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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (167399)	7/27/2005 12:25:53 PM
From: el_gaviero	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Rough Cut, You say the following: “When someone uses the term ‘tyranny’, I consider the natural rights endowed to us all on the basis of our personhood. To the extent that an entity intends to deny any of those rights to a person, it is tyrannous. The struggle of one system of order against another, whether it is corporate competition or political conflict does not by itself qualify as tyranny.” I think you are trying to make a careful reply to my somewhat snide comment, but I am not sure that the distinction you make is valid. A person has natural rights, you say, the denial of which (you go on to say) is tyranny. Fine. But does this not apply to the Iraqi people as well? They too have natural rights, one of which surely is the right to order their own affairs as they see fit. When we go in and impose our vision of order on them, we are denying to them what is surely one of their natural rights, hence, by your definition we are the ones acting in a way that is tyrannical. In a next post, you justify the invasion of Iraq on what seems to me to be flimsy grounds, e.g. Saddam was “biding his time until he could garner his resources to take us out....” Hum. Is it a valid reason to kill 40 or 50 thousand people if the number of years that he would have to bide, in order to garner the required resources, were roughly equal to forever? Also you say that Saddam’s “cat and mouse gaming made it clear that it was a matter of time....” before there had to be war. Once again, is this a sufficient reason to set in motion a process that leads to war, especially in the light of our own recent history as a country. By this I mean: for fifty years we played “cat and mouse” with the Soviet Union, a country that sure enough had the resources needed to take us out. We didn’t invade them. Rather, instead, we played cat and mouse back, under the rubric of a policy labeled “containment.” We could easily have followed the same policy of containment with Saddam, but didn’t. Why? Rough Cut, my problem with you is this: for some reason you want us to be in Iraq. The reasons you give for why you want us to be there are not your true reasons --- or if they are, you are a fool. But I don’t think that you are a fool. I don’t doubt your judgment. What I doubt about you is your integrity.

To: one_less who wrote (167399)	7/27/2005 12:41:03 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

NK is just as bad or worse. We took out saddam because he was deemed to be low hanging fruit who had a wmd program. WMD program intel proved wrong for all nations. Low hanging fruit saddam was, but the aftermath makes the whole operation now look suspect and like a failure. But today is a new day and we ARE engaged with terrorists in iraq who we must beat even if a pullout and/or three states expedites this. We are the terrorist target and once gone they lose their raison d'etre in iraq. The tribal chieftans can then take care of them. Historian will decide all this many years from now. What we did may still turn out to be great albeit for different reasons that we thought. But we have to be flexible in our approach now. No low hanging fruit anymore in iraq. Mike PS As the stone say "you cant always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you just may get what you need."