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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: redfish who wrote (6593)	2/4/2004 1:25:58 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 20773

There is some sort of inate sense that some forms of death are more humane than others. I'm not going to explain it, but it's there. It's why, for example, we execute criminals by lethal injection instead of stoning to death. Though frankly for some crimes I think a slow stoning by the victim or the victim's family would be far more appropriate.

To: redfish who wrote (6593)	2/4/2004 1:46:19 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 20773

Personally, my main objection to the whole "WMD" war formulation was that it seems to have been constructed to purposely smear together three threats of much different character and probability. Saddam was known to have had chemical weapons and used them in the past; it wouldn't have been a big surprise if he still had stockpiles. But chemical weapons have to be delivered in pretty massive quantity to have much effect. They would have been a threat inside Iraq, but not much of a threat outside. Biological weapons are scary because of the unknown element, but it was somewhat improbable that Saddam had produced anything really bad, the US Anthrax scare showed that that particular avenue was actually pretty treatable. Then there are atomic weapons, but outside of random projections out of thin air from the propaganda team, like the bogus Niger yellocake story, there was never any indication that Iraq was particularly close this time around. Three very different threats, three very different sets of probabilities, but it all had to be melded together into one amorphous propaganda mass for the war marketing effort. That none of the threats actually existed in the first place is another story. As far as "terrorism" goes, the largest scale terror in recent memory, the Balkans and Rwanda, needed very little in the way of "WMDs" to be really yucky. The personal touch always works better.