<b>glynch</b>: Being evasive? Answer the question. What gives you the privilege to determine when I am and am not being empathetic. I know you think you know it all but I know one place where your knowledge ends. Answer the damn question. You can be against war and not be a peacenik. That is reserved for a very special class of people. <b>tex</b>: People (like you?) wanted us to get the heck out of Afghanistan as soon as the Taliban was booted. Now that is a point of criticism. Which way do you want it?
Even though posts are made with real information (I believe from mango) refuting the responsibility for this, you haven't read any of it, have you? Let's resolve this, so we can all be in agreement in the future. How, exactly, have sanctions resulted in the deaths of children? Can they not import food? Can they not import medicine? Please be specific.
Are we even after Al Queda anymore? I mean . . .why go after the guy in Cahoots . . . and not the Actual Doers? Rocket River
People say we are at a "rush" towards war, but it sure has taken a while to even get troops over there and a war has not even started yet. Bush has been pretty patient in his actions. Now, he sounds impatient but he's got to if the threat has any credibility. As far as sanctions go, doesn't Saddam bear that burden? If he hadn't invaded Kuwait he wouldn't have had sanctions placed on him. Plus, hasn't it been reported that <i>Saddam</i> is keeping his people hungry to garner sympathy? I heard a Pacifica radio report from a guy who went to Jordan to interview Iraqis. All the people he interviewed in Jordan told horrible stories about Saddam. The reporter concluded with something like "I went to the Middle East to find evidence against the war. Instead I ended up hating Saddam." Another thing about sanctions... How many people were calling for sanctions instead of war? Now, the sanctions are bad, war is bad so I guess we just do nothing? North Korea is the reason something has to be done with Saddam (although I'm still not convinced that we will actually go to all out war yet). North Korea is nuclear blackmailing the U.S. and the U.N. and have been for a few years now. You don't think that Saddam won't do the same thing if he gets Nukes? The problem with peaceful negotiations is that they only work if both parties have a legitimate disagreement and both parties want an acceptable compromise to the problem. Negotiations work great when both parties are sincere. However, when one party has ulterior motives, negotiations are worthless. North Korea used "negotiations" to get nuclear reactors built in that country in return for NOT working on nuclear weapons. What did they do? They developed them anyways! And now, when the Administration says that North Korea is full of **** (which they are) they start pulling the nuclear war card out. We can't attack North Korea because they have the bomb (at least two of them). And if we use force against them a bomb will go off somewhere (in South Korea, Japan or even in North Korea). That is unacceptable and they know it. If they never developed the bomb in the first place they couldn't threaten us (or anyone else) with it. We can thank Clinton and Carter for that. North Korea is a great example of why something has to be done with Saddam as he will do the same thing they are doing if he gets the bomb.
Just because we may go to war with Iraq doesn't mean we're not also going after Al Queda. You better believe there are CIA and military operatives all over the world trying to hunt out remnants of that organization.
Well if (IF) they are in cahoots, State-sponsored/allied terrorists are magnitudes more dangerous. It's not always just about money, because aq certainly has enough. An ally nation not only provides safe haven and access to the funds, but access to weapons that the terrorists would find much more difficult to acquire on their own. Certainly chemical, biological, and nuclear, but even things like a few stinger missiles would wreak havoc. (They could acquire those elsewhere, but it's much easier for a country to acquire weapons)
All of which was mandated by the UN. The same UN that the left insists that we obey. You can't support the UN when it suits you and abandon the UN when you can talk about dead children. Which is it...pro-UN or not?
Answer the question. What gives you the privilege to determine when I am and am not being empathetic. Fair enough. I really don't have the privilege. What gives Cohen the privilege to determine who is empathetic. Now to help us all be more empathic. ************* On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind. On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind.
No, but it seems very odd to insist upon going through the UN one minute and then use the UN's sanctions as a reason to blast the US the next minute.
Seems as if Achebe did not correctly understand Blix's statements yesterday. Achebe took away Iraq's grade of "B" and made fun of W's grades in college, but he apparently didn't hear how Blix was harsher (even by an independent's assessment of the speech) that anybody expected on Iraq. Humor cannot cover up substance, my friend. According to the BBC this morning, "International pressure is growing on Iraq a day after United Nations weapons inspectors delivered an unexpectedly cricitical report on Iraq's attitude to disarmament. Russia, which has insisted on a diplomatic solution to the crisis, indicated it could harden its position if Baghdad hinders the inspectors' work." Jack Straw (UK Foreign Secretary) said about the speech, "The report which the chief weapons inspector Dr. Hans Blix gave to the U.N. Security Council yesterday is damning and disturbing. The conclusion is now inescapable that Iraq is in material breach of Resolution 1441. It shows beyond doubt that the Iraqi regime is responding to resolution 1441 not with active co-operation but with a consistent pattern of concealment and deceit. The burden is on Iraq to prove they are disarming. They've had 11 years to do this, and still are hiding weapons and playing games with the UN. People, please remove the wool from over your eyes and take a break from smoking the peace pipe and thinking you're smart for "going against the establishment" for a minute to see what's really going on.
I have no doubt we are all empathetic. Who isn't sickened by the suffering of the innocent? This is what really gets me. "Your side" somehow feels the urge to doubt "my side's" humanity. Why is that?
A good read that posits answers to many of the questions that have been posed recently on the bbs. 1) What pretext will be used to actually start the war. 2) do only crazy lefties believe the US is responsible for Iraqi children dying. I see how Powell is promising some more satellite photos. Hopefully they aren't false like last time as the article mentions. How do I know they'll lie this time. I don't but when a liar has had great success because of lying in a particular context and that context arises again it would be common to do so again. The Lies We Are Told About Iraq Pentagon propaganda got us into the first Gulf War. Will we be fooled a second time? By Victor Marshall, Victor Marshall, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a public policy group, is the author of "To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War." OAKLAND -- The Bush administration's confrontation with Iraq is as much a contest of credibility as it is of military force. Washington claims that Baghdad harbors ambitions of aggression, continues to develop and stockpile weapons of mass destruction and maintains ties to Al Qaeda. Lacking solid evidence, the public must weigh Saddam Hussein's penchant for lies against the administration's own record. Based on recent history, that's not an easy choice. The first Bush administration, which featured Dick Cheney, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Colin L. Powell at the Pentagon, systematically misrepresented the cause of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the nature of Iraq's conduct in Kuwait and the cost of the Persian Gulf War. Like the second Bush administration, it cynically used the confrontation to justify a more expansive and militaristic foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. When Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the first President Bush likened it to Nazi Germany's occupation of the Rhineland. "If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms," he declared. ********************************************** The administration leaked reports that tens of thousands of Iraqi troops were massing on the border of Saudi Arabia in preparation for an invasion of the world's major oil fields. The globe's industrial economies would be held hostage if Iraq succeeded. The reality was different. Two Soviet satellite photos obtained by the St. Petersburg Times raised questions about such a buildup of Iraqi troops. Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency viewed an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia as probable. ************************************************ The administration's estimate of Iraqi troop strength was also grossly exaggerated. After the war, Newsday's Susan Sachs called Iraq the "phantom enemy": "The bulk of the mighty Iraqi army, said to number more than 500,000 in Kuwait and southern Iraq, couldn't be found." Students of the Gulf War largely agree that Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was primarily motivated by specific historical grievances, not by Hitler-style ambitions. Like most Iraqi rulers before him, Hussein refused to accept borders drawn by Britain after World War I that virtually cut Iraq off from the Gulf. Iraq also chafed at Kuwait's demand that Iraq repay loans made to it during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Administration officials seemed to understand all this. In July 1990, U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad April Glaspie told Hussein that Washington had "no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait," a statement she later regretted. The National Security Council's first meeting after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was equally low key. As one participant reportedly put it, the attitude was, "Hey, too bad about Kuwait, but it's just a gas station -- and who cares whether the sign says Sinclair or Exxon?" But administration hawks, led by Cheney, saw a huge opportunity to capitalize on Iraq's move against Kuwait. The elder Bush publicly pronounced, "a line has been drawn in the sand," and he called for a "new world order ... free from the threat of terror." His unstated premise, as noted by National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, was that the United States "henceforth would be obligated to lead the world community to an unprecedented degree" as it attempted "to pursue our national interests." The administration realized that a peaceful solution to the crisis would undercut its grand ambitions. The White House torpedoed diplomatic initiatives to end the crisis, including a compromise, crafted by Arab leaders, to let Iraq annex a small slice of Kuwait and withdraw. To justify war with Hussein, the Bush administration condoned a propaganda campaign on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. Americans were riveted by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti so-called refugee's eyewitness accounts of Iraqi soldiers yanking newborn babies out of hospital incubators in Kuwait, leaving them on a cold floor to die. The public didn't know that the eyewitness was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, and that her congressional testimony was reportedly arranged by public relations firm Hill & Knowlton and paid for by Kuwait as part of its campaign to bring the United States into war. To this day, most people regard Operation Desert Storm as remarkably clean, marked by the expert use of precision weapons to minimize "collateral damage." While American TV repeatedly broadcast pictures of cruise missiles homing in on their targets, the Pentagon quietly went about a campaign of carpet bombing. Of the 142,000 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait in 43 days, only about 8% were of the "smart" variety. The indiscriminate targeting of Iraq's civilian infrastructure left the country in ruins. A United Nations mission in March 1991 described the allied bombing of Iraq as "near apocalyptic" and said it threatened to reduce "a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society ... to a preindustrial age." Officially, the U.S. military listed only 79 American soldiers killed in action, plus 59 members of allied forces. A subsequent demographic study by the U.S. Census Bureau concluded that Iraq probably suffered 145,000 dead -- 40,000 military and 5,000 civilian deaths during the war and 100,000 postwar deaths because of violence and health conditions. The war also produced more than 5 million refugees. Subsequent sanctions were estimated to have killed more than half a million Iraqi children, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and other international bodies. The Gulf War amply demonstrated the merit of two adages: "War is hell" and "Truth is the first casualty." To date, nothing suggests that a second Gulf War would prove any less costly to truth or humans. Proapaganda
So the White house might give some evidence soon? Better late than never. I just hope this time the evidence is legit, and not like their most concrete evidence to date.(The aluminum pipes, which turn out actually to be more likely used for the Saddam's explanation than Bush's.) The white house has created some serious credibility issues for themselves on this whole thing. I hope if the evidence does really exist people will believe it, and not think that Condoleezza Rice and others are laying out a bunch of B.S. again. http://bbs.clutchcity.net/php3/showthread.php?s=&threadid=50413
A friend of mine recently pointed out the irony that the Bush administration platform has been decidedly NON-Republican: Huge deficits Massive spending on government programs Giant new governmentmental departments Nation building Military policing of the world I just thought that was ironic. Weren't these the exact things the GOP cried were the reason the Democrats weren't responsible enough to run the country?
If you want to be accurate, you said his comment was 'not very empathetic'. I said I expected 'more empathy' from you. Not the same, are they?
I agree with bigtexx, Achebe. Blix was a lot harsher than you portray. imo, Blix came closer to condemning Iraq for a material breach of the Resolution, than not. Also, I think it is foolish of you to believe that satellite images would be definitive proof of VX and anthrax in some test tubes. It is about the lives of informants, and those informants are likely Iraqi scientists somewhat like you.
Osama is dead. The people who are clinging to that audio tape of him a couple months ago as irrefutable evidence he's alive didn't hear the report from the Swiss voice experts. They indicated it is more likely the tape is a hoax than not. Osama put out several video tapes after 9/11. Why would he suddenly stop doing this? Why do we never hear about him or from him? It is in his best interest to make it known to the US that he is alive and their manhunt is not working. He is not doing this. If Bin Laden were alive he'd be all over Al Jazeera and CNN praising his "great victories" and rallying support against the "infidels". We will never find Bin Laden's body. His supporters would do everything possible to either cremate or render his body unidentifiable because if it were ever found, then the US would "win". The longer we go without hearing from him, the more people will come around to the fact that the man is dead.
