Weapons of mass . . . something

Brandon9000 wrote:

To be deceitful, to have the intent to deceive is immoral, and if this is what you think of my character, I wouldn't think you would bother to interact with me at all. Conversely, I am not sure that I want to interact with someone who really considers me to be dishonest.

Brandon this definition you use is a falsehood. Look up deceit in the dictionary. For example The American Heritage dictionare lists both intentional deceit and "falseness".

Personally I'd not care if it's intentional, in effect it's all the same and has the quality of making an effigy out of my position that I do not share.

Regardless of intent, which I do not speculate about, the effect is that it is a position I do not hold and will not defend.

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Adrian wrote:

Pakistan did not meet all of Brandons criteria at the time it aquired nuclear weapons.

Yes it did. Many of Brandon's criteria are so subjective to be nonsensical (e.g. "so evil" "willing to kill") and those are the only ones that are even questionable and a case can be made for those that are far more convincing than, say, Brandon's claim that the weapons inspections in Iraq were "insufficiently effective".

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joefromchicago wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
joefromchicago wrote:
Then, of course, you were advocating an invasion of Pakistan prior to its testing of nuclear weapons in 1998, right?

No, I was not.

Well, Brandon, I must say that you've got me confused. You say that your list (which, apparently, is still subject to revision) is applicable to any country, and that you've been "saying virtually exactly this same thing for 35 years," yet you say that you did not support an invasion of Pakistan even though that country fit all of those conditions prior to 1998.

Obviously, you can understand my bewilderment. If you sincerely believed, since around 1969, that any country that fit all of those conditions was a fit subject for invasion, then one should certainly have expected that you would have supported the invasion of Pakistan prior to its development of nuclear weapons (which would have taken it out of the running by virtue of item no. 6 in your list).*

Your admission, however, that you didn't support such an invasion (despite your unbroken record of, at that point, almost three decades of consistent adherence to your set of conditions) leads me to suspect that maybe, just maybe your belief in those conditions hasn't been as unwavering as you make it out to be. Indeed, I am inclined to conclude that those conditions were formulated solely with Iraq in mind.

*I won't even bother to ask you if you supported an invasion of apartheid-era South Africa, which also fit all of your conditions. I suspect I already know your answer.

I frankly don't care what you're inclined to conclude. I find your implication that you know the details of my past life to be absurd. You do not.

While I said that I did not support the invasion of Pakistan, I did not say that I opposed it. The fact is simply that I did not know much about Pakistan at the time, and therefore didn't think much about it. This is the reason why I did not then advocate invasion. Although I know somewhat more about Pakistan now, I still do not know enough of its history in the late 90s to either confirm or refute your allegation that it then met all of the criteria I have listed. However, if it did, and I had known then that it did, I would have absolutely supported invasion. Also, what I know now and knew then about South Africa pertains mostly to apartheid. I do not know whether it ever met all of the criteria I established above, but if it did, then I would have supported invasion in that case too.

Also, I did not intend to imply that I have had this exact list of criteria since the late 60s. What I have been saying since the late 60s is that the proliferation of nuclear weapons to small dictatorships and possibly even private groups would be a dominant problem in the latter part of my life, and that the world would have to take very extreme measures to have any chance at all of not bombing itself back to the stone age. I certainly have never "wavered" in this belief, although you seem to be such an expert on my personal history that perhaps I am remembering my life incorrectly. Also, I now place biological weapons, and to some extent chemical weapons in this same category.

It's sad that you find it necessary to impugn my honesty, imply I am misrepresenting myself, etc., rather than merely debate the issue. It seems to me that the criteria I have established should be debated on their own merits or lack of merits, and not on the basis of how and when I arrived at them.

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Craven de Kere wrote:

...Many of Brandon's criteria are so subjective to be nonsensical (e.g. "so evil" "willing to kill") and those are the only ones that are even questionable and a case can be made for those that are far more convincing than, say, Brandon's claim that the weapons inspections in Iraq were "insufficiently effective".

When speculating about the likely consequences of some particular dictatorship acquiring WMD, the character of its ruler is very relevant. Although qualities like evil are subjective, it seems to me that our assessment that a national ruler displays behaviors which most would characterize as grossly amoral is a fitting element of the list of criteria. I would tend to trust people like Hilter and Stalin less with a stockpile of WMD than I would most other national rulers precisely because of my estimation of their character.

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Well Craven, I would argue but I agree that the criteria are ridiculous.

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Craven de Kere wrote:

Regardless of intent, which I do not speculate about, the effect is that it is a position I do not hold and will not defend.

I stand corrected, but such misunderstandings about another members' position are not that uncommon here.

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Adrian wrote:

Well Craven, I would argue but I agree that the criteria are ridiculous.

Thank you for your courtesy, anyway. I would find it helpful if you would pick one item from my list of criteria that you find particularly ridiculous and tell me why.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

When speculating about the likely consequences of some particular dictatorship acquiring WMD, the character of its ruler is very relevant.

It's also nearly impossible to quantify at all, much less with the accuracy I would hope you would require in order to invade nations, waging wars that breach fundaments of international security.

Quote:

Although qualities like evil are subjective, it seems to me that our assessment that a national ruler displays behaviors which most would characterize as grossly amoral is a fitting element of the list of criteria. I would tend to trust people like Hilter and Stalin less with a stockpile of WMD than I would most other national rulers precisely because of my estimation of their character.

IMO, you would do well to attach it to the criteria that gives you said estimation of their character, as relying on estimations of character is ludicrous.

Character is only important if it will result in specific actions and in this case specific actions can and should be the criteria.

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Adrian wrote:

Brandon, first I would like to congratulate you. You are doing quite a good job here, against VERY tough opposition.

Second, just a question. How much do you know about how HARD it would be to do what you fear these "tiny, unstable dictatorships" are going to do?

It's not like making a diesel / ferteliser bomb.

I do have a couple of degrees in Physics, which gives me at least some idea of the factors involved in creating a working fission bomb. I believe that with a number of people trying to use a WMD in the US, and the technology becoming more accessible, eventually one will get through and succeed. This seems to me to be only common sense. The real question is how frequently would this happen.

I would have to give a very long argument to say more than that my sense is that we are not talking about once every century, but something considerably more frequent. I suspect that a bioweapon might be easier to build and smuggle in than a nuclear weapon.

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Craven de Kere wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

When speculating about the likely consequences of some particular dictatorship acquiring WMD, the character of its ruler is very relevant.

It's also nearly impossible to quantify at all, much less with the accuracy I would hope you would require in order to invade nations, waging wars that breach fundaments of international security.

Quote:
Although qualities like evil are subjective, it seems to me that our assessment that a national ruler displays behaviors which most would characterize as grossly amoral is a fitting element of the list of criteria. I would tend to trust people like Hilter and Stalin less with a stockpile of WMD than I would most other national rulers precisely because of my estimation of their character.

IMO, you would do well to attach it to the criteria that gives you said estimation of their character, as relying on estimations of character is ludicrous.

Character is only important if it will result in specific actions and in this case specific actions can and should be the criteria.

Well, at the very least, I sometimes know evil when I see it, particularly in extreme cases. I know enough history to attach the word evil to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hussein. Do you feel that I'm being hasty in characterizing these individuals as evil?

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Brandon.

The problems I have with your criteria are secondary to the problems that I have with your basic premise.

You seem to think that the USA should UNILATERALLY invade other countries in order to stop them aquiring weapons that YOU GUYS have butloads of.

If you feel like discussing that then I'm in.

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Adrian wrote:

Brandon.

The problems I have with your criteria are secondary to the problems that I have with your basic premise.

You seem to think that the USA should UNILATERALLY invade other countries in order to stop them aquiring weapons that YOU GUYS have butloads of.

If you feel like discussing that then I'm in.

Frankly, this is a huge drain on my time and energy. Making the arguments is not hard, but it is laborious to debate several people at once. I would have hoped that some of my fellow conservatives would have tried to assist, and to do so with comments relevant to the central points of the debate, but that doesn't seem to be happening. While I feel that the ideas being debated are vitally important, and while I have a strong desire to convince others that my assessment of the issues is correct, I cannot survive long in my job spending hours on this while I am supposed to be working for my employer, and I have very little desire to spend hours on it during the evenings either. I firmly believe that I am exactly correct, but I simply do not have the time to debate this essentially alone against several opponents.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

Well, at the very least, I sometimes know evil when I see it, particularly in extreme cases. I know enough history to attach the word evil to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hussein. Do you feel that I'm being hasty in characterizing these individuals as evil?

Not at all, I personally find "evil" to be nonsense but I can translate it into a corresponding sentiment that I can accept.

Thing is, "I know it when I see it" is a procedural delineation I can't accept because of the potential for abuse.

Adrian touches on it when he mentions unilateralism.

If there is too much leeway in the interpretation of said criteria we open up abuse that is, in my opinion, at least as dangerous to international security as the problem we seek to address.

In the past, the danger from WMD was national use. IMO just because the focus has segued from nation states to rogues doesn't eliminate the dangers of intra-national WMD dangers.

The standards for breaching sovereignty are, IMO, standards important enough to preservation of life that deviance from them is a danger in its own right.

IMO, the danger that Iraq represented was disproportionate to the urgency of the invasion. With less urgency Iraq may have been able to be addressed without as much damage to sovereignty, an underpin for global stability.

For example, do you assert that the urgency was severe enough that a wait of a month would make a meaningful difference? Because I assert that waiting a month or more may have made a meaningful difference insofar as the procedural criteria for breaching sovereignty was concerned.

Furthermore, I think that your concerns could have been address in other means. I'd have favored the invasion anyway based on other criteria (if it met my procedural standards) but I think you'd have a hard time arguing that invasion was the only way to satisfy yours.

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No worries Brandon. I have the same problem with these debates. So much to argue, so little time.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

I believe that the inspectors had had their chance for many years and had shown themselves to be insufficiently effective.

Well, they were insufficiently effective to make Iraq meet every single of the conditions it was bound to, perhaps. But if we are talking of the justification for invasion being not just any transgression of conditions, but a danger posed in terms of the possession of actual WMD that could pose an actual threat to the security of the US - that's the case you're making, right? - I think we must now conclude that the weapon inspections apparently actually did a pretty good deal in preventing it.

After all, we know that Iraq possessed a huge amount of WMD at the time the weapon inspections regime was first imposed, in the early nineties. We know that the overwhelming majority of these WMD were destroyed during the weapon inspections regime, at the time much to the pride of the US government. The question that remained open at the time of the start of this Iraq war was whether he might have had any left, or even produced any new ones, after the years during which weapon inspectors were not allowed in anymore. (We'll leave the question of how they came to not be allowed in anymore aside for the moment.)

According to the new weapon inspectors' mission, which was in Iraq as the plans for invasion were unfolded, they could find no proof of this being the case; the US however asserted that they had intelligence that did prove it was the case; while other countries' governments, such as Germany's, France's and Canada's, noted that they found the suggested evidence weak - too weak to want to act on it.

Now, a year later, we see that there has indeed been no trace that we could find of Iraq possessing WMD at the time of the invasion. Even a trusted researcher like David Kay, who was most convinced that he would find WMD or traces thereof, concluded that Iraq most likely had not possessed WMD anymore when the war started. The argument has since shofted to WMD programs - and, in the latest transmutation, to "the capability" of starting such programs.

I would think this shows that the judgement of allied countries who found the purported US evidence on your criteria 1) ("appears to be working hard to develop WMD") and 4) (the chance of "the country making significant use of its WMD") to be too weak has turned out to be justified. It thus also shows that Iraq most likely did not meet all of your criteria at the time of the invasion - and that the weapon inspections regime apparently was more successful than you contend.

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Meanwhile, to put yet another new perspective into the discussion - if the danger Brandon sketches, of terrorists smuggling WMD into the country and setting off something akin to a mushroom cloud over NYC or LA, is indeed the most immediate of dangers the US faces, is it then misdirecting its defence strategies and budgets?

Quote:

National security priorities: While the 9/11 panel is expected to detail shortcomings in the funding of first responders, customs and immigration officials, the panel steered clear of the politically sensitive other side of that coin: the enormous increase in U.S. military spending that had little or nothing to do with the immediate terrorist threat.

For instance, the record-setting budget of the United States military this year contains $9.2 billion for research and testing of a National Missile Defense system, a sum which has grown every year since 1985 and is still years away from even proving it is scientifically viable.

Similarly, $4.4 billion was included for development of a new generation F-22 Raptor a jet first envisaged as a counter to a generation of Soviet weapons that never was built. The Air Force argues, reasonably, that the F-16s the aircraft is meant to replace are now a generation old and increasingly expensive to maintain. Yet, at the same time, the Pentagon authorized $3.2 billion for purchase of the Joint Strike Fighter. Add a few billion more for the redesigned, upgraded F/A-18 Super Hornet for the Navy, and you have three tactical fighter aircraft going into production at a time when no ten foreign powers combined can threaten the U.S. Air Force's dominance of the skies.

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I find it hilarious that Brandon contends the inspections were ineffective--yet no WoMD have ever been found.

Rock on, dude . . .

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Brandon9000 wrote:

I frankly don't care what you're inclined to conclude. I find your implication that you know the details of my past life to be absurd. You do not.

Oh please, Brandon, spare us the dramatics. The only conclusions that I drew about your past were based on information that you supplied. If you don't want anyone delving into the details of your life, don't provide them.

Brandon9000 wrote:

While I said that I did not support the invasion of Pakistan, I did not say that I opposed it. The fact is simply that I did not know much about Pakistan at the time, and therefore didn't think much about it. This is the reason why I did not then advocate invasion.

Let me get this straight: you've been thinking about this issue for 35 years, yet you didn't know much about Pakistan at the time? For someone who was developing policy guidelines for invading nations bent on acquiring or developing nuclear weapons, this is an inexplicable lapse in your attention. Really, Brandon, how could you have missed it? It was in all the papers.

Presumably, you mention your 35 years of background in this matter as evidence that you have given this issue a tremendous amount of thought -- indeed, one might even conclude that your 35 years of devoted consideration merited some sort of respect. Yet your mystifying inability to pick up on the events in Pakistan during those 35 years shows only that you wasted a great deal of time over the span of three-and-a-half decades. And your list, the product of those wasted years, is further proof that this is, in fact, the case.

Brandon9000 wrote:

It's sad that you find it necessary to impugn my honesty, imply I am misrepresenting myself, etc., rather than merely debate the issue. It seems to me that the criteria I have established should be debated on their own merits or lack of merits, and not on the basis of how and when I arrived at them.

I did not impugn your honesty. Rather, I expressed some astonishment that you would have developed a list that justified an invasion of Pakistan while, at the same time, admitting that you didn't support such an invasion. Of course, one conclusion that could be drawn from this paradox is that you did not develop that list until after 1998, thus casting doubt on your claim that you had been working on the list for 35 years.

Furthermore, I wouldn't have discussed the genesis of your list if you had not introduced the topic in the first place. Having put it on the table, however, it is too late to withdraw it now and claim that it is not relevant. It was evidently relevant when you mentioned it, Brandon; it is perhaps unfortunate for you that I think so too.

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Adrian wrote:

Joe, I must say you being a bit mean. Pakistan did not meet all of Brandons criteria at the time it aquired nuclear weapons.

Play fair.

Yes, let's play fair, Adrian, you and me both. Part of playing fair, however, involves backing up what you've said. So which criteria did Pakistan fail to meet prior to 1998?

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I would opine that it was an insufficient attention paid to the slaughter of their benighted population . . . but hey, what do i know, i'm just a dog . . .

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Weapons of mass . . . something

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