[1984]
The Administration’s rationale for having invaded Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people. The Administration’s rationale for invading Iraq has always been to liberate the Iraqi people.
[/1984]
. . . And all the while there exists a real madman with real WMD, and a million man army who appears to become more unstable, more threatening and whose nation becomes more desperate with each passing day.
Shhhh!!! That war won’t be over in a week, so we will just ignore it! Leave it for the Democrat who takes over in 2005!
I’m not entirely sure of what you are asking here. I got my opinion from talking with local people and reading and watching what I can of the local and international news.
http://www.yementimes.com/
As I don’t speak Arabic this is one of the few local papers I can read. It is relatively liberal from what I understand although I have only the locals to tell me this. Read this for a while and you can see where things usually devolve into a diatribe against the US or Israel.
But that is just the news. Everyone can look through it and eliminate most of the stuff that doesn’t make much sense, or is illogical, right? Even if you agreed with what was being said you would still have a healthy suspicion that would make you use some sort of personal filter to find what you at least thought was the truth. Does that work here? Education levels tend to be a lot lower here and it tends towards rote work, not critical thinking. Example: Part of my job is to train nationals in the computer field. Once I show someone how to do something they can do it again easily, but if I give them a problem with no prior knowledge they have find it difficult. This, of course, varies by individual. Some are very quick to troubleshoot problems, some are very slow. Most would not be working in North America with their skill levels. But then they all make up for it in their enthusiasm. This is NOT because of race, but one of poverty and culture.
So, we try to train them in some of the skills we take for granted in the west. We put them in Problem Solving and Decision Making courses by Kepner Tregoe. I’ve been on the course myself. It uses case studies presented on paper and video to get the points across. You do the cases based upon what you just learned in class. It is a step by step approach, so you don’t take two days of course before you do a case, you do the cases as you learn each step. It is designed to teach you techniques to, well, solve problems and make decisions. I’ve talked to the instructor in this course, who has been giving this course here for years now. He says that the major issue with presenting the course is that the nationals have a tough time filtering out the information from the case studies that is irrelevant. So, if an actor in one of the case studies says they saw a similar occurance (of whatever the case is about) in an earlier time frame they would take it as being part of the current issue without questioning its validity to the issue. Now most of the people who take these courses with us are usually highly educated compared to the typical person in Yemen. Most have a university or college degree. If they have difficulties imagine what the regular person on the street thinks when he sees Baghdad Bob on the TV? Or their local cleric telling them that westerners are evil.
These along with the countless other impressions of day to day living in the country. Is that what you were asking?
Hey, I said 99%, not 100%. Obviously you and the others who responded to this in this thread are in the 1%.
And I’ll bet you guys were calling for Clinton’s head when he accidentally bombed that aspirin factory. Good for you!
Yes! Lets invade North Korea. Seoul may be vaporised, but it’s a small price to pay to avoid hypocrisy! Square peg, meet round hole.
If anyone was, no one heard beneath all the refrains from the Pubbies of : Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog! Wag the Dog!
but i guess your revisionist history shows 100% support of Clinton’s actions except by a select few of elite americans (aka you)
who’s saying attack them? Since we are currently doing nothing, doing something might make us look less like schoolyard bullies picking on nations that put up a defense for a week. trapezoidal peg, meet scalene triangle hole.
Look , when he starts threatening France, Germany or Canada, then I’ll admit we may have a problem.
I am just advocating a politcial solution to a much more significant threat. Saddam was not willing or able to use WMD against coaltion forces. In fact, you could almost say the Saddam would die, before he used WMD. Now maybe that is because those weapons were not of sufficient strategic or tactical use to him. But still they were not used, I don’t anyone is under the illusion that Kim Jong Il won’t use whatever he has.
I am guessing that the solution to the North Korea crisis will be to <Ta Da> Blame Clinton for not taking out those nukular pwer plants back in 1995.
Hey! No fair using your superior knowledge of geometry!
It sure sounded to me that 5 time chump was implying a hypocrisy between military action in Iraq and possibly Syria to none with NK.
Anyway, I doubt nothing is being done, there are probably two dozen brainiacs working out strategies right now.
Ok sorry champ. My last response was before your most recent reply.
i think both sides are jumping to conclusions on what the other is thinking here. Stupid polarization of sides! I’m more inclined to spend all my time arguing that W should go cuz his “i’m a uniter, not a divider” lines turned out to be all bunk rather than war related issues if this keeps up much longer. (not to say i’ll do it, i just like to think i would, that way i can act all morally superior while swimming in the same sewer as those i mock)
Syria’s military is a hollow shell, just like most of the countries that relied on Soviet arms and assistance during the cold war. Today, it’s airforce is old and decrepit, its subs are unusable, and it’s tanks are getting long in the tooth.
Syria’s armed forces, like Iraq’s, are heavily tilted towards armor. Tanks, BMP’s, and Artillery. Syria’s air defenses are mostly Triple-A.
In a shooting war with the U.S., the only difference between Syria and Iraq would be the number of smart bombs required to destroy its armor. The U.S. would easily establish air superiority over Syria, and that’s all she wrote.
One big difference between Syria and Iraq, however, is that Syria has been training thousands of commandos and special forces. Unlike the Republican Guards, which were chosen more for their political allegiance than skill, Syria’s commandos are apparently well trained. In addition, they have a big supply of guided anti-tank weapons like the Russian Kornet, of which only a handful showed up in Iraq (and they were pretty much the only weapon that gave the coalition any trouble at all).
So while Syria is certainly better equipped than Iraq was, to say that it was 100 times more equipped, or that it could do the kind of damage that North Korea could, is a wild overstatement.
Not that I’m advocating an attack on Syria. Syria is nowhere near the end of the rope that was played out for Iraq. Syria has actually been trying to liberalize its economy in the past few years, and the leader of Syria is an ill-prepared former Ophthamologist who never expected to run a country - not a megalomaniac with delusions of forming a new Caliphate and becoming the great leader of all the Arabs, like Saddam was. In short, I think Bashir Assad can be leaned on, and there’s a good chance that leaning on him will show results.
Well I certianly hope that this is all "leaning"on Assad. The Guardian article made me feel a little bit better about the situation.
Or, maybe, he has some brains after all. I hope the Guardian story bears out.
As I understand it the “Bush Doctrine” is that the U.S. has the right to pre-emptively attack any country it wants to, if we even think they’re a potential threat. This really bothered me the first time I heard it, first because it seemed insane on the face of it, and second because of the implications of applying the same principle to the viewpoint of other countries. Given that doctrine, the attack on Pearl Harbor seems justifiable rather than infamous, and given that doctrine and the current situation, it’d be hard to fault Syria for attacking the U.S. now instead of waiting to see what we do.
Eventually something like that is going to happen, and the country involved may state that they’re using our own principle of “pre-emptive self-defense”. I wonder how the State Dept. will answer that. (Whatever happened to the State Dept.? I seem to be hearing a lot of stuff from Rumsfeld lately that’s really the Secretary of State’s bailiwick.)
If it’s true as the Guardian says that
Then I guess we won’t be hearing from Rumsfeld anytime soon that we’re going to war with Syria to liberate the poor Syrian people from an evil regime. Darn! I was predicting this one, as it follows logically from his previous statements. (first harbouring terrorists, then they suddenly have WMD, then… liberate the people!)
I tell you what… It’s Rumsfeld that scares the #$%^ out of me. I hope the White House puts him back in the kennel soon.
I vote for Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-con puppet master behind the curtains. I mean, John Ashcroft is also pretty scary, but he’s a domestic pain-in-the-ass, and has less chance of pissing off the rest of the world against us.