Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (4843)	2/10/2003 11:43:21 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 7689

We'll owe them that. I would quibble only with the semantics of that point, not the underlying sentiment. Imagine a world with no America. Some here seem to dream about such a world, but I suspect if their dreams somehow came true they would regret them. My view is that we don't "owe" the Iraqis anything by virtue of the fact that their system created a beast that must be tamed. We didn't owe the Germans anything for foisting Hitler upon the world either. Whatever Iraqi children perished from economic woes are not our fault either; those that blame us ought to think about whether those children would have died had Saddam (a) decided not to engage in war with Iran from 1980-1988; (b) decided not to gas his own population in the 1980's; (c) decided not to invade Kuwait in 1990; (d) decided not to spend vast sums in a relatively poor country for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; (e) decided not to comply with his own agreements to disarm and destroy those weapons; and (f) decided not to shoot at American and British planes sent to enforce no-fly zones that were imposed after Saddam bombed his own people in the aftermath of the gulf war. (Not to mention the environmental catastrophe he unleashed as his troops exited Kuwait; does no one else remember the awful picture of black clouds rising from oil fields and dead birds washing up on Persian Gulf shores in the Spring of 1991? We didn't do any of those things; he did.) In my view, we don't owe democracy (or food or medicine) to the rest of the world. But we have defined ourselves, as a country and a people, as the providers of last resort of such essential things. We send more food around the world than many countries manage to raise on their own. We (despite our international reputation for laziness -- remember the Japanese stereotypes of the "fat, lazy Americans" from the late 1980's?) work hard to invent medicines that the entire world can benefit from. Do we owe the world a grant of these things, regardless of the world's behavior? I would say we don't. But..... we want the world to have access to these things, and to the democracy and social/economic/political freedoms that nurtured the inventions and products that those Iraqi children could have benefitted from. It should be our place in the world to nurture freedom and oppose totalitarianism, not just where there is oil but everywhere. It is an expensive task; a thankless one; one that because of our economic prowess will leave us open again and again to criticism. It isn't a debt we owe others, but an asset we ought to provide. Regardless of what the French think. Or more accurately, regardless of what the French say.