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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (213685)	12/21/2004 4:49:57 PM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 1578758

Don't you think it is a bit arrogant on our part to promote democracy through the use of force? Yes, it is a contrary way to spread Democracy and we should never use force when spreading Democracy is our primary goal. We should only use force when we are threatened and we've exhausted all other alternatives. I believe Bush went into Iraq prematurely. We had a ways to go before all alternatives were exhausted. However, knowing Saddam's nature, I think going into Iraq was inevitable. Despite the inevitability, if Bush had not taken a shortcut, he would have saved the U.S. alot of pain and kept our alliances intact. <Do you really believe that the people in the ME are in favor of having us come in to help them out using our military? No. Muslims in the Middle East in particular would rather live in poverty and oppression rather than have the U.S. come in and help them through the use of our military. That much is abundantly clear in Iraq. However, I would say that the clear majority in Iraq do not condone the careless chaos promoted by Zarqawi, which kills more Iraqis than Americans. From our perspective, do you think that it is worth the cost? Absolutely not. That is why I voted for Kerry. I believe he would have exhausted all the diplomatic channels first and then when the inevitable happened and we had to invade Iraq, we would have had the world pay for it, like Bush Sr. and Powell did in Gulf War I. If I had been president instead of Bush Jr., I would hav spent my political capital after 9/11 launching a new Manhattan Project to reduce Middle East oil dependency down to nothing by the end of my second term. I would have pulled out all the stops to make this happen as my first priority. That would have destroyed the terrorists and the corrupt M.E. regimes ability to fight us and we would have maintained the moral high-ground. BTW, what will it ultimately cost? or, does it not matter? This thing will ultimately cost us $350-$400 billion. For that sum, we would have outfitted every gas station in the U.S. with fuel cell refueling stations and provided every American with ample incentives to replace their current car with a hybrid or a fuel cell based engine. We would could have boycotted M.E. oil at the end of this decade with zero consequences to our economy. But this president is in bed with the oil kings. And the Democrats are too soft on everyone for us to do something this drastic.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (213685)	12/22/2004 4:43:49 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 1578758

Don't you think it is a bit arrogant on our part to promote democracy through the use of force? How else do you remove a dictator? Do you really believe that the people in the ME are in favor of having us come in to help them out using our military? Hard to say, because under the dictator the freedom to express feelings in favor of the removal of the dictator did not exist. The bigger question is whether or not it is appropriate to determine that some forms of governance of a given country are unacceptable, and deserve to be punished by destruction of that government. I'd say yes, but the process of destroying the unacceptable government and replacing it with an acceptable one needs a lot more work and preparation than I think the Bush administration had done prior to removing Saddam.