Seconded.
No, this is not what I mean.
“What’d have to happen is, that it would have to be, (and we’d have to be able to clearly show), that the only violence in Iraq was not the result of Iraqis seeking to expel invaders, but rather unwelcome terrorists engaging the US in Iraqis’ backyard.”
I know that you’re not a native english speaker, so let me break this down a bit. There’re several ideas expressed in my statement.
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It would have to be that the only violence in Iraq was not the result of Iraqis seeking to expel invaders.
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It would have to be that the only violence in Iraq was rather unwelcome terrorists engaging the US in Iraqis’ backyard.
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It would have to be that these two things could be clearly shown.
What this would leave is one group of foreigners agitating another group of foreigners in Iraq in such a way that leads to the deaths and injuries of Iraqis, w/o any apparent benefit or redeeemable result of the agitation.
This may well be. I’ve merely extrapolated as to what would motivate me to be sympathetic w/ Qaeda. I’d have to believe that they were involved in activities geared toward the greater good. To speak specifically, it’s most likely that different people have different reasons for what they think and believe.
I hope that this lights a chill-pill for you to smoke. If it does, I hope that you inhale deeply.
Do you have any evidence that they AREN’T expending as much effort? Because my understanding is that there are a whole lot of Americans looking for Osama.
There’s a difference between Saddam and Osama - Saddam was dependent on a lot of people protecting and hiding him. He was moving around in populated areas. The chance of getting good intelligence on him or turning a close confidant made this a ‘hot pursuit’, with good chances of getting him. Plus, we knew that he was probably in Tikrit, which made the search area much smaller.
Osama, on the other hand, has vanished off the radar. We’re not even sure which country he is in. He’s deep, deep undercover, with maybe only one or two people knowing where he is. He’s used to living in caves and hiding.
Capturing Osama is a whole 'nuther level of problem than capturing Saddam, and Saddam managed to stay on the run for months.
My understanding is that the U.S. is committing as many resources to capturing Osama as they can reasonably find jobs for. But there’s no point in just ‘getting more resources’ if you don’t have any leads for them to follow. What do you want to do, start a house-to-house search of Pakistan? Or get 100,000 soldiers to walk in a big line across the mountains of Afghanistan hoping to stumble across him?
Besides, the resources required for the two missions were very different. Getting Saddam was a military operation - it involved kicking down doors, capturing close associates, staging raids on suspected locations, etc.
Getting Osama is more of a CIA operation. They have to penetrate his suport network, turn some radicals, maybe bribe some warlords, etc. It’s the kind of work that is best done under the radar.
The question we should still be asking…
Well, we have a majority of our troops engaged in the operations in Iraq. This leaves less than half to be devoted to Afghanistan. since there’s more than half on one hand and more than half on the other hand, it stands to reason that the one with more is greater than the one with less.
Some of the same resources are involved in each type of activity. Specifically the electronic intel gathering resources. There was actually concerned military types grumbling about this pre-invasion. I’m sure that this was covered several times in Iraq invasionm threads.
SECONDED TOO…
Sam: I would agree that getting Osama was more of a CIA operation. So was getting Saddam: the military may have arrested him, but it was from intelligence that they were able to do it.
This kind of thing is all over the place, and the only way you wouldn’t have run across it is if you’re ignoring it deliberately:
From http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/sept11_OBL_030908.html
a link provided by Airman over in the Pit.
I’m happy for the Iraqi people, but I’m not an Iraqi. I wasn’t threatened by him, and I was completely indifferent to whether he continued to rule Iraq. I was and still am directly threatened by OBL, and I deeply resent this BS that finding Saddam didn’t hurt the hunt for OBL, because it so obviously did. Any statement to the contrary is factless and ideologically driven.
funny when we ask for dna reprts they takes weeks. Blair asks for one it takes minutes ???
I think we should be more worried about Musharaf’s close call with a bomb… if he dies and some sort of islamic wacko takes over… he will have nukes.
I’m not asking for simplicity. I’m asking for consistency.
The question at hand is not whether or not this is a good thing, but whether it’s a legal thing. If you claimed the war was illegal (and I don’t know whether you did or not), tell me how the capture of Saddam is legal. Perhaps the question itself was too “simple” to understand.
I have a feeling Saddam will never make it to trial. I think within a few weeks he’ll turn up dead from “suicide”. Of course, I don’t think it will be suicide at all.
If he starts blabbing his mouth about how much the USA helped him in the past, it will look very bad for the USA. The last thing the US needs right now is someone saying “yeah I did that stuff with weapons bought with money the USA gave me to buy weapons.”
I think the USA will shut him up by either allowing him to kill himself or helping him kill himself.
Wanna make a gentleman’s wager on that? It an’t gonna happen.
Didn’t RTFirefly answer that (simply enough)? The war was illegal because it was not UN sanctioned. Since that time the UN has accepted and formalized the status quo with UNSC resolution 1483 affirming the US as occupying power in Iraq, so legal arrest.
Regarding whether Saddam has been actively directing the insurgents. I asserted that it is clear he could not have been.
Indeed you are right. But I don’t see how he could have been directing anything while hiding that dank whole this entire time.
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It’s a very good thing indeed for the Iraqi people, provided they get the real opportunity to deal with him themselves.
It’ll give Bush a popularity boost he does not deserve. Not a good thing in that sense.
For the security of the U.S. itself, it is irrelevant. Saddam has never been a direct threat to the security of the U.S., and since the beginning of the recent gulf war, he potency has been effectively neutralized.
I’m with you all the way. I promise I’ll be doing everything I can to help make sure Bush II’s regime comes to an end with the next election.
Bush’s unilateral/“yer with us or yer agin us”/“bring 'em on” foreign policy is a serious threat to world peace. Many of us here in the U.S. have not forgotten this, and we will be working hard to make sure that all but the most blinded Bush-asskissers don’t forget this, either.
Crapola.
Make that “dank hole.”
-You do know, of course, that Saddam wasn’t hiding in that “spider hole” the whole nine months, right?
That’s a “last ditch” hiding place, a bolt-hole to jump into if/when the hut/house itself got raided. Similar to how a druggie might hide in the crawl space when the police come to raid his meth lab.
I’m not saying he was, but he could have easily been “out and about” doing whatever, since the start of the war.
One other unrelated point: we know Saddam and co. hauled off nearly a billion dollars from the bank- three semi-truck loads- at the beginning. Where’s the rest of the loot?
The term spider hole seems to have its origins in Vietnam.
Well, I for one am happy that Saddam Bin Laden has finally been captured. We no longer have to worry about him sending the Kurds on a suicide mission to fly airplanes filled with VX gas into our tallest buildings. The War on Terror is at an end!
Can I vote for Bush yet? I don’t think I can wait until next November!