We supported Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, back when they were fighting against the Soviet Union; we also supported the extremely violent gangs known as “death squads” in Latin America, who murdered thousands of civilians, including women, children and priests. More recently, we supported groups of Muslim militants in the Balkans, and allied ourselves with Afghan warlords when fighting the Taliban. As for dictators and “mass murderers,” we supported Saddam Hussein in the eighties, as well as Indonesia’s strongman Suharto, Chile’s strongman Pinochet, military governments in South Korea, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, and the repressive Saudi Arabian monarchy.
The problem is, bulletsponge, that you’ve done nothing but avoid every single point that SK and everyone else has made in this thread, and attacked only those that are either the most flimsy, or are the ones you can best argue against.
In defense of Ron Paul, he’s basically a Libertarian in Republican clothing, and Libertarians have staunchly opposed Iraq. That whole addressing the LP National Convention in 2004, lifetime membership to the Libertarian Party, and 1988 Libertarian Presidential candidate probably say more about his ideology than the ® after his name on C-SPAN. So, I guess he’s one of the last Libertarian holdouts in the GOP. But that’s really not of any importance. 
Avoided the points? You argue the points you can and learn what you can about the others. I will be the first to admit, I have never really kept tabs on terrorist groups that we have supported and I haven’t even heard of some of them before. So I am learning. I only recently 5 years or so ago, tried to keep up with these things. Before then my world was comfortably centered around myself. It no longer is. And when have you ever argued the points that you couldn’t argue well? It really is kind of stupid to hold against me the fact that I argue the points I can argue best. And while I am starting to see things from the point of view in which they are being presented, I still hold my ground as to where my loyalties in this debate lie. I am starting to see things through two perspectives, but I still support my side. I do not apologize for anything I have said.
Also, looking at the respective time frames, several of these groups were given support in the Clinton administration.
Well, the Muslim militants in the Balkans were, at least. To be sure, Clinton had his own share of reprehensible global aggression; unfortunately, much of the mainstream Democratic leadership is not opposed in principle to such aggression, although it is less inclined to promulgate it, because its base is more antiwar and more inclined to support antiwar candidates. However, Bush exceeds his predecessors in ideological zeal; the neoconservatives in his administration have made war the defining aspect of his presidency, advocate a perpetual state of war in the service of an abstract “freedom,” and believe that our military should be permanently involved in every region in the world.
what do you mean by abstract freedom? i don’t quite follow that.
I mean that they use “freedom” as a sort of abstract term, disassociated from what goes on in reality. The concept of “freedom” is generally associated with certain rights, like freedom of speech, trial by jury, and so on. Neoconservatives claim to support these rights; one of their (ever-changing) justifications for going to war against Iraq was that Saddam deprived his people of these rights. However, at the same time, neoconservatives also support laws that restrict these same rights and give the government greater powers over people’s private lives (like forcing libraries to hand over lists of books that their visitors read, or letting the government arrest people without a warrant, and imprison them indefinitely without bringing charges). They favour greater government secrecy and reduced government accountability; they also approve of killing civilians, and using torture and collective punishment, when those things occur as part of their own policy. So, basically, they believe that “freedom” is a quality that they inherently possess, and that all of their actions serve to promote “freedom,” even though they condemn these exact same actions when they’re done by whoever they want to go to war with.
ok, i’m all for the support of the rights that saddam has been denying his people, and i think that treating people who have been committed to you as your responsibility the way he has is enough reason for forcible removing from power, but i am not, to use the handy term you’ve been using, a neoconservative. i think that the way this country was meant to run is a balance of power between the government and the people. these people pushing for arrest without warrant and imprisonment without charges…those are the kinds of things that will turn America into the kind of country hussein was running.
Okay, fair enough. But when you support the war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam mistreated his people, you’re making a similar argument. Essentially, your reasoning boils down to this: “Because Saddam killed many of his people, it’s acceptable for us to also kill many of his people, as long as we also oppose Saddam, and then try to establish freedom sometime later.” Because the war doesn’t just remove Saddam from power: it also kills thousands of people (100,000, by The Lancet’s estimate) directly, kills thousands of others indirectly (by destroying vital infrastructure, leading to epidemics, also by spreading depleted uranium), destroys the livelihoods of thousands of others (by destroying farmland and industry), triggers waves of crime and terrorism (by destroying the old government’s ability to control them), and in the end, leads to unintended political consequences, like the rise of a Shi’ite theocracy that may care even less about human rights than Saddam used to. All of that leads to wider support for an insurgency against our occupation, because people don’t like it when their own government mistreats them, but they like it even less when it comes from a foreign government.
Sure, we may not have intended to do all of these things (although the neoconservatives certainly don’t care a whole lot one way or the other), but we’re still responsible. These things are inevitable in war, but that doesn’t justify the war; on the contrary, that’s the thing that makes war a last resort, justifiable only in self-defence. The problem is, when you try to justify killing people for the sake of giving people freedom, that’s essentially the same as claiming a right to decide who gets to be free and who has to die. But that claim is antithetical to the whole idea of freedom, which holds that no one should have such a right.
At the risk of being redundant, the problem with that argument is we’ve supported Hussein before in the past and the fact that you keep talking about how horrible Hussein is and how his cruelty was enough reason to remove him from forcibly from power amounts to nothing because of both our support of him and because it wasn’t President Bush’s initial reason for entering Iraq.
i know that the american government has supported him, but i haven’t. you make it sound as though the flaw with my arguement lies in the fact that i personally supported him. i get the feeling that what you’re saying comes down to, “you supported him and now you don’t. What’s up with you?” from several posts, even if that’s not what you’re trying to say (i doubt it is.) And granted it may not have been the initial reason Bush used, and people keep throwing the fact that we supported him out. the current president, to my knowledge, has not supported him, merely put up with him.
In response to SK, it does take lives directly. the lives it takes directly are those in the military, the ones who already knew the risk of fighting and chose to gamble on it anyway. and as you said, the indirect casualties are unavoidable in many cases. this sounds harsh but, it happens. that’s not to say that i like it, but there is nothing that you or i can do about it.
btw, i’m going to south dakota, so this is the last day i’ll have to debate this issue unless the thread’s still up when i get back on the 22nd.
The flaw with your argument is that you think that, if we make a mistake, we can fix it by doing the exact same thing that we did to make the first mistake. Back when we supported Saddam Hussein, it was also in response to some perceived “problem.” We just thought that he was the good guy, and that by supporting him, we could fix things. Then it turned out that he actually wasn’t a good guy, that we didn’t foresee all the complications that arose from supporting him, and that by supporting him, we created a whole new problem. Your solution to that problem is basically to do the exact same thing once again, namely to use our money and military force to interfere in that region, in the hopes that that will fix the problem that we ourselves had created. The problem isn’t that we chose to support Saddam Hussein instead of some other guy. The problem is that we got involved in a region of the world that we don’t understand, and whose affairs aren’t any of our business, and because of that we only made things worse than they were before. So, in the process of trying to fix the problem of Saddam, we created a whole bunch of new problems that we, of course, were never prepared for. Thus our cycle of failed intervention continues without end.
So, like I said, your argument is essentially this: “Because Saddam killed many of his people, it’s acceptable for us to also kill many of his people, as long as we also oppose Saddam, and then try to establish freedom sometime later.” But then, if you think it’s acceptable for us to kill people in the service of our policy, then that basically defeats your own argument against Saddam on the grounds that he killed people in the service of his policy. Your moral argument enters into a contradiction: you’re claiming to value human life when you argue against Saddam, and simultaneously you’re writing off human life as disposable when we’re the ones destroying it. Yes, everybody knows that war is destructive. But that fact doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for starting the war; on the contrary, that fact is the reason why war is something that we should avoid unless our own survival is at stake. War is inherently not a humanitarian thing, and that is why it should only be used as a last resort, in self-defence.
You’re right, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I never suggested that you supported Hussein in any way. What I’m saying is your only real argument right now seems to be that Hussein is a horrible person who deserved to be removed from power. Those grounds alone don’t make Iraq any more justified, and it certainly doesn’t justify the +100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties you seem to be writing off as acceptable losses.
i am not writing them off as acceptable, i am pointing out that it has happened. civilian deaths are never acceptable. war was meant to be kept to the soldiers who were fighting it. also, war is not necessarily the only way to fix what we screwed up. and now two final points. firstly, my challenge has not been answered in any way shape or form…what would you be doing now if you were president. and as you seem so fond of saying that war should be only in self defence…that nearly contradicts itself. there would be no war in the first place…a very good thing. and yet what about the defence of others. i write off no civilian casualties and the soldiers knew the risk already, as i pointed out before. it is not written off, it is unavoidable at this stage of the game and nothing can be done about it by you or i. if you have some master plan to bring peace to the middle east, and stop the killing there, then i’m behind you all the way. also, as you seem fond of pointing out, we didn’t know very much about the area. that is we can amend that. also, from listening to the news i have gathered that the iraqi’s have finished a constitution and the only ones don’t like it are the ones who lose a fraction of influence due to the changes. it started off quite rockily i’ll admit, and the fight isn’t over, but i think we are nearing the end of the fighting. regretably, there are no plans to remove troops from the area any time soon as far as i’ve heard.
I don’t see why anyone should answer to this challenge. First of all, if anyone were to do so, they would be claiming that they have enough knowledge about American internal politics, foreign relations, and the machinations of the government to form a reasonable plan that would bring about peace. Second, the focus here is criticism of the illegality of the war and why it should <i>not</i> have happened, not how to fix it. No one knows how to fix it cleanly, (and personally I believe) not even John Kerry, as America is already so entrenched in it and so many casulties already taken that it is now impossible to pull out with so much responsibility and pressure on the government. Lastly, simply because something (civilian, soldier casulties) is unavoidable at a late stage does not mean the entire affair could not have been avoided in the first place. Invading Iraq is hardly a defensive operation, for anyone.
Bush, in his characteristic black-and-white, have asked whether the Sunnis would like to live in a society of “freedom” or “violence”. Yet, to settle on a constitution that is not agreed on by 20% of the population of Iraq would only lead to the same problem, at a later date. They can defeat the constitution easily in the October 15th referendum, you know, and the small number of seats that the Sunnis hold in parliament is not really true to rep-by-pop where the Sunnis are concerned.
I hate it when people blame things when its not even that things fault. If they wanna blame someone, blame themselves. I am sick of people, and or other things, being blamed for somthing they havent even done, or think of doing. I almost didnt even read the whole thing, because this man obviously wants to attack religon, because he is scared to blame society or government. Religon is very easy to blame. People are lame and have to blame somthing else for their stupid actions. Religon itself doesnt destroy anything. People that hate religon, or dont promote it, try to bring religon down. Here is an example.
Lets say there was a town full of blue people, every one was happy, and lived a good life. One day, purple people came into the town and settled there. The purple people didnt do anything to the blue people, other than try to be friends with them. But the Blue people were stuborn and didnt like the purple people, just because they were different and did things the blue people didnt do. SO one day a blue person lit a building on fire, but it wasnt an ordinary building, it was a blue owned building, in which the blue people loved and admired. When people started to ask who burned it down, the blue people started to blame the purple people. The purple people didnt do anything, but yet they were looked down upon because they were labled as a people who destroy the blue peoples way of life. Purple was blamed, when blue really did it.
Moral of the story: Dont blame somthing or someone for an action that could very well be yours or some one elses fault.
holy shit
lolz. Bumbles bounce.
And stupidity runs RAMPANT once more.
Stuff like this is why one day aliens are going to come along and kill us all out of pity.