I am an Englishman who beleives that Saddam Hussein must be ejected from power before he obtains a nuclear capability. ... Please confine yourselves to making constructive comments and not just generic anglophobic remarks. I am not a socialist or a liberal, my teeth are in perfect condition and my grandparents despised Neville Chamberlain.
I do not know if you can persuade your countrymen, David. At their core, I do not think that they truly understand that evil cannot be reasoned with, that it cannot be persuaded, and that attempts to do so only forestall the inevitable.
I confess that this makes little sense to me - were there a mad dog wandering the streets of Sedgefield, attacking children and the elderly, would they try to reason with it, to persuade it to behave in a more appropriate manner? Would they "sanction" it, hoping that it would learn to behave if denied food and water? Would they simply ignore it and hope that it goes away on its own, to attack people somewhere else? How many people would it have to bite before it occurred to someone to just kill the damn thing and be done with it?
This is what we are faced with - there is no reasoning with such an animal, and there is no negotiation. I know this is seen as naïve and unsubtle to those who obsess about "root causes" and whether or not the mad dog is somehow justified in biting someone, but I think I'll wait and see who is unbitten at the end of the day - those who reserve the right to act preemptively, or those who insist on trying to pet the nice doggie.
Der Krieg ist ... eine Fortsetzung der politschen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderer Mittel
(War is the continuation of politics and diplomacy by other means)-- Karl von Clausewitz