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

To: tejek who wrote (186869)	4/20/2004 11:19:23 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573922

If someone says that Hamas has WMDs and is a threat to the United States.......implicit in that statement is that Hamas may aim its WMD against this country, its cities and its people at any time. What is also implicit is that its likely to happen sooner rather than later. No it isn't implicit. Hamas may be a threat to the US by attacking it military overseas or its foreign interests. Or it may be a threat but not on considered particularly likely. China's nukes are a threat to the US but few think that a Chinese nuclear attack is imminent or even likely. Also your ignoring the actual statement which involved blowing up American cities within a matter of months. If Hamas had chemical weapons or even bio weapons and planed to use them against the US it still wouldn't blow up American cities with them. Those are several important distinctions. In the real world, it doesn't matter to the general public how he got to the store.....only that he went. I agree normally it does not matter. In fact normally it won't matter to most people that he went or that he did not. The analogy is not about the importance of the issue. WMD are normally considered a more important issue to the country as a whole then one person going to the store. The analogy was about the comparison between the specific and the general. You claimed I was "playing word games" by replacing the general with the specific. I showed how the original contested claim was specific (and specifically wrong) and you tried substituted a more general and more reasonable claim for the specific false claim and tried to argue that it is the same thing. Likewise, people were concerned that Saddam was threat and not how that threat would be translated into reality That's probably true for most people, many of whom had little idea how a threat might translate in to reality. But people would care about the difference between a claim that Saddam would blow up American cities within months, and a weaker more general claim that Saddam had WMD that might be a threat to the US. The first claim, if it was made (and it was not) and was believed might justify a preemptive nuclear strike on Iraq if that would be necessary and sufficient to stop the attack, it certainly would have justified the invasion. The 2nd claim justified the invasion in some people's minds and not in others. The first claim would be an obvious lie. The 2nd claim if it is false could easily be a mistake and in fact it was not far from being true. Iraq had made and used WMD and had programs that apparently would have recreated them at some point in the future. I do think Bush oversold the WMD threat from Iraq. I think he felt it was worse and more certain then it was, and I can even believe that thinking it was a bad threat he spun the words he used to make it seem a worse and more likely threat. If the real threat was a 2% threat and Bush thought it was a 40% threat but then chose words that made it sound like a 70% likely threat then I wouldn't really say he lied. if he has chemicals, then he must have the rockets that Bush or Cheney claimed. Saddam did have missiles with a longer range then the cease fire treaty allowed even if it was apparently only marginally longer range. Tim