Saddam..............

The theoretical base of the Iraq war may be to:

1. Protect the USA - is that true?

2. Humantarian Imperialism - a doctrine that we must carry our unique democratic culture to all the cesspools of the world. It ignores that they like their culture and don't particularly want us to save them. They may not like the looney dictator but they don't want our culture.

IMHO, this second view point of Bush's is fatally flawed as many theorists think. Thus, the only justification is #1 and that's an empirical and undecided question.

I'm reading Sands of Empire by Merry (a conservative) who really vaporizes the justification for the Iraq War and our inability to truly identify a clash of cultures as compared to just a few rotten apple terrorists.
 
We did not go into Iraq for regime change, we went in because of weapons of mass destruction.

Regime change to out a dictator is becoming a popular catch all because there were no WMD.

We have no right to engage in regime change, it is for Iraqui's to wage their own civil war- which apparently they are now doing with Uncle Sam in the middle and getting burned.
 
What we should have done, and what we should do in the future - like say North Korea:

Develop a cheap stamped semi-auto rifle, something akin to an AK-47 for instance. Build them by the millions at the cheapest cost possible. Fly over the repressed country and parachute the guns out by the millions, along with ammo of course.

In other words, arm the entire populace. If the people themselves then do not take matters into their own hands, forget about them.
 
and......

Did I read different ugly papers and listen to different interesting media? Ok, to recap....

WMD was one of many reasons I think we did go into Iraq. If the UN Resolutions weren't considered or the inspection teams bounced out then let back in to get thrown out again, or maybe Iraqi citizens that were able to escape and brought their torture story to the US, ours and friendly nations aircraft in no fly zones getting shot at, should I continue on? NO.... because if the folks that didn't want us to get into Iraq for any or all reasons; continue to remind them sure won't work if they have ear plugs in and are singing FaLaLaLaLa LaLaLaLa............. It is only understood by those who can look at the entire picture and put the information together to form the bigger picture.......not just WMD...........although that in itself should have made it clear to get very interested in what was going on in Iraq..... It's nice to see a lot of the informed that weren't crazy about war, still realize why it was waged.......
 
One of the fallacies of our going into Iraq was the "concept" of Weapons of Mass Destruction. A "WMD" is an undefined bogey. I am not splitting hairs here either. How many deaths at the hands of how many terrorists make a WMD? Do you think that one terrorist can kill 1,000 people with a WMD? Think again.

Chemical weapons - they are only weapons of mass destruction when they are massively applied. Otherwise they are a singularly ineffective weapon. When Saddam used them against his own people he did so by using an Army to distribute the chemicals. This is not something that is going to become a massively destructive weapon in the hands of terrorists.

Biological weapons: They too require massive distribution to get massive deaths. How do you apply them? How many people will be infected before the casualties are contained? Do you think that terrorists would be using suicide bombers who are able to kill around a maximum of 50 people if they had a means to kill 500 at a time? If biological weapons were easy to make and distribute, where are they being used? Why aren't they being used? Cause they aren't easy to make and distribute in a way that causes anything more than a few deaths.

Nuclear weapons - these are weapons of mass destruction. Dirty bombs may be weapons of mass destruction. THESE we need to be very wary of. How close was Saddam to having the capability of nuclear weapons? He was light years away.

So, please do this: Define a WMD for me?
 
Butch.......

I follow you most of the time but this one we are light years apart........

Your a smart person and I sure don't need to explain what a WMD is to you....

We each define it a little different but MASS is a large number...... To some folks three armed bandits is a good enough definition. I can't argue that either if those 3 bad ones are coming my way. We know that a weapon is any item that could be used to cause injury or death. The word destruction is simple as well. When the wrecking ball takes down the old Hilton Hotel - buddy that is destruction. Maybe someday Websters will do a poll and get real data from a bunch of us "want to know types" and add it to the big book?

I hate to even go and give a suggestion of just one type of a WMD is...... Like I said, your smart and have an imagination...... OK, I just aint going to tell any I can think up....... No person in his normal frame of mind has to think too long or hard.....

Biological, Chemical or Nuke............. or mixed............all are the same (WMD) and like it or not, the airliners lost on 9-11 fit the definition too.
 
Apple a Day
He hardly kept the fanatical muslim terrorists under control. He let them move in and out of the country, set up training bases, and use hospital facilities in Baghdad. What a paragon of restraint!
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Even more so than the issue of "WMDs", this is patent bs. Were the "fanatical Muslim terrorists" been given free rain by the Hussein government, the Chaldean Catholics there would have been their first targets.

There is - or was - an interesting landmark in Baghdad; an enormous sculpture-like structure that Saddam Hussein built there in the late 1970s. Blue in color, it is like the huge dome of a muslim mosque - broken in two.
 
Rojoe67: I always find myself alone on this particular issue, so not to worry that you are wondering where I am coming from. Let me try it this way:

My definition of a WMD is one that can be used by three or less terrorist acting together and is capable of killing 1,000 people in a single use.

This definitition is based on what is a threat to us here in the USA. It is based upon that premise for the simple reason that we used the fear of WMDs as our rationale for the war on Iraq. If my definition is somewhat accurate, then the only true WMD is nuclear.

So, having laid my cards on the table, please give me your definition.

Thanks
Butch
 
the Chaldean Catholics there would have been their first targets.
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Patently false. The arab extremists do not and never have had a serious problem with middle eastern christians. They are united in their hatred of Israel. If you don't like the war in Iraq, fine, but it's double-speak to claim Saddam was not interested in terrorism. The only thing he was not interested in was religion. He paid scholarships to the families of many religious suicide bombers in Israel. Saddam hated the state of israel with every fiber in his body, and that's why his cooperation and aid to terrorists was a threat. The idea that Saddam was going around killing terrorists to keep them under control is ridiculous. Saddam, a baathist of Sunni background, had plenty in common with them and it was only a matter of time before they pulled off a catastrophic attack on the US or its interests together.

I've been travelling for a while now, and haven't been around the forum, but I wanted to post here because I've been hearing so many opinions about Iraq. Did the whole world forget that Saddam invaded a US ally, and then refused to comply with virtually all of the terms of his defeat?
 
Butch...

Your a good sport........ I was thinking I might have touched a nerve......I seem to do that often in here, most of the time I'm not even trying too.

It's fair that your standing at 3 or less bad apples and taking out 1000+ good people. I can't assign numbers that great to my idea of it's value. I think if a solo suicide bomber be it on a plane, train or bike has ability to get into an area of a crowd.........and sets it off......... hurting or killing a large amount........lets just scale down and say 100? I would consider that a mass. I guess it's silly for us to debate this after thinking about it. If I was a family member of anyone killed on any of the three planes used on 9-11, I would consider my loved one was also killed by same...........


That is my hand as well.......... sad thing is neither of us is the winner no matter if there is a perfect hand dealt.......

Take care............ With respect to all........ Rojoe67 :)
 
Your a good sport........ I was thinking I might have touched a nerve......I seem to do that often in here, most of the time I'm not even trying too.
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It is a problem with typed communications. Things that are said with a certain tone of voice and facial expression that would not be found offensive, can seem exceedingly offensive when read in cold print without the major communication support of tone of voice and facial expressions :).

The reason I was trying to get to a definition of WMD, is that before we went into Iraq I did not think Iraq had weapons that were truly capable of mass destruction. Unless they had nukes, which turns out they didn't.

Everyone throws around the term WMD and no one defines it. Very few people understand how limited the damage caused by chemical and biological weapons is. Those WMDs just happen to require huge logistics to spread to the extent that they cause mass destruction. Or in other words WMD is just a straw man. Unless it is nuclear that is.

Maybe I should start another thread to see if I can get some definitions from various people.
 
shootingstudent
The arab extremists do not and never have had a serious problem with middle eastern christians.
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Trollop. There is no difference whatsoever between the Chaldean Catholics in Iraq - and those anywhere else in the world.

The only difference in the Middle East was that unlike in places like Saudi Arabia, they were free to live unpersecuted and practice in Iraq, protected under the Hussein government.
They are united in their hatred of Israel
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More trollop. The Rothschild family, of which Edmund James Rothschild was given the title "Father of the Settlements", has lived unprotected and unmolested in England for decades, has properties and business entities all over Europa and the rest of the globe. This while Al Kidya and their "Arab Muslim fanatics" bomb buses and a few subways killing a handful of relative nobodies because "they hate Israel"? Give me a break.

You have been watching too much CNN again.
If you don't like the war in Iraq, fine, but it's double-speak to claim Saddam was not interested in terrorism
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Doublespeak? It takes a heavy dose of doublethink to believe that Saddam Hussein was interested in bringing on his own destruction - right along with your other bizarre assertions addressed above.
 
but history is replete with examples of what happens when the world does not stop tyranny.
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:D Would you like ham or sausage with your irony? :D

gburn u beat me to it. Not only the dictators in Africa (although they did spring to my mind immediately as well) but worldwide. So after realizing there are many just as bad and even worse, there must be another reason why we chose to invade THIS country. Suddenly, "he gassed his own people," or, "he was an ahole" doesnt hold water.

So, the question we must now ask ourselves is, "What is the REAL reason we chose to bomb and invade this country?"

OI'll tell you... :) :barf:
 
Those who take the angle that Saddam was a dictator who was really horrid to his peopleneed to explain why we didn't invade North Korea instead.

Saddam may have had nukes, NK admitted to having both nukes, and a clandestine nuclear program.

Saddam started a war of aggression against a neighbor that cost us a few hundred lives when we came to help that neighbor out.

NK started a war of aggression against a neighbor that cost us sixty thousand lives when we came to help that neighbor out.

Saddam took potshots at U.S. airplanes patrolling the no-fly zone...without actually ever managing to shoot one down.

NK captured a U.S. Navy vessel, and held the crew hostage for a year. Their commando teams also killed a significant number of U.S. soldiers stationed at the DMZ. They've fired a long-range ballistic missile over the territory of an allied nation. Their leader is literally starving his people due to mismanagement. Their intelligence services have repeatedly kidnapped citizens of allied nations and held them captive for decades.

In the "bad regime" sweepstakes, Saddam was a piker compared to the Army Ants that run North Korea. If your main justification of the Iraq war was that "Saddam was a bad dude", you need to lay out why, of all the tinpot dictators in the world, this one's removal justified a few hundred billion dollars of our tax money and a few thousand irreplacable American lives.
 
'Trollop'??????

LAK...are you actually calling shootinstudent a prostitue; a low, vulgar, adulterous, unclean woman; a harlot or strumpet? For shame. :(

Your view of Saddam seems to be as misinformed as your use of the above word. Saddam left the Catholics in Iraq alone because they posed no political or military threat to him, at least one of his ruling clique, Tariq Aziz, was Catholic and Saddam didn't want the moral weight of the Vatican to shift from opposing the UN/US efforts to get him out of Kuwait. At any time, if any of these three dynamics had changed, Saddam would have had his way with them just like he did with everyone else.

It also boggles the mind that, dispite overwhelming, daily evidence, you still deny the existence of Al Qaeda in particular and the worlwide threat of islamofascism in general. Tell it to the families of the dead.
 
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Marko,

I agree with your post and I believe that the answer lies in logistics and the geopolitical realities of the late 20th century. North Korea is China's ballpark and they won't tolerate armed interference there again.
If Mexico was ruled by a megalomaniacal dictator whose regime would stop at nothing to acquire nukes, would we tolerate China crossing the Pacific and forcing regime change by stomping a mudhole in everything south of the Rio Grande? I think not.

The mideast has been the west's ballpark since the end of WW I. We are logistically better situated there than in the Northern Pac Rim. There is the strategic interest in maintaining western access to petroleum supplies, though I don't think our current war is solely about oil.
 
That I can accept...but the old "He had WMDs! No, wait, he was a really bad man!" justification is an insult to anyone with an IQ above that of a chick pea.
 
Bush II was interested in overthrowing Saddam before 9/11. He was influenced by the remenants of his father's regime that wanted to take out Saddam in Gulf War I. I also think there was some psychological father/son thing going on with GWB.

After 9/11, you may recall that there was an argument in the administration about putting Iraq before Afghanistan.

It is clear that Bush has some evangelical view of America that he got from the Neo-Cons and thought that by taking out Saddam, he would convert the Middle East to democracy. He and that crowd were wrong.

The culture of the region is far more powerful than he thought.

All the freedom from a dictator rhetoric is hindsight bias to explain the flop of the WMD/Iraq-9/11 tie BS.
 
LAK,

Your opinion belies the fact that you do not know any middle eastern christians. Christians can and do live peacefully, in large numbers, in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and especially kuwait. As I know from personal friends and acquaintances who are palestinian, lebanese, and kuwaiti, the theology is not the same, but that's not relevant. They uniformly denounce Israel, and live as citizens just like everyone else in their home countries. You can easily verify one fact at least: Christians in Iraq have called for Ali Al Sistani to receive a nobel peace prize.

Marko,

I do agree with your position on the WMD and bad guy arguments. I don't think this administration has voiced the right reasons, but for me that doesn't mean that there are in fact no good reasons to have toppled Saddam. I think gburner said it well.
 
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