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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (40977)	4/26/2004 12:30:47 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794206

With Saddam pouring billions into the back pockets of U.N. members such as France and Russia, it isn't likely they would ever have agreed to an invasion. If someone in Afghanistan, representing the Taliban, had billions to bribe U.N. members with, they would never have supported our invasion there as well. Lack of support demonstrated the degree of corruption, which exists in international politics. If America depended on corrupt governments in order to move the world toward a freer and more just planet, most of the world would be locked in tyranny. What amazes me about the supposedly wise nuanced approach is the willingness of so many to sit by and watch hundreds of thousands of people die of starvation and torture in order to appease every answer a nuance can imagine. How many mass graves do we need to upturn in order for the nuanced among America's intellectual elites to realize Iraq is a whole heck of a lot better of today then it was just over a year ago? No serious war in history to unseat an entrenched dictator has moved more swiftly and with as little bloodshed as this one has. This isn't a one-hour television show or a two-hour movie where all matters are settled and the good guys win. This victory will take a determined effort. President Bush has said nothing less on several occasions. It will have its ups and downs, but we have little choice. Fanatical Islamofascists despise America, they despise us simply because we are the most successful and prosperous society the world has ever seen. So, we have a choice, go after them in the sands and deserts, and in the streets and burrows of foreign lands, or fight them on the streets of America, because, they will not go away simply because we've nuanced a different thought or approach. Like Israel they demand our destruction and total obliteration, they demand we think like they think, they demand control of our future, our lives and our destiny. Bending to the will of these fools would set prosperity and world progress back two centuries, and is a price no serious American is willing to pay. In a strange way we should be grateful our nation is willing to face this enemy now before they had acquired nuclear or mass quantities of chemical weapons. Imagine Hammas, or the Bathist with a nuclear device; imagine what the world would look like today had Osama had access to a stockpile of chemical weapons? Each and every life lost is painful to witness, however, we can take some solace in the fact that every soldier who has died on the battlefield died as a volunteer.

To: Sam who wrote (40977)	4/29/2004 9:44:40 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 794206

if our real goal was to set up a stable democratic govt in Iraq, we couldn't use those tactics. A problem of selecting the right tool for the job. The US military is the best in the world by an enormous margin, but even the best hammer in the world makes a very poor screwdriver. You don’t build nations with armed force. You need other tools for that, and not too many people bothered to ask whether we had such tools at our disposal. we needed a broad national and international consensus and support prior to the invasion. The Bush admin tactics could have been brilliant if they had done that, if they had secured true support. I don’t believe that the administration ever really wanted to do that, though a fairly tepid show of effort was put up. They wanted to show force, and to do it quickly. That had more to do with domestic politics than with the needs of the war on terror: our leaders wanted to be seen kicking somebody’s butt, and Saddam’s was the only one available. Iraq was a factor in the war on terror, but it was by no means the most urgent one on the table. Pakistan, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia were bigger problems than Iraq. They still are, and our action in Iraq has exacerbated those problems, rather than alleviating them. Iraq was chosen not because it was the biggest problem, but because we wanted to use large-scale force, and it was the only front on which that was an option. After Afghanistan, we could have selected the next-most-serious problem, and devised tactics to deal with it. Instead, we decided what tactic we wanted to use, and looked for a place where we could get away with using it. So we kicked butt, and now our foot is stuck in the crack and starting to smell a bit funky. An easily foreseeable outcome, for those who were thinking, but there was precious little thinking going on.