Many good reasons, none of which they trotted out until the first one didn’t work.
Were you born that naive? Or is trust in politicians something you worked at?
And it’s nice to see our first real straw man. Using that line of reasoning I could say that the extermination of Native American’s was a good thing because it led to the establishment of the United States as a world power.
That’s still a pretty big if, in my mind. Also you’d have to weigh whether it’s worth the damage done to the UN, and to America’s relationships with the rest of the world, particularly other Middle Eastern nations.
since gobear mentioned WMD, the front page article in today’s New York Times may be of interest.
Responding to litost
In that case I would think that the war was correct but that the follow-through was not.
Its so clear, please provide cites. AFAIK Bush has been giving a list of reasons in his speeches for over a year. So have other Administration spokesmen. Plesae support your claim that they started with only one reason, and added others later.
BTW, which of the justifications was the “first reason,” which you say didn’t work?
I love this arguement.
Next time, the U.S. should back people when it doesn’t suit their interest. Heck, we should pour money into Al Qaeda training programs and helping to get weapons grade plutonium into Norht Korea.
Of course we back countries when it serves our interest.
To elaborate on my earlier post gobear, bad foreign policy decisions are going to be paid for in human lives one way or another (good decisions have to be paid this way as well, sometimes), whether in the form of wars, famine, terrorism, or just general chaos and anarchy. So no, I do not believe that hasty, ill-thought actions like the ones leading up to this war can be justified solely on the grounds that they savec X lives in location Y, as they may well end up costing 2X lives in location Z.
The real test of justification is a long way down the road.
I’m going to wait and see if actually ends with freedom for Iraq, rather than just a brief interlude of freedom while we’re there.
Justified? I just don’t know. Maybe. Freedom for Iraq will be nice. But if things degenerate into another dictatorship after we leave, then it would be an interlude that cost us 100 billion dollars, some American lives, and a whole lotta face. So, I hope it goes well. I really do.
True enough but I used that line because of what Tejota said in the previous post.
Haj
But he gassed his own people!
this has completely blown me away.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor…,940250,00.html
words fail me, is this true? - would 'audacious be appropriate? or simply totally manipulative. ie, annhialate the opposition by cruise missiles and invasion, then siphon off the spoils of war to Israel at bargin basement prices?
is this plan by America borderline extreme antagonism of the Arab nations, or is the USA simply saying ’ they dont matter, only Israel does. quote. ‘bypass Syria’ - get the oil flowing back to how it was when the British Empire ( ‘thought’ ) they ruled the region. restore the pipeline from Irak to Israel? -
just how much angst does the US want to create with its neighbors surrounding thier newly created Iraki war zone firebases?.
Zanthor
Jonathan Chance has already creditably answered this, but let me ratchet it up a bit, if I might:
The direct implication of this line of logic is that the current Administration has to be counted as supporters of all the nasty regimes JC listed. Because not only are they not acting to remove them; they’re not even shining a light on any of their misdeeds, let alone using actual diplomatic pressure. I realize we can’t militarily remove all those regimes at once, so don’t bring up that straw man. But is the Pentagon drawing up contingency plans to do so? That we can do, so that we can have Burma, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Pakistan, Afghanistan (currently warlord-run, excepting Kabul), Libya, etc. each take a number and deal with them in turn.
Since none of this is being done, gobear’s reasoning dictates that the Administration supports all of those regimes.
Zanthor, your link doesn’t work.
yeah, just noticed, try this
Your analogy fails. If the Administration were actively hampering attempts to change or remove these regimes, then your analogy would make sense.
As for me, I’m all for getting rid of the hideous regime in North Kore. I spent too much time in the South to feel neutral about that coterie of butchers in Pyongyang. I’d be all for the US exerting power to destroy the other regimes you mentioned as well.
Of course we back countries when it suits our interests. And our interests change over time.
And if we presented our foreign policy as simply one of realpolitik, no one could say we were inconsistent.
The problem is when we claim moral justification for acting as we do - “Saddam’s evil and we need to depose him because he’s done X, Y, and Z” - and those were the very things we condoned when we were buddy-buddy with him.
That says good and evil are just silly notions we use to sell a war.
I’ve never been part of the press corps, but will it make you feel less lonely if I tell you I’ve been raising those same points for months?
I don’t see how my analogy fails. as the old saying goes, all that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. They’re doing nothing, and (without at all detracting from their other objectives) they could be doing plenty.
And I respect that. As you can see, my post was using your logic against the Administration, not you.
Quick question Sam. Wouldn’t it be better if the title was “THIS is why we went to war.”? Oh? You couldn’t use that title because that would be a lie? Well, yea, there’s that. Of course with all these after-the-fact justifications the “anti-war” crowd could post threads titled “THIS is what the war caused” and link to those extremely graphic photos of people in their cars who were partially incinerated when a bomb hit a bridge or highway crossing. Normal, everyday people, not troops in military vehicles.
There isn’t really moral high ground to be had here. For every atrocity we “stopped” I have no doubt we committed acts every bit as bad. When you strip away the rhetoric and idealism of both camps all you get is Iraqi civilians who were dying before and are dying now. It is my hope that they will recover, but I’m not sure if what we did will help or hinder such a recovery.
Enjoy,
Steven
From Zanthor’s link:
Wow. Can you say “puppet regime”?
No wonder the neocons love this guy.
Mind you, I’m not saying that there would be anything wrong if the people of Iraq chose to recognize Israel, and ship their oil there. But the assumption has to be that no matter what their government, the Iraqi people don’t think well of Israel. And here’s our handpicked Next President of Iraq, proposing all sorts of things that would be sweet for the U.S., but that the people of ‘his’ nation are likely to be strongly opposed to, if anyone gets around to asking them.
Yeah, that’ll be one hell of an advertisement for democracy in the Middle East.
RTFirefly
“The problem is when we claim moral justification for acting as we do - “Saddam’s evil and we need to depose him because he’s done X, Y, and Z” - and those were the very things we condoned when we were buddy-buddy with him.”
The problem I have here is this: this doesn’t imply, it outright states that we supported Sadaam because he was evil. I don’t know whether we knew he was evil and supported him because he was the lesser of two evils, or we didn’t know that he was evil, or that he hadn’t yet displayed his evil traits.
It kind of reminds me of WWII again…we didn’t really like Russia (and later events justified our concerns), but as someone who was fighting a greater evil (Nazi Germany), it was worth it to support Russia.
AT THAT TIME!!
But it doesn’t then follow that we automatically supported, nay encouraged, the Berlin Wall, the outrages of the KGB, the taking over of entire nations (can you say Lithuania, Latvia, etc?). Situations change as the years go by, and our enemy yesterday (Japan, Germany) becomes our friend today, and vice-versa.