This issue is not whether the current debacle in Iraq is "justifiable."
Obviously nothing is justifiable to you.. Hell, I'd be frightened to death to live in your neighborhood... I could get mugged and beaten every night by the local gangs and you wouldn't lift a finger to get involved..
I mean, my goodness, you might accidentally hurt one of my assailants...
Syria has never answered for the murder of tens of thousands at al-Hamma.
Absolutely right... And they have answered for their occupation of Lebanon either.. (but THAT occupation never seems to receive the same news coverage that the West Bank or Iraq does.. I wonder why?)
I guess we just figure.. "What else should one expect of them... They don't know any better, so it's useless to resist them"...
There are bad governments doing terrible things to their own people all over the world.
Yep.... All because people like yourself (and at times even myself) feel that our interest is not sufficient to intervene forcefully...
But Iraq IS in our vital interest..
"Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile to the United States."
Yep.. and I say that it was a bad decision.. And in retrospect, I bet they are saying the same thing... Look at how it has crippled the UN as an organization, making it corrupt and ineffective in even the most serious of international violations..
I'm not anti-war, I'm anti-stupid. And your criterion for when to fight for human rights are very selectively applied. When we want to use human rights to justify unilateral US military action,
We're all human beings hodb.. We have a threshold of tolerance and calculate our responses to the hostile actions of others on a regular basis. We're constantly assessing the "cost/benefit" of responding to intimidation and aggression..
Hell, look at some of the folks living in crime-ridden neighborhoods... People understand that these gangs are threatening to them.. But they don't want to get involved lest they face retaliation and bodily harm for siding with the authorities. And even if we secretly are rooting for the police, we never know which of our neighbors are involved with the criminals, so we're afraid to show any public support, or to make ourselves a target..
And sometimes we're just apathetic.. We could care less about what is going on, so long as it's happening to other people and not us.. But boy o boy.. let someone in my family get hurt by these criminals, or someone make a credible threat against us, and we're likely to drastically change our attitudes about our perceptions of the threat, causing us to re-calculate the benefit of non-involvment versus the cost of taking a stand..
That's what we do everyday in our lives. And it's what we are doing in a post-9/11 world.. And we're re-calculating the cost of permitting hundreds of millions of young muslims to fall under the influence of Islamic militancy unopposed...
Now maybe we wouldn't give a crap if they didn't have all of that oil that we rely upon.. Maybe we could just "quarantine" the region and let them all just sort it out for themselves... But that's no longer a viable solution..
And while war is certainly not an attractive solution either, unfortunately I just don't see much of an effective alternative being presented by people like yourself.
Face it, war is ugly.. War is a blunt instrument (but far more precise than in previous conflicts).. War causes suffering for civilians..
But let's also face another fact.. We have an enemy that we're fighting, terrorists and Baathists trying to restore the previous brutal regime.. They have families, parents, sisters, brothers.. etc.. And those family members can pretty much be counted upon to support and empower those enemy combatants.
So while I certainly don't advocate the targeting of those civilians, I also don't shed many tears over them.. because they have chosen which side they want to be on..
Who I cry over are the children. They are the future and they are the pawns being used by socio-pathic adults to fuel their own tyrannical agendas.
Hawk |
