The liklihood of WMD's

I meant to comment on this in last post but messed up so sorry for double post...anyway:

Point 2 here "old enemy" hence not our enemy anymore.

Communism is back in style? Comeon now explain this statement to me.

Russia in no way compares to former Iraq, at least to me. That is not to say there is no threat there just as there is in many other countries. Maybe the U.S did not approach the worlds problems in the right order. Maybe the check list of countries we should do something about was out of order. I seriously have no idea if we should have done something about the other countries first or not.

By the way I do not think the U.S. is safer now because Saddam is out of power, but I still defend the decision to have him removed. Go figure. My philosophies are a bit skewed I admit, but in the end only kindness matters, oh wait I meant in the end I hope the world is a better place. It is going to take time though. You can rush war, but it is hard to rush peace.

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

"Yo know what the threat of a dictator with WMD's is my friend. As far as the targets go why not ask those who have already been targeted in the past by these weapons. Why not ask a man I had met in Kuwait who had lost his sight"

well, apply that to Palestinian children, and Israel is supported by the US, and apply that to people i met in Japan where children are still born NOW suffering the consequences of those A-bombs Yankees dropped there in an ecstatic frenesy of power, and apply that to the 20 countries or so the US thought they had the right to drop bombs on, supporting dictators in South America, ... and i'd say if tyrans and dictatures shouldn't have nuclear weapons and such, take them away from the US! by force if necessary!
see, i'm a threat for the American so-called "democracy" and world domination! so, drop a bomb on me and kill my children, be a good american soldier!

and was deformed due to mustard gas used by Saddam's regime. I am not here trying to justify anything other than the right to act if a threat exists. How many of Americas allies are in stricking distance of Iraq if they had decided to use weapons against them? I go back to the bomb threat scenario. If someone threatened to blow up a school and they were caught but it was found that there was no bomb would we just let them go. No of course not, they would be punished, and the punishment for the threat is severe, at least here in America.

You want me to somehow defend dropping the A-bomb? I am not going to travel that road. You are angry and rightfully so about many things and your focus is not where it needs to be. Lambasting me for being an American soldier is quite unproductive unless you did it to just release some anger. If so you go right ahead, I will listen. I may not agree but I will listen. You have no idea what my story is and I have no idea what yours is. I react to what I experience as do you. The world is not black and white as much as you may want it to be. I learned this lesson the hard way. All I wanted to say here is that there was a threat, a real one by a ruthless sick leader of a large country with a capable military. Are there other countries that fall into this category...well Hell yes there is. Should something be done about them? Of course.

hei 7thson, i didn't mean to insult u, really. it was more addressed generally to whomever forgets cuz of his/her citizenship all the right and wrong things one's country has done in the past or keeps doing now.
u're right we don't know each other. may i assure u that if u did, u wouldn't think 2 minutes i see things things in black and white, there's (almost??) no one more all-is-hues-of-grey than me.
and yes i'm angry at the American politics since 2 centuries or so, but not only at them defending all the rest indiscriminately. everybody has faults.
i don't/didn't agree with Iraq's government either, but still don't think they would've attack a country much more powerful like the US.
and i wanted to point out that when one says "a ruthless sick leader of a large country with a capable military : Are there other countries that fall into this category", one should think of the possibility of including the US into that category, is all.
happy to have a conversation with you.

I think I read everything you wrote and I don't think I missed the point. If I understand it correctly you used the example of the bomb threat against that school to illustrate the Iraq situation pre-american invasion. I just do not agree with you. I don't think it illustrates the level of threat against US in reasonable propotions at all. Or against America's allies. Iraq wouldn't do the mistake of attacking another arab state once again, and more importantly, they were not able to. And Israel. That would be more or less like attacking the US. And I can't understand how Cheney can say that the violence in Israel has decreased since the removal of Saddam. I don't have the statistics but here the news still show images of molested corpses every week.

Over to the gun example... See, if you knew a little more about my views about american gun laws, you probably would also know that I can never buy your allegory here.

There are a lot of bad guys in the world that own guns. Some of them have a record, some of them have not, but that doesn't matter when America decides who to attack and who should be left alone. Now, if we came to an agreement that it is the guns, not who own them, that is the problem... then we can start talking.

Once again, I think it is good to overthrow murderous dictators, we should see more of it. But I don't think humanitarian reasons had much to do with the american invasion, except when selling the war to the public. Please note though that I am not saying that the humanitarian work being carried out by people working on iraqi ground is not valuable or good. Those people should have all the credit.

First of all, using Russia as example is a bit absurd in a way, but at the same time it makes sense.

About point 2. It is an old enemy, just like Iraq. The fact that Russia has a president who rubs USA the right way can change really fast.

Communism is back in style. Russians hated the communists deeply in the beginning of the 1990's when the Soviet Union collapsed. The communist party almost disappeared. Now, it's amazing to see how fast they have recovered and a lot of people actually want to go back to the good old days with less democracy but more order. The communist party is not an insignificant factor in Russia today. But probably not the most dangerous one. One of the things that russians long back to the most is the respect that the name Soviet Union brought with it back in the days. And that is something that the ultra nationalists use more effectively today.

...getting sidetracked here..

I don't think your philosophy is skewed. I understand exactly what you mean and I think you want more or less the same result as I want only we differ in our views about how to get there. You are very right when you say that can't rush peace, only I think that is kind of what you are doing when you rush war. I have said it lots of times before and I say it again: Colin Powell had way too little influence in the Bush administration and that's a damn shame.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

Hey, you made me write "liklihood"!

Thanks for the reply Pidds, very informative. I kinda knew that you got my point, but I wanted to make it clear that I had no paranoia about Iraq directly attacking the U.S. I didn't. I still stand by my belief that he was a threat to many countries including his own.


sidenote: Did I use the word Lambasting earlier? I need a drink.

hey now that's the way conversations should be held (all over the world), congrats guys!
"Once again, I think it is good to overthrow murderous dictators, we should see more of it. But I don't think humanitarian reasons had much to do with the american invasion, except when selling the war to the public. "
good point, i don't see how people can still use such an argument (humanitarian reasons) when it's obvious the US don't move its ass when not in its interest, or why wouldn't they do something for Tibet before Tibetan culture and folk and religion become extinct, or in Tchetchenia? and does anybody know/was it ever shown on TV, what happened in Mandchuria? the language is almost extinct now (a few hundreds left), but who ever cared? who ever helped Kurds and Armenians against Turks? and the US support the entry of that kinda country into a Europe they never belonged to for what reasons? if not military strategy?

Not if you turn that little old vampire bat into a hydra. Or ignore all the boogie men hiding in the batcave's closet.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

I think the only thing that is being hidden in the Batcave closet is Batman's frilly panties. Bruce did seem a bit feminine in the early comics. As far as turning a bat into a hydra well thats why you kill it while it is still a bat.

No, no. Follow my metaphor spam it. I made it a vampire bat. It'd infected things. Including Bruce's floral draws

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Ok, in all seriousness, I'll try and make my worries more concrete:

EDIT: Please note, my good sir (), the idea behind this little spiel is that, even with Saddam's threat taken as a given, there are still downsides to the style of intervention we've used which really could create greater "threat"-and-suffering. [it's not an argument for apathy or leaving him to it. It's an argument against this poorly orchestrated intervention]

-The US (and its itty bitty allies) is struggling to deal with the requirements of an imposed regime change. We don't actually have the manpower or investment to do the job effectively. [i believe that a stable regime, which benefitted the populace, could emerge from all this - but the odds are still against it. And any form of social collapse is liable to kill more through warring and malnutrition than Saddam was likely to do]

-The divisions between the US and its main world competitors has become more entrenched. China, Russia and large trenches of Europe see the line of them-and-us/US as fully drawn now. And although this stems from tussles over oil-influence (to my mind), it can spread it's creepers out into all areas of politcal and financial interaction (as these are the only areas these countries can now 'hit back' in).

-Islamic extremism/terrorism has been helped rather than hindered by this action. The US has spread itself too thin. It's only coz Afghanistan was a NATO operation that there are forces enough to ...just about... keep regime change ticking over. And even there the hunt for Osama was apparently beyond their ability and was left mainly to the Northern Alliance after the Iraq build-up began. Intelligence resources, manpower and investment have all been, understandably, funneled into Iraq, when there are other pressing areas for them to be focused on, with regards to terrorism and world stability.

I'm not saying the idea of interveening in Iraq was wrong. I'm just saying the Bush-admin bit off more than it could chew.

And as such, Iraq might well get chewed up (and other places'll just get spat on).

It's hard being the nation that can make or break world stability. But to my mind, the Bu****es have wielded their power unwisely in Iraq.

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One thing i'm saying is:

-there's more risk to (multiple forms of) international stability in the US inadvisedly using its all-important influence than Saddam could ever muster.

The other things i want to say will have to wait... got work to do