I can’t imagine what I would want your forgiveness for. You’re just this guy who shows up once in a while to fan flames, cause trouble and stir shit up.
Certainly that’s all you’ve done here.
No, not really. The “serious consequences” language has been taken by some as meaning the application of national military force, but it was made pretty clear at the time the resolution was passed that the people and nations with the majority vote, and more importantly the veto vote, in the Security Counsel that the language meant no such thing. That was why we had all the hand wringing about securing a second Security Counsel resolution in the face of a certain French and Russian veto and opposition by Germany. The “serious consequences language of the resolution can be made to say “military intervention” only by ignoring what the members of the Security Counsel were saying in the debates, in consultation and in public, and by shoving bamboo splinters under the resolutions finger nails. Your reading of the resolution is a tortured interpretation.
As to the “doing the right thing for the wrong reason” argument, I persist in the view that as a great power the United States has an obligation to act in strict accord with accepted norms of international dealing. When the United States quits justifying the invasion on the basis of the existence of a clear and present danger to the vital national interest not capable of protection by any other means and starts talking about things like “Sadam needed killing” or that we have made sure that Iraq will not be a threat (without regard to the nature of the threat) the nation becomes a thug and a bully. If that is what you want for your nation that is your business. I say that might does not make right. I say that I don’t want a country run by people who think it is all right to concoct a pretext for war and then blithely ignore the pretext when it does not pan out. The Administration’s justification of the invasion and occupation is simply the equivalent of Boss Tweed’s retort to accusations of corruption: “What are you going to do about it?”
It’s not right. It is not honest. I can only hope that in the next year or so the American electorate will come to understand that.
Bravo! Hurray for the lame and nuetered one! Well said sir! [sub]Can I still call you sir? The title still applies even if you don’t have all the bits right?[/sub]
Enjoy,
Steven
It was weaseling. You said it and then tried to back out of it. Instead of clarifying, you simply made it worse. You could have argued your point but chose not to. wring asked you a direct, specific question, and you’re the one who replied “Oh I dunno. Off the top of my head Congress, Blix, Khoffii Annan, Gore, Clinton and every Democrat in 1998 as well as the entire UN.”
You said that. No one else did. If you were being flippant, you had ample opportunity to say so. Nope. You chose instead to call wring’s behavior crappy when she called you on your very own statement.
If you cannot back up your statements, maybe you should take them elsewhere, to a place that’s not as insistent on the validity of one’s statements.
If there’s a stooge in this thread, it’s not minty, Xeno, or Hentor. How dare they call someone on his own words!
Yes, that’s right. I merely post to stir shit up between you and whoever it is you’re maligning at the moment. Me, and minty, and Hentor, and carrot, and wring sometimes-when-you-decide-it’s-advantageous-to-accuse-her, and 'lucy, and…
Gosh, that list just gets longer and longer.
But it’s still a somewhat effective evasion tactic, innit, complaining about the outrageous fortune our slings and arrows represent for you?
Tell you what, though, I’m not interested in forgiving; I’m only interested in countering. My forgiveness is irrelevant and would be pointless. It’d be like forgiving pollen. You’re just something that posts shit I disagree with on a message board.
Sheesh. I swear when I began posting that, this whole 'nother page hadn’t popped up. I see you folks are sorting it out just fine without me.
Since wring, the primary offended party, has decided to move on, and since Scylla has at last clarified that he did not intend for his list of persons/entities to be taken seriously, I’m content to let the issue rest.
I am not, however, content to drop the question of the relevance of long-past assessments of Iraq’s WMD possession/capacity to the current controversy over the Bush administration’s reckless disregard for the truth in service of war.
So since the Bush admin and and its cheerleaders have seized on Clinton and Gore’s alleged assessment that Iraq had (What? WMD’s? Capacity for same? The Anarchist’s Cookbook? Please specify.) something or other bad going on with regards to WMD’s back in the 90’s, would someone please clarify just what the fuck that has to do with lying, fudging, and misstating intelligence for the sake of justifying a war to the American public and the rest of the world?
No. You’re just a guy that likes to start trouble. You’re like the little kid back in school that goes back and forth between two other kids inciting shit.
You do it a lot and you’ve been called on it before. Instead of making a positive argument you attack the way the other person makes the argument. Instead of attacking the argument, you attack the person.
I promised you I would point this out when you did it again. Indeed the very last time you and I spoke was, if I recall you apologizing for precisely this kind of thing.
I think I have a link
here.
You say:
Your apology is still not accepted, and it appears you’ve broken your promise. Again.
Has anyone ever seen december and Ari Fleisher in the same room at the same time? Just asking because…
…seems near perfect as an example of spinicism. The rest of the Bushwah in this post I’ll ignore for the moment, just to explore the nuance. It is a chestnut.
Note the passive voice, the denial of agency. Like a child, when asked “What the hell happened to the lamp!”
“It broke.”
No one broke the vase, the vase broke. The vase didn’t even break itself, it is simply an example of spontaneous disunity. Denial of agency.
The reasons for this war “turned out” to be false. No one intended them to be false, they weren’t false to begin with, but over the course of time, they mutated into a state of other-than-truthfullness. (Theres probably a word in German for that concept, a kind of quantum state of not true but not entirely false either, the kind of complex and compound word form beloved of paranoid German bachelor philosophers…but I digress…)
So GeeDubya, it is revealed, was not relating a falsehood. At the time of his speaking, it was in this amorphous state that later “turned out” to be a steaming pile of bullshit.
You’re smart, december. But so are we. No sale.
Well, there you go. Just put a myth and a parable into a blender and you’ve got a one-eyed giant crying because he’s got a stake in his eye and needs a mouse to pull it out.
And a justification for war.
A very interesting take on this here:
"Another possibility is more disturbing still, and regrettably I have to say I think it is a certainty. Those who use military intelligence do not understand what it is.
Throughout history, in virtually every conflict, a universal law has applied. That law says that when it comes to military intelligence, whatever you think you know is incomplete, and some of it is wrong. You don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know how much you don’t know, and you don’t know what part of what you think you know is wrong. "
Billy Bob Elucidator says “Check it out!”
I’m sure you know the answer to your question, minty. If Bush was saying pretty much what leading Democrats and other world leaders were saying, then chances are he wasn’t lying. If he was lying, then all of them were lying, which seems like an unlikely conspiracy. Whether or not Bush was lying is important politically.
It seems clear now that some intelligence reports were wrong, but that doesn’t make liars out of Bush and all these leading Democrats and other world leaders. In fact, it’s hard to fault them for believing the intelligence reports and acting on them.
BTW it’s still not clear whether or not Iraq had WMDs. They certainly had plenty of time to hide them between 1998 and 2002. And, they never provided a sensible report of what happened to the WMDs they were known to have in 1998. People who claim that we now know that there are no WMDs are exaggerating.
elucidator’s cite makes a similar point. Intelligence is invariably incomplete and partially wrong. So, there’s all the more reason to believe that Bush’s errors were due to imperfect intelligence, rather than outright lying.
Once you set aside the lying, the question remains: Did Bush make the right decision, even though some of the intelligence info was incorrect? I think he did. YMMV.
What December just said with a caveat on the right decision thing. I want to see how this WMD thing plays out, first.
BTW, eluciator, that’s a good link. Editorial, but not in a bad way.
Ditto on that link. Excellent stuff.
I want to meet the Information Dominatrix, myself. Just so we could discuss aforesaid intelligence, you understand.
elucidator:
Ahh Yes, the Many World’s Interpretation of Quantum Physics as applied to the WMD controversy.
As we all know from the Schroedinger’s Cat experiment, the cat is neither alive nor dead until it is observed.
Therefore Bush was neither lying nor telling the truth when he asserted that Saddam posessed WMDs.
The WMDs existed in a dysmorphic quantum state.
The reason we have not found them is because they have not actualized. They will not actualize until we observe them. Seeing as how we can’t observe them until they actualize, and they can’t actualize until we observe them, demanding that we find them is an unreasonable request.
We know for a fact that they exist, just not necessarily in this particular quantum state of the multiverse.
Excuse me, I need to email Ari Fleisher.
Even apart from the obvious definitional of “leading Democrats” and “other world leaders” (hint: Nancy Pelosi and Jacques Chirac called Bush for the hysterical fabricating piece of shit that he apparently was), the fallacy you’re working with is that a person who is lied to does not become a “liar” by accepting the liar’s representations in good faith.
“Sucker” != “Liar isn’t lying.”
And I say that accepting my own role as a sucker for Bush’s falsehoods, misrepresentations, ill-informed assertions, and wishful thinking. Before the war, I fully accepted that Iraq had chemical weapons and was more or less actively seeking to produce nuclear and biological weapons. I did not believe that Saddam’s paltry NBC programs represented any real threat to the U.S. given the existing sanctions and his complete inability to deliver those weapons to U.S. targets, but I was foolish enough to believe the Bush admin’s assurances that Saddam had that stuff.
Fool me once, shame one you. Fool december and Scylla incessantly, spam the boards with transparently stupid rationalizations.
One word: Niger.
“definitional problem”
Repeating a post from earlier this month:
There were so many good reasons to effect regime change militarily:[ol][li]Iraq had indicated that they would never obey their commitments and the UN resolutions.[]Iraq had large amounts of WMDs[]Iraq had a desire to acquire an arsenal of WMDs.[]Iraq supported terrorism[]Saddam hated the US.[]All non-military approaches had failed to bring them into compliance.[]Because of the corruption of certain member countries and the UN itself, the UN was never going to take effective action.[]The US had the wherewithall to win the war quickly and with relatively few casualties. []The cruelty of the Ba’ath regime justified regime change all by itself.[/ol]As it turns out, reason #2 appears to have been wrong or exaggerated. OTOH #9, the cruelty of the Ba’ath regime, was even worse than many believed. All the other reasons turned out to be correct. [/li]
So, granting that the report of the uranium from Niger turned out to be incorrect, there were still many, many reasons justifying the war about which Bush was correct.
Honestly, as time goes by I´m getting more convinced that Bush apologist must suffer some kind of battered wife syndrome .
I really don`t get it. :rolleyes:
This thread might as well get moved to Great Debates, the way it’s been going. What I’m going to do next would solve that problem at most boards I frequent, but you people are too smart for that. 
What did you call december? :eek: