Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "You didn't? Well, either you're trying to change your position, cover your tracks by lying, or just don't know what you believe from day to day."
You're having difficulty understanding basic college English. Here's the full context:
Hawkmoon, June 15, 2003
No responsibility for the massacres, starvation, and civil war that would result, right?"" #reply-19032595
Bilow, in reply
No, we do have responsibility for all that." #reply-19033609
responsibility:
1. The state of being responsible, accountable, or answerable, as for a trust, debt, or obligation.
dictionary.reference.com
answerable
1. Obliged to answer; liable to be called to account; liable to pay, indemnify, or make good; accountable; amenable; responsible; as, an agent is answerable to his principal; to be answerable for a debt, or for damages.
dictionary.reference.com
Your error is in assuming that "responsible" means the same as "responsible to remain". No, I use responsible in the sense of "answerable". In fact, my meaning was made clear by the next sentence: "The blood is on our hands ..."
Here's a similar reference to my usage:
The blood stained hands of those responsible for genocide has to be arrested
ulg.ac.be
Re: "So which is it Bilow... Should we stay or should we just pack up and go?"
Just pack up and go. Heck, you're slowly drifting towards that view yourself, you just won't admit it.
Re: "What happened to the Vietnam analogy?"
It's still there. Yes I know that its confusing when your adversary uses more than one simple analogy, but hey, I'm college educated, what do you expect.
Re: "Will you acknowledge that one of the primary reasons the Afghanis were able to defeat the Soviets is because the US was providing them with tremendous amounts of weapons and equipment which eventually make the price of their occupation too high to bear?"
There's no doubt that we provided the Afghans with a lot of weapons (about $2 billion worth). And there's no doubt that our aid affected the course of the war. But the example of Chechnya proves that our aid to an enemy of Russia is not necessary to make major problems for Russia.
If we hadn't got involved in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed, and, at worst, the new government would have pulled out of Afghanistan a few years later.
Also note that Afghanistan is on the border of the Soviet Union, while Iraq is far, far away from the US. Historically, that implies that the US is less likely to spend a lot of lives and treasure on a battle in Iraq.
In short, we'll leave Iraq long before we have anything near as high as the Soviet's casualties in Afghanistan.
Re: "Fight fire with fire. Support a rival faction to do our "dirty work" for us and battle that minority faction. Terror on terror, but dealt out by other Iraqis who have had enough and fear being subjugated by that group. Use US/UK forces as the "sledgehammer" where local officials are unable to "nail down" these armed factions. Eventually the groups will call a truce and learn to live together."
Which "rival group" do you want to support? The only one that's already organized is the Iranian supported Shiites Islamic Republic true believers who hate us.
Re: "But once again, you're willing to abandon the majority who desire our assistance, but who are too scare and weak to defend themselves, to be thrown to an aggressive minority, ruthless in their actions."
First of all, I don't know what you mean here by "once again". I supported our actions in Afghanistan. Or maybe you're admitting that you're just saying the same thing over and over.
As far as "abandoning" those who are "two scare and weak to defend themselves", yes, that's what I'm in favor of, more or less.
If they're not willing to fight to be free, then let them be slaves in their own country. It's not our God-provided Duty to free the peoples of the world. Especially when our sending soldiers has no effect other than to create new recruits for those who are against us (and wishing to create another totalitarian government to enslave those same sheople you're so intent on saving from slaughter). But to explain our actions in Iraq as humanitarian is a thin lie. If protecting the scared and weak were really our objective, we'd be intervening all over the planet.
Re: "Just leave the sheep to be slaughtered, right?"
The Iraqi people are wayyyyyy too vicious to be called sheep. And in any case, they're not our livestock. For that matter, note that the Iraqis that slaughtered the 6 British MPs the other day were Shiites, the same people that Saddam had suppressed so much. God's truth is that before we got there, the Iraqis had more guns per capita than Boise, Idaho. If they'd wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, they'd have done it themselves. Our actions, on humanitarian grounds, were like kicking over a hornet's nest in order to save the hornets from the hornets.
Re: "How noble... And shades of Ruwanda... Will you bear also bear responsibility for the resulting massacres that take place after we leave?"
We, as a nation, have already made ourselves answerable for the problems we've created. Our leaders will be sued for war crimes, particularly for starting a war based on a lie. As citizens, we will be subjected to more terror attacks. Foreigners will look on us as a collection of lunatics. As a people, we can only hope that our strength will prevent the rest of the world from punishing us for our hubris.
And as far as Ruanda goes, why don't you, the great humanitarian, find me a single post where you've argued for sending the US military in there to sort it out. My search gives "No results found."
-- Carl |
