I read alot of the discussion here about Iraq and the thing that never seems to get much consideration is this: WE HAVE BEEN BOMBING THE BLOODY HELL OUT OF IRAQ FOR OVER TEN YEARS.
We have bombed Iraq on a weekly basis since 1991. Almost every other day. Do any of you truely believe that you can bomb a country for ten years without them using any and all weapons available to stop you? An imminent threat to us? Are you shitting me? It is beyond me sometimes that people here are so dumb. Maybe not dumb, just ignorant of facts. Before you decide what threat Sadam was to us please consider, one more time, WE HAVE BEEN BOMBING THE BLOODY HELL OUT OF IRAQ FOR OVER TEN YEARS. Think about that for a moment. What has been the reaction of Saddam? Granted he was an asshole of historic porportion and considering this, why didn’t he strike back at us? Because he couldn’t. He had no capability. If he had a small fraction of the capability we claimed him to have it would have been used a long time ago.
And as this may relate to 9/11, remember, if you go around bombing people incestantly, sooner or later they will find a way to strike back. The repercussions of this war have not yet even been fully considered by either side but rest assured our country will pay the price for its deeds someday. May God have mercy on us.
Odd as it may seem, I really and genuinely hope that evidence of WMD, all tooled up and ready to go, is found.
I really hope that the foundation reason for this war is solid, that we , the UK, and the US can be seen to have been protecting the interests of the whole world, that the French, Russians, Germans and all those who were sceptical in the UN are proven to be naive, laissez-faire nations that are lacking in true leadership.
Sadly I think that after months of searching it seriously looks like we the electorate were grossly misled, that our nations sanctioned a war against the wishes of the majority of the world, that we were too gung-ho to actually wait for inspections to do the task set out.
In any event, it now seems very clear that the self-defense aspect, that Iraq was an imminent danger to the West, (and really the only possible justification for an agressive act upon a sovereign state under current UN charter rules), that threat was and always was a complete figment of the imagination.
Newcomers can probably form their own opinions on that, don’t you think? Yours seems to be…lacking.
Everyone here seems to be well entrenched in their positions. My position is that Powell’s case to the UN is available on the web for all the public to read. It is pages long and contains no “one” justification or legal reason. It’s a whole case for regime change. Some accepted it as a good case, some outright reject it, but there is really no sense in insisting that half of it is meaningless and only the WMD issues matter. What’s up with that.
A great majority of “pro-war” people were absolutely apoplectic about WMDs as a reason to bomb Baghdad. In fact the war wasn’t hardly a day old when someone started a thread along the lines of … “They’re firing WMD’s at us, don’t you pussy Liberals feel stupid now!?”
And now that WMD’s aren’t the issue (because nobody can find any, and the “evidence” of them seem to have been exaggerated at best), “Regime Change” is the battle cry. Either that or fucking museum looting is propped up as a bone of contention. Museum looting – like that’s the humanitarian issue that everyone is most concerned about.
It’s transparent. Hell, I’d have more respect for “war-mongers” if they just screamed bloodlust. At least that would be honest. “Liberating the Iraqi people” is the biggest load of bullshit to come from this.
I would normally estew posting just to say, “me too”, but abso-fucking-lutely, this is what I hope for, unambiguous, in-your-face proof that Iraq was tooled-up.
But I don’t think it’s going to happen – it would already have happened, you might be able to hide weapons in bunkers in the desert, but what of the people who know of their location, are they hidden also? Do they maintain some sick loyalty to Saddam? All of them? I don’t fucking think so.
And it scares me shitless. Tee, read the fucking title of the fucking thread.
This may actually be the foundation of our disagreement. I don’t think enough time has passed yet, nor is there enough clear information, to make that determination. Notice how I’m specifically NOT bringing up those “mobile bioweapons labs.” I’ve become a mite jaded as well.
I’m not ready to cede that point yet. Plus, it may very well be that an economic threat is every bit as potentially lethal as a warehouse full of VX. This is a subtle, dangerous point, but given that people die without petroleum, it may be vaild.
Actually, my point is quite a bit more subtle than that, and I’ll thank you not to misrepresent me so irresponsibly. There is a vast world of difference between “go and take the oil,” and “the supply of oil must be stable.”
People always tell me I talk too much. Tee did an admirable job of summing up my point, without all my characteristic hard-eyed bluster. Thanks.
Remember all those prospective WMD sites the US didn’t even bother to try to secure on the way in? The ones that were looted to the ground before we could ascertain what was or wasn’t there?
If there were WMDs in Iraq, they could be anywhere now. Let us hope to high heaven that Bush was merely lying through his teeth about the WMDs, and that the US plan of war didn’t involve securing WMD sites because Bush, Rumsfeld & Co. knew the whole time they didn’t exist.
I misread your post the first time, and very nearly flamed you unjustifiably. You are right, it seems the best we could credit Bush with is incompetence – if the forces have not secured the alleged WMDs you can bet that the people who have are no more trustworthy than Saddam.
Hey, Dick Dawkins. You write a great letter. Unfortunately for the US, we don’t have your governmental system. These sumbitches we elect here don’t resign. They just change their story on what went wrong. Or what their true objective was. Or what…ever.
[sub]Although, Blair is doing a pretty good imitation of a US politician. He’s toast! IMHO. [/sub]
This is well-written, but fallacious. The possibility that a certain amont of chemical and biological weapons falling into the hands of terrorists is not “exactly the circumstance the war was supposed to forestall.” The war was supposed to forestall the possibility of Iraq making major, continuing use of its WMDs. E.g., to threaten the west while re-invading Kuwait. Or, to use against Iran in another war against them. It was supposed to forestall Iraq developing nuclear weapons and using them or providing them to terrorists. In fact, the war did succeed in ending the possibility that any of these things might occur.
Let’s take another look at Dawkins’s above hypothsis. If there were WMDs then Iraq was willfully not complying with UN resolutions and, more importantly, Iraq was becoming more and more dangerous, as their stocks of WMDs increased. Under those circumstances, any reasonable action to stop them was better than not stopping them.
That’s the gist of the title quote from famous business professor, Peter Drucker. Bush’s possibly flawed action against Saddam was the right thing. It was superior to the wrong thing – inaction. That’s what the world got from the UN and other leaders.
Furthermore, to say that the war didn’t meet Dawkins’s utopian ideal of perfection isn’t to say that it didn’t go very well indeed. Look at the predictions of anti-war folks before the war actually began. They forcast all kinds of disasters, which didn’t occur. Or, look at the disasters that actually took place in other successful wars. By most reasonable standards, the war in Iraq went very well indeed.
As opposed to Afghanistan, the enthusiasm for the rebuilding of which seems to have trickled away in the light of other events. But hey, Afghanistan is just so…last year. :rolleyes:
