I meant, it might have worked out better on its own terms. You really can’t pursue a minimal-government agenda and fight a war at the same time. War is a major government function. It also costs a whole lot of money, which makes meeting fiscal-conservative, balanced-budget goals problematic – the more so if you’re incredibly stupid enough to cut taxes at the start of a war! :mad: Has any American president, any national leader anywhere in modern history, done that before?!
This is the first war in the history of America where taxes have not been increased.
Actually, I think they really ARE, what with things like putting incompetents who oppose federal emergency services in charge of FEMA. I think they are deliberately trying to engineer disastrous governmental failures, so they can point at government and scream about how awful it is.
You can if you are the sort who believes in “starving the beast”; the conservative idea of running up so massive a debt that there will be no choice but to cut government services. And let’s be realistic; the majority of the people who talk about “minimal government” are only referring to the parts of government that help people, and restrain the wealthy and powerful from running roughshod over everyone. They want a massive military, and a strong police/security force, for conquest and crushing dissent. Tyranny and malice are core values of the Right, and always have been.
To paraphrase Lord Acton, Der, never attribute to malice what just as easily can be explaned as stupidity.
When the people in question have often expressed malice in the past, assuming malice as a motive makes sense. Especially when they consistantly act just as if they were following the dictates of that malice. I think that as a culture, we’ve developed an unhealthy unwillingness to attribute malignancy as a motive for people’s behavior.
Sometimes, when people cause harm, that’s because harm is exactly what they were trying to cause. Even if it doesn’t profit them, or acts against their own self interest.
OK, Lord Of Bullshit.
It’s more like “we want a massive military to counter real or perceived threats from (gasp!) real enemies to our country and our interests, because we’re a REALLY big country that is vulnerable to attacks from a myriad of opposers”.
We also want a strong police force to maintain domestic security. Abolish the police, who runs the streets? Criminals, that’s who! It really isn’t for crushing dissent, as you believe. It really isn’t, man. Is your dissent on here or anywhere else being mitigated, stopped? Have you been thrown in the clink for being a contrarian?
I bet you fantasize that the FBI reads all your internet material in the hopes of one day proving everyone else that’s sane wrong because the black helicoptors and jack-booted Nazis will finally come to the Der Trihs residence and prove you, tha magnanimous one, finally right about your paranoia and vile suppositions about American people.
Hanlon’s Razor is not an infallible guide. Just after the Iraq invasion, when no WMDs were found, it appeared the decision to invade and the case for invasion had been based on faulty intelligence. Now it appears they were based on lies.
Key word being “appears” of course, since there exists the possibility that, you know, intelligence was just wrong and we relied on it anyway, and that there were flaws in the buildup to invasion elsewhere.
I personally find myself in quite a conundrum on this issue, becasue I come off as appearing to defend GWB, when I’m not. I’m defending the reality that sometimes shit happens and you’ll never know why. To just arbitrarily suppose that we were outright lied to is just as realistic as supposing that Saddam was stockpiling WMD’s. He had them, he used them, he maintained the illusion that he had them in the face of UN inspections…Saddam clearly liked to play cat and mouse with the West, only this time it cost him his life and his country.
The “at what cost” argument is a valid one. I’m not certain as to what we’re accomplishing over there more than anyone else on here is.
If it all were a lie adn it was all about securing energy resources in the short term, I wish leadership would just come out and admit it. Frankly, I really wouldn’t have a problem with that.
You’re sadly in denial.
Oh, it’s much more complicated than that.
The kindest thing I can say to that is, in the future, think before you post.
Just because another country has something we really, really need does not mean we have any right to go in and take it by force, causing more than a million deaths and 4.2 million refugees.
Don’t be silly; our military is far larger than needed to defend ourselves, even if we didn’t have thousands of nukes.
Not yet. But then, we wouldn’t hear much if anything about the people who have.
And the Republicans have no interest in maintaining public order and safety; they are far more concerned with spying on and harassing their political enemies.
They, or some other government agency probably does; or at least their computers do.
Liar. Everyone who was paying attention knew we were invading on false pretenses; and noting short of willful blindness can explain someone like you.
Of course not; like the majority of Americans, you are a thief, torturer, and mass murderer. By proxy at the least, even if you never deign to get your hands dirty.
Countries have done exactly that many times. They do not need a right to do it. They just do and hope for the best.
Then so are you.
All your cites do is cast doubt on anything, or try to explain “the way things are” through the eyes of a supposed impartial observer that is writing a book for profit…hardly an objective analysis.
And you’re right, just because another country has something “we want and feel entitled to” doesn’t make it right for us to take it.
I fear that there are a multitude of factors and possible ramifications that went into this waylaid plan to invade Iraq. I agreed with it at the outset because in the wake of 9/11, we believed what we were told. Now, I’m not so sure.
But i cannot at the same time allege that my government utterly fabricated everything or had no real reason to invade Iraq other than out of sheer malice and greed. The truth has to be a complicated mess of combining factors.
Sorry I don’t see it as black and white as you do. And thanks for the suggestion on that thinking thingie. Nothing like a veiled insult to spruce up my day!
Whatever man. I suppose you’re amongst the few that still maintain that our government orchestrated 9/11 in order to launch a neverending war against terrorists (read: Islam/Muslims) too, aren’t you?
And as far as “deigning to get my hands dirty”, even if your motherfucking worthless ass is right about me being a murderer because I support our military, at least I had the cajones to join and actually serve.
And like** 2 and a half inches ** points out, if you’re going to lump me into this “by proxy” argument then you have to lump yourself into it too, as a taxpayer.
That fact does not place it in the category of things with which we should not have a problem.
We can have a problem with anything.
Greg Palast makes no claim of objectivity, but he does claim to have copies of both pre-invasion plans and nobody has yet debunked that claim.
If you really would have no problem with our invading Iraq to secure energy resources in the short term, you deserve a lot worse than a veiled insult.
I said I would have no problem with it if in fact that was the real and only cause for it, and if our leaders that spearheaded such a cause were open about it.
I did like the “breaking the back of OPEC” theory from your book cite, though. Interesting.
I will state my position: I am an American, make a decidedly middle-class salary, am not from wealth, I have a wife and children that I love very much, I have been a soldier and was stationed in Riyadh in the early 1990’s and have no desire to ever go back, nor do I wish it on my fellow countrymen and women, I hate war but view it as an inevitable consequence of life in this or any other nation, and I hold personal liberty dear.
That said, I can’t help but play Devil’s Advocate on this particular issue. So many cites, so much blathering on, etc by people that don’t even know what it even means to leave this country, let alone serve in her armed forces.
No one will ever know the why’s and how’s of our involvement in Iraq. And even when they come out 20 years from now, anyone that’s “culpable” (meaning the entire Congress as well as the White House) will all be dead or irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that we’re there NOW, and we have to try to disengage ourselves from that region militarily with the rationale that we did actually accomplish something, which would be another Democratic nation in that region that is friendly to us, will sell us their oil and shows other ME countries that democracy is the best way to govern as we know it now.
What is it with people who think saving face is better than admitting your mistake?
I do wonder what the title of the EPA’s email was, that the white house knew not to open it?
“Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States”?