> Answer: He didn't. Man did. All religion is man's failed attempt to restore relationship with God through his own means. Instead, that relationship was meant to be had freely, simply because God loves us. That is the core message of true Christianity, though it may often be obscured or even ignored by those who claim to be "religious".
Loves us so much that he'll torture us for all eternity if we don't play his arbitrary game?
> Because the UN is impotent. They have been so for almost a decade now. Don't believe me? Go look up some history. They basically function as an inspection group and human rights auditors. They have no real power any more. Even a tiny country like Iraq laughed at them.
Funny... they disarmed Iraq during that decade.
BTW, your silly satire only works for people who share your beliefs that the UN did the wrong thing for the wrong reason w.r.t. invading Iraq. Some of us believe they did the right thing, possibly even for the right reason.
> In a nut shell, the U.N. truly is a step away from becoming the next League of Nations.
Yes, they're helpless in the face of a rogue superpower. Is that something to cheer about?
> You are ignoring the recent poll of Baghdad that Gallup did. 71 percent of those surveyed like our presence there and don't want us to leave any time soon.
Great! Now we only need to worry about the other six and a half million Iraqis.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Ambush bombers struck Wednesday in the center of Baghdad and in the tense Sunni Muslim area west of the capital, as the commander of American forces reported an increase in attacks against occupation troops....
During a press conference, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, confirmed an increase in the number of attacks on American troops. Sanchez said the average of 20 to 25 attacks daily had increased over the last three weeks "to a peak of 35 attacks a day." He did not elaborate....
The homemade bomb in Baghdad exploded as a three-Humvee convoy passed through a tunnel under Tayeran Square... Local residents said U.S. Army convoys had been repeatedly targeted in the tunnel. "It's always the same," said traffic policeman Adnan Khadim. "They should stop using the tunnel."...
A U.S. Army Humvee could be seen burning on the western edge of Fallujah.... Witnesses said a roadside bomb exploded Wednesday morning as the convoy passed.... After looting an abandoned vehicle, residents set it on fire as one man fired pistol shots into the wreckage in a sign of contempt....
> One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit."
I bought 10,000 wooden noses from Japan and tried to hawk them outside the Student Center. I'll be lucky to pay off the loss before I retire...
> Are they living in a paradise now? No, but at least the religious freaks are gone.
Since you haven't checked the news lately, you'll be interested to hear that those freaks are murdering westerners and perceived collaborators all around the periphery of the country these days, and and have reorganized themselves to the point that we are now fighting pitched battles with them again.
And the regional warlords think of Karzai as the Mayor of Kabul...
I would guess that actually cleaning up the country would require about 10x the resources that the USA and the international community has actually committed there, and given Afghanistan's long, long history of tribal mentality without any substantial national sentiment, the commitment would probably have to last for about 50 years to make a lasting difference after the foreigners pulled out.
> Much the same with Iraq, Saddam's crimes were clearly documented by British media.
No one doubts that Saddam is a monster.
Nor that he was already a monster when he was our friend...
> There's no way everyone would vote a dictator in again, given a real choice.
Aye, there's the rub. In a year or two they will be able to vote for someone with the USA's stamp of approval. A few years later they'll be able to vote their 100% support for whoever is viscious enough and has enough heavily armed thugs to take over the country.
> Iraq is far better now than it was before the war.
What is your unit of measurement, and what are the actual numbers?
> Better yet, this time next year they will be far, far better off than they are now.
What is the basis for that assertion?
> Additionally, they can more than likely expect the same trend to continue for years to come.
What is the basis for that assertion?
> For the first time in decades, Iraq's people truely has a future to look forward to.
What is the basis for that assertion?
> Remember, it was Sadam that was refusing to update and maintain Iraq.
Yeah, the same wilful neglect that kept him from rebuilding his army after 1991.
> The US is pledging significant funds to modernize it. Granted, that is a scam for the President's friends, but it doesn't change what's being done to rebuild the dilapidated country.
What is being done for them?
How much of that money will end up in US stockholders' pockets instead of in improvements to Iraqi infrastructure?
> The biggest danger than Iraqies have right now is from the terrorists that run around their country right now.
For most of them, the most immediate threat is getting shot or hauled off to interminable imprisonment by the Americans. Over the medim term, the biggest threat is the pending civil war between Baathists trying to rebuild their regime and Shiite religious extremists trying to build an Iranian-style theocracy.
> Most of which are from Syria and Iran. Heavily slanted toward Syria, which is exactly why the US has been thumbing their finger at them lately.
And your evidence for that claim is...?
> Simple fact is, historically, we needed a foot in the door in that region of the world.
"Needed"? In fact it's our decades of callous meddling in the region that has brought out the violent anti-American movement now endemic throughout the region. What we needed was to bug out and let them get along with their lives.
> If the US can educate and politically convert Iraq into a Pro-US country which respects human rights
Yeah, I suppose if we kill enough of them they'll be our friends and start supporting the values that we ourselves are progressively discarding...
> This is why it's called politics and why, generally speaking, people that see and deal with the world in a strictly black-n-white manner, have no business as politicians or world leaders.
Yes, exactly why Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz need to be voted out of Washington post haste.
> At some point in time, you have to look for the greater good. In this case, their job is to look for the greater good of our country.
But for some reason they're looking out for the greater good of the biggest corporations.
> That's what they are paid to do. That's what's expected.
By the lobbyists...
> Generally speaking, historically, that's what they've done.
Oh, wait - I thought you were serious!
> Many of these middle eastern countries get very, very angry at the US for not having a single, stamped in stone, closed minded, iron-fisted foreign policy.
No, they get angry because for several generations we've been walking all over them for the benefit of Israel and the oil barons.
> What they fail to recognize is, if we were that narrow minded and stupid, most of those countries would of been nuked into embers decades ago.
No, if we were that narrow-minded and stupid we'd have been doing exactly what we have been doing. We've done ourselves incalculable harm by our narrow-minded and stupid short-term self interest.
> For example, they're always available to help prevent the "establishment" of religion, but they're never around to preserve the "free-exercise" of it.
> All you liberal, peacenik, Bush-bashers just can't set aside your pessimism to see how much happier a place the Middle East & Iraq will be once we finish invading it.
"They have made a desert, and call it 'peace'." -- Tacitus, 20 centuries ago
> France stood up to the Nazis when Poland was invaded.
>The precise time table is: >Sep 1, 1939: Poland invasion >Sep 3, 1939: France declares war to protect its ally >Sep 5, 1939: US proclaim neutrality in the conflict
> Funny you forgot to mention the sitzkrieg, with the french hiding behind the maginot line, hoping to once more save peace as they did in Muenich
And you forgot to vilify the British for sitzing alongside the French.
> Now, Iraq: Americans have killed more innocents than Hussein is said to have.
That's almost certainly not true. I haven't heard what you're saying about the Kurds, but even if you are correct I still understand that something over 300,000 thousand Shiites were killed after the Gulf War (though that's hardly the kind of thing the USA should be eager to call attention to, seeing as it was us who stirred them up to rebellion and then sat back to watch them get slaughtered). Also, though people don't usually think of soldiers as 'innocents', I would have to say that about a million 'innocent' soldiers died as a result of Saddam's unprovoked war with Iraq. So it looks like he has at least 1.3 million inexcusable deaths on his hands, and as much misery as we've caused with our invasion, I don't think it's even within an order of magnitude of that yet. Likely not even within two orders of magnitude. (Though we should count again after the US pulls out and they're plunged into civil war.)
OTOH, his hands have been fairly tied since the Shiite affair, and though his prison guards were surely kept busy with ill deeds, it would be interesting to know the average montly rate of death and misery he caused over the past ~10 years vs. the average montly rate since the 'end' of the US invasion.
> Now, gas costs as much as it does in the US...
I read somewhere a week or so ago that US taxpayers are subsidizing the sale of gasoline in Iraq to the tune of $1.75 in addition to what the Iraqis themselves are paying. (Chew on that next time you're filling up your tank or looking at how much tax was taken out of your paycheck.)
> Kuait should be next...
Yeah, part of the pathetic humor of the Bush claim that we were going to invade Iraq to establish democracy was that we already had Kuwait packed full of US troops, and didn't have the least inclination to bring those people the blessings of liberty.
> I would accept that Iraq posed a danger due to powerful WMD, only they had none. They also did not have the means to deploy them if they DID have any, and they had no DESIRE to do so.
I suspect that there was a genuine concern that Saddam would eventually obtain WMD that he could deploy against Israel, though of course the Administration could hardly come out and say they were sending US troops to die in order to make the world safe for Israel. But see the rather strange 'logic' in this interview with John McCain, where the interviewer didn't stick to the "right" questions and McCain was left groping for an explanation that justified his position without saying that. (He failed.) [Notice also the prophetic content of the first few paragraphs of that page, before it gets to the interview.]
BTW, I suspect your post has some other substantial factual errors mixed in with the good stuff. No need to overplay the case; to those not blinded by ideology or hypnotized by FAUX News, the whole thing stinks plainly enough on the simple facts.
> The US went to war for many reasons. Go back and read some of the very early speaches on Iraq. What happened was the media picked up on WMD because it was a buzz word and a new one that hadn't grown stale yet. So the result of all this was whenever the president or someone spoke of the othe reasons, the press did the media equivilent of "Yes yes, but what about the WMDs?"
Those early speeches are what convinced some of us that the war was an evil venture in the first place. The Bush Administration never made a case for the war. They went to the US Congress and tried to shame them into supporting it by saying that the UN would if they didn't. Then they went to the UN and tried to shame them into it by saying the US would if they didn't. They went to the UN to "make the case" and got laughed at. Basically all they ever did was say whatever they thought would push the best buttons in the current context. And whenever anyone actually called them out on it and said, "you didn't make the case", they would reply "we'll make the case when the time is right".
And though much has been made of the fact that all the alarmism has turned out to be false, it was abundantly clear that the alarmism wasn't well supported even before the shooting started. If you got your news anywhere other than FAUX, you heard over an over again "The Bush Administration said today 'xyz'", followed by "our contacts in the intelligence community say that the evidence for 'xyz' is not reliable".
And just a couple of weeks ago, even after the White House had formally acknowledged that there were no terrorist connections with the Hussein regime, Mr. Bush still couldn't resist trying to push that button in his speech to the UN.
> What happened was the media picked up on WMD because it was a buzz word and a new one that hadn't grown stale yet. So the result of all this was whenever the president or someone spoke of the othe reasons, the press did the media equivilent of "Yes yes, but what about the WMDs?"
That is historical revisionism, pure and simple. While the Bush Administration was all over the map trying to find buttons to push, WMD and (the also non-existent) ties to al-Q were the boogeymen that they invoked most often to marshal public support in the USA. We were terrified with WMD before, during, and after the war. Hardly a day went by without the 'discovery' of a lab, factory, or cache, that had to be retracted a week later. The Administration made a big issue of the capture of a stash of chemical warfare suits... and then the news would cut to a scene of US soldiers training on the use of similar suits. The spin control was absolutely sickening.
And they haven't given it up yet; they tried like hell to spin the recent inspection report as a 'win' for the anti-WMD motivation - never mind the fact that the report was mostly empty spin to begin with.
> We don't actually need Iraq's oil. Supplies from other sources are moving along just fine. However, I will not completely discount oil as a reason.
The war wasn't fought so US citizens could have the Iraqi oil.
It was fought so US companies could have the Iraqi oil distribution contracts.
The oil barons running the Bush Administration don't have the slighest interest in the well-being of US citizens. US taxpayers, and the blood of US National Guardsmen and of Iraqi soldiers and citizens, are subsidizing the US corporate takeover of Iraq.
Remember, that $87,000,000,000 is coming straight out of US taxpayers' empty pockets, is already the second installment, and you can bet is only designed to last through the 2004 elections. (Whereupon there will be another request of similar size. Bookmark this and make yourself a note to re-read it in December 2004.) Meanwhile Haliburton rakes in the dough, as will the US energy companies if Rumsfeld can ever scratch up enough Guardsmen to guard every square inch of the Iraqi petrol infrastructure.
The medium-term outcome is 99% predictable: after another year or two, when the sabatage doesn't stop and the profits don't materialize, the energy companies will lose interest, the Bush Administration will lose interest in paying the political cost for no benefit, and the USA will be out of there faster than you can say 'Viet Nam', 'Lebanon', or 'Somalia', with many pompous speeches congratulating the new Iraqi government on their new-found freedom and independence... almost at the same time they flee their own country. Then after a bloody civil war there will be three mini-Iraqs, and if we're lucky one of them won't have an anti-West regime.
Or maybe only a single Iraq, with a regime just as repressive as the last one, a sense of victory over the West, and no inhibitions about dealing with anti-West terrorists.
> But there was. France and Russia had trade agreements that were suspended until the sanctions were lifted. That's why they were opposed to removing Saddam, they were afraid (and they should be) that the new Iraqi regime would refuse to honor any agreement made by Saddam's old (illegitimate) regime.
And that's why the USA is so hell-bent on controlling the puppet strings, even at the political cost of going it without international support. (Notice that if any of the stated reasons for the regime change were the actual reasons for the regime change, there wouldn't be the slightest reason not to turn the whole darn clusterfuck over to the UN right now.)
IOW, it was an act of economic imperialism, pure and simple. French and Russian companies had the oil contracts, a lot of people died, and now US companies have the oil contracts. God bless the USA! Hope you bought shares in the right companies!
> The war is a good idea, but for human rights -- not any threat Saddam may or may not have been to us.
a) are the Iraqis (in general) actually any better off now than they were under Saddam?
b) will they be better off than they were under Saddam a year after the US occupation ends?
c) does the same justification apply to Libera, the Congo, the USA, etc?
I do pity the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam and his cronies, but I fear we've done them a great harm under a false pretext. After they've suffered a US invasion, a resistance movement to the US occupation, and a civil war when ever the US finally pulls out, do you really suppose they'll be sending us a thank-you note?
> The French, taking an annoyingly self-gratifying position, opposed the whole war just because they opposed Bush. Around these parts, that's called asshat.
Maybe they, like lots of Americans, just opposed the war because they thought Bush was being the asshat?
> - Moore weasel... never heard of any Moore in the press I'm reading, who is he/she?
A US filmmaker reviled by the my-country-right-or-wrong crowd for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq. They've been pooping on him for the same reason they've been pooping on the Dixie Chicks and the French.
> I especially love getting a passionate response on some topic from an AC. "I feel so strongly about this topic that I'm not even going to tell you my fake name I use on slashdot."
> It's really amazing how many people forget that there's such a thing as freedom of speech in this country. I'm allowed to dislike GWB's policies and bash him all I please.
So long as you do it in a "designated free speech zone"...
> George W Bush has done more good for this country than any president has in the past 225 years. It's time for you shit heads to learn this.
> Next time you un-patriotic motherfuckers get out there are start protesting Iraq or the PATRIOT act or whatever, I hope the cops bash your skulls in!
OK Ashcroft, when you gonna create an account so you can stop posting as an AC?
> The thing is, before September 11th you could bring a box-cutter on an airplane.
And the saddest part of all is that boxcutters are just about the least likely tool for the next terrorist act. Anyone who whipped out a boxcutter on an airplane today would probably be torn limb from limb before they got ten steps down the aisle.
Barn door, horse; bullet, messenger... you know the drill.
Similarly with ABC's repeat performance at smuggling radioactive material into the country a couple of months back. Law enforcement goes ballistic and threatens prosecution, but you can bet it will still be possible next year.
And Congress won't approve money for airliner missle defenses until after one gets shot down.
Slashdot Mirror
> The last time I tried to calculate the amount of energy saved vs. the energy expended by recycling Aluminum or Paper, I couldn't make it even close.
Did you remember to add in the heat dissipated by your act of doing the calculations?
> Answer: He didn't. Man did. All religion is man's failed attempt to restore relationship with God through his own means. Instead, that relationship was meant to be had freely, simply because God loves us. That is the core message of true Christianity, though it may often be obscured or even ignored by those who claim to be "religious".
Loves us so much that he'll torture us for all eternity if we don't play his arbitrary game?
> I don't have a source, but Minnesota grows a lot of paper trees, and the logging companyes prefer popal, which grows very quickly
Actually, they prefer harvesting public lands at no cost under the guise of fire prevention. They settle for popal when they can't get what they want.
> Because the UN is impotent. They have been so for almost a decade now. Don't believe me? Go look up some history. They basically function as an inspection group and human rights auditors. They have no real power any more. Even a tiny country like Iraq laughed at them.
Funny... they disarmed Iraq during that decade.
BTW, your silly satire only works for people who share your beliefs that the UN did the wrong thing for the wrong reason w.r.t. invading Iraq. Some of us believe they did the right thing, possibly even for the right reason.
> In a nut shell, the U.N. truly is a step away from becoming the next League of Nations.
Yes, they're helpless in the face of a rogue superpower. Is that something to cheer about?
> You are ignoring the recent poll of Baghdad that Gallup did. 71 percent of those surveyed like our presence there and don't want us to leave any time soon.
Great! Now we only need to worry about the other six and a half million Iraqis.
> One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit."
I bought 10,000 wooden noses from Japan and tried to hawk them outside the Student Center. I'll be lucky to pay off the loss before I retire...
> Average college tuition is up 40%
Gather what satisfaction you can: asymptotically, that average CEO won't be able to afford tuition.
> Here's the link to Victoria's Secret Web site.
Does all that sticky stuff mean it's slashdotted?
> Are they living in a paradise now? No, but at least the religious freaks are gone.
Since you haven't checked the news lately, you'll be interested to hear that those freaks are murdering westerners and perceived collaborators all around the periphery of the country these days, and and have reorganized themselves to the point that we are now fighting pitched battles with them again.
And the regional warlords think of Karzai as the Mayor of Kabul...
I would guess that actually cleaning up the country would require about 10x the resources that the USA and the international community has actually committed there, and given Afghanistan's long, long history of tribal mentality without any substantial national sentiment, the commitment would probably have to last for about 50 years to make a lasting difference after the foreigners pulled out.
> Much the same with Iraq, Saddam's crimes were clearly documented by British media.
No one doubts that Saddam is a monster.
Nor that he was already a monster when he was our friend...
> There's no way everyone would vote a dictator in again, given a real choice.
Aye, there's the rub. In a year or two they will be able to vote for someone with the USA's stamp of approval. A few years later they'll be able to vote their 100% support for whoever is viscious enough and has enough heavily armed thugs to take over the country.
> Iraq is far better now than it was before the war.
What is your unit of measurement, and what are the actual numbers?
> Better yet, this time next year they will be far, far better off than they are now.
What is the basis for that assertion?
> Additionally, they can more than likely expect the same trend to continue for years to come.
What is the basis for that assertion?
> For the first time in decades, Iraq's people truely has a future to look forward to.
What is the basis for that assertion?
> Remember, it was Sadam that was refusing to update and maintain Iraq.
Yeah, the same wilful neglect that kept him from rebuilding his army after 1991.
> The US is pledging significant funds to modernize it. Granted, that is a scam for the President's friends, but it doesn't change what's being done to rebuild the dilapidated country.
What is being done for them?
How much of that money will end up in US stockholders' pockets instead of in improvements to Iraqi infrastructure?
> The biggest danger than Iraqies have right now is from the terrorists that run around their country right now.
For most of them, the most immediate threat is getting shot or hauled off to interminable imprisonment by the Americans. Over the medim term, the biggest threat is the pending civil war between Baathists trying to rebuild their regime and Shiite religious extremists trying to build an Iranian-style theocracy.
> Most of which are from Syria and Iran. Heavily slanted toward Syria, which is exactly why the US has been thumbing their finger at them lately.
And your evidence for that claim is...?
> Simple fact is, historically, we needed a foot in the door in that region of the world.
"Needed"? In fact it's our decades of callous meddling in the region that has brought out the violent anti-American movement now endemic throughout the region. What we needed was to bug out and let them get along with their lives.
> If the US can educate and politically convert Iraq into a Pro-US country which respects human rights
Yeah, I suppose if we kill enough of them they'll be our friends and start supporting the values that we ourselves are progressively discarding...
> This is why it's called politics and why, generally speaking, people that see and deal with the world in a strictly black-n-white manner, have no business as politicians or world leaders.
Yes, exactly why Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz need to be voted out of Washington post haste.
> At some point in time, you have to look for the greater good. In this case, their job is to look for the greater good of our country.
But for some reason they're looking out for the greater good of the biggest corporations.
> That's what they are paid to do. That's what's expected.
By the lobbyists...
> Generally speaking, historically, that's what they've done.
Oh, wait - I thought you were serious!
> Many of these middle eastern countries get very, very angry at the US for not having a single, stamped in stone, closed minded, iron-fisted foreign policy.
No, they get angry because for several generations we've been walking all over them for the benefit of Israel and the oil barons.
> What they fail to recognize is, if we were that narrow minded and stupid, most of those countries would of been nuked into embers decades ago.
No, if we were that narrow-minded and stupid we'd have been doing exactly what we have been doing. We've done ourselves incalculable harm by our narrow-minded and stupid short-term self interest.
> For example, they're always available to help prevent the "establishment" of religion, but they're never around to preserve the "free-exercise" of it.
You forgot to post links to the examples.
> All you liberal, peacenik, Bush-bashers just can't set aside your pessimism to see how much happier a place the Middle East & Iraq will be once we finish invading it.
"They have made a desert, and call it 'peace'." -- Tacitus, 20 centuries ago
And you forgot to vilify the British for sitzing alongside the French.
> Now, Iraq: Americans have killed more innocents than Hussein is said to have.
That's almost certainly not true. I haven't heard what you're saying about the Kurds, but even if you are correct I still understand that something over 300,000 thousand Shiites were killed after the Gulf War (though that's hardly the kind of thing the USA should be eager to call attention to, seeing as it was us who stirred them up to rebellion and then sat back to watch them get slaughtered). Also, though people don't usually think of soldiers as 'innocents', I would have to say that about a million 'innocent' soldiers died as a result of Saddam's unprovoked war with Iraq. So it looks like he has at least 1.3 million inexcusable deaths on his hands, and as much misery as we've caused with our invasion, I don't think it's even within an order of magnitude of that yet. Likely not even within two orders of magnitude. (Though we should count again after the US pulls out and they're plunged into civil war.)
OTOH, his hands have been fairly tied since the Shiite affair, and though his prison guards were surely kept busy with ill deeds, it would be interesting to know the average montly rate of death and misery he caused over the past ~10 years vs. the average montly rate since the 'end' of the US invasion.
> Now, gas costs as much as it does in the US...
I read somewhere a week or so ago that US taxpayers are subsidizing the sale of gasoline in Iraq to the tune of $1.75 in addition to what the Iraqis themselves are paying. (Chew on that next time you're filling up your tank or looking at how much tax was taken out of your paycheck.)
> Kuait should be next...
Yeah, part of the pathetic humor of the Bush claim that we were going to invade Iraq to establish democracy was that we already had Kuwait packed full of US troops, and didn't have the least inclination to bring those people the blessings of liberty.
> I would accept that Iraq posed a danger due to powerful WMD, only they had none. They also did not have the means to deploy them if they DID have any, and they had no DESIRE to do so.
I suspect that there was a genuine concern that Saddam would eventually obtain WMD that he could deploy against Israel, though of course the Administration could hardly come out and say they were sending US troops to die in order to make the world safe for Israel. But see the rather strange 'logic' in this interview with John McCain, where the interviewer didn't stick to the "right" questions and McCain was left groping for an explanation that justified his position without saying that. (He failed.) [Notice also the prophetic content of the first few paragraphs of that page, before it gets to the interview.]
BTW, I suspect your post has some other substantial factual errors mixed in with the good stuff. No need to overplay the case; to those not blinded by ideology or hypnotized by FAUX News, the whole thing stinks plainly enough on the simple facts.
> The US went to war for many reasons. Go back and read some of the very early speaches on Iraq. What happened was the media picked up on WMD because it was a buzz word and a new one that hadn't grown stale yet. So the result of all this was whenever the president or someone spoke of the othe reasons, the press did the media equivilent of "Yes yes, but what about the WMDs?"
Those early speeches are what convinced some of us that the war was an evil venture in the first place. The Bush Administration never made a case for the war. They went to the US Congress and tried to shame them into supporting it by saying that the UN would if they didn't. Then they went to the UN and tried to shame them into it by saying the US would if they didn't. They went to the UN to "make the case" and got laughed at. Basically all they ever did was say whatever they thought would push the best buttons in the current context. And whenever anyone actually called them out on it and said, "you didn't make the case", they would reply "we'll make the case when the time is right".
And though much has been made of the fact that all the alarmism has turned out to be false, it was abundantly clear that the alarmism wasn't well supported even before the shooting started. If you got your news anywhere other than FAUX, you heard over an over again "The Bush Administration said today 'xyz'", followed by "our contacts in the intelligence community say that the evidence for 'xyz' is not reliable".
And just a couple of weeks ago, even after the White House had formally acknowledged that there were no terrorist connections with the Hussein regime, Mr. Bush still couldn't resist trying to push that button in his speech to the UN.
> What happened was the media picked up on WMD because it was a buzz word and a new one that hadn't grown stale yet. So the result of all this was whenever the president or someone spoke of the othe reasons, the press did the media equivilent of "Yes yes, but what about the WMDs?"
That is historical revisionism, pure and simple. While the Bush Administration was all over the map trying to find buttons to push, WMD and (the also non-existent) ties to al-Q were the boogeymen that they invoked most often to marshal public support in the USA. We were terrified with WMD before, during, and after the war. Hardly a day went by without the 'discovery' of a lab, factory, or cache, that had to be retracted a week later. The Administration made a big issue of the capture of a stash of chemical warfare suits... and then the news would cut to a scene of US soldiers training on the use of similar suits. The spin control was absolutely sickening.
And they haven't given it up yet; they tried like hell to spin the recent inspection report as a 'win' for the anti-WMD motivation - never mind the fact that the report was mostly empty spin to begin with.
> We don't actually need Iraq's oil. Supplies from other sources are moving along just fine. However, I will not completely discount oil as a reason.
The war wasn't fought so US citizens could have the Iraqi oil.
It was fought so US companies could have the Iraqi oil distribution contracts.
The oil barons running the Bush Administration don't have the slighest interest in the well-being of US citizens. US taxpayers, and the blood of US National Guardsmen and of Iraqi soldiers and citizens, are subsidizing the US corporate takeover of Iraq.
Remember, that $87,000,000,000 is coming straight out of US taxpayers' empty pockets, is already the second installment, and you can bet is only designed to last through the 2004 elections. (Whereupon there will be another request of similar size. Bookmark this and make yourself a note to re-read it in December 2004.) Meanwhile Haliburton rakes in the dough, as will the US energy companies if Rumsfeld can ever scratch up enough Guardsmen to guard every square inch of the Iraqi petrol infrastructure.
The medium-term outcome is 99% predictable: after another year or two, when the sabatage doesn't stop and the profits don't materialize, the energy companies will lose interest, the Bush Administration will lose interest in paying the political cost for no benefit, and the USA will be out of there faster than you can say 'Viet Nam', 'Lebanon', or 'Somalia', with many pompous speeches congratulating the new Iraqi government on their new-found freedom and independence... almost at the same time they flee their own country. Then after a bloody civil war there will be three mini-Iraqs, and if we're lucky one of them won't have an anti-West regime.
Or maybe only a single Iraq, with a regime just as repressive as the last one, a sense of victory over the West, and no inhibitions about dealing with anti-West terrorists.
> But there was. France and Russia had trade agreements that were suspended until the sanctions were lifted. That's why they were opposed to removing Saddam, they were afraid (and they should be) that the new Iraqi regime would refuse to honor any agreement made by Saddam's old (illegitimate) regime.
And that's why the USA is so hell-bent on controlling the puppet strings, even at the political cost of going it without international support. (Notice that if any of the stated reasons for the regime change were the actual reasons for the regime change, there wouldn't be the slightest reason not to turn the whole darn clusterfuck over to the UN right now.)
IOW, it was an act of economic imperialism, pure and simple. French and Russian companies had the oil contracts, a lot of people died, and now US companies have the oil contracts. God bless the USA! Hope you bought shares in the right companies!
> The war is a good idea, but for human rights -- not any threat Saddam may or may not have been to us.
a) are the Iraqis (in general) actually any better off now than they were under Saddam?
b) will they be better off than they were under Saddam a year after the US occupation ends?
c) does the same justification apply to Libera, the Congo, the USA, etc?
I do pity the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam and his cronies, but I fear we've done them a great harm under a false pretext. After they've suffered a US invasion, a resistance movement to the US occupation, and a civil war when ever the US finally pulls out, do you really suppose they'll be sending us a thank-you note?
> The French, taking an annoyingly self-gratifying position, opposed the whole war just because they opposed Bush. Around these parts, that's called asshat.
Maybe they, like lots of Americans, just opposed the war because they thought Bush was being the asshat?
> - Bush weasel : Invading Iraq
^w^w \input{bush-biography.tex}
> - Moore weasel
A US filmmaker reviled by the my-country-right-or-wrong crowd for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq. They've been pooping on him for the same reason they've been pooping on the Dixie Chicks and the French.
> and three big name 'liberals' (Moore, Arafat, and Chirac) drawing the 'conservative' votes
If you think Arafat is a liberal, you need to lay off the OxyContin.
> I especially love getting a passionate response on some topic from an AC. "I feel so strongly about this topic that I'm not even going to tell you my fake name I use on slashdot."
You forgot to click "Post Anonymously".
> It's really amazing how many people forget that there's such a thing as freedom of speech in this country. I'm allowed to dislike GWB's policies and bash him all I please.
So long as you do it in a "designated free speech zone"...
> George W Bush has done more good for this country than any president has in the past 225 years. It's time for you shit heads to learn this.
> Next time you un-patriotic motherfuckers get out there are start protesting Iraq or the PATRIOT act or whatever, I hope the cops bash your skulls in!
OK Ashcroft, when you gonna create an account so you can stop posting as an AC?
> I have the same question....perhaps we should be saying "most weasly"? But I don't want to be pegged as a grammar weasle.
I was going to suggest the same thing, but I didn't want people to think I was being anal-retentive.
> The thing is, before September 11th you could bring a box-cutter on an airplane.
And the saddest part of all is that boxcutters are just about the least likely tool for the next terrorist act. Anyone who whipped out a boxcutter on an airplane today would probably be torn limb from limb before they got ten steps down the aisle.
Barn door, horse; bullet, messenger... you know the drill.
Similarly with ABC's repeat performance at smuggling radioactive material into the country a couple of months back. Law enforcement goes ballistic and threatens prosecution, but you can bet it will still be possible next year.
And Congress won't approve money for airliner missle defenses until after one gets shot down.
And