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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (100549)	6/6/2003 9:21:34 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Being a bit selective in our bolding, are we, then? Of course the bold thing is a bit more honorable than standard local practice of pulling sentences out of context to whine about, or prove the "bias" of the "liberal media".

To: Neocon who wrote (100549)	6/7/2003 12:24:48 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "Downing Street admitted making a serious error yesterday as it emerged that a dossier against Saddam Hussein was partly copied from a student's PhD thesis and cobbled together by Alastair Campbell's propaganda machine." This is old news. That the dossier was a copy off of a bad thesis was known within days of its publication. My problem with these yahoos is not that I expect politicians to tell the truth. Okay, I admit that I expect them to tell the truth when they're under oath, especially if they're lawyers, but I certainly don't expect them to tell the truth when they have a war going on, and I can understand the occasional exaggeration. My complaint about Iraq is that they lied to get us involved in a fiasco. Practically the whole rest of the world looked on and told us that it was immoral, illegal, unnecessary, horribly expensive, cruel to the Iraqi people, and wouldn't do a damn bit of good in the war on terror. But they did it anyway, and just to make sure that it happened, they lied like dogs. If they had lied to bring us something that was worthwhile I could have understood it. But they lied like children. They lied even though it should have been obvious that they'd be talking to parliament / congress about it within months of the lie. Jesus weeps! If they'd lied about Iraq having WMDs, and then used the effects of the lie to arrange tighter sanctions against Iraq, or to speed up the inspections that would be one thing, but they lied so that they would have the opportunity of having their lie proved and demonstrated to the public. And their excuses are the excuses of the sort that little kids give. Kids that are too young to be able to understand how other people figure out what is a lie and what isn't. No rational person on the planet believes that Saddam ordered his troops to destroy the WMDs at the last minute. Only an idiot could be standing up and proclaiming that Saddam didn't want to kill Americans with his secret WMDs. If he wasn't keeping the WMDs to use to fight off an invading American force, then what the f were they for? It would be like a US president destroying all our ICBMs just before a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. You know, I really don't think that Bush and Blair knew that they were lying. Instead, I think that they were idiots that believed what they wanted to believe, and no evidence on the planet would convince them otherwise. And I can understand that with Bush, he's a religious moron. But I don't see how Blair got caught up in it. The only conclusion I can come to is that they truly expected the Iraq "liberation" to prove to the Arab world that the Iraqi people loved Americans / Brits, and that the American people were therefore good people that should not be terrorized against. But the effect of all this is that the Arab world hates us now more than at any previous time. This is not progress in the war on terrorism, which is a battle for hearts and minds. Instead, what we are doing is imitating Israel's brutally ineffective foreign policy, and the effect is the same as Israel's. The locals hate us more now than when Bush was elected, and terrorism in the future will be worse then, than it was before he was elected. What's more, Sharon has "seen the light", and realized that a policy of military force was ineffective in bringing peace to the Israelis. How long will it be before Bush figures out the same thing? As a country, we are much more susceptible to terror attacks than Israel is. Our ineffective government bans nail clippers from airplanes, but any fool can buy a good hunting rifle and terrorize all of Washington DC for months. We are not in a position where we can win a pissing match with terrorists. But that is what Bush is dragging us into. Instead, he should cut the Israelis off and let them deal with their problems without our assistance. Then the Arabs will leave us alone, just like they leave the Canadians alone. -- Carl P.S. Read what Zogby said about this war back before it happened: The neoconservative infantile fantasy that the war will last only mere days, that evil will be defeated and that democracy will reign supreme and American influence spread happily throughout the Middle East, is a dangerous notion. I find no empirical evidence to support it. It comes from people who do not know the region and most of whom have never served in the region. aaiusa.org