OMG INVASION >:E!
Oh, please, spare me the crocodile tears. Not only did the United States and British governments have no problem with Hussein killing his own people in the eighties, they actively supported him and helped supply him with the exact same chemical weapons that he used to kill his enemies (after helping him seize power in the first place). In addition to being complicit in those murders, we also committed just as many, if not more, on our own. According to a study conducted by the British medical journal The Lancet, we killed 100,000 civilians in this past war, but this figure doesn’t include our assault on Fallujah, nor does it take into account the crime wave that we unwittingly unleashed when we destroyed the Iraqi government, or the future deaths that will occur from the depleted uranium with which we’ve poisoned many parts of the country.
No. The 9/11 Commission found that there was “no credible evidence” of any link between Hussein and al-Qaeda in planning attacks against the United States.
I take up that challenge.
Edit; on second thought, I won’t
a bit of rephrasing from a comedian I once heard;
“I don’t mind wars for justice, revenge, love, but religion? Come on, that’s just like fighting over who has the better imaginary friend”
Not to mention that stating the Al Qaida network as an “ally” of the former Iraqi government is a far stretch all by itself.
The ones who came over to our nation and knocked the towers down, that was unintentional “training.” If you knew that someone was gonna fly a plane into a building, would you have trained them? No, you would have arrested them. You make it sound as though we knew what they were going to do and trained them anyway. We have not aided in their training to the degree you make it seem. btw, the ones we “trained” are already dead.
p.s. Kairi, you must not fully understand religion in any way shape or form. Religion is the basis of the creation of this nation, religion influences the formation of laws in nearly every country in the world, including the US and Iraq. If you tread on ground consisdered sacred by one sect or another, do it nonchalantly and unapologetically, there are generally groups of that sect that will do something drastic about it. Every religion has its extremists. Religion is important to all but the small number of people who refuse to believe in a god of any sort. I think you hardly know of what you speak.
No, i’m talking about us giving them weapons, and CIA training. We gave them the weapons and training to fight the soviet union.
Great idea, huh?
http://www.hevanet.com/peace/cia_trained_bin_laden2.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/155236.stm
CIA? You think we sent CIA teams over to train them? And if you are suggesting they got CIA training some other way, I’m curious to hear about that. I’m willing to put money on most of the stuff you see on the web being a load of bull anyway.
You really should learn a bit about this subject before trying to argue over it. USA originally trained and supplied these people with weapons in order to fight off the communist forces that were moving in on the territory, particularly Afghanistan. There’s a saying in my country “Breed crows, and they’ll poke your eyes out” (…I swear, it sounds a lot better in Spanish) which fits the situation perfectly. That’s the irony: You trained the hounds, forgot to put the leash on and now they are biting you in the ass.
If the dog bites, kill it. (Referencing the terrorists, not the innocents…obviously)
Just look at the links I’m sending, i’m pretty sure it’s clear through those. here are some more.
www.americanfreepress.net/10_01_01/Bin_Laden_s__Freedom_Fighters_/bin_laden_s__freedom_fighters_.html
http://proliberty.com/observer/20011005.htm
It wasn’t recent training, but training no less.
Edit: beat to it.
I’ll concede the point to you with the free press article but, given that we trained them (in a sense, and no matter how recent) we should be able to counter them effectively. And as far as I can see, you’re right we may have helped train them, but we did nothing to inspire the attacks of september 11 (at least, not that I am aware of.)
Ignoring the fact that your comment springs an enormous moral debate, do you know ANYTHING about wars?
I study them. World War 2 most specifically, but I learn as much as possible about any and all wars. Why do you ask?
Because someone as knowledgeable as you claim to be should understand that it’s just an itsy bitsy more complicated than saying “Okay, innocents on the left, terrorists on the right. Move it along people, we don’t wanna shoot the wrong ones here”. And that’s still without bringing up the fact that you are suggesting genocide.
But therein lies the point. We <i>didn’t</i> know that they would turn on us; we just had no problem with them using terrorist tactics to murder other people, because we thought that would strengthen our influence around the world and weaken the influence of our rivals. They were always terrorists and religious extremists; it’s just that they used to terrorize someone else before they started terrorizing us. This shows two things. First, the government’s “humanitarian” justification for war is hypocritical and deceitful, because in reality the government has no problem with people who use terrorism and violate human rights, as long as it thinks they can expand its global influence by doing so. Second, our policy of endless warmongering is short-sighted and harmful to us, because in reality we are ignorant of the regions and people we are trying to influence. As a result, our actions repeatedly turn against us, we never expect it, and when it happens, we think we can fix the problem forever by just doing the same thing again, even though that will eventually turn against us too. The only way to escape this cycle is to abandon the policy of intervention in areas of the world that are none of our business.
No, I know war is not that way, and …genocide? Hardly. Genocide would mean I wish to incite the deaths of each and every person in the country. That would be genocide. What I am suggesting is war. Even Bobby B. down the street knows that you shoot the other man before he shoots you in war. Its logic, yeah? Not brain surgery. And exactly what do you mean by saying that trying to help someone is hypocritical? I do not believe this is merely a war to expand US influence. I must know though. How many flaming liberals and Bush haters are there in tonights crowd. I see your hand raised, who else?
Edit: So if we are that ignorant of how they are, why do we not open minds for a different view and learn what’s going on to a greater degree than we know now?
World War 2 left survivors in my country, does that mean there was no genocide?
Genocide - the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic, religious, or cultural group. Extermination notates that there is NO ONE left in that group. So in all reality, there has never been genocide. I’m not saying, by any means, that there has never been mass murder of thousands of people, but never a true genocide.
It’s really pretty simple. If the government claims that it opposes terrorism, but has a long record of supporting terrorist groups who happen to be friendly towards the government, then the government is being hypocritical. Similarly, if the government claims that it wants to promote human rights, but has a long and on-going record of actively supporting people who violate human rights, the government is being hypocritical. And if the government claims that it wants to stop a dictator from killing innocent people, but kills just as many people as the dictator (while also having helped the dictator kill people in the first place), using cluster bombs and depleted uranium, that is also hypocritical.
That’s your problem. That Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, however, is a fact acknowledged even by the 9/11 Commission, not to mention Bush’s own former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and top counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke.
Hey, it looks like you’re trying to discredit your opponents by calling them liberals, as if that even meant anything anymore. But actually, it so happens that the critics of our self-destructive foreign policy include such “liberals” as Republican Congressman Ron Paul, Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, and hell, even that old “liberal” Pat Buchanan.
I am not trying to discredit anyone, i am merely curious. i have a some friends quite close to me who are liberals. i call them flaming liberals and they call me a tightwad conservative. some liberals hate bush because of the war, some because he’s a Bush, and others just jump on the bandwagon. I am curious though, so not sarcastically or offensively, but what terrorist groups have we ever supported?