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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Ox who wrote (21664)	10/1/2004 3:25:59 PM
From: kodiak_bull	Respond to of 23153

Michael: You wrote: "At the same time, there are questions about their stances on civil liberties which are the exact opposite of the way they want to be treated while in office. They appear to want it both ways and I, for one, question the validity this approach!" I assume you mean the Patriot Act. I think it's playing out exactly the way it's supposed to. Legislation was sponsored and voted into law. It is up to the courts to determine the constitutionality of all or part of it. That's the great thing about separation of powers and tripartite government. We don't have absolute civil liberties in any sense, actually. We have activities and borders that run along those activities. You have freedom of speech and association, but they are not absolute (you don't have freedom of speech, for example, on someone else's property, or freedom of association there, or assembly). The power to regulate and police our activities is recognized; it has limits, but those limits, like everything, are evolving (and devolving, from time to time). If the Executive Branch (say the Justice Department) refused to enforce a court's order, then we might have a problem with civil liberties, movement, association, etc. But until that happens, we just keep going along discovering exactly how we wish to govern ourselves. (Where democracy has a real problem, imho, is when we decide that judges should step beyond the business of interpreting the law and into the business of creating it. Democrats seem to feel that this is the only way we will get to the "right" result, in many social policy areas, most recently in the question of gay marriage. What they don't like, or can't accept, is that democracy is a system of living with the wrong result until we can get it right, the RIGHT way, via representative democracy.) Kb

To: The Ox who wrote (21664)	10/3/2004 12:59:19 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

Hi Michael. I agree with your post in almost every point you make. The one difference is that I think you make an assumption that will keep us in trouble and eventually reward us with poison. You say; Even if one assumes that we went into Iraq for all the wrong reasons, we can't abandon the situation we've put ourselves in. We must not conclude our actions there until there is a government in place which will lead the Iraqis out of the desperate situation they've been in for the past 25 or so years. We have a similar obligation in Afghanistan. We owe it to ourselves, the people over there, and to everyone else in the world to see this thing through as effectively as possible. How are we doing so far in "leading the Iraqis?" How did the Russians do in Afghanistan? How did we do in Vietnam? How did the French do in Algeria and in Vietnam? What is it that we "are able to do" that you say we "must do?" Even IF our motives are pure, I don't think that matters; the people of another tribe, culture, religion or nation will not be "led" by those of another hive. If we think we can move them generations ahead to our view of enlightenment without their having to undergo the steps that we went through, then that's a little too missionary-like for me to accept. It's apparently a little too missionary-like for their alpha males to accept also. We might be "right," we might be powerful and we might be able to impose a heavy cost on them for not seeing it our way, but their resistance will not ebb. We did something they could have eventually accomplished themselves when we suddenly removed the government of Saddam Hussein. By doing so we left them, however, without any viable governing force to step into the leadership vacuum other than their clerics or America's pawns. The Iraqis won't accept the pawns and we won't allow them to fragment and follow the Shiite clerics, the Kurdish goverment and the Sunni Clerics. Eventually we will learn that they will decide a course for themselves but first they will teach us a bloody lesson that will continue until we step out of the way. What we are left with when we step away will be what it will be. We have almost no control. Invading and occupying Iraq was a gamble where we put a lot to ride on a sucker bet. Like all suckers, we will have to slink off, lick our wounds and hopefully learn a valuable lesson. We should have listened to Bush senior and we should have listened to many of the Mideast experts, and we should have listened to Colin Powell. Instead we listened to the geopolitics of oil, with a little "God" thrown in for spice. Ed