The "Bushbots" aren't questioning the "patriotism" of the appeasement crowd.Oh, so it's "the appeasement crowd" now. The straw man is of your own verbal construction. All counter assertions are "cheap debating tricks" and "straw men" to you, while your own arguments descend from the burning bush. Right. Like you said earlier, you've neither fought nor served, so perhaps you find the threshhold to commit others to battle a little lower than mine. Zinni has a point.
Appeasement is appeasement. Dress it up in fancy clothing, but history still condemns it.
You cite my lack of military experience to buttress your argument. That is where your whole argument falls apart. In short, you did just as I expected you to, which is why I told you that I had no military experience. I wanted to see if you'd go for the bait, and as I expected, you just couldn't help yourself. You imply that I lower the bar to military intervention because I have no experience in this regard. In so doing, you have to assume that I would lower the bar in all cases. I should inform you that I was opposed to the Kosovo war because I saw no direct threat to American national interests.
Your argument rests on the presumption that only those who have served in the uniformed military should have the call on when we get to go and when we do not. Your argument rests on the fallacy that only those who have worn a uniform have validity to their argument. That is the erronious assumption on which your house of cards rests and you cannot back out of it. You have made your own bed, and now you have to lie in it.
Alarm bells should accompany the fevered rush to invade and occupy Iraq and any other country we dislike. If war is truly necessary, it will come soon enough and the issue will be crystal clear, and the evidence will withstand the full scrutiny of an assembled Congress. Instead, we hear the call to "shut up" and "trust us" and "don't ask questions" and "let's invade now." As with a sales pitch for a great deal that won't last unless you buy today, I have to wonder what we're being sold. War can bring one hell of a case of buyer's remorse.
Ah, once again, the bodies of straw men litter the battlefield. Who is telling you to "shut up"? Who is telling you to "just trust us"?
The fact is, no one on the pro-war side is, and both of us know it. No one is asserting that the President need not lay out his case to the people before dispatching troops to war, except a few politically tone-deaf White House lawyers. This President knows that he will have to lay out the case for intervention.
Your argument is no less a straw man than it would be had you not served.
As to the actual merit of your argument, it has none. I assume that you have concluded that we will be immeasurably safer if Saddam develops a tactical nuclear weapon or two. Which he will if he is left to his own devices. That, apparently, does not bother you. It bothers me. Fortune favors the brave, but it does not favor the foolish. If Saddam can sneak one bomb into the United States, he can hold us hostage. Or, better yet, he can use a cutout like Al Qaeda and take some serious revenge. Those possibilities don't appear to have entered your head.
I had a conversation about this with my cousin last night. All things being equal, Saddam could stop this rush to war if he let in unrestricted observers and just got out of their way. If he decided to get out of the business of mass murder, he'd be sitting on cloud nine for the rest of his life.
But he has something to hide. He wants personal glory and sees WMD as his ticket to the history books.
I really don't care if Saddam or any other foreign dictator misbehaves within his sovereign borders or possesses WMDs -- both are commonplace today. There's no legitimate beef unless he attacks another country or blatantly poises for attack, and neither situation has occurred since 1990. Until such a provocation occurs, we are prejudging Saddam's "hate thought" without evidence of any overt foreign aggression. Now that's a fine precedent...
Okay, the same argument was made in 1936 when the Wehrmacht retook the Rheinland. The same argument was made in 1937 when Germany seized Austria by use of the Aunschcluss. They tried to make the same argument in 1938, and it worked for a time: Hitler pulled off the Sudeten Crisis without war. Eventually, we ended up in 1939, and the world went to war.
All because we didn't stop one megalomaniacal dictator when we had the chance.
You don't care, but History does. You want to ignore Saddam, but History will not let you. You want to deligitimize the arguments of others based on your military experience, but History chooses not to smile on you.
Saddam will become immeasurably more powerful should he obtain tactical nuclear weapons and have the means to deliver them. He is not a thoroughly rational man. At least the Israelis are. They have a sense of limits. Saddam does not. And Saddam wants to go down in the Arab History books as the modern Saladin who destroyed the Zionist Crusader State. With nuclear weapons, he can do that.
It is to forestall a larger catastrophe that I argue for war. This has happened before in History. Thankfully, we have a national leadership which understands the choice at hand. One path, that of "containment", is objectively the path of Appeasement, as it would only become a matter of time until Saddam won possession of nuclear weaponry. The ring around him would be broken. The other path is to go in and to smash him in one campaign, thus removing a dangerous man with dangerous means from the world stage.
Dress up the path of appeasement all you want. None of your assertions alter the fact that you have argued that we do nothing in the face of evil. Using the cheap, tawdry argument that those who have not served don't have the intellectual legitimacy to argue their point serves no one's argument, least of all your's, well.
And it neatly sidesteps the argument at hand, which was your intention, of course.
Be Seeing You,
Chris