I note that your defence, New_Iskander, relies on the validity of your cause. Kinda doesn’t held you much.
help, not held. :smack:
Do I believe there is an achievable end in the Iraq situation? No I don’t. Only levels of bad to worse. The best thing we could have done is stayed out, and possibly getting accused of standing on the sidelines while SH tortured his populace.
I have yet to see anyone lay out a realistic plan as to what’s going to happen over there. I would be thrilled if someone could provide something a little more specific then “we’re going to see this through”.
Now cut the bullshit and tell me step by step how we’re going to get out of this mess.
*get accused.
Looks like I caught something from you Desmo. 
Patience World Eater, patience. The leader of the free world is going on the tube tonight to explain his cunning plans. I’m sure he would be doing that unless he was certain that all things will work out for the best…
While we’re waiting, I’d like to hear a little more about Sophia Loren’s titties. Are you online elucidator? Could you supply us with a cite or two to while away the empty hours til the president’s speech?
He’s not even taking questions tonight. I predict a lot of “Staying the course”, “the people are better off without SH”, “getting our friends on board”, and all the other tired clichés we’ve grown to hate.
Oh yeah, don’t forget “the entity to which we’ll hand over sovereignty to”.
I’m sure my eyes will be rolling out of the back of my head.
I don’t even think in that direction. I’m firmly convinced that removing Saddam and giving Iraq a chance to start all over again is ripe with enormous promise for the whole world. We don’t need to even think about extricating ourselves; to the contrary, we need to try to stay with Iraqis as long and as close as possible, giving them all the possible “special statuses” we can think of.
Of course, I could be wrong. It might be quite possible that murderous dictators are necessary for the world eco-system and removing any one of them by force is an extremely perilous undertaking. If so, we’ll fail and crawl back licking our wounds eventually somehow, and the whole world will advance a little closer to Hell.
Have we taken a huge risk? Sure.
So, wait, Brutus is a moron? I’ve missed so many new developments since I’ve been gone for the weekend.
Which is a big part of the problem. The current admin doesn’t even think in that direction either.
I’m not.
First off, we haven’t given them a chance to “start over”, because they don’t even have any say in the matter. So far we’ve picked who will be in charge, what people can say (we’ve shut down anti US newspapers), and written a constitution for them, which they’ll probably burn the second we leave.
The real way for them to start over, is to pull the fuck out of the country, but that ain’t going to happen.
See, this is the vague shit I’m talking about. Stay with them as long and close as possible? What the fuck does that mean? Be MORE specific please.
ANY military action is ALWAYS an extremely perilous undertaking, this will never change.
Crawl away licking our wounds? Like Spain is accused of doing? :rolleyes:
That’s the problem with Bush. He’ll run this country though the ground before he ever does anything that remotely resembles “giving in to the evildoers”, even if it’s our best course of action.
A risk I, and tens of millions of others, preferred we hadn’t taken.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/25/iraq.main/index.html
Focus groups working overtime.
Looks like you’ll have to start another thread, World.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/25/iraq.main/index.html
The only thing “Holy” about this mosque was it’s architecture after the damage.
I’m sure there’s a proverb about that…
“The road to Freedom, Democracy, Self-Government for Brown-Skinned People, and Being-Welcomed-With-Garlands-of-Flowers is paved with good intentions.”
Something like that, anyway.
So SH’s “stockpile” consisted of two artillery shells with chemical agents that pretty much became inert years ago.
Whoooo, what a threat. :rolleyes:
Typical Bush-bashing lefty! Downplaying the significance of this find, simply because it doesn’t quite meet the numerical implications of “vast stockpiles”. I mean, if you take “vast” to be a rhetorical flourish, the “stockpile” part is valid. And Saddam was in possession of mustard gas, the very acme of WWI-era weapons technology! Heaven only knows what may have befallen us if they got thier hands on a Gatling gun!
Yeah, that was sure worth the 700 or so coalition deaths, and the 10,000 (plus or minus) Iraqi civilian deaths. Someone could have been hurt with those two shells!
I’m stunned by the lack of outrage.
There’s plenty of psychological “tricks” that people use to keep them from the unpleasantness of outrage.
When the WMD war justification is blown to smithereens, they revert to the “saving of the Iraqi people from Saddam and his torture” justification.
When they hear about the US torture of those Iraqis we were supposed to be saving from torture, they demonize the Iraqi torture victims (like in that So-called ‘abused’ prisoners = The beheaders BBQ pit thread obscenity).
Then, there’s the always the last resort of accusing those critical of the torture or the war itself as being America-hating liberals.
There’s never a reason to feel outrage.
Sad, but very true Revtim.
I’ll once again express my surprise that the Bush admin hasn’t played these two shells up to kingdom come.
A) The chemical wasn’t ‘inert’. It wasn’t mixed properly, because it was designed to mix in flight due to the rotation of the shell. Had it been mixed properly, it would have been deadly.
B) Two shells SO FAR. This shell is of a type that Iraq never declared. Therefore, we have no idea how many there are. It MAY be a leftover ‘test’ round, because the only mix-in-flight binary shells Iraq declared were some prototypes that were supposedly all test-fired. It may be that this is one of those rounds and it was a dud. The ISG should be able to determine that. IF, on the other hand, this shell is from production tooling, then you can assume that there are a lot more of them. You don’t build an assembly line for one shell. Perhaps the others were all destroyed, but since Saddam never declared them, I have my doubts. We shall see.
It is also highly suspicious that this shell had no markings indicating it was a chemical weapon. That would suggest that the intent was to camouflage their nature from inspectors. Because it’s damned dangerous to have chemical shells that aren’t marked as such, and you’d need a good reason to do so.
And this one shell, had it been mixed properly, could have produced a couple of liters of Sarin. That would be enough to kill thousands of people if it were released into the ventilation system of say the Sears Tower or sprayed from an aircraft over a football stadium. So let’s not get too cocky about it just being one shell.
Bolding mine
and
Am I missing something? Is someone going to fire the shell into the ventilation system? That would be a pretty neat trick smuggling a huge ass artillery gun into downtown Chicago to shoot it.
We’ve had thousands of specialists in the country looking for over a year. We supposedly knew where the stuff was being made an/or stored before the invasion, yet all we’ve come up with is two measly shells.
In my opinion, nothing short of a huge stockpile of WMD would justify this war, and buddy, 2 stinking shells != stockpile.