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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/28/2005 6:55:46 AM

mnottertail

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Oh, Christ.....like we are not experts at creating failed states. See the post that included Noriega, add to it Mengistu, Khaddafi and nearly every failure in South America......the list can go on and on........

By the way, we didn't create it, that country was around a thousand or more years before we were a glimmer in Leif Ericcson's eye. They will survive our meddling.

I don't see an end to the war on terrorism either, unless we quit fucking around in other countries internal affairs. Remember terrorist have political motivation, insurgents do not. Who are being terrorized? England, US.... How about Belgium? Hmmmmmmm, not on the list. The WWI comment you made is absolutely true. What we are seeing now with Herzogovenia, Bosnia, Palestinians(although a much larger situation), Lebanon, Kurdistan(again a much larger situation) and so forth is due in large part to our divine right in mapmaking skills after WWII.

I am all for hunting and killing terrorists, and bringing to justice anyone who does this to us, regardless of who shot john first. Done is done. I am not guilty because the chinese are communists. But I want clean hands when this is said.

Ron

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/28/2005 11:49:49 AM

Lordandmaster

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Add Iran.

Edited to add: Add Iraq.

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Oh, Christ.....like we are not experts at creating failed states. See the post that included Noriega, add to it Mengistu, Khaddafi and nearly every failure in South America......the list can go on and on........

< Message edited by Lordandmaster -- 7/28/2005 11:50:01 AM >

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/28/2005 11:52:23 AM

mnottertail

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Thank you LordandMaster,

I was aware that there existed more than one insurgent on this site.

Ron

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/28/2005 3:11:49 PM

Pavel

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We sure screwed the pooch on Germany, Japan, Korea and the like too, just a continued chain of failures.

We're looking at something else entirely different than playing chess in South America, toppling leaders and playing rebel groups off each other. Iraq has sorta kinda existed for thousands of years, but before that it was a whole host of other nations, or part of larger empires. You're making a claim that essentially there's always been a Poland (even when it was parts of Russia and Germany). Iraq has fallen before, and it's always been a bastard of a nation, split between three groups all of whom rather hate each other. There's a difference between modern Iraq and the history you refer to, and as is it's not a stable happy place right now.

Who made the maps after the second world war? The same people who carved up Africa in the 1800's and invented countries in Asia. Put the blame where it belongs with old Europe. We just supported the post world war two states generated from that cluster fuck because they were pro-US, in a time when more and more of Eastern Europe was dragged kicking and screaming under the iron curtain. When you're looking at World War Three you're less likely to worry about the human rights record or the legitmacy of the goverment of your allies.

We're attacked because we're the "great satan." Why waste your time on the little fish when the big one is right there?

As is, we should back off and keep from meddling in the affairs of other nations. The cold war is over, and plenty of former allies need to get the boot. That said, it isn't going to result in some drastic reduction in terrorism. The object of Islamic fundamentalism is by far more vast than merely haveing an isolationist US/western world.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/28/2005 3:31:43 PM

Lordandmaster

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Anything from within the last forty years?

Didn't think so.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Pavel

We sure screwed the pooch on Germany, Japan, Korea and the like too, just a continued chain of failures.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 12:25:54 PM

fourpeas

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster

And here I was thinking our level of discourse was starting to get too elevated.

quote:

ORIGINAL: SirKenin

It was a select few nitwits that were against the war, the typical tree hugger crew, that are against anything and everything as long as they can smoke a joint while they protest.

LaM, you should have your own TV show. Seriously. I'd watch it.

Back to the war....

I agree with support of the individual troops as I have friends and family in Iraq. It breaks my heart to see them being over there. I also was with the support of the war on terrorism... but now we have to do things in a new way. It doesn't make sense to me to compare this to VietNam because there were no Viet Cong bombers throwing themselves onto trains, buses, and into planes and flying into buildings.

What *is* the same is the feeling of helplessness. Sigh. I don't know. It just doesn't make sense anymore. Someone should be gracious and humble enough to call this whole thing off so we can all have ice cream together. It is sad however how good war is for an economy. It is true. Ahh. This whole thing makes me so upset I don't even know what I'm saying anymore...

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 1:03:59 PM

Pavel

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How many nations outside of Vietnam have we occupied for an extended peroid of time? How many nations have we been involved with beyond regiem changes? You can point to South America and Iran all you want, all we did was keep people in charge that were favorable to our position. I would call that somthing entirely different from reconstruction or the efforts we're making in Iraq. We're doing things from the ground up, rather than just saying "hey, this guy wants to nationalize US intrests, let's off him and replace him with someone who doesn't want to do that."

We haven't done anything like this for 40 years is my point. Even in places we invaded, Grenada, we were in and out, Panama, once the war ended we went back to our bases and left the mess for the locals to clean up, Iraq the first time, we turned the place back over to Saddam when the fighting ended, essentially we haven't stayed around long enough to rebuild much of anything.

The Viet Cong killed plenty of civilians, just it prefered to do it in a non-suicidal manner.

How good is the war effort for the economy? I really haven't seen any numbers to support this. I do know the security business is makeing bank off of Homeland Security.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 1:42:25 PM

onceburned

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Pavel
How good is the war effort for the economy? I really haven't seen any numbers to support this. I do know the security business is makeing bank off of Homeland Security.

Yes, any government spending will stimulate the economy. The problem with military/defense spending is that it doesn't have the multiplier effect that spending in other areas would have such as education, transportation, health etc.

So if stimulating the economy is the purpose of government spending, the military/security sector is the least efficient way to do so.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 2:02:42 PM

Pavel

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I think that's kind of what I meant in a indirect way. The war isn't really that good for the economy. It has some effect, but only in certain areas, which hardly constitute a large portion of the US economy.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 2:17:01 PM

mnottertail

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quote:

I'm just saying it wasn't like a bolt from the blue to some mentally handicapped redneck in the basement of the CIA. These were smart educated people comeing to what was a logical conclusion shared by other people doing the same job globally.

This has ate at me for a long time and I have tried not to comment further on this, but I am gonna.

Sentence one is pretty much exactly what happened. Sentence two has no bearing in reality. There was no doubt in any thinking humans mind that there would be some reason found to invade.

If you (in the royal sense) did not see invasion of Iraq coming when;
Dick Cheney was named as vice-president;
Colin Powell was named secretary of state;
Donald Rumsfeld as Sec'y of Defense;

Then (in the royal sense) you are a dipshit.

Ron

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 4:02:18 PM

Pavel

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I saw the invasion comeing, I'm just saying the WMD pretex was one that was at least feasiable to many folks out there. It wasn't like Kosovo where we went in for Humanitarian reasons (so we only ignore most genocides), or the No-Fly zones (by randomly blowing up SAM sites and not allowing Iraq's limited Air Force to fly in some places, somehow this was supposed to lead to Saddam's downfall), or maybe just the whole intervention in Bosnia too (hey! dropping bombs will solve hundreds of years of ethnic strife!). Saddam haveing WMDs was a realisitc threat, one that had been highlighted by the Clinton admin from day one.

What happens from there is a classic bit of how intelligence goes wrong. Everyone "knows" Saddam is hiding weapons. Thus anything that looks like it could maybe sorta kinda be involved with Saddam fowarding such a program becomes plausible or some form of evidence. The presense of this "evidence" backs up the false conclusion, in a case of circular logic.

I'm pretty sure without WMD as a cause we'd have gone to war eventually. Saddam was too fond of playing close to the edge, and unlike Clinton, Bush was willing to meet him at the edge and shove him off. I intially believed the WMD evidence as one, I was all of 19, and had been hearing for the past 8 or so years of my life, that Saddam had WMDs and wanted to use them on me, two, I was hearing it from Colin Powell, one of the few people in civil goverment I trusted. It was also easy to believe that the UN weapons inspectors couldn't find their own asses with a map and a flashlight given the UN's past successes (go Rwanda and Sierra Leone!). You can't just pretend like every thing was crystal clear, and obvious from day one.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 6:06:57 PM

dominmd

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I was in support for the war based on information given at the time. However, I am no longer in support for the war.

What and whom I support are the troops. Screw the politicians that are safe here in the states. I have and will have more family over there soon. I want them home, no ifs and or buts. We are no longer wanted there by the indiginous population or the population of the region. They want to murder each other, let them have at it. Israel (sp) wants to glass them, let them go for it. These people have been fighting for centuries, and the USA cannot stop this.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/29/2005 7:36:17 PM

Lordandmaster

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I feel very much the way dominmd does.

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RE: A new thorn in our lives - 7/30/2005 7:22:09 AM

QuietMaster4u

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I had read an article about that...

Why Bush had picked these particular people for those positions. And the conclusion was then, that he surrounded himself with people, who had the knowledge of the target. So, we got an administration that was designed for one thing in mind. War.

The other thing, that the article had mentioned, and it was only a speculation. That the jumior Bush wanted to go in and finish the task that dad had started. To exact, some kind of "revenge" for his father.

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