THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

OK! Let's see if I can cause you some doubt.

PROPOSITION:
God exists or did exist.

AXIOM = SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH:
1. The Universe exists.
2. That which causes something to exist, either exists or did exist.

DEFINITIONS:
1. God is that which always existed or caused itself to exist.
2. The Universe is all there ever was, is, or will be.

ARGUMENT:
The Universe either always existed, caused itself to exist, or was caused to exist by X.

If the Universe always existed or caused itself to exist, then by definition the Universe is God.

If X never existed, then X could not have caused the Universe to exist.

If X did or does exist, then X itself was or is in the Universe.

If X is in the Universe, then X either always existed or caused itself to exist.

If X either always existed or caused itself to exist, then by definition X is God.

If X did exist but no longer exists, then God did exist.

QED:
God exists or God did exist.

Millions demand end to Iraq occupation
Millions demand end to Iraq occupation:


http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/03/20/world/protests_040320

Re: Millions demand end to Iraq occupation


Then that settles it. If that is what millions of people out of more than six billion people want, the US should get outa there ... right?

Never mind whether our getting out is actually in the interest of the welfare of the Iraqies.

Never mind whether the Iraqies themselves want us out of there.

Never mind whether those millions of people know what is best for the Iraqies.

Never mind whether those millions of people are truly millions of people.

Ican,

Slow down - I was just posting an article that pertained to the US, UN, and Iraq.

I don't recall posting an opinion related to the article.

Cheers,

-Jer-

I don't recall writing that I was responding to your opinion. Like you wrote, you didn't express your opinion. I was reacting to the implied alleged opinions of those millions of people.

And their motives, I presume......

ican's quote, "Then that settles it. If that is what millions of people out of more than six billion people want, the US should get outa there ... right?" You're comparing apples and oranges, my friend. The fact that this planet now has six billion has relatively little to do with the millions that supposedly demonstrated against the war in Iraq. The known fact is that we're never going to have six billion demonstrating for anything on this planet at the same time, no matter how horrendous the politics or economics of any one country. Get real, is all I can say.

Meanwhile, back to the war....
Six soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners.

I am glad this isn't being swept under the rug.

hobit, It's not going to be swept under the rug, but it's also never going to get the coverage in the major media as it should. Remember Janet Jackson's breat? That's going to get much more coverage than the article you posted above.

The latest from Afghanistan. Turn up your volume.
******************************************
http://www.prairiehome.org/performances/20011020/ram_files/04_linda.ram

Yes, exactly, but probably not in the sense that you mean it.

Apples and oranges are both fruit, just like Iraqies and the rest of us are both people.

You overlooked my statements:



That aside, your comments suggest to me an interesting analogy: an opinion poll, although those millions of people , whatever their actual number, do not constitute a random sample.

It is alleged by the opinion pollers that approximately 1000 opinions are equivalent, within + or - 4%, to the opinions of 100 million US voters.

So lets examine a mixed bag of 6 billion apples and oranges partitioned into adult fruit and non-adult fruit. Let's suppose there are 3 billion adult fruit in the adult partition, and we sample the adult fruit to determine within + or - 4% what percentage of the adult fruit are apples and what percentage are oranges. How many random selections should be made from the adult partition?

If 1000 random samples out of 100 million US voters = 1/100,000 is adequate, then (1/100,000) x 3,000,000,000 = 30,000 random samples out of a 3 billion adult population would be adequate.


How many folks not selected at random were actually participating in those alleged protesting millions of people?

A WSJ article (3/22/04) alleges: "Large world-wide protests marked one year since the invasion, but reaction was muted in Iraq, where there were no street demonstrations, either for or against the war."

Dallas Morning News articles (3/21/04) allege: millions of people actually = hundreds of thousands of people (organizers estimated 2 million). "Although turnout was high in some nations, the protests were far smaller than the enormous demonstrations held around the world shortly before the war began."

After we , what should we conclude from those demonstrations of millions of people?



True, but irrelevant!

I cannot make that link address work. Please copy some key parts and post them here.

It's a 5 mins and something audio - you must have 'real player' to get it.

Ican you said in the same post



ok so this is an open question, not fundamentally important.



but now it is - according to you a fundamental precept. God exists, there is no room for doubt, its obvious taken as read, he exists. So how does that square with your first that the existence of God is an open question, and not fundamentally important?




I'm sure there are amateur philosophers out there (on a2k and in the Universe) who could challenge that statement.


then



But you just said he did exist...."of course"! So you are back to postion 1. God may or may not exist.

"the probably not completely knowable" bit is surely irrelevant when discussing the existance of God. It implies that God could very well exist, but there is a chance he may not, or God probably does not exist, but there is a chance he may. Or She may. You forgot about Her!

The question my friend on this thread at least, is not the existance of God, but whether one has Faith...in Iraqi WMD.

We're not hearing alot from both sides of Clarke's statements. This is one of them.
********************
washingtonpost.com
Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response
President Pushed Iraq Link, Aide Says

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush
wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's
calamitous events.

Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of
aides into the dark paneled room.

"Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam
did this."

"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied.

"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before,
Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq,
Saddam."

For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from
neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account
-- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying
publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a
major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national
security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior
posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months
ago yesterday.

Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his
strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11
on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for
taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein,
Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist,
radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."

Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The
crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the
war,' " Clarke writes.

Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that
he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election
campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself
loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this
week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent
commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told
CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the
president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."

On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find
evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews
for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.

Rice, in an opinion article published opposite The Washington Post editorial page today, writes: "It
would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a
nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there
was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his National Security
Council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11
would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan."

White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described
Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated.

Like former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who spoke out in January, Clarke said some of
Bush's leading advisers arrived in office determined to make war on Iraq. Nearly all of them, he
said, believed Clinton had been "overly obsessed with al Qaeda."

During Bush's first week in office, Clarke asked urgently for a Cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda.
He did not get it -- or permission to brief the president directly on the threat -- for nearly eight
months. When deputies to the Cabinet officials took up the subject in April, Clarke writes, the
meeting "did not go well."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, "why we are
beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden." When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda
"poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States," Wolfowitz is said to have replied that
Iraqi terrorism posed "at least as much" of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in
saying they had no such evidence.

"I could hardly believe," Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the "totally discredited" theory that
Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, "a theory that had been
investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."

Wolfowitz, in a telephone interview last night, cited statements by CIA Director George J. Tenet and
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirming that Iraq once trained al Qaeda operatives in bomb
making and document forgery.

"Given what George Tenet and Colin Powell have said publicly about Iraqi links to al Qaeda, I just
find it hard to understand how Dick Clarke can be so dismissive of the possibility that there were
links between them," Wolfowitz said.

Like Tenet, Clarke was a Clinton holdover who faced initial skepticism from Bush loyalists. But Rice
asked him to keep the counterterrorism portfolio and discouraged him from leaving in February
2003.

In the first minutes after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, Rice
placed Clarke in her chair in the Situation Room and asked him to direct the government's crisis
response. The next day, Clarke returned to find the subject changed to Iraq.

"I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda
about Iraq," he writes.

In discussions of military strikes, "Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets
for bombing in Afghanistan" -- where al Qaeda was based under protection of the Taliban -- "and
that we should consider bombing Iraq."

Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security
views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and
Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and
then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi
forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican
Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its
nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force.

In his experience, Clarke writes, Bush's description by critics as "a dumb, lazy rich kid" is
"somewhat off the mark." Bush has "a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution,
the bumper sticker description of the problem."

"Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on
terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes.
"What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country
that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he
estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more
terrorists than we jail or shoot."

"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range
mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Partial quotes that overlook full meaning are careless lapses. Please try to avoid such.

This is what I actually wrote:
(boldface emphasis added here)





Where did I write or imply that was "a fundamental concept". What I implied was a fundamental concept was that:




If God and the Universe are one and the same thing, and if the Universe certainly exists, then God certainly exists.






Invite them to comment. I'd be very interested in what they think about the subject and what evidence they have to support their claims.





By definition, God certainly exists IF the Universe exists.

However, it is not completely knowable whether or not the Universe exists. That is, (as you suggested above) it cannot be proved to a certainty that the Universe actually exists. Even if that were agreed, I doubt consensus on my definition of God.

Your disagreement would be better directed at my definition of God. If you don't buy my definition, then you need not buy my conclusion based on that definition.



Excuse me! If I actually used the pronoun He for God, I erred. I think of God as I defined God to be an IT :wink:



You've got only a tiny piece of it. What is WMD; or, Is there any WMD in Iraq is a tiny piece of the whole question.

The fundamental question on this thread my friend is:
What was the nature of the real threat of Saddam Husseins's regime to the Americans, to Iraqi citizens, to their neighbors, to the human race?

The fundamental definition we continually debate is definition of real threat. We shall never agree about the answer to the fundamental question in this thread if we cannot agree on the definition of real threat.

The same is true with respect to agreement whether God exists or not. We must first agree on a definition of God before we can ever agree on whether God exists or not


Now, perhaps you understand my 2nd purpose for my announced digression regarding the existence or non-existence of God.

Yes, shame shame on that mediocre bush. He didn't stop the terrorists from murdering 3,000 people. He had the well organized and dedicated experience of a 96 month Clinton Administration at his disposal. He had a whole 11 months (correction, 8 months) to act and the meathead failed to stop it. And then almost 2 years after going into Afghanistan that cowboy raced into Iraq. What a nerd. Gad, he actually gives nerds a bad name.


Yeah, right

LOL. Steve, we need Frank Apisa here. How did we get from Iraq to God? I think some of the Muslims could "fill us in."

ican, "cicerone imposter wrote:
The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein,

Yeah, right"

Yeah, right - if you quote me correctly! There's a big difference between what I post from another source, and what I write as a personal opinion. Yeah, right!

Kara, I had two objectives this past Saturday afternoon when I first digressed and brought up this alleged proof of God's existence. One I stated at the time was to entertain myself on a Saturday afternoon (a cloudy Saturday afternoon).

The other objective was to show that one could prove pretty near anything starting with the appropriate axioms and definitions. However, one generally cannot prove for certain that the axioms and definitions are true.

What we are generally debating here is whether or not a real threat to millions of people would have existed with a continuation of Saddam's regime.

I claim that debate will go no where until we agree on the definition of real threat.

In addition, we must agree on this axiom or one like it:

A real threat cannot be transformed into an unreal threat in any other way than by destroying the cause of that real threat.