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

To: KLP who wrote (171628)	10/1/2005 10:15:37 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I think we should have continued to contain him, since that was working well enough. He was hardly doing "as he pleased". Many of Saddam's worst atrocities happened long ago- many when the US saw Saddam as a bulwark against Iran (which he was- to be fair to the administrations which saw him that way). Now, why don't you tell me why it is important to bring up Salman Pak, sinice there is no evidence for it being relevant, especially since it would not change your mind if it was a hoax? If your mind would not be changed by the lack of evidence for Salman Pak, why should the idea of its existence change anyone else's mind? Do you see how the logic of that works? And why should you care about the Iraqi people more than worse off people in Africa? Do you care abut the peoples of Africa in the same way? Parts of Africa are in much worse shape than Iraq- with much more death, and depravity- why not invade there first, if humanitarian assistance is your goal? And how exactly are we to frame the international law of invading countries because we "care about the people there". Would you like to see other countries practicing this caring on the US? Many see are huge prison population (greatest in the Western nations) as evidence of a lack of "caring" on our part, and they see our use of the death penalty as rather barbaric. Should we be invaded by caring individuals, and if not, why not? What criteria, exactly, should be used to differentiate why we invade some nations "because we care", and not other nations. When you post to me some silly post like the one you did, I can see that you are framing the issue in terms of "either people agree with me, OR they don't care about the IRaqi people." That is what is known as a false dichotomy. Sometimes, if you think about things, you realize they are not either or. You might even realize that though Saddam is a bad leader, his removal had the potential to cause more deaths than he himself caused. Check my posts from before the war if you want to- you will see that of the two possibilities I mentioned as most likely, the first was civil war, and the second was a Shiite theocracy. Neither of those outcomes looked to me to be 1.beneficial to the US (and I presume our foreign policy decisions should be somewhat aimed to further our own interests, no matter how caring we are) and 2. likely to reduce the suffering of the Iraqi people. So, proceeding carefully, and not using any false dichotomies, or attributing to me any opinions which I have not expressed, let us see if we can have a discussion.