Innocent Iraqis
Western Civilization
The millions killed in the name of Allah....
Posted on 07/26/2004 6:12:00 PM PDT by TeleStraightShooter
so's Detroit and that's in our back yard. What's the solution to that one?
"The president?"
Kindly enlighten us all as to how you think any President has benefited in a time of war.
"The taxpayers?"
How would the taxpayer "benefit"?
"The defense industry?"
The defense industry does indeed benefit during a time of war. Is that concept something new to you?
The innocent American civilians?"
To which "innocent civilians" are you referring?
Innocent Iraqis
Western Civilization
The millions killed in the name of Allah....
I think you are correct. Freedom is infectious. Many of the older generation must have had enough contact with freedom that they remember it vividly and yearn for it daily. If, God willing, they get their freedom, maybe they will defend it relentlessly.
If this is true, then what happened to all of the mass graves that supposedly would be found?
bump
We know that Saddam's mass graves have yielded +300,000 so far.
How many did Milosevic kill en-mass?
Exactly. The axis of evil knows it, and they're shaking in their shoes.
But the real value is medium- and long-term, and that is the foundation of genuinely representative, elective governments where before ruled the iron fist and secret policeman's truncheon. This, in my view, is the most powerful and subversive reply possible to a rich, violent, and self-righteous cult of murderers, and although our putative "allies" refuse to recognize that fact, the murderers certainly do, and are suicidally desperate to stop it. Hence Iraq.
Charles Krauthammer addressed this point in a recent column. He's not optimistic about rebels being able to overthrow the Iranian regime, so we'll have to take care of business soon after Nov.
"Just about Saddam" ignores a big issue.
The choice before us, realistically, was this:
1. Take out Saddam (invasion)
2. Saddam survives, sanctions are lifted as he gains fair amount of independence, he goes nuclear within 10-year timeframe
There is no 3.
A lot of people speak about Saddam as if the status quo - a "contained" Saddam who we could "contain" and prevent from going nuclear because of this magical thing "containment" (which, uh, was being cheated on left and right) - was something that could be kept going for all eternity. Just keep doing it! On and on! Throughout the Hussein dynasty, as Hussein passes power to his kids, them to their kids, etc! (The year is 3872, and the United States... has bases in Kuwait from which pilots daily get up and patrol the "no-fly zone", because it's JUST TOO COSTLY to take Saddam's great^50'th grandson out of power....)
This is fricking ridiculous. How long were we supposed to keep the Hussein dynasty in power anyway? (That is what we were doing. Calling a ceasefire and preserving a protracted standoff with a dictator, in which you initiate economic warfare on that dictator's country, whatever else it does, keeps that dictator in power. It prevents his people from being able to overthrow him, so he will stay in power (unless YOU choose to overthrow him), thus you're keeping him in power.)
But never mind, he was "just Saddam".
This ignores: the cost of patrolling the "no-fly zones", the need to have bases in Saudi Arabia/Kuwait from which to do it, Saddam firing at our patrols, the fact that "oil for food" was a big scam some of the money which was channeled to terrorists (!), the AQ Khan outsourced nuke network, and the political momentum against the "sanctions" regime (remember how the sanctions were "killing 500000 Iraqi babies"???).
The truth is that we should have finished the job in 1991. Take out Saddam, help the rebels against him. Yes our generals weighed the cost of that, and it looked huge.
But the cost of not doing that has arguably been huger. Suppose we had gone to Baghdad.
No "sanctions", no whining about our killing the perennial 500000 Iraqi babies, no patrolling "no fly zones", no need for our troops (infidels!!) in Saudi Arabia....
Heck, when you look at the grievances which Bin Laden was publishing prior to 9/11, 99% of them seem to boil down to things the US had to do as a direct result of not taking out Saddam in the first damn place.
IMHO you can toss 9/11, every last casualty, into the "cost of not finishing the job in '91" column.
So, the choice is somewhat different than you present. Saddam was not some faraway person with whom we had no relationship. He was a declared enemy - who had killed Americans - with whom we had a ceasefire, which was costing us (or "blowing back" on us, if you will) quite a bit in terms of increased terrorism against us. (Whether he was directing it, or not, really doesn't matter in this analysis.)
The point is we were being charged a semi regular fee in order not to go to Baghdad. We paid that fee with the USS Cole. We paid it even more on 9/11. To say that we should have kept up the "sanctions"/"containment" is to say that we should have kept on paying that fee. That's a difficult sell, to me.
It also ignores the high likelihood that the "sanctions" were going to go bye-bye. One more (D) administration, one more propaganda push about the dead Iraqi babies... remember that (I think it was) France proposed to the UN to drop the sanctions after 9/11!!
Iraq was a strategic choice. It was a strategic choice made by our administration to win the Gulf War rather than lose it. (In this sense, anyway, I think the Bush haters have a point: Bush was "finishing what his daddy started". I'm glad for it.) This choice prevented the emergence of a newly strong (for "standing up to" the U.S.), nuclear-armed (again - all estimates put this on a 10-year time frame; Joe Wilson's BS doesn't set that timetable back at all), oil-rich Iraq headed by Saddam Hussein (and his descendants), its wealth at his disposal for his Saladin ambitions.
Because, make no mistake, that WAS the alternative.
I've yet to see a single convincing argument why that alternative ought to be considered preferable by any American.
Is selflessly bringing democracy and human rights to millions of hitherto oppressed and brutalized people worth it? Is our national security worth it? Let me think about that for a while. Okay, they are.
Exactly. We fight the war on our terms, not theirs...with many victories we'll never hear about.
The reports were always in the hundreds of thousands.
The mass graves never panned out....not that I remember anyway. I remember comments about some mass graves that showed up at the sites where major battles had been fought, but those could have been war dead. Even then, the numbers were limited.....nothing like hundreds of thousands.
The simple answer is "No." The more complicated answer is that we aren't there because of Iraq. We're there because of America. We were attacked on 9/11. The attack was brought about by the failure of American leadership to deal with unchecked terrorism. We can argue about whether this was the best way to deal with it, but it's clear that by attacking Iraq, the US attacked al Qaeda. The more complicated answer, then, is "Yes."
What are you talking about? The US was on the side of the islamists in Afghanistan(in the 80s), in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia more recently. It is only when the dog we fed bit us on the ass that we turned against it.
That is a big improvement over their being able to attack us over here simply because we won't willing allow the conversion of American law to Sharia "law" over here.
I'm not sure I agree that "the islamic creeps" are quite as occupied as you state.
As we've learned from our fellow freepers, there are very serious problems with "middle eastern" men walking into our country from mexico, maybe thousands daily.
We are reminded at least once a month that another attack is highly probable.
Your points are well taken, though.
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I also arrived @ that ironic conclusion while I was writing this.
May I suggest you read the book "The Pentagon's New Map" it will answer your questions, I am sure.
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