Ah, who cares what you say anyway? Your profile says you’re an artist and links to a web site where I thought I’d get to see samples of your work. But, does the link work? Noooo.
So that’s it, your credibility is blown with me.
ooooooooh - don’t even get me started on the skullduggery of Comcast, who ate my page when they took over from AT & T.
So…uh, how 'bout another site? Yahoo and others have 'em for free and you can build 'em yourself with their web building tools.
I’d really like to see your work if you ever get something going again. It seems like I stumbled onto your previous site at some time in the past when I was new here and clicking on profiles all the time, and your work was very good. I was looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with it, only to be brought up short by those devils (conservatives, no doubt) at Comcast.
Anyway, if you’re who I’m thinking of, your work is very good. 
You’re so kind, how delightful! And where exactly is the link to your work?
The rest of the story on me is that when I became pregnant with my twins last summer, I had to put art aside for a while for a number of reasons. I’m looking forward to resuming art-making when the kids are a little older - for now, taking pix of them is my major creative outlet.
So, Starving Artist, you’ve decided not to answer me. A simple yes or no would do.
The answer is yes! And I’ve said so many times. My view is that Hussein may or may not have had WMD. If he did, he may or may not have hidden them or shipped them off. If he no longer had them (as in he once did), it was by no means certain he wouldn’t obtain them at some point in the future, and not necessarily a long time, either. And my view (which many here choose to disbelieve) is that a very logical synergy existed between Iraq under Hussein and al-Qaeda, and that made it made it even more imperative that we make certain Hussein was in no position to furnish al-Qaeda (or even terrorists of its own. I’m sure Hussein took the lessons of 9/11 to heart, and I’m equally sure he would have loved to inflict similar damage on the U.S. himself) with WMD.
So again, my answer (and yes, I know other countries also can be said to pose a similar threat, but I think the threat Hussein posed was much more likely and therefore much more urgent) is yes, I definitely think the war in Iraq is protecting American citizens, from Iraqi WMD both now and in the future.
Thanks for the explanation. Perhaps after you resume your art you’ll get around to another web site. I hope so.
Regarding my own site, it’s in preliminary stages. I’m relatively new to art, and I’m primarily learning to paint by copying other works that appeal to me and are within my ability to paint, while still allowing me to learn something new. In other words, nothing of my own yet, and I don’t really feel comfortable as an artist in showing off works I’ve painted but which someone else actually created. (They are mostly public domain paintings by the way.) I’ve sold a few to people who ask to buy them, but I couldn’t take pride in showing them off as examples of my talent.
Great… nearly a thousand servicemen killed, several thousand maimed, and countless civilians blasted to bits to protect the US of A from an imaginary menace. :rolleyes:
Imaginary? Hah!
I’m sure you’d be singing a different tune if a hundred thousand people were killed in New York, Washington or Los Angeles and it turned out the WMD that was responsible came from Iraqi sources. You’d be screaming to the high heavens that the Bush administration should have recognized the threat and taken steps to prevent it.
The real issue is that you’re opposed to Bush and the Republican party and you’re prone to criticise virtually anything they do. If they do A, you’ll claim they should have done B; if they do B, you’ll claim they should have done A.
There’s an apartment with a couple of guys living in it. They’re kind of weird, and there’s yelling from inside, and there was a fight in there once, which the police broke up and told them never to act up again.
The neighbors don’t like them , and are sure they are up to something. So they call the cops, and tell they’re sure there are drugs and guns in there. The cops manage to get an undercover guy inside. The people are odd, but he gets a good look around, and sees nothing. Not a trace, not even in the closet where one neighbor was positive there was a hoard of guns.
He comes out and reports - and Lt. Bush, the chief cop on this case, orders his men in. They blow away a few of the guys (who don’t put up too much of a fight) smash the hell out of the place, and then take a look around.
No drugs. No guns. No nothing.
Oh well, says the Looey. They were bad, and maybe they would have bought guns sometime and come down and shot up the police station.
Ironically invading Iraq has probably made this more of a possibility. We’ve taken a step back in the actual goal of securing our country. We need to be more prudent about chasing boogymen in the future and focus our resources on concrete attainable goals. (catching Bin Laden as opposed to bringing peace to the ME)
Iraq was a mistake, we need to own up to it, learn from it, and move on. The war on terror won’t be won with bombs.
This is a very good analogy from your point of view, but I would suggest that there are certain key differences that make it inaccurate to say the least.
a) For one thing, they don’t appear to have been mass murderers, guilty of killing many of their own roommates as well as many of their neighbors, and killing them not only through the weapons of the street, but WMD as well. If they were, it would be a travesty if they were even allowed to be on the street.
b) They are subject to arrest by the police if their behavior becomes too egregious, or if they are found to have illegal weapons. They can also be required by the court to have no weapons in their possession. If they violate the laws of behavior and weaponry, they can be tried and convicted and put in prison and the threat can be eliminated that way.
With Iraq, there was no such option. Instead, there was impotent U.N. resolution after impotent U.N. resolution, and certain sanctions applied that it is almost universally agreed did nothing to harm Hussein and his followers; only his people.
c) They were not well known to have been trying to obtain illegal WMD on the black market, despite court order after court order that they obtain no such weapons.
d) And speaking of court orders, they had not flaunted court order after court order demanding they stop their activity.
e) They had not had a group of fanatical terrorists sprout up nearby, terrorists who had already murdered thousands of innocent people who were doing nothing more than sitting at their desks talking to their wives at home about what to have for dinner that night, only to have a jet plane come crashing into their office; terrorists who have as their primary goal in life the destruction of the police, the courts and the people themselves; and terrorists who were known to be interested in obtaining just the type of weapons our hypothetical apartment dwellers had so blatantly used in the past and were know to be trying to obtain more of, the courts be damned.
So you see, we are a nation of laws. If people do not abide by them, they get arrested and put in jail.
Iraq, on the other hand was impervious to any outside authority. The U.N. had shown itself to be singularly inept at enforcing its own resolutions; many of the world’s countries balked at taking action because by and large Hussein’s activity wasn’t any skin off their nose and they didn’t want to send their own native sons to fight someone else’s battle.
Therefore, it fell to the U.S. to take steps to protect itself from this outside entity that was not subject to the same laws, punishments and constraints as your apocryphal apartment dwellers, and the only workable option was to take care of the problem by force before it was too late.
This may be true but I hope not. However, while we may have indeed created more terrorist wannabes, I think we’ve vastly reduced the probablility that they will be able to cause us great harm. Libya, Jordan, Iran, North Korea, et al. know we’re serious, and they are taking steps to keep a lid on terrorist activity in their own countries. Even if they support it themselves, they are being made to be much more cautious as to how they go about it, and this is a significant hindrance. And one thing that is certain is that no terrorists–al-Qaeda or otherwise–will be able to obtain WMD from Hussein.
I agree. But remember Bin Laden is not the sole entity we need to eliminate in order to reduce the threat he poses. He has (for want of a better term) a large army concentrated in the Mideast but spread out all over the world. The people in this army, and other ones it’s inspired, need to be contended with as well. Simply going after Bin Laden will not eliminate the threat he poses.
And what the hey, I’m in favor of working to acheive peace in the Middle East too, if it can indeed be accomplished. But I agree with you that it shouldn’t be an incentive to go to war.
Well, all I can say is I disagree.
No, but a significant part of the overall terrorist threat can be, and indeed has.
Do you remember after 9/11 when Bush said the war on terror would be a vast and multi-faceted war? That some of the efforts to combat it would be visible and some would not? That the war would be fought in many ways and over many years? The war in Iraq probably doesn’t comprise 5% of the overall action being taken around the world, much of it at our behest, to fight terrorism. It is only the most visible and controversial part.
I’m flattered that your rebuttal is twice as long as my story. But you need to start facing reality. There were no WMDs. Saddam was not flouting the Security Council resolution ordering him to disarm. He did disarm, and he did not build new ones. Second, at the time of the war, there were UN inspectors, and they were going everywhere - even to palaces. Bush claimed the UN was impotent because they didn’t find any WMDs. But it was because there were no WMDs to find..
The guys in the apartment acted like big shots, of course. They’d never, ever say that they got rid of their weapons. Probably figured it was dangerous in their neighborhood. They definitely weren’t nice people. Ex-cons all, and not allowed to have guns. Most of the city figured they’d be better off dead. But there are laws.
Maybe there was a mass murder in the neighborhood. I forgot that part. Lt. Bush was assigned to hunt him down before he killed more. But instead, he went after this apartment. It turned out the murderer had called the people in the apartment for help, and they told him to get lost. And the murderer continues to kill while Lt. Bush is going after someone with nothing to do with the murderer. And some people in this apartment, seeing what a pig Lt. Bush is, are starting to help the murderer because of it.
I also forgot that Lt. Bush, after the undercover agent reported, tried to get a search warrant and an arrest warrant. But he got laughed out of court, even when he brought in testimony about weapons from one of the groups old roommates. He was mad about that, because he was absolutely sure there were guns inside. In fact, a lot of his colleagues assumed there were - until the undercover agent reported, that is.
Now the neighborhood is in an uproar, with people picking off cops left and right even after the Lt. said the raid was done and peace is restored. Maybe there are some gangs, with all the weapons that these guys were supposed to have, plotting away, happy indeed that the force had to pull cops off the beat to deal with the apartment disaster.
Time to fire this guy’s ass, don’t you think? And thanks for reminding me of the mass murderer that Lt. Bush let get away.
Well, I’m flattered that you’re flattered, but I must admit that if I had known how close-minded you are and what you’re true feelings are, I wouldn’t have bothered.
It’s clear you just hate that “pig” Bush, and nothing he does will make you happy.
There is absolutely no way you personally could know this to be true. But whether it is or not, he had them in the past; he played fast and loose with the weapons inspectors (who, let’s face it, didn’t necessarily know where to look in the first place); he did everything he could to keep the region guessing as to whether he did or not, and he was working to develop more. The threat Bush was facing was not necessarily from present day WMD, but from the liklihood of future WMD as well. As I said before, Hussein engaged in game playing and brinksmanship and it eventually did him in. Had he had a history of being more reasonable I doubt the war would have occurred.
But you’ve shown your true feelings, and it’s obvious you don’t want to hear this as your mind’s already made up. So I’ll not waste any more of time trying to show you there is another side to these things other than that Bush is a pig. :rolleyes:
Must not have been around in the '60s when people were calling cops names. The pig reference was Lt. Bush as a bad cop. I’m sure the President’s table manners are impeccable, and no real pig ever started a war. Make a joke without a smiley, and see what happens.
Saddam really played fast and loose with the inspectors during the '90s. Remember, when they were harrassed, not let into the palaces, etc? if someone had invaded then, I could almost see it. In 2002, though, the inspectors could see everywhere. How did they know where to go? US intelligence - the same intelligence that was the so-called proof for the WMDs. If I tell you the pot of gold is in the hall closet, the garage, and under the bed, and it ain’t any of those places, or anywhere else you look, it is rational to assume there is no pot of gold. But your faith in them is heartening.
Oh, and a cite for the real WMD development program, involving hardware? I’m sure some of his scientists were working in lab notebooks and the like, but that is a feeble excuse for a war. A guy I new bought a missile once - I’m glad Bush wasn’t in office, or he would have war declared on him.
Invading Afghanistan was justified, and a good thing to do. There was a real threat there. If Bush had justified the invasion as a means of overthrowing a vile tyrant (no dispute there) and the American public and Congress agreed, some might be upset, but he’d be honest. But that wouldn’t play, so he lied about the reasons - about the threat, about how sure they were about WMDs, and about the connection to terrorism . I bet he thought he’d get away with it. If the Iraqis had met us with flowers, he might have. If the WMDs had turned up, he’d be home free.
I’m not surprised by your reaction, though. Plenty of Republicans backed Nixon to the end also.
Yep, a smilie would have helped. Sorry, I missed the connection and the joke completely. My apologies for taking it seriously. I guess I’m just used to seeing Bush called everthing under the sun around here that I assumed you meant it as it sounded.
The problem is severalfold. First of all, it was my belief during the period of time you refer to in the nineties that the world was flying blind in regard to Hussein’s WMD programs. Who knew what he was doing, or how it was being deployed or hidden? My feeling was he could have been up to all sorts of shenanigans and no one would have known what was going on.
Secondly, no intelligence by any country is infallible or up to the minute. There is no way any intelligence could disclose all possible weapons. And because of their easy mobility, no intelligence could pinpoint exactly where they may be at any given time, or where they may have been moved to.
We’re just going to have to agree to disagree here. You believe Bush lied to justify going into Iraq, I don’t. I’ve spoken at length in this thread about what I believe to be his motivations and concerns regarding Iraq. I don’t know what else I could add. Neither of us is going to persuade the other.
SA - I know you addressed rjung, but I just want to make it clear that I dislike Bush because of the war in Iraq, not the other way around. Before that, I had no real feeling pro or con the guy.
I suspect that after George W. Bush was annointed President by the Supreme Court, a lot of folks simply resigned themselves to the fact, and – like myself – asked, “How much damage could he do in four years?”
Boy, do we feel embarrassed in retrospect…