Silverbackman said:
The problem is that people, especially Americans, want simple answers to complex problems. We mouth clich?s like ?gTax the Rich?h without understanding the economics of taxation and ?gExit Strategy?h without understanding the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics while pretending these and similar catch phrases have some sort of mystical power to change reality. They don?ft.
I find the Bush administration's continued use of catch phrases like "stay the course" to be much the same, made even worse when you consider the status of the person making it.
silverbackman said:
The fact is this is not the time to ask if we belong in Iraq regardless of if you agree with our presence there or not.
ER...so when American troops are in Iraq is not the time to ask if American troops should be in Iraq? When would be the appropriate time then? When American troops are in Sweden?
silverbackman said:
However due to the overwhelmingly complex nature of the Middle East and it?fs history the time to have asked this question was – before – we went in. At the time both sides of the aisle said, ?gyes?h but now we?fre starting to second-guess ourselves. This is not a good idea in any situation but this is especially true in dealing with the Middle East.
I disagree with this completely. When it becomes apparant that you have made a collosal error in judgment second guessing yourself (or to use a less loaded phrase, 're-thinking your position') makes perfect sense. If your thinking was wrong in the past, then why just stubbornly stick to the same course of action without questioning whether, given the unexpected change in situation, it makes sense to do so anymore?
Silberbackman said:
Not only that but it completely screws our global reputation.
Not to be rude, but America's global reputation got flushed down the crapper a long time ago.
Silverbackman said:
Vietnam did enough damage to our credibility we don?ft need to compound it by following it up with half-measures in Iraq.
If that were even remotely true then you would expect that the old 'domino theory' would have been actualized. But it wasn't, the biggest damage to American credibility in Vietnam was its stubborn insistence on drawing out the conflict years after it had become apparent it was a loosing cause.
Silverbackman said:
It is entirely inconceivable how bad it would be to leave at this point. Essentially we?fve committed ourselves to open heart surgery and half way through the procedure we?fre getting ?gcold feet?h and want to quit. This is bad for the doctor, bad for the patient, and bad for everyone involved.
Yes, but if the doctor is using infected instruments that not only aren't improving the condition of the patient but risk making his condition much worse, then what good is being done?
silverbackman said:
As much as I hate loosing soldiers the effects of leaving would result in far more deaths in a far shorter period of time. Remember we?fve lost around 2,000 men in the years since we invaded Iraq while we lost over 3,000 people in a single day on September 11, 2001. If loosing a couple hundred people a year trying to rehabilitate the Middle East saves thousands, hundreds-of-thousands, or even millions of lives in the long run then I think it is a cause that warrants our support.
yes, but that is all hypothesizing and there isn't much reason to believe that the violence Iraqis will suffer from an American withdrawal is going to be any worse than the violence Iraqis will suffer from America staying in Iraq.
silverbackman said:
A year and a half previous and in no way related to Iraq.
Silverbackman said:
2. You get intelligence that Iraq is trying to purchase fissionable material that can be used in the construction of a nuclear device. (This turned out to be false but Bush didn?ft know this until after we invaded – he didn?ft lie – we were duped - to be honest I?fm not sure which is worse).
Only they didn't "get" intelligence, they just looked through the same old intelligence they'd had lying around for years and cherry-picked the stuff that made Iraq look dangerous while ignoring the much more convincing intelligence that suggested Iraq posed no threat. That is as good as lying by any objective standard.
Silverbackman said:
4. Iraqi reports to the UN demonstrate that even by their own estimates thousands of gallons of chemical and biological agents are unaccounted for (these likely ended up being accidentally / intentionally dumped into the local water supply via the Tigris / Euphrates rivers which explains elevated levels of birth defects found down stream from these depots).
Pretty big leap to say that because they can't be accounted for they must not only still exist but also pose a threat to the US. Especially when you've got convincing reasons to believe that A) most of them have in fact been disposed of and B) Even if some haven't you KNOW that Saddam has absolutely no way of using them against you or his neighbors to his advantage.
silverbackman said:
5. Saddam is putting out speeches about (paraphrase) the "heroes of 9/11" that this is "Only the beginning" and other inflammatory rhetoric designed to stoke Islamic hatred.
Empty rhetoric spews out of people's mouths everyday, it is hardly a reasonable excuse for starting a war.
Silverbackman said:
6. UN weapons inspectors found hundreds of shells filled with mustard gas that Iraq denied having. Tests on these shells indicated the weapons were still over 90% effective even though they were vintage shells stockpiled since World War II.
Thus proving the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors the Bush administration was so eager to displace in favor of war.
Silverbackman said:
7. How any of you can want such an evil man like Saddam in power to stop "anarchy" is beyond me. Saddam is the worst type of person, he killed close to a million people. He didn't just rule with an iron fist, he killed people who were innocent. His all-time favorite idol was Joseph Stalin, as if that is anything of a suprise.
Some of you say that there is a high amount of Iraq casuality in Iraq, but the truth is it doesn't come near to the amount of people Saddam killed and the many more people he would have killed if he was still in power.
This ignores a lot. Saddam killed lots of people, but the last time he had done (or been in a position to do) anything overly horrendous was over a decade before the invasion. IN 2003 he wasn't commiting massacres nor was there any ground or fear to believe that he could or would do so anytime soon. True, he was killing political opponents and torturing people, but not on a level that would have differentiated him from any other regime in that region. If the humanitarian excuse for the war is to have any validity, you must be able to show that the situation now in Iraq is probably better than it would have been had Saddam stayed in power. The tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in this was are way more than any reasonable estimate of what Saddam's vicims would have numbered over the same period- and that isn't counting the future victims as the number of Iraqis killed in violence continues to spiral upwards.
Silverbackman said:
1. Invade and make sure the WOMD?fs are secured and if they don?ft exist he gets egg on his face.
2. Not invade but if Baby Bush ignores all of this and Iraq walks a nuke across our exceedingly porous (essentially unpatrolled) Southern boarder and turns LA, Chicago, or some other city or cities into radioactive craters it would be what we in science call ?gbad.?h
There is just absolutely ZERO basis in reality for this scenario. The logic fails on so many levels. Lets ignore for the moment the fact that Saddam didn't have any WMDs. THe fact remains that its not easy to make nukes and there wasn't any real danger that he would produce them after 1991. The process would have taken years (probably decades), required technical skills and facilities Iraq didn't have, required resources Iraq didn't have and would have no way of acquiring and would have had to be undetectable to 24 hour US surveillance. Then the bomb would have to be somehow smuggled out of Iraq - no easy task -and into the US -again no easy task.
But even that isn't the end of the ludicrousness of the scenario. What the hell would Saddam have to gain by doing this? NOTHING, and the only foreseeable consequence would be his instant annhiliation by US retaliation. Then there is the even further point that even in the one in a billion chance that Saddam ever were able to produce a nuclear weapon the only possible situation in which he would use it would be if the US invaded, so how the hell invasion can be justified along the lines of preventing an Iraqi attack just confounds me.
silverbackman said:
So he didn?ft have a choice. I would have made the same call, as would anyone with a measurable IQ, so it didn?ft matter who was in the White House – it had to happen. Bush, Gore, Kerry, Hilary Clinton or even Teddy F?fing Kennedy would have had to do the exact same thing and gotten the exact same egg on their face. If we?fre going to kick Bush for something let?fs kick him for something he actually has some control over like his F?fd up domestic policies or that fact that he ignores the illegal immigration problem. Iraq is a nonsequitur.
Like hell he didn't have a choice. He had a choice, he made it and now people are paying the consequences. He isn't going to get off the hook on that one.
Silverbackman said:
Before someone brings up ?gUS greed for Oil?h it has nothing to do with ?gUS greed for Oil.?h We get around 10% of our oil from the Middle East and we could easily cover this loss using domestic sources (around 50% of US oil consumption) or with imports from Canada and Latin America (around 30% of US oil consumption). On the other hand Europe gets around 35% of its oil from the Middle East while Japan gets around 75% (maybe more) of it?fs oil from the Middle East. Now for those not keeping up on current events Japan and Germany make up the second and third largest economies on Earth. What happens if these economies loose access to oil on such a grand scale? Here?fs a clue: Global Economic Disaster.
Of course its the oil, for reasons you've just explained but failed to notice. The US doesn't need middle east oil but the rest of the world does, making control of the middle east undoubtedly the largest focus of American foreign policy for the past 50 years. The political and economic power American dominance of the region creates is immense and would be greatly enhanced by the permanent establishment of US military facilities in Iraq, which is one of the planners of the war's main objectives.