One of my good friends is an ex-Air Force man with a ponytail, a Masters' degree, a profession, and a Sierra Club membership who stands on the street to protest this war. Thank God we don't have to conxider killing one another to keep expressing our opinion.
And if you were as critical of the US as you are of academia, maybe you would experience some realizations of your own.
I don't have a problem with what he said, he has some significant points. What he fails to discuss is how exactly Iraq would fare if we do not topple Saddam. Also, Macbeth...academia is fine, how else would we get those nifty new bombs? DD
I would hope that preventing Saddam from rebuilding his Army completely was a result of the sanctions. Wasn't that their main purpose? To punish him and to prevent him from becoming an even bigger threat to the region.
Actually sanctions do not seem to work anymore. Sanctions are put in place to starve the people, and get them so pissed off that they overthrow the government. However, in today's high tech weaponary world, I think it only hurts the citizens, and they have very little chance of overthrowing a ruthless dictator like Saddam. It may be time to re-think sanctions as a viable alternative. DD
And you STILL haven't answered my question: Were you against these sanctions when Clinton was in the White House? Were you against the other military operations in Iraq when Clinton was in the White House? What about Kosovo under Clinton's watch?
Sorry, I don't buy that logic Bob. Saddam doesn't play by the rules....which causes the sanctions....which causes those deaths. The relief and aid that does get through doesn't get to the people that need it for one simple reason: Saddam is an evil b*stard. The end. I think its incredibly ignorant to blame America for any deaths or hardships brought about by the sanctions. This is a ridiculous argument. By this logic, we could nuke Iraq and kill10 million civilians and say it's completely Saddam's fault because we wouldn't have done it if Saddam wasn't there. Just because he's an idiot doesn't give us carte blanche to do anything we want and not assume any responsibility. There can be multiple causes here. Saddam has a good chunk of the responsibility because he's a jackass. That doesn't change the fact that we're the ones that implemented the sanctions, which accomplished nothing except contributing to the deaths of thousands of civilians. We share some responsibility here, just as we would if we nuked Iraq to eliminate Hussein.
Major, I agree with your point. But the sanctions in place do allow for the people to get food and medical supplies. And didn't the UN also support the sanctons?
But the sanctions in place do allow for the people to get food and medical supplies. And didn't the UN also support the sanctons? In theory, they allow people to get food & medicine. However, it should be neither surprising nor unexpected that it didn't play out this way, and if we implement a plan that we should reasonably know isn't going to work, then we have some responsibility for that. These types of sanctions against dictators <I>never</I> work. They didn't work in North Korea, they didn't work in Cuba, and no one should have expected them to work here. Aid programs in dictatorial countries rarely work either - see Somalia. Unless the UN is in there forcifully administering the aid, the warlords / dictators will always take the food for themselves and then use it to further strengthen their power base. The net result almost always is a strengthening (or at the very least, a maintaining) of power for the leadership and death / subjugation of the civilians. Sanctions can only work if the people have the ability to rise up against the government or the government actually cares about the people, and in the first case, that's basically the equivalent of knowingly trying to starve / hurt civilians in the hope of pissing them off enough to overthrow their leader.
So, war is a better solution. Over sanctions? Absolutely. If the goal is to get rid of Hussein (which was the goal of the sanctions), then the much simpler / more direct way is to attack and physically remove him. Of course, there are dozens of different ways to go about war, and we picked the one that best alienates the rest of the world.
To be clear (since I can't edit), alienates the rest of the world's people , not necessarily the governments.
If you mean "we" to be the whole world then fine. It's not just the US that did it. Aren't the sanctions UN imposed? http://www.un.org/News/ossg/iraq.htm The sanctions provided for humanitarian need and the UN also established the Oil for Food Program. Saddam squandered billions in oil revenue that he could have used to improve the conditions of his people. How is it our fault??? The real solution is to remove Saddam, he is preventing his people from a better life. Even if there were no sanctions, how much better would his people be? I doubt that he would have spent any more money to improve the quality of life of the average Iraqi citizen. If after the Gulf War, the sanctions were lifted. I would bet that his people wouldn't be in much better shape now and Saddam would be even stronger, probably with nuclear weapons.
Given the performance of the "world", is it really worth it not to alienate them? Bill Mahr joked, as quoted by Michael Moore, "what does it say about Bush when he came off worse in world opinion than Saddam Hussein?" But what does it say about the "world" if it considers Bush a bigger evil than Saddam? The right thing is not always the most popular thing. Maybe we should shake up the world system and let the French come out the tyrant-loving wussies as they are.
If you mean "we" to be the whole world then fine. It's not just the US that did it. Aren't the sanctions UN imposed? Absolutely - this was a UN failing. However, the sanctions were pushed by the US, and after Gulf War I, the world was basically going to do whatever the US thought best. Given the performance of the "world", is it really worth it not to alienate them? The mistake was made last summer when the Bush Administration failed to articulate the case for war convincingly. That was the time when people's minds were not already set and the opportunity existed to win over the will of the world. At the time, the Bush argument was both disjointed - changing every week - and often lacking substance ("we'll provide the proof when we feel like it"). After that, it should come as no surprise those arguments convinced no one, the people of these countries took an anti-war stance (since there was no counterargument), and that these countries followed the will of their people against the war. Bush simply expected the world to along because they had done so on terror issues - that was his big mistake. What he failed to realize is that the world went along on terror issues because the people of all these countries supported that fight.
Please enlighten me... I have spent years before academics doing other things , so I do have some insight into the 'real world', but I fail to see what the common shortcomings of devoting your years to studying the relevent issues bring to the discussion about those subjects...About life in general, about what you bring or don't bring to your loved ones, etc....yeah, academics has it's drawbacks in general...but I would say that one area where knowledge of a subject is a more-is-better absolute would be the kind of issues we are discussing and this man is talking about.
