Posted on 02/05/2003 1:44:05 PM PST by kattracks
The "unused space" to which Minister Villepin referred is in the collective French skulls.
And while we're on the subject of collectives, the UN is a useless antique born of Marxist utopian theory. The national security of the United States of America (and any other nation that values its sovereignty) should never, ever be held hostage to the whims of any other nation or group of nations. The League of Nations was not truly disbanded. It merely morphed into the UN after WWII. I wish it would disband forever.
Ha-Ha! Excellent analogy. Reminds me of the time I was a kid sleeping over at a house of friends of my parents. One kid in that family was a spoiled brat, acting up. His mommy went through the same bit, begging him to stop. He got worse, started throwing toys at her. His daddy promised to buy him that big stuffed animal he wanted. Junior ended up spitting in his mother's face. Next day he got the big stuffed animal. 30 years later I ran into his mom, asked "how's junior?". She said "we don't talk about him anymore, he's in prison for assault, robbery, weapons, etc..." (and was in and out of jail since his teen years).
What more needs to be said?
Nothing could be more mega-stupid than the juvenile insults we see above.
No matter how anyone rationalizes this war through WMD treaty evidence, we are the aggressors. We are the ones who are going to start it. Politicians lie and governments break agreements. That's not enough to justify butchering a population in my book. Fighting Iraq will be as helpful against terrorism as Vietnam was against communism. It won't be helpful at all and will probably make the problem worse. After all, the Twin Tower attacks, the worst terrorist event in history, were not committed with WMD.
This will be an immoral war because we are going to wipe out thousands of people based on the miniscule possibility that Hussein is just going to, on a whim, launch an attack on us or our allies. Unfortunately, no matter what we do, there is no guarantee of a perfectly safe world in all places at all times. We can only deal in probability. Launching a devastating war puts the original sin upon us and makes us the villain. We can't just assume he'll launch an attack. That is reckless and stupid. As long as he knows the consequences, which he has to, everything likely work out. You can't have a foreign policy based on paranoia. Besides, these things have a strange tendency to resolve themselves. Nasser of Egypt just dropped dead of a heart attack one day. Stalin died right before he was going to initiate another bloody purge. It wouldn't be surprising to see somthing like that happen in Iraq.
The US has never started a war in this manner and it will be a sad day when we do. As pointless and immoral as Clinton's war against Serbia was, there was already a war taking place. We just interfered, killed a lot of people, and wrecked a lot of property for an ambiguous result.
Bush said this was going to be a different type of war. But it looks like a very typical old type of war to me. The war on terror is probably really going to be World War III and could last decades because it's the first truly global guerrilla war with no end in sight. We will lose if we keep fighting it in the way we've fought the wars of the past.
There's a greater possibility that North Korea could do something rash - but Bush is too much of a coward to deal with Kim Il Jung because he may have nukes and also has a extremely powerful and large conventional force. On second thought, Bush is wisely going to avoid pressing that situation there. We will likely let the South Koreans deal with it and OK whatever they come up with. However, every country that thinks it's on our hit list is going to desperately try to get nukes because they can see the contradictory policy.
It's stupid for Bush to be fighting Iraq when the ultimate problem is the intolerance and inherently violent nature of Islam. He's too afraid to call it like it is and would rather appease the Gods of Diversity, the altar upon which Blair worships, much to the chagrin of the great people of Britain. I think Islamic liberals can reform the religion if they have time. Whether they can do it before some terrorist cell nukes NYC is the great race of all time. But the liberals need time and a war with Iraq only makes it harder for them, and more dangerous for us. But it's up to them.
With a war more Americans are going to be at risk all over the world and it will somehow eventually come back to haunt us. It may take a year, 5 years, or 20 years. We may go an entire decade without an incident and think the war on terror is won until one of our cities is suddenly hit with a nuke or bio/chem attack.
These countries aren't just going to sit idly by while we knock them off one by one. If our enemies are smart, there is probably in the works an informal alliance between China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and various other thug regimes. They will probably coordinate operations to spread us out so thin that we can't be everywhere at once, ensuring a strategic US setback somewhere.
Finally, there is the issue of fighting and what our guys are going to be exposed to. The evidence is coming in that the 1991 Iraq War, which was also pointless, was not such a clean one as we thought it was. Post-war casualties from Gulf War Illness are quite high - 160,000 (or 28%) to the satisfaction of government doctors - a higher casualty rate than any previous war (I have the article, I'd be happy to forward it to you). The way the government railroaded these guys and tried to deny anything is shameful.
This whole thing stinks. The only thing worse than an idiot like Bush are the people dumb enough to follow him, dumb enough to be swept up by the grand spectacle of the state. I shouldn't say that. You're not stupid. It's just that nobody likes to believe they're being hoodwinked by the government. Bush is basically a decent guy (yet stupid), who I sort of like personally. We all want to believe that we're all in this together and that politicians have our interests at heart. I stopped believing that a long time ago.
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