NO. WITH EMPHASIS.
as much as I hate to say it, yes
No.
No, mostly for the reasons DesertGeezer cited on the first page of this thread.
Though Powell’s presentation to the U.N. was compelling, and I believe much of what he had to say, I’m not convinced that we have the need (or the right) to invade tomorrow. Like DesertGeezer, I would support a covert operation or minimal strike to remove Saddam and his upper echelon, but a full-scale invasion has yet to be justified.
No.
Yes.
No,
No proof, no attack. No aggresion, no attack.
Morally, yes. The guy is scum and should be taken off the face of the earth forthwith.
Realistically, no. The demise of Saddam, while it won’t be met with much sadness, will probably be a bad thing for the people of Iraq. Dictators don’t tend to leave pension plans behind for the people who enforce thier will. The country will descend into chaos, and a lot of people both innocent and not, will die as a result. Pehraps more than will die by the hand of Saddam during the remaining years of his life.
No.
thank you javaman for clearing things up about oil…i so wish most people could understand that this isnt a game, its our life and we have to control the oil supply. Not only that, but as the worlds super power the us must maintain a control presence and stop would-be agressors from gaining any sort of foothold. I will say again, it isnt reality tv or monday night football, our freedom comes at a price. so i believe would should all step back and look at how we spend our time, how we come and go, and how we are able to do all these things.
no, i’m not saying to bow to america, i’m just saying support this country because we owe our freedom to the us. reaching an agreement by peaceful means is just not possible beteween some nations, so get over and know that some will die. If some extremists have their way, it will be our children. So, to remain free and in power i say destroy saddams regime and move on to n korea if that is neccesary…no it wont be easy but maybe it will be called for…
as far as you and i seeing a"smoking gun" forget about. We are the civilian public that must be entertained or we panic…with nothing to talk about we would just die…so drink in all what our mainstream media tell us and be a bush basher or supporter eh? my question is why would We the people know about a smoking gun and why would the govt share their plans with a bunch of motherfuckers that would rather run than give thanks for the freedom they have so enjoyed(i’m not pointing fingers). there are things we’ll know, and things we’ll hear about well after the ball is rolling.
also a problem i hate is celebrity activism. they wear the shirts, beads and visit countries and raise hell about all the sufferung the us causes, yet look at where they are employed…they have money to move away, more than you and i perhaps, yet they continue to take it all in…yes, yes, yes, we must protest and in some way we are all hypocrites, but sometimes it sickens me…it sickens me to know that those protesting the war are comming off more anti american than ani war…
in closing you may ask what gives the us the right to have nuclear weapons and the like, whilst other countries are not allowed to have them? the fact that the us would not use them to take out another country because not many can oppose america, for that i am happy…if our country is failing i hope we go out with a bang, so to speak, grab what we can and pull ourselves back into glorious power…
It’s not enough that we succeed, our enemies must also fail, eh?
::growing less proud to be an American every day::
I’m just going to take issue with this statement because, well, it’s wrong.
The U.S. is, in fact, the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against another nation.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but I do take issue with the above statement.
And again, I don’t think many people are looking at what comes after a war with Iraq.
- underlining mine --DG
So I guess your answer to the OP is “yes.”
“Glorious power.” Right! MANIFEST DESTINY! Iraquis are the new American Indians. The US should control the world’s oil supply. What, not the world? So what if people get killed. So what if the majority of Iraqui casualties will be innocent civilians. Just collateral damage, right? Your statement (truncated for the sake of space) exemplifies the Ugly American attitude that causes extremists to attack us and vast numbers of less extreme people to sympathize with them.
Peace is not just a word. America will never achieve peace until we set the example. Setting an example is what true leaders do.
by failing i did not mean that their county should fall to the ground and everyone starve, i meant not to gain any foothold in destroying the us…
as far as the us being the only country to use nuclear weapons, when was the last time? its been a while, eh?
american indians my ass, get over it. why in the owrld would you make that comparison? as far as my statement causing extremists to attack the us(or stamnets like it used by those in power) bullshit…i hope the us being attacked is over something larger and a bit more important than words, to me that sounds like a gang fight…silly…as i said, it isnt a game, world peace just cant be done. if america sits back and never does anything else, we’ll be the ones starving and waiting for some other superpower to bail the us out…if you dont support the war thats just fine…but dont accuse me of not caring that innocent people die because i didnt rant about that in my post…my point was that i love freedom and we live in a big country in which our silly ass gov’t is doing squat about stopping immigration, so our pop is not only growing from americans having kids, but from others pouring in…so hell yes, let the us control the world, we may need to be able to move freely in other countries somewhere in the future…
i’m not a warmonger or fanatic, i’m just sharing another view, i’m not saying i’m right or wrong…
Yes, absolutely. In fact, Bush has been much too timid about this for my taste. No, I am not kidding.
Although actually, my real preference would be for Mr. Hussein to be targeted for assasination. If he is too well protected, target the organizational layer directly under him, with the understanding that if he were deposed, the assasinations would stop. I think that once we got one or two of them, the rest would get together and depose Saddam straight away. If they go to ground and become as difficult to get as Saddam, then we go to the next layer. And so on down the line.
I think a strategy like this, perhaps along with selective incursions if and when Saddam tries to mass force, say in order to bring the northern territories back under his control, and we can fight the kind of open desert battle we’re good at, and also special forces operations and precision bombing of strategic targets, would be the most efficient way to acheive the desired result.
Of course, Bush is not going to rescind the directive forbidding the US to get involved with assasinations. And he is not going to do that because he is, imo, too concerned about world opinion. Again, no I am not kidding.
I find the parallels between the western democracies and the League of Nations vs Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and the western democracies and the UN vs Saddam, to be compelling. If there is anything that episode of history taught us, it is that it is both necessary and right to pre-emptively take down insane dictators before they become too powerful. In fact given the existence of nuclear weapons it is even more true today than it was then.
Furthermore, I have this idea. I haven’t yet fully worked it out yet, but so far no one I have shared it with has been able to refute it. It is this: That if slavery exists, and people are being held as slaves by a slave owner somewhere, and we are capable of setting those slaves free comparatively very easily (comparatively meaning compared to, say, WWII, in which the moral pretext for us going to war was to free people from Nazi oppresion), then we have a moral obligation to do so. And, even though the label is not typically applied to them, the people of Iraq are Saddam Hussein’s slaves.
So, I care not one whit whether or not Mr. Hussein is or is not in compliance with, or “moving toward” compliance with, UN resolutions. I don’t care if there is an Al Queda connection or not. I don’t care if Mr. Bush is doing this to some extent for the wrong reasons, such as to avenge his father or please the oil companies (though I think that last one is silly).
I say: Free the Iraqi people. Depose Saddam Hussein
Are you kidding? I know this is IMHO, but please, a cite? My history says the reason we went to war with Germany was that their ally, Japan, attacked Pearl Harbor. Spare me the “FDR set it up” argument please, I’ve heard it (and used it). But we did not make a pre-emptive strike on Germany or anyone else on any pretext whatever. We were attacked by the Axis, of which Germany was a part. And we formally declared war on Germany, Japan and Italy as members of the Tripartite Pact. We should have declared war against Germany in 1940 when they started bombing Britain, but the best we did for the Brits was Lend Lease until we had our backs against the wall.
All that is irrelevant anyway. What Bush proposes (and nobody who’s paid attention imagines he ever had any other idea) is to attack Iraq without a declaration on the pretext (unproven) that Saddam has WMDs, and the pretext (unproven) that Saddam is in cahoots with Al Queida. Even if those allegations were proven it would not excuse raining bombs on a civilian population. That will only make us the aggressors in the eyes of the whole world, some of whom don’t like us already.
But thanks for your opinion. I’ll put you in the “yes” column.
Perhaps I was unclear. The immediate cause of our entry into the war was the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s declaration of war against us. But the moral justification for sending the boys across the Atlantic to Europe was to free the people thereof who had been enslaved by the Nazis. Do you disagree?
Furthermore, while we didn’t actually join the war until Pearl Harbor, imo we clearly should have acted against Germany much sooner. You seem to agree:
I agree with you (and the history books) that we didn’t hit Germany before 1942 (although actually we were fighting an undeclared war against their subs in the North Atlantic by 1940), and I agree with you that we should have done something before that. Of course, I would say (in hindsight) that a pre-emptive strike against Germany would have been justified much earlier than 1940, but…you are familiar with the anecdote in which Winston Churchill asks a woman if she would have sex with him for $100?*
I believe there was also something about a Mr. Hussein’s defiance of a UN resolution, one which places the burden of proving he does not have WMDs on him. But, as this is irrelevent to you, it is also irrelevent to me, as I said in my previous post.
Clearly you are indulging in hyperbole when you talk about “raining bombs on a civilian population”. Nonetheless, in modern warfare on the scale we are contemplating, civilian casualties will be inevitable, not in the least because Mr. Hussein will doubtless use some of them as human shields. Also you are again correct in saying that the rest of the world will perceive us as aggressors. And the perception will be right!
What I am saying is that, in my opinion, none of these things relieve us of the moral obligation to stop Mr. Hussein before he becomes a major threat, the way Hitler was in 1941, ie by acquiring WMDs, and while we’re at it, to free the those civilians you were referring to, which he has enslaved. Civilians died during the fighting to liberate France, from D-Day until the Nazis surrendered, but that did not relieve us of our moral obligation to prosecute that war.
It’s where I belong.
*[sub]Just in case: Churchill asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars. She says yes. He then asks if she would do it for one hundred dollars. She says no, and angrily asks, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” He replies, “We’ve already settled that, now we are haggling over the price.” So, if you agree in principle that a pre-emptive attack can be justified, then we are now arguing over whether the present situation fulfills the requirements.[/sub]
I do. Isolationists, some as high-profile as Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and Joseph Kennedy (then Ambassador to the Court of St. James) were against American involvement in Europe. I don’t know the figures (perhaps you can enlighten me) but I think the ratio of people for and against American involvement were about on a par with the polls being taken now re: Iraq.
**
I do in principle, but we should have joined our British allies in defense of their islands, not pre-emptively attacked Hitler. Both Hitler and American isolationists thought the Atlantic was much bigger than it was.
This is the sticking point with me. I would agree that military action should have been taken earlier to aid our allies who had been attacked. But I don’t believe a pre-emptive strike would have been justified.
Hussein is defying a UN resolution, and so far the UN is not ready to take military action. George W. Bush is gung-ho to go it alone, even in the face of a UN veto. He has told the UN, first through Colin Powell and then in a speech of his own, that that body is, in effect, irrelevant if they disagree with American (read Bush) policy. He’s not ready to pull America out of the UN, but he expects the world community to go along with anything he wants.
I don’t think you would regard it as hyperbole if the bombs were dropping on New York. It’s not as if Saddam Hussein were propping people up in front of him for protection. We will be bombing where his people live, and on a much larger scale than the attack launched by George I to prove that he wasn’t a wimp.
And you regard that as a good thing?
I think we have a moral obligation to protect our own people, not to bully other countries into doing things the American way.
The Free French were fighthing to liberate France, and, at the time at least, were glad to have our help, even at the cost of civilian lives. The Iraqui people are not our allies. We are not pledged to defend them. Most of them hate America. The French didn’t hate us until after the war.
To the moderators: Couldn’t this thread be moved to GD? It seems inevitible that opinions on a topic like this would be debated and not just tallied. Just asking.
Frankly, I’d rather this thread stay right here. If people insist on debating, there are any number of threads already in GD in which to do so.
DesertGeezer and Weird_Al_Einstein, I ask that you continue your debate in the appropriate forum, rather than hijack this thread (deliberately or not) into a move to GD.
Please!
A very tentative yes, with grave reservations.
I am appalled that the US has demonstrated such incompetence at international affairs that it has come to this. There were alternatives. The current administration will have much to answer for.
But, for reasons too complex to get into here, I believe (at this moment) that it must be done.
Though I am voting yes, I know that there will be very unfortunate consequences.