HairyCanary said:
What is important to me about GW's belief structure is the conviction that he cannot make mistakes, and that his way is the only Right Way. That's what I mean by "annointed by God". He is still human, but he seems to have lost sight of that fact.
This is simply your opinion, stated in a way to appear as fact. I've never heard anything about Bush saying that he is infallible - especially justified on the account of religion. You made the claim that he feels that he is "annointed by god" and that because of that he believes he can "do no wrong". You have to admit you've done nothing to support this viewpoint other than just restating it. The bottom line is, of course he is going to stand behind what he has done that he thinks is right, in fact - a lot of people say he’s right, and he has admitted in the debates that has had made mistakes in appointment decisions. Then you do on to talk about flip-floping, an issue I didn't even mention and will leave for the sake of sticking only to points you made in response to my statements.
HairyCanary said:
Well, 80 billion is obviously not enough to deal with bin Laden, since we have not caught or killed him yet. It could be 200 billion if we didn't have to reconstruct Iraq -- keeping in mind that it only needs to be reconstructed because we destroyed it.
Perhaps, and this is just a guess, the variables at play in catching Osama depend on more than just money? I wonder if we spent 200 billion on figuring out where Hoffa’s body went we might find him? Or maybe, we could determine if OJ really is guilty after all?? For one thing, money doesn’t solve everything, there is no proven correlation between the amount of money spent and the success of a given operation. Secondly, we wouldn’t have spent any significant amount more in Afghanistan if we had not gone into Iraq, we have most of what is necessary for now. The fact is, people are fond of complaining about any foreign military expenditure.
To your second point - you advocate sanctions but complain about the logisitic mess we are cleaning up there? Sanctions and poor government management are what “destroyed” Iraq LONG before March 2003. There are now more megawatts of power on the grid of Iraq than there were before we kicked out Saddam. By June, there will be more power on the grid than has EVER been there, we’re talking pre-gulf war. Also, if you look at the damage as a result of the war, a huge proportion of it is the result of terrorists thinking this is a time to compete for power. Iraqis themselves are responsible for much of the bombing, chaos, and destruction. Would you have made this argument when the Marshall Plan rebuilt all of Europe?
HairyCanary said:
With all due respect to the Kurds, if it comes down to them or Americans, I will give priority to Americans -- it's our own citizens that were killed when the twin towers were destroyed.
And it will be our citizens again if we don’t do something to stop the movement of terrorism that we are now obviously facing. Assuming that Iraq has no part in all of this is naïve.
I didn’t mention the Kurds to say that they are, expressly, why we went into Iraq, but, you cannot discount the good we did for them, or the evil of Saddam; especially when you are referring to him as a "nuisance". We lost 3000 people and the hands of Osama and company, they lost 300,000 people thanks to Saddam, and he is the nuisance – the comparison is stark.
HairyCanary said:
Alright, tell me how many nations he has attacked while we had 2/3 of his country covered with a no-fly zone. We crippled his country with sanctions, and effectively castrated his ability to do *anything* threatening to other countries. He may have been a threat in the past, but for a number of years before we invaded Iraq a second time, he has been merely an annoyance.
The US, and your candidate, obviously did not believe that his ability to do “anything” to other nations was castrated. We are talking about terrorism here, no fly zones didn’t stop him from giving $25,000 to families of suicide bombers, all the UN rules in existence did nothing to stop him from plotting to assassinate one of our Presidents.
John Kerry voted for the war, and he believed that there was a good possibility that there were indeed weapons and a threat there. Saddam had a history of hiding things, he broke resolutions left and right, and was finding ways to get around the sanctions to re-start his weapons plans (see oil for food fiasco and darfur report). There really is no debating this issue- 30+ nations agreed to help out, even the UN was threatening to use force but could not do so due to veto power of two nations getting rich off Saddam (again, see oil for food).
HairyCanary said:
If the UN never authorized force, then we should never have used any unless Saddam became a direct threat to the United States or one of her allies.
We know at least one of the reasons why the UN didn’t use force (see above), even though they puffed up their chest and threatened it. The problem with what you are saying is that “direct threat” is an ambiguous thing. If you support the war in Afghanistan, which incidentally, Kerry does, then you have to follow the same logic. Did the Taliban plan 9/11?? No, but we took them out of power unabashedly. In Iraq, you have a regime breaking resolutions, with a record of funding some terrorism, who plotted to assassinate the President, and was continuing to defy the will of the world. Iraq had YEARS to clean up its act, time was up. If the UN had said ok, then this would have all been justified, right?
HairyCanary said:
Saudi Arabia does more to support terrorists than Iraq. Bin Laden is a Saudi Arabia native. And have you taken a good look at the Saudi's human rights record? Why aren't we invading *them*??
According to your argument, we're not invading cause the UN didn’t say we could. Obviously, we can’t invade every country that has a human rights problem, or has terrorists within its borders. That is like saying we feed hungry people in Venezuela, why not every hungry person in every country. You cannot take the logical extension of every argument to its end in order to attempt to prove a fallacy. We dealt with Iraq because the issue came up. We are dealing with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the like, who, not remarkably, have cleaned up their act significantly since we showed we mean business. If you read the paper, there are articles all the time talking about the terror arrests made the by governments of these countries. Syria voluntarily gave up their weapons programs and allowed military transparency as a result of Bush-led diplomacy, we gave Saddam the same opportunity on many occasions.
HairyCanary said:
No offense, but I'd like to use this phrase as a demonstration of a problem I think faces our country -- we're declaring war on nouns, because other people are declaring war on nouns. Bin Laden is waging war on "western values"? That's what we tell our self to make it all feel okay. And we're declaring war on "terrorism"?? Neither of these make any sense at all -- if we're going to declare war, it needs to have a goal. Saying that we're going to war on terrorism is like going to war on drugs -- it's a never ending war, it cannot be won, because there is no definition of winning. Watch carefully, and you will see that the real losers in this so-called war are ourselves.
Are the real losers in the “war on drugs” ourselves as well? Should we not fight drugs because we can't eliminate them completely? Obviously, when you declare war on a noun, it is more for the purpose of a catch phrase to show intent to tackle a serious problem. I agree with you that this is a bit of a euphemism, but I disagree with your assertion that the term is essentially meaningless.
You have to look at not so much the wording of the declaration, but the effect of it. What this really is, is a war on fundamentalist groups who preach hate toward the US, its allies, and other industrialized nations. And they conspire to, and carry out, acts of terrorism on us. That is what 9/11 was about, not some isolated occurrence, but rather part of a greater movment and product of ideology. All of this is largely justified by religion, a minority of the Islamic community who believe that killing Americans and others (ie: Europeans) with “western values” (capitalism, freedom, democracy, women’s rights, etc) is sanctioned by god. It has taken root all over the world and everywhere shares essentially the same doctrine; progress is bad, Christians are infidels, 'we must strike them and their way of life from the planet'. It’s a twisted form of Islam that, most of the Middle Eastern community and world, would like help in defeating. As the recent acts in Russia, Israel, Spain, the Philippines, etc serve to show, "terror" has more substance to it than you may suspect. Will it ever completely go away, no, but we can do a lot to mitigate it. Oh and btw your candidate supports the war on terror.
Ok, I'm done..lol, I do like discussing this stuff - it is tough to do on stanknet cause the situations are more complex then this forum is really designed to deal with.
Oh as far as mustangs go, I should also give a congrats to you for the recent cobra buy - was the color of my choice, hopefully after my rates go down, i'll be able to afford to insure one of those bad boys
.
Later,
Scott