Alternatives aren’t the point here beags. The point is to alleviate a vague guilt felt by members of a priveledged group at the expense of people like their parents. Or it is to learn a bit about questioning authority. Or to get babes. Anyways, it’s harmless at worst, and susceptible to criticism as you’ve so eloquently pointed out. On the other hand, the great thing about America is that we tolerate opposing viewpoints without regard to their intent or substance. What a cool thing to learn in college, even at Pitt ;).
george
Excellent point. There is nothing I like better than an emotionally driven person using logic admirably from a fringe position. Two out of three ain’t bad.
curious george, it was very nice of you to ignore all the substantive rebuttals to your position(s) from Vinnie and beagledave in your last little response.
The only problem I have is Vinnie’s little rant towards the end. Specifically:
Two problems with this. First is that nukes and napalm can’t get everyone. Not all the terrorists are in Afghanistan. And the chances of us killing a large amount of terrorists with those tactics is very little. They are extremely mobile and hard to find. You would likely just kill a lot of innocent people, making us no better than the terrorists. Infiltration of cells is a much better idea.
Second problem is that george is right (sort of). Terrorism is a tactic. There are lots of people throughout the world using it. What makes it so attractive is its ability to inflict massive damage on an enemy for relatively little cost. Perfect way for individuals to wage a private little war against a super power. So long as we are pretty much invulnerable to military attack by conventional means, expect lots more unconventional attacks (cyberwarfare, terrorism, economic warfare, etc.).
It is like organized crime. Very difficult to pin down because of its penchant for mobility and its attractiveness in terms of asymmetrical attacks. And remember that nukes won’t really scare them because they don’t seem too afraid to die.
So I think the best solution is the stick and carrot. Use the stick on the terrorists through careful infiltration, assasination, etc. Use the carrot with the poor of the world by helping them build infrastructure for schools, highways, etc. Economic wealth helps bring stability. Of course, that won’t get rid of the radical types, but by improving the lot of some of the poorer in the world and giving them a better life to live for it’ll make it harder for the radical types to recruit. IMHO, anyways.
Look, this is classic tactics by Mr. George. Cut and paste an anti-American leftist rant, then sit back and watch as it gets cut to pieces, then complain about how we’re all war criminals and fascists.
If you want to debate, how about you put forward YOUR opinions, instead of violating the copyright of some other leftists? You don’t debate, you cut and paste and run.
As one who has long been aligned with the conservative wing of the extreme left, I have many times lamented with (some famous person)“I can deal with my enemies, Heaven protect me from my allies!”
However, there are kernels of truth in this that cannot, or at least should not, be answered with slurs on another’s partriotism. The right does not own patriotism, Lord knows they think they do. If unity is to be bought at the price of unquestioning obedience, it isn’t worth it.
It is clearly not our intent to make war on the Afghan people. That subtlety may be lost on them. I am gratified and relieved that the air war has, thus far, been conducted with such professionalism and care that civilian casualties have been so low. But as any Viet Nam vet can tell you, when you get “in country”, the distinctions get blurry. Heaven help the Afghans if an actual ground-war invasion is deemed necessary.
I don’t believe “oil” is our primary motivation. I fear that our primary motivation is vengeance. I can’t see how this is any improvement, but it probably springs from the Marxist fallacy to view everything as economic determinism.
The lines about "war on terrorism"s futility are at least partially right. Our allies no doubt take this with a grain of salt, they know that we mean our terrorism, not thiers. Spain may back our play, but not under any illusion we will send 1st Cav. to rout the Basque terrorists of the ETA. The only people who believe this, most likely, is us.
But enough. I tire. The road is long, bleak, and lined by imploring beggars. And we have hardly even started.
What facts are they putting forward to support #4? Let’s examine #4:
You did, by re-posting their work here.
This is a fact. It does not support in any way the supposition that this is a war over oil. A fortunate choice of geography on the part of the Afghani’s.
Yes, they had another fortunate choice of geography.
There is no cite for Unocal “welcoming” the Taliban’s rise to power. And why shouldn’t any business welcome stability in a country? Which business, outside of the arms trade, welcomes instability and chaos?
Speculation - no facts here. They do not know the minds or motives of these mysterious, unnamed “oil men”.
More speculation - supposes to know what the “hidden motives” of others are, while offering no facts to support that.
You posted it here, you be prepared to defend it. Or withdraw it.
My utmost sympathy goes to the parents of Curious George, who are paying the University of Pittsburgh $25,000 a year to teach CG that his OP makes sense.
How are they supposed to do that while they’re starving? Have you ever gone a day without food? You get all weak and dizzy-imagine that magnified by a few days? Hunger pains?
Yep, all those ex-airline employees have been thrown out into the street with no income or government aid at all. And the federal airline bailout has nothing at all to do with preserving a vital industry affecting many thousands of additional workers. Nah. Let’s talk about the CEOs, the “common working people” (about whom we have read diligently in our Economics and Poly Sci classes and deeply sympathize with, short of actually helping them, and who would knock us on our butts if we called them “common working people” to their faces) and otherwise strut our anti-capitalistic rhetoric in the face of the obvious.**
Not sure how the War on Drugs got dragged in here, except as a protest against the high price of building a decent stash at the University of Pittsburgh. Our getting serious about blunting the impact of terrorism will save thousands and perhaps millions of lives. That’s a laudable and realistic goal, except to people who feel guilty or outraged about the fact that the lives saved will include those of many Americans.
Perhaps the Pittsters and their fans, who “know” so much about evil U.S. interventions around the world, can explain the sinister corporate motivations behind our recent costly involvements in Africa and Eastern Europe, which as we all know came about only so we could lure the locals into drinking Coke and eating McBurgers.
Ignorance and guilt make a lousy framework for explaining current events.
I get so tired of people arguing against this by using hypotheticals and suppositions. And I’m getting REALLY tired of people arguing against this war without proposing any other solution, other than to trot out the same old tired cliches about how we just need to give our wealth to everyone and we’ll all be happy and peaceful-like.
Instead of trying to refute the endless stream of straw men and nonsense, the best rebuttal is to just remind them of the reasons for what we are doing:
#1 - The U.S. was attacked in an incredibly violent way, causing greater loss of life than any other single battle in U.S. history.
#2 - The people who attacked the U.S. claim that they will not settle for anything less than the destruction of the United States.
#3 - The states that sponsor these people either have, or have access to, weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, chemical, and biological.
#4 - They are clearly willing to use those weapons, as evidenced by the current outbreaks of Anthrax.
Now, Curious George, WHAT DO SUGGEST WE DO TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM? And beware: If you start carping about poverty and evil businesses and oil, I will tear that argument into so many shreds you’ll have to use a whisk broom to collect the remnants of your ego.
The last war where America truly was dealing with an unquestionably evil enemy was World War 2. That was 50 years ago, of whose anniversary start date will ironically be in about 7-8 weeks.
Today’s generation does not understand the totality of what it truly takes to win a war against Evil. Flamethrowers into caves. Atomic bombs. Fire bombing of Dresden Germany. These were ugly, inhumane things America was forced to do to gain the unconditional surrender of the evil German genocidal Third Reich and the suicidal expansionist Japanese Empire. These weren’t a bunch of barefoot peasants in the Vietnam jungle; these were governments and societies that were truly misguided and needed to be destroyed, similar to Al Qeada and extreme Muslim fundamentalism.
Today’s peace pundits make the mistake of trying to combine politcal correctness with warfare. Problem is, once you set your mind to go to war, you must be prepared to everything possible to meet the ends. In war, you kill other human beings. In war, sometimes the innocent must die. Until Americans are willing to face the fact that we will be forced to do some very, very ugly things in order to preserve our freedom and security for ourselves and hopefully the next 50 years of America, yes, a war on terror will be very very hard to win.
In order to destroy Evil one must be in touch with one’s own evil side.
Absolutely not true. Well, at least the greater loss of life than any other single battle in US history part. Gettysburg had 20,000 killed on the Union, and another 20,000 killed on the Confederate side. I could bring up many others. I doubt the WTC would even come in on the top 10.
I’ve really got no argument with your other premises though, except the anthrax thing. I doubt that is being done by Al-Queda, simply because they’re not doing a very good job of it. Mailing large envelopes full of anthrax isn’t very good, because everyone in their right mind knows right now to check to see if its anthrax then get the treatments ASAP. If they were really trying to do damage they’d just walk into the lobby in the Capitol building, put some on a spoon and just puff it into the air. Then proceed to do it in other major public areas.
Plus, we don’t really know who’s doing it.
**
Here’s the problem, Vinny. In those wars we knew who the enemy was by sight. They were the ones in the German and Japanese military uniforms and the ones sitting in Japanese and German cities. My point here is that not only will the same tactics not work because we can’t identify the people in the terrorists organizations on sight like we could with the German and Japanese military. Also, there’s no city objectives. We can go through and take control of Afghanistan, and the terrorists will just slip across the border into Tajikistan or Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan or Iran. There is no real home base for the terrorists like there was for the Germans or the Japanese. And they don’t rely on huge factories for munitions, so we can’t really target those to help cut back on stuff. To put it bluntly, terrorists are not the same as another state. They cannot be fought effectively in the same way. Nukes and conventional weapons will not work. You need special ops, infiltration and changes in our foreign policy that help other states establish stable governments and a good educational/economic infrastructure to reduce the ability of terrorists to recruit.
Oh yeah, Vinny I also forgot to mention that if you thought that the destruction of Dresden was necessary to win WWII then you need to check your history. That city had no manufacturing plants, military targets, or anything of the kind. All it did was kill people going about their daily lives.
That’s the sort of atrocity that we are trying to avoid this time around.
What’s there to debate? It’s just a list of statments. Each statemnet is followed by a paragraph which, except for the last (which almost supports the claim), is irrelevant to the preceding statement. But if you like debating those sort of things, try refuting these points: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=1721713#post1721713
I think that the five points that started this thread, and the supporting arguments underneath, can be adequately rebutted with a hearty “so what?”
So what if we are at war with the afghan people? There is a good deal of evidence that afghan residents with the implicit, if not tacit approval and support of the afghan government, planned and executed this attack, as well as other attacks on U.S. interests. If the afghanis can’t clean up their backyard, we need to do so for our own security interest. If we can’t tell the civilians from the enemy, its unfortunate that innocent people will die, but that’s what happens in a war.
So what if we reap the benefit of getting more oil out of the ground? Unless you are prepared to argue that we attacked ourselves to justify this war, this is a non-sequitor.
So what if we backed the wrong horse before? So what if we back the wrong horse this time? We know the Taliban supports an organization that is harmful to our security. Our options as to who assumes power after the Taliban is removed are limited. Maybe the government that takes control will not support extremists. That’s better than allowing a government that we know supports terrorists to remain in power.
So what if you have detected some inequities in the domestic response to what happened on September 11? This was an unprecedented event, and we are making up the rules as we go along. It is difficult to tell what precisely this point is - is the war too expensive? I certainly expect to pay more in taxes to pay for this war, and I hope I pay enough in taxes to pay for a bomb myself.
So what if we can’t win a war against terrorists? We can at least fight it. I prefer action over inaction every time. There are only two other options: (1) surrender, or (2) do nothing in response and hope they don’t hurt us again. Are either of these realistic responses? No.
How do the faults of the Northern Alliance somehow mean that the US is not trying to free the citizens of Afghanistan from the Taliban tyranny? That’s like saying that we weren’t trying to free the Jews from the concentration camps because we helped Stalinist USSR. Also, while the Northern Alliance may not be great, the areas of Afghanistan they hold are ruled far better than those held by the Taliban.
It’s interesting that these people can’t even put together a coherent argument even when they seem willing to pass off suppostion and rumor as truth.
It’s also interesting that curious george posts crap that he gets from email lists, and then never tries to back up the opinions expressed therein.
Oh, and I’d like to welcome back Mary Hart’s Legs, everyone’s favorite knee-jerk anti-American, from a long vacation.
Marc, the railyard was a legitimate target, but IIRC correctly, that wasn’t the reason Dresden was bombed in the manner in which it was. The Allies had some faulty intelligence that there was a major Nazi operation of somekind there and in order to wipe it out, they firebombed the city, and damned near killed everyone in it. When they later found out that there was nothing of value there (the railyard was considered important, but could have been taken out with a plane or two) the Allies were mortified.
