Your point? Were we trying to systematically exterminate the Sunni insurgents? Two things occur to me: 1) The number of prisoners from Fallujah is > the number of enemy KIA. 2) Large sections of the Sunni insurgency later decided to work with us. Interesting choice on their part if we were engaged in genocide against them.
Yes, because anybody who is opposed to gun control must agree with 100% of what the religious wing of the GOP stands for. I'd love to have a debate with you about abortion (I'm pro-choice) and stem-cell research (in favor of, but skeptical about governmental involvement) but based on the close minded remark above, I'm doubtful that you have anything interesting to say.
Your libertarian comment is quite political in the truest sense, as it is the far right which has tried to paint itself as libertarian without actually being so, and the far left which has encouraged the misunderstanding to keep its own faithful. I fail to see how being anti-war, anti-empire, anti-drug war, pro-privacy, and pro-freedom are characteristics of the far right.
But those scary libertarians support gun rights, so they must be living in a mountain compound somewhere preparing for the revolution or something. Far-right extremist nutjobs that they are....;)
Obama's also done a lot of bad. Or, rather, Tim Geithner has. And it's just gonna get more interesting from here.
I gotta say I got a kick out of the political game that the White House was playing a few weeks ago -- trying to link the GOP to Rush Limbaugh. That came right out of the West Wing, courtesy of Axelrod and Plouffe. I seem to recall Democrats complaining at the top of their lungs when the GOP used these types of tactics (say by linking every Democrat to Al Sharpton, Michael Moore or Sean Penn), so where's the outrage now that one of their own is engaged in the same behavior?
But it's nice that you guys on the fringe right have a party to vote for.
What are you basing your "fringe right" assumption on? You don't have to be a member of the right to be a civil libertarian. In fact, those people are usually attributed to being members of the fringe left.
By your logic we could have ended the Iraq war by nuking all the major cities.
No, I'm pretty sure I made a distinction between WP and weapons of mass destruction, but thanks for twisting my argument to support yours.
And tell the Iraqis for each terrorist act you vow to kill 1000 civilians.
That would be kind of counter-productive, given that most of the terrorist acts were directed at civilians and not our troops.
I realize I'm taking this to an extreme but that is the purpose of wartime conventions. To stop things from getting to far out of hand.
Things already get far out of hand. The conventions just allow us to feel better about ourselves. The Brits and Germans promised not to bomb cities in 1939. How long did that last? The Germans promised not to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare. How long did that last? War is hell and I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to pretend that it isn't.
Also WP is a sticky cloud. It gets into your lungs and starts to cook you. On your arms it begins to burn taking off your hair and then burning off your skin slowly you turn black and holes start to punch through you. Eventually the stuff in your lungs makes it near impossible to breath until you have holes going right through you. You try to wash it off but the water only speeds up the process. You eventually suffocate with no lungs and die. The phosphorus keeps going, melts off your face burns out your eyes, blackens your bones leaving a skeletal zombie corpse behind. So yeah, most people prefer a bullet to WP.
So come out into the open where we can kill you with bullets and our guys won't have to use WP. Point being that our forces are under no obligation to place themselves in harms way just to make sure that our enemies receive a humane death. Would you have likewise objected to our use of flamethrowers on Iwo Jima? Should our guys have gone into the caves and taken many more casualties to kill the Japanese more humanly instead? What purpose would that serve? The end result would be the same but many more people would have died.
but Mandela was a terrorist all right - he was in prison all those years for a reason you know
Mandela was targeting an oppressive government. Bit of a difference between doing that and random killings of an opposing sect (what the Sunni insurgents were doing)
As for Washington, plenty of the colonists had no desire to rise up in treason against the Crown, and I am far from certain that they were well treated by the revolutionary factions either during or after the war; certainly some were executed for collaboration with the British forces, and I do not doubt that many more instances of violence go unrecorded as part of the campaign of intimidation against opponents of the revolt
Being executed for collaboration is still not the same thing as acts of terror committed against whole populations. Do you have a single shred of evidence that the Continental Army engaged in actions remotely similiar to what the Sunni insurgents were doing?
Enjoy seeing US troops have their faces melt off from unconventional weapons.
What, being killed by a 5.56mm slug is somehow better than being killed by WP? You are just as dead.
How about bio-warfare? Nuclear weapons?
Bio-warfare and nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction. WP is anything but.
You are supposed to bring down the horrors of war with these deals.
Bringing down the horrors of war is the reason why we fight so many goddamn wars. Let them be as horrible as possible and maybe people will stop trying to engage in them. A real war represents a nation-state fighting for survival. If you were fighting for your life would you fight fair or would you fight to win?
And had a war with the UK, gloves are off no treaties apply
Huh?
I for one am happy that we do NOT have a nuclear powered cruise missile that kills everything it flies near for months, launching nuclear bombs as it goes
How a discussion about WP turn into a discussion about nuclear weapons?
The general civilian public is as innocent as any of our people.
Actually when the general public supports the insurgents with weapons, shelter and information they cease to be innocent. When our people work in weapons plants they cease to be innocent. War is hell and no civilian is ever completely "innocent" in the age of industralized warfare.
While Godwin'ing yourself to make your appeal to emotion.
Killed tons of innocents
There were around 1,300 enemy KIA for almost 100 American KIA. Given that ratio it seems like a fair assumption that our troops were meeting heavy resistance and I don't see a whole lot of evidence to back up the claim that we killed "tons" of innocents.
No, but the country you hail from having thousands of nuclear weapons generally is;)
I don't regard what our forces did as a war crime but even if it were do you think we'll be turning our troops over to the Hague any time soon? Doesn't seem very likely.
Think about that when YOU'RE on the business end of an AK47. As the bullets blow your world away, know that in the country where your murderer came from you will be immortalised in a computer game, where for a split second some ignorant brute bursts into your house and shoots you as you cower in your bed.
If I was on the business end of an AK I'd be hoping that the Americans came and saved me from the fellow who wanted to kill me;) Perhaps you meant on the business end of a M16A2 or M4?:P
Fuck. Off.
Wow, how original. Did you have to stay up all night to think of that witty retort?
So it is legal for the US. Just fantastically depressing knowing that you won't sign the fucking geneva convention.
Why the hell should we sign it? If the US is dragged into a war I want us to use the most effective weapons possible to kill as many of the enemy as possible while exposing as few of our troops as possible. That's been our policy since WW2 and I don't think we owe anybody any apologies for it.
The fact that the insurgents were killing innocent people doesn't matter? Yet somehow I think that if we had stood by and allowed them to continue killing you'd be complaining that we didn't live up to our obligations as an occupying power.
Or you really believe you were invading Iraq to give them freedom? And if that is the truth, why hasn't America invaded Sudan, North Korea, Israel, and any other very violent regiments?
I'm not here to debate the wisdom of the Iraq War. I opposed it back in the day because I felt that we should have sent 150,000 troops into Afghanistan instead of outsourcing the job to local tribesman of questionable loyalty. My only point is to demonstrate the stupidity of portraying the Sunni insurgents as some sort of noble freedom fighters when they were engaged in the process of killing their fellow Iraqi citizens. I must have missed the part where Ghandi, Washington and Mandela killed their own people to obtain their freedom.
Genocide is defined as the systematic extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. Do you really think that's what our forces were doing in Fallujah? If you do you are a moron. If you don't then you ought to be calling out morons like the GP who make dumbass comparisons with the Holocaust to stir up emotion.
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Nice deflection but you haven't disproved my point or contributed anything meaningful to the discussion that gnick and I are having.
Your point? Were we trying to systematically exterminate the Sunni insurgents? Two things occur to me: 1) The number of prisoners from Fallujah is > the number of enemy KIA. 2) Large sections of the Sunni insurgency later decided to work with us. Interesting choice on their part if we were engaged in genocide against them.
Bush, for example, would never have said that he's striving toward a world without nuclear weapons
Probably because for all of his faults he knew how naive such a statement was.
Yes, because anybody who is opposed to gun control must agree with 100% of what the religious wing of the GOP stands for. I'd love to have a debate with you about abortion (I'm pro-choice) and stem-cell research (in favor of, but skeptical about governmental involvement) but based on the close minded remark above, I'm doubtful that you have anything interesting to say.
Plus, you really won't have to worry about withdrawal when you're stuck on an island with no WiFi, no coffee, but plenty of hot native girls.
Actually, in that case I'd say that you DO need to worry about withdrawal, unless you want to knock up the hot native girls or brought birth control ;)
Your libertarian comment is quite political in the truest sense, as it is the far right which has tried to paint itself as libertarian without actually being so, and the far left which has encouraged the misunderstanding to keep its own faithful. I fail to see how being anti-war, anti-empire, anti-drug war, pro-privacy, and pro-freedom are characteristics of the far right.
But those scary libertarians support gun rights, so they must be living in a mountain compound somewhere preparing for the revolution or something. Far-right extremist nutjobs that they are.... ;)
Obama's also done a lot of bad. Or, rather, Tim Geithner has. And it's just gonna get more interesting from here.
I gotta say I got a kick out of the political game that the White House was playing a few weeks ago -- trying to link the GOP to Rush Limbaugh. That came right out of the West Wing, courtesy of Axelrod and Plouffe. I seem to recall Democrats complaining at the top of their lungs when the GOP used these types of tactics (say by linking every Democrat to Al Sharpton, Michael Moore or Sean Penn), so where's the outrage now that one of their own is engaged in the same behavior?
"Change"... is all you'll have left in your pocket or bank account once Obama is done.
Well yeah, all you'll have left is change. Coins don't burn nearly as well as bank notes ;)
But it's nice that you guys on the fringe right have a party to vote for.
What are you basing your "fringe right" assumption on? You don't have to be a member of the right to be a civil libertarian. In fact, those people are usually attributed to being members of the fringe left.
because Obama is certainly markedly different from Bush on a wide swath of issues, but some things never change
Yeah, like gun rights. "Markedly different" doesn't always mean better.....
Yeah, the kind left in your pocket.
What, people are surprised? He telegraphed this months before the election when he reversed a campaign promise to support the FISA "compromise".
I can't wait for all the rationalizations by his supporters and deflections to how much worse GWB supposedly was.
And Mandela? No Violence? You better read your history a little closer...
Where did I say no violence?
Hell, I'm a conservative and I could see the folly in our invasion of Iraq.
Did you not see the part where I said that was opposed to the war?
The last administration set back the conservative cause back decades.
No kidding :(
By your logic we could have ended the Iraq war by nuking all the major cities.
No, I'm pretty sure I made a distinction between WP and weapons of mass destruction, but thanks for twisting my argument to support yours.
And tell the Iraqis for each terrorist act you vow to kill 1000 civilians.
That would be kind of counter-productive, given that most of the terrorist acts were directed at civilians and not our troops.
I realize I'm taking this to an extreme but that is the purpose of wartime conventions. To stop things from getting to far out of hand.
Things already get far out of hand. The conventions just allow us to feel better about ourselves. The Brits and Germans promised not to bomb cities in 1939. How long did that last? The Germans promised not to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare. How long did that last? War is hell and I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to pretend that it isn't.
Also WP is a sticky cloud. It gets into your lungs and starts to cook you. On your arms it begins to burn taking off your hair and then burning off your skin slowly you turn black and holes start to punch through you. Eventually the stuff in your lungs makes it near impossible to breath until you have holes going right through you. You try to wash it off but the water only speeds up the process. You eventually suffocate with no lungs and die. The phosphorus keeps going, melts off your face burns out your eyes, blackens your bones leaving a skeletal zombie corpse behind. So yeah, most people prefer a bullet to WP.
So come out into the open where we can kill you with bullets and our guys won't have to use WP. Point being that our forces are under no obligation to place themselves in harms way just to make sure that our enemies receive a humane death. Would you have likewise objected to our use of flamethrowers on Iwo Jima? Should our guys have gone into the caves and taken many more casualties to kill the Japanese more humanly instead? What purpose would that serve? The end result would be the same but many more people would have died.
but Mandela was a terrorist all right - he was in prison all those years for a reason you know
Mandela was targeting an oppressive government. Bit of a difference between doing that and random killings of an opposing sect (what the Sunni insurgents were doing)
As for Washington, plenty of the colonists had no desire to rise up in treason against the Crown, and I am far from certain that they were well treated by the revolutionary factions either during or after the war; certainly some were executed for collaboration with the British forces, and I do not doubt that many more instances of violence go unrecorded as part of the campaign of intimidation against opponents of the revolt
Being executed for collaboration is still not the same thing as acts of terror committed against whole populations. Do you have a single shred of evidence that the Continental Army engaged in actions remotely similiar to what the Sunni insurgents were doing?
In a total war, yes, they do.
Enjoy seeing US troops have their faces melt off from unconventional weapons.
What, being killed by a 5.56mm slug is somehow better than being killed by WP? You are just as dead.
How about bio-warfare? Nuclear weapons?
Bio-warfare and nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction. WP is anything but.
You are supposed to bring down the horrors of war with these deals.
Bringing down the horrors of war is the reason why we fight so many goddamn wars. Let them be as horrible as possible and maybe people will stop trying to engage in them. A real war represents a nation-state fighting for survival. If you were fighting for your life would you fight fair or would you fight to win?
And had a war with the UK, gloves are off no treaties apply
Huh?
I for one am happy that we do NOT have a nuclear powered cruise missile that kills everything it flies near for months, launching nuclear bombs as it goes
How a discussion about WP turn into a discussion about nuclear weapons?
The general civilian public is as innocent as any of our people.
Actually when the general public supports the insurgents with weapons, shelter and information they cease to be innocent. When our people work in weapons plants they cease to be innocent. War is hell and no civilian is ever completely "innocent" in the age of industralized warfare.
I said slaughter not genocide
While Godwin'ing yourself to make your appeal to emotion.
Killed tons of innocents
There were around 1,300 enemy KIA for almost 100 American KIA. Given that ratio it seems like a fair assumption that our troops were meeting heavy resistance and I don't see a whole lot of evidence to back up the claim that we killed "tons" of innocents.
and in turn slaughtered everyone the could.
Citation needed.
13:1 isn't "enormously unbalanced" in the annuals of military history. What was the ratio from the Gulf War?
No, but the country you hail from having thousands of nuclear weapons generally is ;)
I don't regard what our forces did as a war crime but even if it were do you think we'll be turning our troops over to the Hague any time soon? Doesn't seem very likely.
Think about that when YOU'RE on the business end of an AK47. As the bullets blow your world away, know that in the country where your murderer came from you will be immortalised in a computer game, where for a split second some ignorant brute bursts into your house and shoots you as you cower in your bed.
If I was on the business end of an AK I'd be hoping that the Americans came and saved me from the fellow who wanted to kill me ;) Perhaps you meant on the business end of a M16A2 or M4? :P
Fuck. Off.
Wow, how original. Did you have to stay up all night to think of that witty retort?
So it is legal for the US. Just fantastically depressing knowing that you won't sign the fucking geneva convention.
Why the hell should we sign it? If the US is dragged into a war I want us to use the most effective weapons possible to kill as many of the enemy as possible while exposing as few of our troops as possible. That's been our policy since WW2 and I don't think we owe anybody any apologies for it.
Probably yes, and still don't matter
The fact that the insurgents were killing innocent people doesn't matter? Yet somehow I think that if we had stood by and allowed them to continue killing you'd be complaining that we didn't live up to our obligations as an occupying power.
Or you really believe you were invading Iraq to give them freedom? And if that is the truth, why hasn't America invaded Sudan, North Korea, Israel, and any other very violent regiments?
I'm not here to debate the wisdom of the Iraq War. I opposed it back in the day because I felt that we should have sent 150,000 troops into Afghanistan instead of outsourcing the job to local tribesman of questionable loyalty. My only point is to demonstrate the stupidity of portraying the Sunni insurgents as some sort of noble freedom fighters when they were engaged in the process of killing their fellow Iraqi citizens. I must have missed the part where Ghandi, Washington and Mandela killed their own people to obtain their freedom.
Our soldiers go out there to protect innocent lives.
Actually, no, our soldiers go out there to execute the policy of the United States of America.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to give a shit about other nations' innocents, only American innocents.
That's generally how military forces work.
So genocide is about numbers, not actions?
Genocide is defined as the systematic extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. Do you really think that's what our forces were doing in Fallujah? If you do you are a moron. If you don't then you ought to be calling out morons like the GP who make dumbass comparisons with the Holocaust to stir up emotion.