Re: OT Iraq Vote

In article <mg9bl1djnfeqc9mb8ng2faln3m0mk72at1@xxxxxxx>,
larry <larry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:42:09 GMT, Carbon <nobrac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 16:29:02 -0700, Larry Bud wrote:
> >> Carbon wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:33:09 -0700, Larry Bud wrote:
> >>> > Carbon wrote:
> >>> >> On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:42:37 -0700, Larry Bud wrote:
> >>>
> >>> >> > The fact is Iraq could turn the entire region into a much less
> >>> >> > extreme area, similar to that of a Turkish culture.
> >>> >>
> >>> >> That's a guess, not a fact.
> >>> >
> >>> > Not really.
> >>>
> >>> Yes really. If I said "the fact is it could rain tomorrow," would it be
> >>> a guess or a fact? Take your time.
> >>
> >> Thanks for cropping my answer, it's really disingenuos on your part.
> >
> >Once again, your statement "the fact is Iraq could... " is not a statement
> >of fact. It's a vague statement about the future, i.e., a guess. This is
> >incredibly straightforward.
> >
> >The rest of your post contained a sentence about Libya plus a sentence
> >fragment. Neither one of them had anything to do with your non-factual
> >statement "the fact is Iraq could... " so I didn't include them.
>
> Hopelessly naive. Read this:
>
> Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe
> and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had
> sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between
> England and America for food and war materials.

But in the Battle of Britain had seem the air superiority Hitler
believed necessary effectively destroyed by the RAF. But never mind the
real facts, read on.
>
>
>
> Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing
> millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more
> as slave labor.
> The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and
> Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

The US was being hawkishly kept OUT of the war by the very icons of the
right that Larry would hero worship - Lindbergh, Hearst, etc. Not the
liberal left, which was the first group in the world to take up arms
against facism. But never mind - read on.
>
>
>
> Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage
> Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on
> Germany, which had not attacked us.It was a dicey thing. We had few
> allies.
> France was not an ally, the Vichy government of France aligned with
> its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, it was an enemy, and
> Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was
> not an ally, it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia.
> Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico,
> and then the United States over the north and south borders, after
> they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

France was an ally - at least the French people were, since the Vichy
government were just the puppet rulers put in place by the Nazis.
Remember the maquis, Larry? Well done.
>
>
>
> America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada,
> Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other
> countries of any size or military significance with the will and
> ability to contribute much or anything to the effort to defeat
> Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of
> Nazism. And we had to send millions of tons of arms, munitions, and
> war supplies to Russia, England, and the Canadians, Aussies, Irish,
> and Scots, because none of them could produce all they needed for
> themselves.

Correction, only Northern Ireland - the Irish Republic was neutral, and
remained so throughout the war. And many of the "supplies" were outdated
surplus that was never used for any purpose during the war.
>
>
>
> All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was
> already under the Nazi heel.

In those days it wasn't Russia, it was the Soviet Union.
>
. . . snip, snip . . .

>
>
> Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600
> million in gold bullion in the Bank of England that was the property
> of Belgium and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war
> when Belgium was overrun by Hitler - actually, Belgium surrendered one
> day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the
> Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day anyway just to prove
> they could.Britain had been holding out for two years already in the
> face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of its air
> force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by
> Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits
> were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and
> turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the
> verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.
>
>
>
> Russia saved America's ass by putting up a desperate fight for two
> years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
> Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of
> Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly
> civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a
> million.
> Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his
> entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would
> have won that war.

Christ on a bike, Larry, how many times do you have to be told that your
lord and master Raymond Kraft is simply DEAD WRONG here. It is not 24
million - the Soviets own figure is closer to 8 million. Go to the back
of the class, and write out 100 times "I must not copy from ignorant
zealots, but try harder to think for myself". It will be a struggle, but
worth it in the end.

>
>
>
> Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941,
> instead, there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to
> use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England
> would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help
> take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle,
> and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third
> Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits), the
> US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were
> basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today
> would be very different and much worse. I say this to illustrate that
> turning points in history are often dicey things. And we are at
> another one.

Oh, good Lord, to equate the turning points of WWII with Dubya's
ignorant and specious escapade in Iraq is simply absurd. Vietnam is a
much better analogy, and we all know how well that turned out, don't we?
>
>
>
> There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants
> and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological,
> or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are
> prevented from doing so.
>
> France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology
> at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and
> Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed
> from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the UN with the
> complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.
>
And before that, the US couldn't get guns to them fast enough, when we
thought that the Taliban could de-stabilize the Soviet Union with an
expensive war in Afghanistan. My, how times change. The same is also
true of Saddam, especially when he was at war with Iran.

>
>
> The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs -
> they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not
> liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle
> East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow
> to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to
> finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, purge the world of Jews. This
> is what they say.

Larry, lay off the caffeine, dude, it is clearly affecting your grip on
reality.
>
>
>
> There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most
> part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its
> Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which
> will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation.
>
>
>
> If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control
> the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian
> economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of
> OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and rational Saudis
> of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

This would as opposed to being at the mercy of the Saudis, and other
pillars of democracy, would it? "Rational" - oh yes, women don't drive,
executions are public beheadings, and on and on. Just the kind of
friends we should all be in league with. And haven't they done a real
friends' job in keeping the price of oil down these past few years to
help protect our economy? Indeed.
>
>
.. . snip, snip . .
>
>
>
> (1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly
> involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been
> actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a
> terrorist.
> Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible
> for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million
> Iranians.

But we only deposed him when it suited us, not in the 1990's after he
had invaded Kuwait. No, he was too useful to us then. How times change.
>
>
>
> (2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic
> terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad
> guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or
> anywhere else. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic,
> peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the
> rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American
> military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

We are also killing a lot of good guys - you know, the ones from Ohio
and New Jersey. I'm sure they feel great to have you rabid support. And
Iraq is more likely to end up as another fundamentalist Islamic state
than a true democracy.
>
>
>
> The Euros could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We
> now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihad, the French,
> Germans, and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than
> a million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a
> threat to anyone, why did Saddam need a million tons of weapons?
>
Damn right, they won't. And they have only followed our lead in selling
arms to all sides. It's good, Republican, business. Just ask Dick Cheney
how Haliburton made all that money.
>
>
> And Iraq was paying for French, German, and Russian arms with money
> skimmed from the UN Oil For Food Program (supervised by UN Secretary
> General Kofi Annan and his son) that was supposed to pay for food,
> medicine, and education, for Iraqi children.

Oh, now my heart bleeds for your poor, wronged, soul.
>
>
. . snip, snip . . .

>
>
> Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by
> 60 minute TV shows and 2-hour movies in which everything comes out
> okay.

Actually, more conditioned by Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and co., n=and
their "zero tolerance, zero intelligence" radio.

> The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and
> sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will
> be.
> If we do this thing in Iraq successfully, it is probable that the
> Reformation will ultimately prevail. Many Muslims in the Middle East
> hope it will. We will be there to support it. It has begun in some
> countries, Libya, for instance. And Dubai. And Saudi Arabia. If we
> fail, the Inquisition will probably prevail, and terrorism from Islam
> will be with us for all the foreseeable future, because the
> Inquisition, or Jihad, believes they are called by Allah to kill all
> the Infidels, and that death in Jihad is glorious.
>
>
>
> The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic
> terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away
> on its own. It will not go away if we ignore it.

Nor if we feed it and provide martyrs, causes and targets.
>
>
>
> If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we
> have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can
> work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of
> the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and
> civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war
> is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And
> now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear
> weapons. Unless we prevent them. Or somebody does.

Good, then they can play cricket and take afternoon tea - just like
civilized people. How quaint.
>
>
>

>
Jesus, enough. I can't take any more of this warmed over Republicanism.
I'm off to bed. Let me know if YOU ever have a thought of your own,
Larry. I won't hold my breath.

William Clark

(Signs off expecting wailing from Larry about how he is being targeted
by "ad hominem" attacks. Really, and he wonders why.
.

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