read more of Latin America’s history. You’ve heard of “the dissappeared,” right?
torture is a relative term, like vegitarianism. Solitary confinement is considered torture in some circles, but we do it in america.
Quite a lot, actually, but that’s not important now.
Your problem (well, one of them) thus far is that you’re using overly emotional rhetoric. Were you expecting us to be whipped up into a frenzy by your (rather incoherent) initial post in this thread? My primary reaction to someone who is blatantly trying to push my emotional buttons is one of ridicule. I can’t be had that cheaply, pal!
This issue could have been debated in a fairly straightforward and rational manner had you started with “Does the ongoing torture of political prisoners in Iraq constitute an additional incentive to overthrow Saddam?” Instead, you went for “They’re torturing people in Iraq! Do something! Do something! If you don’t do something, you’re a savage murdering monster!”
I do not believe that “humanitarian reasons” rank high on the Bush Administration’s agenda vis a vis invading Iraq. Iraq’s supposed arsenal of mass destruction is not a priority item either.
Why? Let’s go back to the 2002 State of the Union Speech in which Bush declared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as comprising the “Axis of Evil”. In my mind on that night in January 2002 all three came out of the gate at a dead heat even.
Now what have we found out about the “Axis” (Iraq and North Korea, Iran is irrelevant at the moment) in the intervening 13 months? Well, let’s see:
Human Rights Although both countries have dictatorships that rank high in the pantheon of evil drawing toe to toe with the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, it is said that Kim Jong Il is to the right of Attila the Hun and is a megalomaniac that puts Saddam to shame. Anyway, for this discussion let us call it a draw betwee Kim and Sad.
Strategic Worth Economically Iraq…Oil,Oil,Oil,Oil,Oil The Iraqi oil reserves are the second largest in the world, after Saudia Arabia.
Strategic Worth Economically North Korea…No oil. Imports almost their energy. For all intents and purposes a “dead” country economically.
Weapons of Mass Destruction Iraq…Even after the U.N. inspection teams have been searching for 5 months there have been no significant findings. I’m sure that sorry ass liar has some weapons squirrled away but we have not found them and he’s contained and we can stay there forever.
Weapons of Mass Destruction North Korea…We don’t have to hunt for Kim’s weapons. He is flaunting them in our face. He cranked up his nuclear reactors 2 months ago and screamed it to the world. Especially to the U.S. Only today (Tuesday Feb.25) Kim blatantly blew a missile past Japan into the Sea of Japan.
Kim Jong Il, as I said earlier is a megalomaniac. He is truly crazy. He is barely 5 feet tall, walks around in elevator shoes, drives around in armor plated Mercedes and enjoys all the amenities of the West while denying his people the basic necessities. He is cruel, obsessed and perpetuates a reign of terror inherited from his father that is unequaled in the world. His people are dying of starvation by the thousands.
Now I don’t pretend to be an expert in geopolitics, but as they say, “it don’t take no rocket scientist” to figure out who’s the bigger threat to our national security. Gol-darn, it sure don’t.
Remember that old saw about everyone pretending there is no elephant in the room? Well there are two elephants in this sanctimonius room: Oil and rectifying Papa Bush’s truly astounding mistake at not finishing the job in '91.
Thanks hansel for making me clearer than I was. You interpreted my words exactly.
Thank you, hansel. I now understand the point. I don’t like the reasoning, though. You and jjimm claim that the US’s failure to make war in certain other situations with humanitarian problems proves that humanitarian concerns have never been an element of US military decision-making. I think the US chooses its battles. Note that the US has made war for humanitarian reasons as recently as the bombing of the former Yoguslavia.
Your sort of reasoning could “prove” that the US has no motivation at all for invading Iraq:[ul][]We didn’t invade Israel despite UN resolutions against it.[]We didn’t invade Kuwait to take their oil.[]We didn’t invade India, although they developed nukes.[]We didn’t invade Zimbabwe, despite a corrupt or insane leader.[/ul]The fact is, our imminent invasion of Iraq is being done for a number of reasons, including humanitarian concerns. Bush has stated his desire to spread democracy throughout the world. I challenge the two of you to find real evidence that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq is not informed by humanitarian concerns. Otherwise, your comment appears to be just a bit of anti-American propaganda.
december, I don’t deny that this may be one of the many factors leading the US to take action.
My objection is merely to the OP’s presentation of the war as being motivated by humanitarian ideals. Without the strategic positioning of Iraq, its oil, and Saddam’s WDM, I don’t believe this action would be taking place. YMMV.
I take your point about the Kosovan/Belgrade campaign, though.
Please don’t accuse me of “anti-American propaganda”. Even if it were propaganda, it would be anti-the-current-US-administration propaganda.
Glad to hear it.
I agree that the war would not be taking place if humanitarian concerns were the only reason.
However, I read the OP differently than you did. I didn’t see where it addressed the motivation of war supporters. I read it as a criticism of the war’s opponents – that they are ignoring humanitarian concerns. I think that’s a fair criticism. Or, more precisely, IMHO many war opponents are taking a one-sided view of humanitarian concerns. They focus on the harm that will result from a war, but air-brush away the on-going atrocities committed by the Ba’ath regime.