Re: USA & Iran

On 3 May 2006 14:52:47 -0700,
wf3h <wf3h@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

AC wrote:
On 2 May 2006 17:46:35 -0700,
wf3h <wf3h@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

in what way? having a history of developing WMD's, having lied about
it, taunting the international community with full knowledge that the
ONLY thing allowing UN inspectors in was the threat of force...in what
way WASN'T iraq a threat?

And, unlike Nazi Germany, where every indication of militarism in violation
of treaty could be found by the most trivial glance, every expert out there
stated Iraq posed no threat.

where did THAT come from? NO ONE said that. NO ONE. what they said was,
at BEST, iraq needed MORE inspections. NO ONE, including the germans
and the french, said iraq was NOT a threat

And those inspections were underway when the US made it apparent that an
attack was imminent.


this is what i mean about your argument. because it begins with latent
anti-americanism, the very idea that a rationale existed for the war is
beyond the scope of your imagination.

There's no anti-Americanism in the argument. It's just that I think the
Iraq was a pathetic blunder. As well, there is no correlation between
Germany and Iraq. Germany was, even after its defeat in 1918, a highly
populated, industrially advanced society capable of producing a war machine
and the underlying economic system to sustain it.

Iraq, on the other hand, was surrounded, shattered and posed no meaningful
military threat to anybody. The situations are incomparable.


Unlike Nazi Germany, where successive
governments in the 1930s in Great Britain basically minimized militarism, in
the case of Iraq, the US ended up grossly exagerrating the threat and
creating false links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

the links between AQ and hussein were minimal...but they were there.

Hussein was a secular dictator. He spent most of his time, particularly
after any capability of even pissing on foreign soil was removed, doing
everything he could to controlling a destroying religious threats to his
power base.

and you guys seem to have more faith in hussein than a saint has in
christ.

Now, once again, you begin inventing positions for your opponents to have.
Where have I said Hussein was a saint? He was a monstrous butcher, but a
perfectly acceptable monstrous butcher when he was threatening Iran, but an
unacceptable monstrous butcher when he turned his attention to Kuwait.

(You will note that I was fully in favor of Gulf War I).

what guarantee do you have...other than his word as a
gentleman, that, when it served his interests, he WOULDN'T cooperate
with murderers?

I'm sure he would co-operate with murderers, just not the kinds of murderers
that base their intent on religious doctrines that were as much a threat to
him as to the West.



and was contained, and even if it wasn't, it simply does not
possess the industrial capacity and population that Germany does.

it doesn't need to possess the INDUSTRIAL capacity. it merely needed
the weapons capacity.

Which it did not have. It's nuclear program was no more.

unfortunately hussein successfully deceived everyone about that,
including his own generals.

So far as I can tell, outside of the mad imaginings of Bush and his cohorts,
no one thought Hussein was capable of building a bomb.





Iraq was contained.

until it wasn't.

When precisely wasn't it contained?

when hans blix stated that the ONLY reason he was cooperating was the
presence of US troops in saudi arabia. how long would THAT have to go
on?

Apparently forever, judging by how much the House of Saud needs an American
presence to hold on to power.




oh brother....again you seem to have a fascination to blame the US for
every hangnail suffered by every human since 1776.

The US wasn't solely to blame from Germany's military rise.

gee that's sweet of you. somehow the US was responsible. the folks who
WEREN'T, it seems, were the germans. wonder how THEY escaped blame.

Oh *** off. Of course Germany was to blame. But this isn't a black and
white world. In fact, the whole intent of the first half of Churchill's
first book on the history of WWII was to lay out precisely how the Allies
turned, over a twenty year period, victory over Germany into a calamitous
and even more destructive war.



Now, the most Hussein was able to do was to harass his own population, steal
oil money and poke the No Fly Zone. He had no WMDs, posed no threat even to
his neighbors and most certainly, considering the kind of dictator he was,
would certainly not have aligned himself with a pack of religious fanatics
like Al Qaeda.

you guys keep saying that as if it were a surah in the q'uran.

prove it.

He spent a good deal of his time killing and threatening his more religious
citizens.



I'm not defending Hussein, but let us also recall who was helping that
monster out in the 1980s, all to get Iran (which collapsed into theocracy
itself due to the US backing a very bad guy).

the biggest arms seller to iraq in the last 30 years?

germany.

the biggest oil investor? france.

yet you seem to think the US singlehandedly engineered hussein's rise
to power, and his continued presence in office, absent the massive arms
sales from germany and the oil purchases from france.

why?

And again you invent positions for me. When did I ever say the US
singlehandedly engineer Hussein's rise?



you simply haven't made your case. should we have waited until hussein
broke out and attacked? until he DID develop WMD'S?

The weapons inspectors had been let back in, but were never given a chance
to do their job.

that is true. and it's probably irrelevant. at SOME point he would have
resumed his weapons development. it was only the threat of US
intervention that even got the inspectors as far as they got.

With planes ready to bomb any suspicious activity, when precisely was he
going to resume activity.


what do you think would have happened when US troops left saudi arabia?
would hussein have continued to play nice with others?

Was this some sort of possibility?



you haven't put forth a clear statement about the legitimacy of
intervention or non-intervention, except to state that, no matter WHAT
the US does, it's wrong.

That's not what I said. Are you always this dishonest in debates? Do you
always make up strawmen of others' positions. I mean, this isn't even a
strawman, it's a complete fantasy of what I have been saying.


i asked you a simple question, one that you have not answered to date.
the question is:

when was the US RIGHT to go to war?

you write VOLUMES about why the US was wrong. you keep telling me you
think the US WAS wrong in ALL of its engagements. yet you say i'm
simplifying your position.

fine. then answer the question.

I did. I said the Revolutionary War, WWI and WWII come to mind. The Korean
War and Gulf War I are also cases where it was reasonable.

It seems like you're not reading many of my responses.

--
Aaron Clausen
mightymartianca@xxxxxxxxxxx

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