Craven de Kere wrote:The official reaction by White House press secretary Scott McClellan was: 'It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people.'
No denial, just an ad hominem.
It seems pretty tame compared to "A blind man in a room full of deaf people."
"Ad hominem" has nothing to do with severity and everything to do with a certain tactic.
I'm not saying it was out of line, I am simply saying they chose to discredit the source rather than rebut the allegation (which had ad hominems of its own).
Ad hominem simply means a reference about the person instead of the issue.
Yes, but the ad hominem made about Bush by O'Neill was very insulting indeed, whereas the one quoted above made about O'Neill was exceptionally tame. I am not denying that they both qualify as fitting the definition.
Actually, I don't think that there would be any point in denying the charge about wanting to oust Hussein from the start. I think that wanting to oust him was an extremely reasonable thing, both because he was a very evil man who seemed enamored of creating WMD and lying about it, and because he tortured and murdered millions of his own people. I should think that not wanting to oust him would be more unreasonable.
Fair enough, like I said, I won't be rehashing the Iraq debate this morning.
I will however point out that the statistics you refer to obliquely are incorrect.
Since 1979, Saddam has been directly responsible for the deaths of approximately one million Iraqi citizens, not including the additional one million Iraqi soldiers who died in wars which he instigated against Iran and Kuwait.
If you throw in the number he's tortured but not killed, I'm sure my assertion is correct.
Suit yourself, your certainty is your prerogative.
Perhaps you could find a source with incompatible figures. I would be interested to see them. One thing is certain, though. Saddam Hussein has killed many more people than the number of allied troops or civilians who died to oust him. And he has tortured many as well. It seems to me bizarre to criticize an American president for wanting Hussein's ouster from the beginning of his presidency. That kind of seems like a recommendation for Bush, rather than the reverse.
Perhaps you should note that I have resigned myself to leaving you to think what you want. ;-)
Hint: "I won't be rehashing the Iraq debate this morning."
Craven de Kere wrote:Perhaps you should note that I have resigned myself to leaving you to think what you want. ;-)
Hint: "I won't be rehashing the Iraq debate this morning."
Yet you continue posting...
Indeed, but not rehashing the whole debate.
I never said I would stop posting, I just said I wasn't going to do the Iraq debate this morning. ;-)
Craven de Kere wrote:Perhaps you should note that I have resigned myself to leaving you to think what you want. ;-)
Hint: "I won't be rehashing the Iraq debate this morning."
I know you said that, but I could see in the subtext that you really wanted to continue.
This morning I listened to Dick Gephardt expalin his position on Iraq invasion (I am not a Gephardt fan) essentially he said he voeted on supporting Bush on the invasion because he thought it was the right thing to do (at the time) to protect American interests but now realizes it was in error. I consider that to be a valid proposition, perhaps if Bush said something similar he would be percieved as a far more honest politician, as in "Hey, I did what I thought was best at the time."
dyslexia wrote:This morning I listened to Dick Gephardt expalin his position on Iraq invasion (I am not a Gephardt fan) essentially he said he voeted on supporting Bush on the invasion because he thought it was the right thing to do (at the time) to protect American interests but now realizes it was in error. I consider that to be a valid proposition, perhaps if Bush said something similar he would be percieved as a far more honest politician, as in "Hey, I did what I thought was best at the time."
But, why would he be perceived as more honest? He doesn't think it was an error.
Brandon9000 wrote:Since 1979, Saddam has been directly responsible for the deaths of approximately one million Iraqi citizens, not including the additional one million Iraqi soldiers who died in wars which he instigated against Iran and Kuwait.
If you throw in the number he's tortured but not killed, I'm sure my assertion is correct.
And he had huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction ready to be launched and used at a moments notice.
Right?
Perhaps he did, however, I think that what Bush actually said was that some people would wait for the threat to become imminent before acting, but that he would not.
I note that you do not deny the Saddam death toll.
If one single nuclear weapon were to be smuggled into the US, perhaps in pieces, and detonated in a major city, it seems to me that we could have something like a million dead and a million wounded. Don't quote me on the numbers, but it's got to be that kind of scale. It would make 9/11 look very small indeed by comparison. Something on the same scale might happen with bioweapons. Since the consequences of this happening are incomprehensibly bad, we need to take the prospect of an evil madman acquiring WMD very, very seriously indeed. We do not posess the luxury of looking the other way when this kind of consequence is possible. Since Hussein had previously had WMD and WMD programs, and had previously been found to have lied about them, since he had actually used them more than once, and since he offered very feeble proof that he had destroyed the weapons and would no longer seek to build them, I believe that at the instant we invaded, the probabilities were such as to justify the invasion.
Think of it like this....
If I was president, the third convoy in would have been laden down with French designed WOMD that I would have planted all over Iraq.
Frank Apisa wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:Since 1979, Saddam has been directly responsible for the deaths of approximately one million Iraqi citizens, not including the additional one million Iraqi soldiers who died in wars which he instigated against Iran and Kuwait.
If you throw in the number he's tortured but not killed, I'm sure my assertion is correct.
And he had huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction ready to be launched and used at a moments notice.
Right?
So Frank, are you trying to imply that Saddam didn't have his own people tortured and killed ? Or that the mass graves that we are digging up in Iraq were just bodies that were dropped from B-2 bombers to give the illusion of mass graves?
McGentrix wrote:If I was president, the third convoy in would have been laden down with French designed WOMD that I would have planted all over Iraq.
I've actually been mildly surprised something like that didn't happen.
Why do
you think it didn't happen?
Could it be...
A) they were certain Iraq had WMDs (despite Iraq's repeated protestations to the contrary), thus saw no need for a Plan 'B'?
B) they wouldn't have been able to pull off the plant without getting caught?
C) they just
forgot to cover their asses?
D) some other reason?
D.
They believed that the likelihood that Iraq might have WMD was high enough, and the likelihood of getting real cooperation from Hussein was low enough, that they simply had to go in and look. They didn't plant WMD, because they were mostly honest people.
