You were fine echoing his “dancing,” but you’re over the line suggesting he’s wanking.
Cool it.
[ /Moderating ]
Oops; missed that rule. My apologies.
Nope. The point is that you’re making the innocent citizens of *another * country die for your version of how they ought to run it, without considering their views of the matter at all.
How’s that going so far? How many more innocent people do you wish to kill in order to show the survivors who’s in charge?
Absolutely false. The inspectors were, in fact, let back in and in fact had just about finished showing that there were no WMD’s when Bush started his war, with you cheering him on from in front of your TV. You could look it up, but I doubt you will. But please don’t tell yourself such nonsense.
“Politically incorrect”? It’s mass murder.
And sometimes you have to simply make shit up in order to pretend you’re not an accomplice to a heinous crime.
The “enemy”??? So this is, to you, a war of conquest and not liberation and democratization after all, and was right from the get-go? Kindly confirm or deny, please.
9/11 dragged us into a war. And lacking a North Al-Quadia to declare war on we essentially declared war on every country that supports terrorism. You’re either with us or against us. Iraq was most definitely against us.
Plus Bin Laden wanted the West to invade a muslim country to start a holy war. Except that, as always, the arabs can’t fight and they lost miserably. And if you don’t think that hasn’t quelled any desire to attack us again you’re very wrong.
Bottom line, yes, I do value American lives much more than the Iraqis. Mainly because 9/11 showed me that a large number of muslims don’t value non-muslim lives at all. And I saw no groundswell of denial of this from them. And 9/11 was not only an unbelievably heinous act, it was carried out with unsettling ease. It required an overwhelming, brutal response. Some might even call a heinous response. Maybe. But if 600,000 arabs had to die to prevent another few thousand American citizens from being murdered on their home soil, so be it.
I guess I’m just a selfish dick…
Whoa. The first thing he’s posted in years that I actually agree with…
Bless his heart. He means well.
You are right.
But victory in that war has been put in jeopardy by a needless, wasteful adventure in Iraq that has derailed our focus on Al Qaeda in a misguided occupation of a country unrelated to 9/11.
Then we should declare war on ourselves.
It’s not like they had any choice in the matter.
Why ? The attack on 9-11 was a massive victory, that we keep making more massive every day. Attacking the wrong country is hardly going to intimidate anyone who actually intends us harm, only those that don’t.
And the “Arabs” appear to be fighting quite well, now that they can get around our technological edge in a guerrilla war. Beating your chest about how we smashed a devastated, helpless country is sick. Although it does underline why Americans have developed a reputation as murderous bullies.
Assuming that to be true, that still doesn’t excuse Iraq, since they had nothing to do with 9-11.
Then you weren’t paying attention. They were even holding candlelight vigils in Iran after 9-11; at least, until we proved to the world that we really ARE the monsters our enemies call us.
Against the wrong people ? Why didn’t we just invade Mexico then, or Canada ?
All we’ve done is encourage such things, and made it look more excusable.
It does indeed look like the primary joy of the pro-war faction is violence and to spill the blood of innocents. [Conan]What is the greatest thing? …[/Conan]
Despite that first appearance, that is not really the case. The greatest thing for conservative USA is to deceive rational and decent people. So there really is no need to ask the obvious question: “What prevented the president’s case for the war advertising the need to show the muslims who is boss in the most brutal ways imaginable?” The question answers itself.
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You reason that American lives are worth more than Muslim lives because Muslims don’t value the lives of non-Muslims. Then you turn around and say that you would gladly kill 600,000 non-Americans to save a few thousand Americans. Are you capable of detecting irony?
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If you think that a few thousand American lives are worth 600,000 Arab lives, there is a term for you. It is not ‘selfish dick.’
I suppose so. If by ‘means well,’ you mean, ‘advocates lashing out blindly in response to injustice by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and then justifying the act by saying that none of those several hundred thousand people probably gave a shit about us anyhow.’
Not sure if anyone pointed this out, but the OP’s link takes you to an article about a Steven King novel. Also, the W.H.O. just published their figures for “violent deaths” and came up with 151,000 (104k -223k). They did a survey of 10,000 households, then used a statistical method to extrapolate for the whole country.
And while it’s still too high no matter how ones measures, can we dispense with the “sigh” in the future when discussing these things as if anyone who disagrees with you is just being dense?
Word. And let’s dispense with sentences beginning with “Ummm…” and “Ermm…” as well.
I was just coming in to post that.
BrainGlutton, are you willing to admit that there might, perhaps, be an error in Lancet’s methods?
But I thought (perhaps erroneously) that the Lancet study wasn’t just about violent deaths, but also (e.g.) deaths from drinking polluted water in cities that had a safe water supply before the war, deaths from lack of access to hospitals where there had been functioning hospitals before the war, etc. In short, I thought the Lancet study focused on civilian deaths resulting from the war, not just from war-related violence. It seems the former figure is in fact the relevant one. Are there any reliable estimates of that figure?
The wikipedia article says:
That says “due to violence”.
I see. It would be interesting to see if anyone has studied excess deaths full stop, not just excess deaths due to violence. If my Google-fu is strong tomorrow, I’ll look around (unless someone has something at the tips of their fingers).
So you’re a self-loathing American who thinks that we’re responsible for all the evils in the world, including 9/11 itself I suppose.
Saddam had many choices including working out a deal where he could live in exile and even take a few hundred million of the money he’s stolen from the Iraqi people with him. Instead he chose to continue being the arab-strongman dictator to show his strength and resolve amongst his arab-strongmen dictator peers. And we demonstrated where that will get you nowadays.
Iraq gave money and support to terrorists, even at least a couple of the 9/11 19. And in terms of hating the great satan the Middle East is the Middle East. We would have attacked Saudi Arabia for their support of extremists, but post-9/11 the Saudis knew the only way their regime would survive was to do what we say, so they did.
And what, because the Taliban hosted more actual terrorist training camps that somehow means that Afghani citizens were less innocent than Iraqi citizens and it wasn’t as bad for the US to kill them in attacking the Taliban? Or do you think that we shouldn’t have even attacked Afghanistan either?
We didn’t attack Iran. And the arab world already thought we were monsters pre-9/11. And what I did see was Saddam saying we deserved 9/11 and arabs dancing in the streets over it.
I never said gladly. Nor do I really believe the 600,000 figure. I said that an armed response to 9/11 was necessary and that response needs to accomplish its goals even if that means a lot of casualties.
Nor is it bleeding heart liberal. Its more like realistic American citizen.
Not all, but plenty. But you said that we should declare war on all countries that support terrorism; America supports terrorism.
Garbage. We would have attacked Iraq regardless of Saddam fleeing, or dieing for that matter. That was admitted even before the invasion. The lesson of the Iraq invasion is that America does not respond to reason or negotiation.
Oh, please. We sucked up to them because Bush is a buddy of theirs. We do what they say, not the other way around.
And I’ve never heard of any evidence that Saddam gave evidence to anyone involved in 9-11; rather that he’d execute or threaten to anyone who proposed operations against America.
:rolleyes: No, they hosted the people that actually attacked us. Which is why most people in and out of America supported attacking them. It’s not even remotely comparable to attacking Iraq.
And others supporting us. Plenty of people in and out of the ME hate us now who didn’t before, because we have proven that hate is what we deserve.
And we have attacked Iran, repeatedly, through our proxies.
Garbage. Attacking Iraq was stupid and evil, and most certainly not “realistic”.
Hussein gave a few dinars to a few randomly selected families of Palestinian suicide bombers, always after the fact, but there is no evidence (at least as presented by our ever competent administration), that Hussein was financing anything that resembled a terrorist organization. As to your claim regarding the WTC/Pentagon attackers, I call bullshit.
This is false in every regard. Most of the WTC/Pentagon attackers were Saudis. Some members of the (Saudi) bin Laden family continue to support al Qaida fairly openly. Saudi money has been directly linked to numerous terrorist organizations. The U.S. response to such Saudi support? Pleas to increase their oil flow to keep the market stable. Your claim is purely in your imagination.
You may find it comforting to invent odd things to believe, but it makes no sense to base government policy or societal responses on invented fairly tales that are not grounded in reality.
And yet, you openly support policies that are in direct contradiction to your claims. If our armed response needed to accomplish its goals, then the Bush decision to strip materiel and personnel out of Afghanistan in order to go play conqueror in Iraq was the exact wrong response. We failed to accomplish any of our goals regarding al Qaida while doing our best to recruit more members to them and now both al Qaida and the Taliban are gathering strength in Afghanistan and Pakistan while we waste our resources cleaning up the unnecessary and fruitless mess we made of Iraq.