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STOP BY A BUMP THE FUNDRAISER THREAD
It's on the Breaking News Sidebar
OK, but how many give a rat's @ss?
Gore repeats that Saddam MUST GO - June 2000
Taliban, Clinton, Saudi Involvement - All laid out in a book published in 2000 (from USMC.MIL site)
The Democrats' Case Against Saddam Hussein (Dems nailed, yet again)
Headline Rundown and links on Iraq - Things the democrats have conviently forgot...
Saddam Abused His Last Chance, Clinton -clear and present danger to safety of people everywhere 1998
What the democrats want you to forget
Iraq is a Regional Threat, capable of as much as 200 tons of VX nerve agent (1999 Clinton report)
Czech military reports say iraq has smallpox virus in weapons stockpile (and camelpox)
Iraqi chemical weapons buildup reported (Sept 2001 Report)
Clinton, Gore rally domestic support for strike at Iraq, "unholy axis" (1998 Must read)
statement President Clinton from 1998 on the air strikes
Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 - Full Text, Sense of Congress - Remove Saddam
It is amazing to watch the press ramble and rant about things that are supposition and political commentary, but not investigative reporting. It also betrays the liberal leanings and political slants of the press, once you have some idea of what is known and agreed upon fact, and what is conjecture and supposition.
There is no doubt that Iraq once had WMD and their programs constituted a dire threat, not just to the US, but to the entire world, including the people of Iraq. What has happened to those weapons and programs and materials is in doubt, but their existance and the intent to use them is not.
This kind of crap is no different than what happened during VietNam.
Editorial after editorial whining about the reason for the war when our men and women were dying for that reason.
There's going to be a big push to get us out of Iraq, the same way the anti-war protestors did during 'Nam.
If it succeeds our children will have another despot to deal with in a few short years.
Bee Ess!! You don't need to read any further than that.
The president of the United States had good reason to be concerned. People with reason to know had warned him:Liberals are always at a disadvantage when arguing with conservatives, since conservatism is always based upon the lessons learned from history. We always can point back to reality, to substance, to history to give concrete examples that back our positions. Liberals, on the other hand, must rely on revision of history, ignorance, and denial. Even liberals pretending to be more-right-than-you conservatives (I remember when this guy used to post as rightwing2).
A ruthless dictator whose aggressive intent had already been amply demonstrated now aspired to develop new and awesome weapons of mass destruction.
Once in possession of those weapons, the tyrant would be undeterrable. The nation's security and that of the free world depended on beating him to the punch.
The warning had come in the form of a letter dated Aug. 2, 1939, and signed: Albert Einstein...
There was no time to waste. "I understand," Dr. Einstein told the president, "that Germany has already stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over." He added that experiments with uranium were even now being conducted at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin...
By that time, Nazi Germany had fallen, and although every scientific laboratory and secret arsenal in the country was being scoured, there was no sign that Germany was anywhere near having a nuclear weapon. Working under the venerated Werner Heisenberg, the German physicists had taken a wrong turn and were still playing with "heavy water" while Robert Oppenheimer's boys were doing the equations and engineering at Los Alamos...
Does that mean the danger never existed? That Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had over-reacted? That Einstein was an alarmist?"
Truth is independant of public opinion. If 81% of the people polled believed the earth was flat and the moon was made of cheese, it would not make it so.
There's a big difference in those two statements. Even I think the administration is guilty of salesmanship.
The poll can be found here: http://www.pipa.org/
Here is the poll question/results:
Was Administration Fully Truthful on WMD?
Is it your impression that when the US government presented evidence of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to justify going to war with Iraq, it was:
Presenting evidence they knew was false (10%)
Stretching the truth, but not making false statements (52%)
Being fully truthful (32%)
"PIPA and Knowledge Networks conducted a nationwide poll of 1051 American adults over June 18-25, 2003. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 3-3.5%, depending on whether the question was asked to the full sample or three-quarters of the sample. The poll was fielded using Knowledge Networks’ nationwide panel, which is randomly selected from the entire adult population and subsequently provided internet access. For more information about this methodology see page 13, or go to www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp. Funding for this research was provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation."
When we come to the specific case of Iraq, however, things are a lot messier than that. I am amazed that so many people are willing to hang their hats on the proposition that there was no significant threat there. Maybe I'll agree with them in another three years. But if we haven't found Saddam Hussein's most closely-guarded military secrets after three whole months of looking, I am not surprised. The discovery of a uranium-enrichment centrifuge under a rose bush in some guy's back yard — with him telling us that he was told to hide it there — gives us just a hint of what we are up against. Here's Hans Blix to tell us he checked all the big buildings with smokestacks and storage tanks, and he didn't find a thing. How many back yard rose bushes did he dig up? That might be what we're looking at to find this stuff. This author, like so many others, ignores the Second Law of Decisionmaking Under Uncertainty. We can't know for a fact what a dictator in a foreign country with seven layers of ever-more-secret police might be doing down in his dungeons. That's reality. We have to guess. Rule One is, we try to put probabilities on the nature of the threat and its potential size. Might he have smallpox? Might he have anthrax? How close might he be to having one or more nuclear weapons? We take what we do know (he gassed the Kurds, he gassed the Iranians, the UN put 550kg of yellow cake uranium he had collected into a locked warehouse) and we make educated guesses. If he had 40,000 tons of Liquid Death in 1997, how many tons might he have now? There's no certainty to any of this. The second-guessers and the Magoos with 40/40 hindsight (we haven't found the WMD's in 3 months, ergo they do not exist) have a field day with this stuff. "See that? He was wrong. In fact he probably lied on purpose." Not so fast. There's Rule Two. Rule Two says, "probabilities aside, what are the penalties for making a mistake, one way or the other?" The probability of Lightning Nag winning the 6th at Pimlico are pretty small, but the penalty for making a mistake by betting on her can be as low as $2, and in any case we control the size of our own mistake. The penalty for making a mistake about whether Saddam Hussein has a nuclear weapon and a deal with Osama bin Laden to deliver it to midtown Manhattan is a million dead and worldwide economic chaos. Even if the probability of that is very low, we might act against it anyway. I think we had something like that situation here, and too many of these critics are ignoring that. What American wants the President of the United States to sit in the White House and take serious risks with million-dead strikes against the American people? How cavalier of these yahoos to say, "Well, it didn't happen, so there was no reason to make sure it wasn't going to happen." They'd be the first ones hollering "Bush knew!" if New York City was today a radioactive ruin. The days when we could afford to wait for the other guy to hit us first, so that we could look like gentlemen, are fading fast. When the other guy's first punch is a nuke to the Capitol, or smallpox in Texas, it's insane to give him the chance to strike first. It's a puzzle. We have this happen every day, on a small scale, when police shoot a guy who looked like he was raising a gun. Sometimes it is a gun. Sometimes it's a cell phone. Do we really expect the cop to wait to find out the hard way that it was a gun? That's not reality. And neither is the idea that the strikes on 9/11 do not alter the variables in the penalty-for-a-mistake equations concerning possession of deadly gasses and germs. The appearance of a willing and well-funded delivery system for covert attacks with these weapons changes the game forever. In any war between a guy with a gun, and a guy with a bullet-proof vest, bet on the guy with the gun. If the guy with the vest really wants to live, he needs to go get his own gun, and shoot first if he gets the chance. |
All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war with Iraq was worth fighting, or not?
I can sympathize with the general-case thrust of this guy's argument. The occasional Hitler aside, I'm not a big fan of having U.S. troops running around the world playing Superman, righting the world's wrongs. And I absolutely do not want us to get into the business of invading other countries to steal their minerals or whatever. Worth Not worth No
fighting fighting opinion
7/10/03 57 40 3