[quote]rainjack wrote:
I’m still waiting on Kinky. [/quote]
Wait, there’s a kinky party? Cool.
Ok, got my gimp ball ready, and my latex outfit is packed, where do I sign up?
[quote]MapShooter wrote:
I can’t wait to see how “agressive diplomacy” will work out for Lord Obama in the face of nuclear conflict.
And I really can’t stand it when liberals make comments about how BIG OIL is costing Americans soooo much money.
Well, how about BIG UNIVERSITIES. College tuition has gone up exponentially in comparison to fucking gasoline. And who controls these oligopolies we call colleges? OBAMA’s UBER LIBERAL BUDDIES!!!
But in reality, I went on Obama’s website. His plan is to make COMMMUNITY COLLEGE, not the Harvards or Princetons or Yales more affordable. 40,000 a year is still gonna be the norm for a top 25 school, Obama ain’t gonna change that[/quote]
er… you realize private uni’s are already working towards making it more affordable, free market style, yes?
Harvard, Yale, hell the entire ivy league is free for anyone who’s family makes <60k/year. I myself am going to Cornell for 25k/year, far cheaper than regular tuition. Is it a problem still? Yes. But throwing government money at it is probably the OPPOSITE of the conservative position, so your rant is a bit laughable.
[quote]MapShooter wrote:
But in reality, I went on Obama’s website. His plan is to make COMMMUNITY COLLEGE, not the Harvards or Princetons or Yales more affordable. 40,000 a year is still gonna be the norm for a top 25 school, Obama ain’t gonna change that[/quote]
Do you have to go to Yale?
How much more affordable can the CC’s and JuCo’s get? You can go the the CC near here, carry 15 hours, and not be out more than $500.
Funny thing about those CC’s - they spend most of the money they got on - get this - EDUCATION. They don’t have multi-million dollar athletic budgets, nor do they pay an ex-president 7 figures to teach 1 class a semester.
The community colleges also pay miserably.
My original motivation in wanting a PhD in medicinal chemistry was to afterwards teach organic chemistry in community college, as I like teaching and especially like explaining organic chemistry, and I was very favorably influenced by my community college organic chemistry professor. I had had no thought whatsoever of going into chemistry and would never have had a thought of it if not for how outstanding he was.
However, in an example of really bad planning, I did not bother beforehand to find out what professors in community colleges earned. It probably wasn’t till I was 3 years or so into the PhD program that I happened to learn that.
Around here, they (at that time anyway) got paid only $5000 per semester per class taught.
The norm and probably the most that most could expect is teaching two classes per semester.
Wow, $30K a year for very bright people (with no exceptions among those that I’ve known, community college professors in the sciences are very bright people) with PhD’s.
That idea went flat out the window tout de suite.
That said, that’s the free market pay level. No one is compelling the professors to agree to those terms. They choose to do it. And there’s no resulting shortage of professors at that pay level, nor any shortage of teaching quality. So, while it’s a good reason not to go into the field, it’s not as if it would be sensible for the CC’s to offer higher pay when there are plenty of takers at the current pay.
Also, that said, at least in Florida I’m convinced that the quality of community college education is better for the first two years than is university education.
The reason is that in the CC’s, one is taught by a PhD professor who ordinarily is on top of that qualification a very skilled educator, and the class size is ordinarily small, whereas in the universities one is either taught, in the first two years, by a graduate student teaching assistant, or if by a professor then in a giant auditorium with a class size of hundreds or thousands.
Agreed also on how wasteful the universities can be.
[quote]pookie wrote:
<<< Ignoring U.N. resolutions and basically giving the world the finger while going at it unilaterally just about guaranteed that all NATO nations would see their population opposed to military support of US missions.
[/quote]
ROFLMAO!!! IGNORING UN RESOLUTIONS HE SAYS ROFLMAO!!!
My middle finger is permanently atrophied in the up position at both the UN and the world when my sovereign nation deems it necessary to do… whatever… to preserve it’s security and interests. If mistakes are made I won’t like it but tough shit. It’s a big bad world where worrying about what others think can cost you dearly and nowadays maybe mortally.
He with the biggest gun wins. That’s the way it’s always been and for at least the even vaguely foreseeable future that’s the way it will be. We have the biggest gun and while all reasonable restraint, to be determined by us, should be exercised in it’s use it’s better safe than sorry for me.
What’s more, I don’t wanna hear a peep from you Canadians who have lived under our military roof for practically nothing, not to mention the untold billions we have saved you on military spending and then have to be dragged kicking and screaming into anything, but a token force when we ask for your help.
Non action in the face of any credible threat today is not an option so you and Hans Blix can sip your Darjeeling, pinkies out and discuss how terrible we are. I’m not willing to wait until the danger comes to us.
On top of that, what “UN Resolutions” is pookie talking about anyway?
Perhaps he has confused the US with Saddam?
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
On top of that, what “UN Resolutions” is pookie talking about anyway?
Perhaps he has confused the US with Saddam?[/quote]
Hence my uncontrolled hilarity.
That just has to be a joke.
minor hijack—
Bill, If I had you for an organic chem teacher, I might have been persuaded to get a chemistry degree. As it is, I had 2 of the most horrible, un-listenable, mind-numbingly boring and uncommunicative organic teachers in history.
It forever pushed me away from any form of hardcore organic study. I went biochem. If you ever decide to teach again, judging by my experiences with you on this forum, I envy your students!!
/minor hijack
Ok, continue rants and arguments…
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
Ok, continue rants and arguments…[/quote]
Well I will argue against rants, so I won’t rant about arguments.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
How much more affordable can the CC’s and JuCo’s get? You can go the the CC near here, carry 15 hours, and not be out more than $500.
[/quote]
It really varies from state to state. A lot.
When I left California in 2004, I think it was still under $30 a credit for residents at CC’s.
This year, in Wisconsin, it’s around $150 a credit. Granted, that’s still a big savings compared to the university’s cost, but it still can be financially hard to make it through. Especially when there is often no housing or food plan offered.
COMPLETE HIJACK:
Typing “CC” reminded me of how fucking dominant CC Sabathia has been. If he keeps this up, he needs to be awarded th Cy Young. I don’t care bout the switching leagues bullshit, he has been amazing for the Brewers.
Thanks, Aragorn! 
I also don’t mean to hijack and won’t stay on this unrelated topic, but along the lines of your experience, a really horrible thing is that kids in elementary and high school usually have as their only exposure to science teachers that themselves hate science.
This is a huge part of why public-educated students in the US are falling so far behind in science.
It makes such a huge difference – not just in the classroom that year but very likely in the student’s entire life – as to whether the teacher clearly himself or herself enjoys a subject and finds it fascinating, is skilled in communicating and transferring that enthusiasm, and is skilled in teaching generally; vs the opposite of all-of-the-above being the case as is so often the case in the public schools, particularly in the sciences.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
My middle finger is permanently atrophied in the up position at both the UN and the world when my sovereign nation deems it necessary to do… whatever… to preserve it’s security and interests. If mistakes are made I won’t like it but tough shit. It’s a big bad world where worrying about what others think can cost you dearly and nowadays maybe mortally.[/quote]
Well isn’t the idea behind the UN exactly that since guns have gotten so big, it’s better to try and negotiate things in ways other than war? It’s one thing to take on piddly little Iraq by yourself, but how do you deal with China or Russia if some situation spirals out of control and you’re not amenable to talks or negotiations?
Your biggest guns are also shared by every other nuclear power. The problem with those big guns is that any kind of escalation with them could very well be the end of mankind. As technology advances, it’s easier and easier for small groups of people - even sometimes a single individual - to harm or kill a lot of people. The best way to prevent those scenarios is through international cooperation. It is in no nation’s interest to see fanatic individuals get their hands on nuclear (or even bio or chemical) weapons.
If you’re so big and mighty, why do you even ask for help?
I’ve never understood that argument. First, deride Canada for having a small, obsolete army. Then, be angry at them for not lending a helping hand.
There’s also a bit of hypocrisy, since Canada has mostly been your staunchest ally. We skipped the Vietnam war and the Iraq war. The conditions given by our premier at the time was that Canada would join the Iraq war effort if a UN resolution/authorization was passed, like one was for the 1st Gulf War. (In which we participated. We sent both tanks.)
Well, turns out Blix was right on the money, there were no WMDs. Again, it’s disingenous to call for inspections and then disregard the results because they don’t agree with what you’d like them to say.
And I don’t think for a moment that Americans are “terrible”… I do think that you’ve let your government be hijacked by corporate interests by letting their political agents use various low-impact issues (gay marriage, abortion rights, war on drugs, war on terror, etc) to rally people to their causes; but then use the presidential/congressional powers to mostly make it easier for big business to do what it wants in the name of profit; to let them rack up record deficits that will make any social program easy to oppose on the ground of lack of money, etc.
I don’t know of a thread that hasn’t been hijacked yet.
Our education system needs a complete overhaul. There is too much politics involved in our schools system.
Then there is the whole idea of which students are smart and which ones are dumb. Instead of getting the students to a D, we should get the students to the point of understanding.
Often a student falls behind early in understanding something, and that little piece holds them back for the rest of their formal education. Both because it is a weak link that may make understanding everything else, and because the child is now convinced he is an idiot.
Then we have the smart students actually being held back just because the school doesn’t want the other students to feel stupid.
Then the disruptive students need to not only be removed from the classroom for the benefit of the other students, but if they are bad enough, maybe they should be sent to a military type school.
[quote]pookie wrote:
Well, turns out Blix was right on the money, there were no WMDs. Again, it’s disingenous to call for inspections and then disregard the results because they don’t agree with what you’d like them to say.
[/quote]Saddam’s WMD
have been found
New evidence unveils chemical,
biological, nuclear, ballistic arms
Posted: April 26, 2004
1:36 pm Eastern
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213
New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein’s missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.
Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.
But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president’s critics continue to insist that “no weapons” have been found.
In virtually every case – chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles – the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.
The Iraq Survey Group, ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found “hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited” under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight.
“There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for.”
Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam’s regime was in “material violation” of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised “serious consequences” if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner.
The United States cited Iraq’s refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.
Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had “a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs,” the official said. “They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects.”
They found equipment for “uranium-enrichment centrifuges” whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, “Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors,” the official said.
But while the president’s critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam’s ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence.
“Where were the missiles? We found them,” another senior administration official told Insight.
“Saddam Hussein’s prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions,” the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.
When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found “no stockpiles” of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice.
Among Kay’s revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:
* A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?
* "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"
* New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
* A line of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."
* "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."
* "Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] -- well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made “clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles – probably the No Dong – 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment,” Kay reported.
In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed the ISG had found evidence of a “crash program” to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents.
The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a “high-speed rail gun,” a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq’s main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for “a clandestine nuclear-weapons program.”
In taking apart Iraq’s clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that “the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program.”
What the president’s critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find “stockpiles” of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism “a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security.”
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam “probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons [MT] and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents – much of it added in the last year.”
That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account.
Until now, Bush’s critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration “lied” to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.
But what are “stockpiles” of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English?
Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory?
Stockpiles found
In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority’s intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order – but found all the same.
Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.
In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq’s CW stockpiles have indeed been found.
Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.
But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the “finds” Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam’s chemical-weapons “stockpiles” look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble.
“Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena,” Hanson says. “In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the ‘grandfather’ of modern-day nerve agents.”
The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides, or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.
When coalition forces entered Iraq, “huge warehouses and caches of ‘commercial and agricultural’ chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists,” Hanson writes. “What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches.”
Caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals don’t match the expectation of “stockpiles” of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. “At a very minimum,” Hanson tells Insight, “they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly.”
Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment’s notice. At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a “camouflaged bunker complex” that was shown to reporters – with unpleasant results.
“More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent,” Hanson says. “But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The ‘agricultural site’ was also colocated with a military ammunition dump – evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.”
That wasn’t the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai’ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin – a nerve agent.
Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site.
“Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up,” Hanson says. “It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.’”
At Taji – an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia – U.S. combat units discovered more “pesticides” stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum.
Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. “They were labeled as pesticides,” he says. “Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps.”
Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding.
“If it wasn’t a chemical agent, what was it?” Hanson asks. “More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier’s perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy.”
The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that’s the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn’t fit the image the media and the president’s critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq’s weapons ought to look like. A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation.
“The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX,” a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors “felt they had more. But where did it go?” The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.
What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? “It could fit in one large garage,” the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.
Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.
“The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive,” one official said. “But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring.”
[quote]pookie wrote:
A long post
[/quote]
Pookie my friend, I think you are a decent fella, but had we simply ignored the utterly useless UN in the first place and taken out Hussein in 92 none of this would be happening.
Additionally, here’s where you and I part company with complete totality.
Just like in this country where everybody is looking for some impersonal governing body above themselves for all the answers, the socialist countries of the world, not content with even their own socialist state, want yet another body of supreme global bureaucrats that oversee the entire world.
I do not.
Blix is a tool and you are beyond naive if you actually believe that Hussein did not play him and his powder puff inspectors to the hilt buying himself time to hide those weapons programs and that they would not have swung right back into action once they “passed” those idiotic inspections. That’s not even to mention that OUR CIA report demonstrated conclusively that Hussein was diverting vast sums of money from the oil for food program to his own ends.
Here’s the kicker. Most of the UN countries with pull there are not our friends and are hell bent on reducing our power and influence in the world. I am hell bent on seeing that never happens for the primary and very selfish reason that it puts me in an advantageous position for which I am not ashamed. That is the way of the world and to deny that is to deny the whole of human history.
Secondarily, my country has been a force for more good and has spent more of it’s own blood and treasure on helping everybody else than every other country in history combined. Check it out. On top of all the outrageous taxes we pay, Americans, and in particular self described conservative Americans, are the most voluntarily charitable people on the face of the Earth. I am sick and tired up to here with hearing how we somehow are screwing the rest of the Earth with our evil imperialism.
We’ll decide how to deal with international affairs thanks. The UN can kiss my at the moment sweaty ass.
Oh yeah, we just thought it might be cool if you shared some of the cost with us after having a huge chunk of your economy supported by us for like decades. I also know there are some Canadians who would be nodding their head up and down with everything I’ve said, I live right across the river, so I’m not inditing your whole society
[quote]The Mage wrote:
Then there is the whole idea of which students are smart and which ones are dumb. Instead of getting the students to a D, we should get the students to the point of understanding.
[/quote]
If the student doesn’t get above a ‘D’ - he fails, and must repeat the class/grade again.
It won’t take long for “understanding” to kick in if there were such a rule, and it was enforced.
[quote]The Mage wrote:
An Even Longer Post[/quote]
Yes the Duelfer report was what I was referring to and it can be found on the CIA’s website here: https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/index.html
It got almost no attention.
Wars blow and no sane person wakes up in the morning hoping to be involved in one. However, I am not sorry for the invasion of Iraq. It was bound to be sticky nasty, bloody and longer than we hoped from day one. I have however had nightmares about the protests had we done nothing and one of these things wound up in Times Square on New Years Eve. What then? There would be a cacophonous litany of calls for Bush’s head for not protecting us. You cannot wait and hope for the best in today’s world. We’re not sure is not good enough. Now we are.
Yes there will be more and yes I hope we take them out too. Not because I enjoy being at war. But because there is no other plausible course. Negotiation is horse pecky when God has told your enemies to kill you or you have rabid fanatical heads of state who despise your way of life and have the UN as their hapless ally.
I promised myself I wouldn’t get into these discussion and boy have I failed.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Pookie my friend, I think you are a decent fella, but had we simply ignored the utterly useless UN in the first place and taken out Hussein in 92 none of this would be happening.[/quote]
I agree. Although it had nothing to do with the UN. Here, I’ll let Dick Cheney explain to you the problem of a power vacuum in Iraq: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7Ik_X1HU0
[quote]Just like in this country where everybody is looking for some impersonal governing body above themselves for all the answers, the socialist countries of the world, not content with even their own socialist state, want yet another body of supreme global bureaucrats that oversee the entire world.
I do not.[/quote]
I’m not sure where that’s from, since I don’t either. There’s a big difference between a global government and a body that tries to foster mutual cooperation and negotiated resolutions of international conflicts.
Why then even support inspections in the first place? Why not simply come out and explain why they were useless, instead of insisting on them as a condition that Saddam had to comply with?
Also, isn’t it a bit odd that you agreed with my military post about the lack of “fog or war” for the American army, but are somehow unable to imagine that technology being put to use for sanction-compliance surveillance?
If you believe that, you have to believe that Saddam was one of the greatest genius ever, able to mystify the most advanced military on the planet using crappy Soviet hand-me down tech; or that your government and military is staffed with the most slack-jawed idiots ever born who can be played for fools by some tin pot dictator.
Their motives are quite similar to your own. You also wish to increase your power and influence in the world while keeping that of your rivals to a minimum.
Just as long as you accept to be (either you or your distant grand kids) on the receiving end if the US ever find itself relegated to a has-been power.
Instead of eternally repeating history, it’d be nice to learn from it and use that knowledge to find better ways of resolving conflicts.
I’ve never said anything to the contrary. I’ve even argued that very point in some threads where the “US = bad” crowd were, as usual, showing their complete lack of perspective.
On the other hand, simply because a country does a lot of good worldwide, and has a generous population; that doesn’t mean that it gets a free pass on what it does wrong. No country is perfect; and most situations don’t have an easy, correct solution. Criticism and dissent from one’s government is not treason; it’s one of the things that makes America - and other democratic countries - better than rogue nations ruled by dictators.
So according to you, the US is currently doing nothing wrong? Not a single thing could be done better? With hindsight, does even a single decision appear to have been made too hastily, or for the wrong reasons?
Go right ahead. But stop complaining when other countries don’t go along on your simple say so.
Why should we share the cost of an endeavour we don’t support? It’s interesting that you argue so vehemently for the complete sovereignty of the US, but don’t extend the same rights to other sovereign nations.
Why don’t they just cross the river instead of nodding their heads?