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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106355)	7/18/2003 9:01:47 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<Where do you get off slamming the Bush 41 for having supported Saddam, while equally condemning Bush 43 for overthrowing Saddam?> What I'm pointing out, is the hypocrisy, the way this humanitarian argument suddenly comes to the forefront, after being ignored for decades. What you, and the President, don't understand, is that nobody is going to believe you, if you keep changing your reasons every year (and sometimes every day). Any standard of morality, any set of rules for behavior, have to be applied consistently and universally. Tell us one thing today, and a different thing tomorrow; apply one set of rules to your friends, and a different set of rules to your enemies, and none of your reasons will be believed. And the further hypocrisy, that the only massacres the War Party sees, are the ones that happen where the ground is soaked in oil, in addition to blood.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106355)	7/18/2003 11:20:27 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Rules for deciding whether to make war: 1. In defense of our soil, after an attack. This is a strict standard, and does not include imaginary threats, preemptive wars, threats to the profits of our corporations operating on foreign soil, or any of the other expansions of the term "defense" currently in vogue. 2. Fulfilling mutual defense treaties with other market democracies. The word "mutual" means decisions are made by consensus, not U.S. fiat. "Democracy" means free elections, freedom of expression, church-state separation. "Defense" means the only permissible action is defense of a treaty nation, after an attack on that nation. Sending any of our soldiers, onto the soil of any other nation, is only permissible, in response to an attack, and at the invitation of the democratically-elected government of that nation. No exceptions. I would not send U.S. soldiers to die for Kings, Shahs, Emirs, warlords, dictators. Or oil. 3. In rare cases, I would be willing to do Regime Change on other nations who are carrying out unacceptable internal policies (ethnic cleansing, use of chemical weapons). I would hedge this, with lots of caveats and safeguards, because (as we have seen recently) it is very easy to use this reason as an excuse for wars of aggression. Big nations can always find a list of plausible humanitarian reasons for bullying little nations. The main safeguard here, is that the action must be multilateral, with broad participation, and approved by international organizations (UN, NATO, regional organizations). There must be a clear exit strategy told to Americans, before a single soldier is committed. None of this vague "as long as needed" nonsense. 4. the reasons for the war, must be clearly and honestly explained to the American people, and must have broad bipartisan support. We should never, never, never still be trying to figure out why we went to war, after the soldiers start dying. 5. All wars should be pay-as-you-go. It is unethical to leave the bills for the unborn to pay. Using the above rules, the following wars would have been allowed: Afghanistan 2001 (after WTC attack) Regime Change in Iraq in 1988, theoretically, (after they used chemical weapons, if UN approval was obtained.) WWII (after Pearl Harbor) Mexican-American War (Texas was a democracy, as much as the U.S. was at the time, so coming to their defense was OK) Revolutionary War Not allowed: Iraq 2003 Kuwait 1991 WWI (borderline case; our ships were attacked) Any of the dozens of "police actions" in the Caribbean in the last 100 years Spanish-American War War of 1812 (impressing seamen wasn't a good enough reason) If we were going to do Regime Change in Iraq, for humanitarian reasons, we should have done it in 1988, as part of a coalition, with UN approval. We should not have done it unilaterally, anytime.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106355)	7/19/2003 7:17:04 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 281500

It's not the overthrowing of Saddam, it's the way it was done, and the justification that was used. The problem, as I see it, is supporting him, and supporting him IN his genocidal efforts (as we did in the war with Iran) and then later changing our tune- that does smack of hypocrisy. Also, what has happened between the US and the rest of the world IS a political problem. You may not think it is much of a problem, but that is your opinion. Those of us who favor more global cooperation, and not less, might think it is significantly more important than you do. It isn't curious mental gymnastics- it's simply that you do not agree with the priorities of (for example) globalists. Calling it metal gymnastics is a cute rhetorical flourish, but it's not mental gymnastics to condemn the regime in Iraq and STILL not think the preemptive war thing is a good idea. I've been writing letters and bitching about Iraq and it's treatment of the Kurds for years- but that has NOT made me love preemptive war any better. Both things happen to be Very Bad, imo. Sometimes that happens in life- you meet two evils, and not all of us feel we have to embrace one, just because we don't like the other.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106355)	7/19/2003 8:38:31 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, what the anti-Bush crowd fails to see is if we had followed their prescription of non intervention, more graves like the one below would have been created by Saddam's machine of death squads. To ignore such human rights abuses, and pretend the Iraqi people were better off under Saddam's tyranny is morally reprehensible. Another Mass Grave Found in Iraq Friday, July 18, 2003 BAGHDAD, Iraq — In the latest in a series of grisly discoveries, the U.S. military said Thursday it found another mass grave — this one in northern Iraq and thought to contain the bodies of up to 400 Kurdish women and children slain by Saddam Hussein's regime. Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division (search) found the grave on the side of a dry riverbed in Hatra, 200 miles north of Baghdad (search). An assessment team was sent to the site. Some 25 sets of remains — all women and children — have been pulled from the grave, each with a bullet hole in the skull. The military said the size of the area leads them to believe the site contains between 200 and 400 bodies. Since the end of the Iraq war, at least 60 mass graves, some with hundreds of corpses, have been discovered. The United Nations (search) is investigating the killing or disappearance of at least 300,000 Iraqis believed murdered during Saddam's regime. With the finding of the mass graves, the U.S. and British militaries, the Red Cross (search) and some small humanitarian groups specializing in battlefield pathology have been involved in a behind-the-scenes dispute: Should the dead be used as evidence for war crimes trials, or should they be identified and returned to their families? Either task would be costly. Doing one might damage the prospects for performing the other, and accomplishing both might be prohibitively expensive and logistically impossible. Another option is to do little or nothing, which is currently the status quo. The United States has deployed a British humanitarian group called Inforce, which specializes in collecting war crimes evidence from massacre sites, to look at about 15 of the graves. If Iraqis request it, they are allowed to search for loved ones. The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross favors identifying the dead and returning the remains to the families. Yet the organization is torn internally over whether to take on a job that falls within its charter but might drain its resources.