I guess that’s Fredspeak for “not irrelevant and untrue – but not many.”
So off with two more heads and your lust for religious war willl be sated for good? I don’t know. Why am I having a hard time believing you?[/quote]
I do not believe I’ve read anything from Fred about this being a religious war, or his lust for a religious war.
Let’s please be careful, and start accepting what people write as being their own thoughts on the matter and stop blatantly putting words in their mouths.
How about Fred’s return abpout 10,000 prisoners not equating a magaprison?
Also, of interest: how many of that 10k are return visitors, recaptured baddies?
The both of you could help this thread a whole lot by asking far fewer questions or answering more of them, don’t you think?[/quote]
It’s my view that this is first and foremost a religious war, which is why I refer to it as a religious war.
That explains the conundrum for example that no matter what stated causes fall by the wayside (WMD etc.) it makes no difference whatsoever.
10,000 doesn’t equate to a megaprison but the context was after the U.S. invades Syria and Iran. The combined Muslim/Arab populations under U.S. occupation then would go from 23 million to around 110 million. Presumably the numbers in detention would grow accordingly while prisons most likely wouldn’t proliferate because they’d be too hard to defend.
Numbers in detention even in Iraq are growing monthly. A year from now 10,000 will be old news.
So no one except Bush believed that Saddam was developing wmds before the invasion. Please see the list of quotes supplied by Tigerman in which Democrat officials and numerous world leaders talk about this issue. The list went back more than 10 years so you apparently have an awful lot of religious people all over the world.
I am glad to see that you are finally entertaining the possibility.
Don’t forget we have about 25 million in Afghanistan and another 27 million in Iraq. Are we also “occupying” Qatar? Kuwait? Bahrain? Oman? UAE? Just curious. We also have troops in Turkey, Kirghiz and Tadzhik.
Not necessarily. You are I assume discussing prisoners with high political value? Not just criminals?
Yes, sort of like the 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq became a mere 25,000 despite the fact that nearly 9 months have passed as well since the first mention of 100,000 was made. Right? Remember the 170,000 pieces looted from the museum? the quagmire during the invasion? the Stalingrad that Baghdad would present? the famine that would cause 7 to 9 million Afghans to starve? etc. etc. Oh yes, I am sure that we will be seeing these numbers as old news, but not necessarily in the way that you seem to be implying.
“Lowered expectations” seem to be the current status of the war planners, that plus the 57% of Americans who now think the war in Iraq has actually made the U.S. less safe.
Explain again how it was that we went to war with a secular tin-pot dictatorship when America was being attacked by Muslim fundamentalists.
Explain again how it is that by invading and destabilizing one of the only secular countries in the region we’re shoring up our defenses against Islamic fundamentalism.
Explain again how by taking action against a country with zilch WMDs and avoiding effective action against countries with budding nuclear programs we are not encouraging countries to speed up their WMD programs. Simple rule to understanding Bushian thought – if you don’t have WMDs the U.S. attacks … if you might have WMDs we leave you alone.
They are entitled to their views. The fact is that the US “homeland” has not been attacked for four years.
We went to war to prevent any linkup between Saddam and al Qaeda especially since we did not know and had every reason to believe that Saddam had wmds. He certainly encouraged that view himself to give him added traction.
Well, the Iraqis are now taking steps toward democracy as are the Afghans. We pulled our troops out of Saudi Arabia and Arab television is no longer about Iraqi women and children starving because of US enforced sanctions. Now, we know about UN corruption causing that starvation. Now, we see Iraqi women and children dying but by ruthless Islamofascist insurgents.
So you agree. We should invade Iran? I would be happy to do so. It is just that I was not sure that you would support such an action. Do you?
Given the situation in North Korea and given that Bush frequently noted that we had to act BEFORE Saddam became an imminent threat, I could see how this works. After all, once a nation has nuclear weapons, they are much more difficult to deal wtih.
Not quite. You must be forgetting that there was an attack on September 11th, 2001. The big attack. Sound familiar?
“To prevent any linkup”?? That’s a new one. Fundamentalist terror leader and a strictly secular authoritarian were going to get together? Sounds like a bad remake of the “Odd Couple” if I’ve ever heard of one.
“Steps”? The dysfunctional Iraqi “government” either are a bunch of puppets or there’s something besides Uncle Sam’s hand that’s up their asses. Now we see the only secular country in the region turned into a massive mess through U.S. intervention. We’re sure “selling” democracy pretty badly. How many more countries are really going to sign on for more of this??
Will you sign up to be the first one out of the trenches from our side? Iran and North Korea are clearly nations that have learned what to do about Bush.
So all that huff and puff about WMD really is just that. Going after the low-hanging fruit. Leave it to a president who has skated by on low grades and family connections to get befuddled the first time his daddy’s friends get him into trouble instead of out … and that’s with him tackling an “easy” country like Iraq.
Makes one think back to the great presidents of the past, the sort who didn’t have to lie to the American people about why we were putting our troops into harm’s way. Even in the Vietnam era people could at least somewhat understand that we were in a massive Cold War struggle on a daily basis with the very aggressive Soviets. Too bad Bush couldn’t even hack it then … despite the Soviet bombers rumbling about off the coast of the U.S., he ditched his relatively simple Texas Air National Guard duties as fast as he could. When the going gets rough, Bush gets running.
Gosh even in your smart-ass remarks, you are slipping MFGR. I know that you are deliberately trying to be obtuse about the four years since we are all of two weeks short of that anniversary, but within the context of the actions against Afghanistan and Iraq how does this make sense? So color me corrected, I should have written 3 years 11 months and 19 days rather than four years?
Ah but you have not read those reports very well have you MFGR. Various terrorist organizations were active in Iraq PRIOR to 911 and just because the reports noted that there was no proof that Saddam and al Qaeda had linked up during the attack, it did note that there were several instances of cooperation and contact between Saddam and the al Qaeda organization. Ever hear of Zarkawi? No? hmmmm?
Anyway, you can carp and whine all you want but we will move ahead in Iraq and elsewhere.
I really do not understand why it is so difficult for people to comprehend that it is much more difficult to deal with a rogue nation with nuclear weapons than without and why Bush would attempt to stop Saddam from getting them. Now, that North Korea has them, does anyone not see that this is much more difficult. An attack would have much more devastating reprecussions. Is this really so difficult to absorb?
Um. Let’s see I attack before you get nuclear weapons or I attack after you get nuclear weapons just so that in the minds of simple people, all foreign policy actions are consistent? Gee. Gosh. I don’t know. Which should I choose? Ummmm. Guess I must be a Democrat.
Fascism is still correct. The variant is Islamofascism.
Um. Let’s see I attack before you get nuclear weapons or I attack after you get nuclear weapons just so that in the minds of simple people, all foreign policy actions are consistent? Gee. Gosh. I don’t know. Which should I choose? Ummmm. Guess I must be a Democrat.[/quote]
Currently North Korea has a handful of fission bombs and has never tested one so it doesn’t even know if they’ll light off or if they’ve overlooked some design flaw. That’s a powerful deterrent to their use – not knowing if your first shot at a powerful adversary will be a dud.
Also it hasn’t weaponized atomic bombs yet in any strategic sense – mounted them on a delivery system such as a missile and solved all the technical problems of surviving re-entry and igniting – not to mention targeting accurately. It’s only real delivery method currently is to mount them on trucks or ships and set them off at ground level and hope the prevailing winds don’t blow the radioactive fallout back at them – something the U.S. didn’t have to worry about over Nagasaki and Hiroshima since those were high-altitude blasts which didn’t create radioactive fallout…
Most importantly though North Korea hasn’t developed thermonuclear weapons yet. An H-bomb is about 500-700 times more powerful than an A-bomb, which was the reason they had to be tested on remote islands in the South Pacific rather than in the Nevada desert.
So once the DPRK develops H-bombs, tests and weaponizes them it will go from being an atomic gadfly to a proven thermonuclear menace capable of vaporizing entire cities on distant continents.
There’s a significant chance this situation will develop in the next fifteen to twenty years.
Yes, very strange that Iraq’s growth rate of 50 percent last year appeared no where, yet the child malnutrition rate (no exact figures from Saddam’s sanctions era) go from 4.4 percent to 7.7 percent and this is read as
That was just low-hanging fruit, of course. I thought you would understand that.
Oh, you mean the ones that were operating outside Saddam’s zone of influence? You previously tried to cite groups that were sitting up by the Kurds or across the borders, but I think that only supports the fact that Saddam as a secular tin-pot dictator didn’t like having uncontrollable fundamentalist wackos on his soil. There was also that one old fart dying of leukemia in a run-down Baghdad apartment building, but I don’t think he was “active” in any usual meaning of the word.
There was also lots of contact between the U.S. and Al Qaeda terrorists who committed the 9-11 attacks. For example, you’ve got the INS guys who let these folks right in, the FBI guys who didn’t bother following up on the leads about “flight students who don’t want to learn how to land planes”, there were at least 2 of these Al Qaeda guys whose real names and addresses, etc. were right there in the phone book, and so on and so on.
More and more the news indicates that we’re backsliding. (That’s moving backwards, in case you didn’t know.) Look at today’s Taipei Times and you can see a front-page article about how we took a secular government and are now turning it into a land of Islamic law. Don’t you usually whine and complain about how it was all “Carter’s fault” that the U.S. didn’t play a “Weekend at Bernie’s” move and prop up the administration of the dead Shah?? Well, at least Carter didn’t lose 1,800+ American lives in an effort to turn over a government to a bunch of ayatollahs. It would appear Bush is, yet again, determined to take actions that run in direct opposition to the interests and safety of the American people.
Oh sure we understand that it is more “difficult”. I guess you can also see how a guy maintaining a “C” average in conversational Spanish classes at Yale would also tend to take the “easy” route in all things. Leave it to Bush to slack off and always go after the low-hanging fruit.
Glad to hear you’ve got some doubts about your political identity – you like many other Americans must be quite shaken by the many revelations about the false justifications used for the war. Many Americans are still trying to sort through the big whoppers told by the Bush administration in the buildup to the Iraq invasion, so you’re not alone.
No wonder his credibility has been in the tank these past several months, no wonder Americans don’t believe the lies emanating from the White House about Rove, no wonder the only thing we can trust the GOP leadership on is to screw up time and time again.
Fine, explain to me how losing 1,800 lives in a war and occupation that have lasted 2.5 years is somehow far above average in terms of what was accomplished. Can you name another similarly sized conflict where the fatalities were much lower?
Also, what is your plan for North Korea? The problem has been around for a while and certainly since Carter got involved with the peace-in-our-time deal that was signed in 1994. That was a full 7 years before Bush arrived. So what would you like him to do? Invade North Korea? And do you support action against Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons and if so what kind of action? You carp but you never offer any constructive suggestions. Well, what’s it going to be?
This should be amusing. Almost as amusing as pointing out that Bush actually had higher scores than what was it Gore or Kerry or was it in fact both? Would you have voted for either of those two over Bush even though their academic records were poorer? Hmmmm? hahah
And what happened to the explanation on 50 percent growth in Iraq in 2004. Can you explain to me how this would not be important. Can you also tell me how 3.7 percent growth in the Middle East would be disastrous given that the other nations of the region have exactly the same types of growth? Back to you, but I am sure that it is all Bush’s fault. Your last name isn’t Sheehan is it? First name Cindy?
In my exhaustive search of previous wars in which the president out-and-out lied to the American people about the basis and reasoning for the war, I had to go back to the Spanish American War. Not surprisingly, McKinley was a Republican.
There are appropriate threads for these discussions.
What kind of “growth” are you talking about? Cancer?
I am talking about economic growth of 50 percent in Iraq in 2004. So I see that you have nothing else to say about the other areas, hence nothing to counter my assertion. I will accept your acceding to me on these points. Thank you.
I can imagine the economy must have been pretty rotten in 2003 or so, so I bet 2004 must have been a big improvement. I read somewhere that they were invaded that year. Maybe it was floods, typhoons or something else, but I vaguely recall that there was a war sometime around then in that part of the world.
Yes, the economy shrank a lot in early 2003 while recovering in the second half of the year. The invasion you may recall was over within a few weeks so from March 2003 to end of the year, the economy was already in recovery. Regardless, 50 percent growth in 2004! All while the newspapers were reporting incredible disasters like child malnutrition doubles. In reality, however, the figures increased from 4.4 percent to 7.7 percent and the earlier figures were during the Saddam era and were mere estimates. So why no glowing headlines about 50 percent growth? Hmmm? We all know why and so do you. Also, 3.7 percent growth this year is still in line with every single country in the region that I cited earlier. The only gloom and doom is that many had forecast that the country would grow even faster. So what do you have to say now? I am sure that somewhere somehow this must be Bush’s fault.
Whereas Schroeder managed 7 years without muslim terrorist attacks on Germany. Doubt he will make 8, but does that 7 year record make him twice as good as Bush then? Of course not. It makes him four times as good because he had Fischer along as a handicap.
Or is this ‘argument’ Bush fended off terrorist attacks since 9/11 perhaps simply hot air trying to mitigate the fact that he was the guy unlucky enough to be in office when that happened.
Shall I shorten this here and already field that it is Clinton’s fault 9/11 happened? I mean, that’s the other usual distraction cited in these cases.
Not really. Things like the Hitler-Stalin pact did happen before. Though I must admit with Saddam and Osama the coupling looks a bit less likely than with Hitler and Stalin. Too religious and fanatic on Osama’s side I’d say, but all mere guesswork by me of course.
However - instead of mere guesswork I am sure Fred will be fast with some proof such a link-up was either immanent or already in place. Not some vague projections by a think-tank pondering the possibility or some second or third-hand sources or something nebulous as ‘having had contacts’ but something of real substance with very direct implications.
And that is what is shown now on Arab television and what gets attention in the region? Or is it rather about “bad, bad U.S. occupation” coupled with reruns of “bad, bad U.S. enforced sanctions” conveniently distracting from islamofascists?
Germany has never been a major target of the Islamofascists. Why should it be? After all, the fascism that is prevalent in today’s Middle East had its roots in Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps, they have found “soul” mates. I think that it is no coincidence that most of the 911 attackers came from or through Germany and not France or the UK. I think that Germany may eventually become a target just like everyone else. In the meantime, the No. 1 targets are Israel, the US and the UK and may eventually extend to other coalition partners like the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy and Poland. Who knows?
I don’t blame Clinton for 911. I don’t blame anyone except the terrorists.
Apparently, the Middle East has also seen two elections being held: Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, the Middle East also sees the intense negotations in Iraq to write a constitution, one that is being Negotiated not Dictated. Interesting experience, eh? The Middle East is also looking at the terrorists attacking Arab and Muslim men, women and children. I would argue that currently the level of discussion about what kind of destiny people want has never been higher in the Middle East. I do not recall EVER have heard or seen such intensity in my 20 plus years of traveling to the region.
Stick around, the benefits are spreading. The terrorists are on the run. If we could do something about Syria and Iran, the movement would be dealt a death blow. We will need to hurry because when Pakistan goes, we are going to have a problem that will require ALL of our resources.
I think that it is entirely possible that at some point al Qaeda and Saddam or some aspect of his regime might cooperate in any of a variety of ways.
In any event, most people frame this issue incorrectly. Bush clearly stated that the war on terror was not only a war against al Qaeda. Bush clearly stated that any regime that assisted terrorists anywhere, and specifically in Israel, would be deemed our enemy. Saddam did in fact assist Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Moreover, Saddam (or aspects of his regime) did in fact have contact, if not cooperation with al Qaeda. In fact, Saddam’s regime did grant sanctuary to certain known terrorists and he did also assist with funds Abu Sayeff (which had an association with al Qaeda) in the Philippines.
It is thus wrong to define the issue so narrowly as to limit it to actual cooperation between Saddam and OBL.
Why do you think that? FS has never argued that any link-up or cooperation with OBL was imminent or already in place. All we know is that there was in fact contact, however indirect, between them.
I don’t see anything nebulous about it. The fear was legitimate, and the threat was clear even if not imminent. In any event, Saddam was already cooperating with other terrorists, as indicated above.
