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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (142972)	2/27/2002 6:04:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574199

You can't have it both ways.......you want the Europeans help when trying to track down the terrorists living in their countries but then you blow them off when you want to expand the war... Even before 9/11, but esp. after the Europeans should want to try to track down terrorist in their countries. The fact that we ask them to track down terrorists and criminals doesn't give them veto power over our foreign policy or plans for military action. how long would you as an individual put up with that kind of treatment. Most people would be pssed.* The equivilent for me as an individual would be for society to expect that I would turn in someone living in my house if they where a violent criminal and then after doing this I get no veto power or serious input on actions taken against violent criminals that are not in my house. I don't see why I should be pissed. We are taking a fairly unpopular stance in the world and we look like a big bully. Why would you alienate your friends at at time like that? Doesn't seem smart to me. What unpopular stance specifically are you talking about and how does it make us look like a bully. If you are talking about the posibility of an attack on Iraq's government, it hasn't happened, nor has our government announced an intention to launch such an attack, so it is not a stance that the US government is taking. Also if it is done it would be justified by the fact that Iraq has violated the ceasefire agreement (in addition to the fact that they are a major sponsor of terrorism and that the government opresses the people causeing many of them to suffer and die). Why does it matter whether the Taliban were the gov't of Afghanistan or not? We are talking about prisoners of war. Under the Geneva convention POWs are soliders of a government that are captured in a war. If the Taliban is not a government then its fighters that where captured would not be POWs. Of course since the Taliban did control most of Afghanistan it might be considered to be pushing it to not consider them a government (before there fall from power of course, they don't govern anything besides perhaps a small hidden cave now). It does matter under the Geveva convention if the Taliban was a government. Our allies were asking us to follow the provisions in the Geneva Convention for treating POWs as one of the Convention's signatories. For a while there, we were refusing. We were refusing to say that we were bound by the convention in this case, and a good argument could be made that indeed we were not and are not bound by the convention because we where not dealing with POWs. But we did not violate the Geneva convention even as we were saying we were not bound to follow it. Wouldn't you be suspicious of a partner who signed a partnership agreement with you but then decided that for a while, he/she would not follow certain provisions of that agreement? I would. That does not discribe the case. We never said we would not follow the agreement. The Geneva convention does not outlaw any action we did take. Also it does not apply to Al-Qaeda, and it is not clear that it applies to the Taliban. If you made an agreement with me that we would not by any computers with Intel systems, and then I bought a computer with a Via or Transmeta chip I would not be violating the agreement, even if you came to me and said "I though we were only going to buy AMD systems". But even this doesn't discribe what happened. A better analogy would be if we had an agreement not to buy Intel, and then I said "you know the agreement doesn't mean I can't buy Via or Transmeta systems", and then you got upset, and I said "ok I will only buy AMD" after we argued about it awhile, and I never actually even bought the Via or Transmeta system let alone one with an Intel chip. Maybe from where you are sitting the shift hasn't been very strong but from where I am sitting it has....and that's true for the Europeans as well. So any shift from Clinton's ideas is unacceptable? How is Bush so much more conservative then Reagan? Oh I guess he was beyond the pale too. BTW do we get to complain about shifts to the left when socialists or labor parties take over in Europe? things like the kyoto agreement and environmental issues in general Kyoto was allready dead, Bush just dropped the polite lie. It went down by something like 98 to 0 in the Senate, and even the Europeans countries never ratified it (except one or two). Most other environmental issues are internal American matters or at most matters for the US and its Canadian and Mexican neighbors. our military positioning and becoming an aggressor nation ?!?? Did something happen with our military today that hasn't been posted on SI? I suppose from a certain perspective Panama was an agressive action but it happened when Bush Sr. was president. Other then that you could argue that the Mexican/American and Spanish/American wars where acts of agression but they hardly represent recent shifts in US policy... the rise in nationalism There is nothing wrong with Americans careing about America or the American government being more concerned with important American interests then international consensus. renewed talk of star wars and the development of other military systems 1 - Its our business what military capabilities we want to develop. Unless the Europeans think we are going to attack them they have no reason to be worried about this. 2 - Missile defense never went away, it was just not the policy of the Clinton administration to do much about it, but even the Clinton administration kept developing technologies for it. It has been a firmly accepted policy on the Republican side ever since Reagan proposed the idea. 3 - Our missile defences not only wont hurt the Europeans, they might protect them. Particuarly in the case of the UK because they often cooperate with us in important military actions and right now there is no really effective way to protect our soliders against even something as primitive as Scuds (we have Patriots but they are not very effective, particuarly when you are trying to defend large targers like cities, or big air bases) Ashcroft's attempts to intervene in OR's right to death law... That is entirely an internal American matter. If you want to talk about it in that context I might even agree with you as a matter of states rights but it isn't something that effects Europe. Just the nature of your attitude in the paragraph above reflects the new conservatism.......fukk you if you don't like what we want, its us against the world. Doesn't work well in social groups and its the same for countries. Ted, its like you decideing to get pissed at me if I had painted my house blue and you didn't like blue. If this happened and I said it was none of your business it would not be like saying FU. But Bush hasn't even said "its none of your business", he has been a lot more polite then that. If Europeans wants to talk to us about it we will listen and nod and perhaps try to make a few polite comments, and then do what we want. It isn't something that is going to hurt Europe and its our decsions not theres. Recognizing that fact is not being mean or arrogant. Yes but one of his main points was that the current European criticism is motivated by envy. I don't think that's a fair statement. Do you? I don't know. I certainly would not make such a claim. I can't read others minds and I don't interact with a large enough cross section of Europeans to have enough knowledge to make a good educated guess as to what motivates them. Mostly I would say it is a lot of different things. Like any other large group they have a lot of different opinions and have them for different reasons. Tim

To: tejek who wrote (142972)	2/27/2002 6:48:27 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574199

More about the possibility of war with Iraq. Message 17118336 Here's a interesting angle on the war with Iraq, which has gotten some play. washingtonpost.com Anti-Iraq Rhetoric Outpaces Reality Military Not Primed For New War Soon By Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, February 24, 2002; Page A01 At Boeing Co.'s high-tech factory in St. Charles, Mo., three shifts are working 24 hours a day turning out smart bombs to replenish Air Force and Navy inventories that ran dangerously low during the Afghan war. Pentagon planners say it will take six months to produce enough Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), the precision systems that guided 1,000-pound bombs to Taliban and al Qaeda targets, to contemplate an attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. <snip>