Understanding America and the Bush administration

Attacking a sovereign country without justification is a crime. All the intel our country used was wrong and full of errors and omissions. Mistakes do not absolve us. "Fear" is not reason enough to preemptively attack a nation and kill thousands of innocent people.

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C.I., let me ask you a question...

Let's say you had to live in either Mosul or Basrah. At what time period would you elect to live in those towns?

A. 1988
B. 1995
C. 2003

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Unfortunately, I've lived in the US for most of my life. ;(

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McG, What if you lived in the second century?

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Answer my question C.I.

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Boy, imagine a bunch of cops taking out a group of people in a car because it was stolen by murders hellbent on killing as many people as possible.

Problem is even though the stolen car is the same make and color with the suspects identical license plate, but the party inside was a family of four, hidden behind tinted windows, on their way to the playground.

Turns out the license plate was switched so that cops would clearly identify that car as the murder suspects' vehicle.

Wouldn't you think that the police would make absolutely sure before shooting what the situation was? Or was it the fear of heightened gang activity in the neighborhood that provoked them to react with knee jerk mentality?

It is Bush's "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to foreign policy that is a dismal failure here, and we went into Iraq thinking the absolutely worse about Saddam without proper corraboration by the proper intelligence channels. And even though there WAS doubt regarding Saddam's WMDs right before the war started, we shot first anyway. There are plenty of WMDs in the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, India and Pakistan.

And speaking of Bush's foreign policy, how about that bin Laden? Nobody can find him now. And Bush insisted that he is looking for bin Laden everyday, despite the fact that he thinks it to be a fine and dandy thing that he remain hidden.

There's a little more understanding regarding the Bush administration. Why America doesn't hold him more accountable leaves little if anything TO understand...

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McG, I don't answer stupid questions. I would never presume to understand the living conditions of those countries you listed.

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I'd be hard pressed to answer any question about cities and towns in the US - let alone places I have never visited beyond our borders. Also, time changes things.

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Stick your bait where you might get some bites. You ain't gett'n any from me. There are probably some fish out there hungry for your kind of "feed."

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McGentrix wrote:

C.I., let me ask you a question...

Let's say you had to live in either Mosul or Basrah. At what time period would you elect to live in those towns?

A. 1988
B. 1995
C. 2003

just so I understand your question correctly, are you suggesting that any given individuals personal safety is dependent on which of the years you posted he/she resided in Mosul or Basrah? Interesting question at least, does Mcg no the answer?

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Moishe3rd wrote:

The question that I do not understand is why the European Union should succeed or, at the present time, appear to be succeeding.
It does not fit with any of my pre-conceived historical paradigms and therefore, it fascinates me.
I fantasize that Europe has slid into some vast cross-cultural ennui; a morass of bored existentialism where nothing really matters as long as there is wine and the seashore. This is obviously ridiculous as a rational explanation of Europe's apparent growing cohesiveness, but I can think of no other serious explanation that takes into account over a thousand years of cutural rivalries.
Any thoughts on this conundrum?

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Attacking a sovereign country without justification is a crime. All the intel our country used was wrong and full of errors and omissions. Mistakes do not absolve us. "Fear" is not reason enough to preemptively attack a nation and kill thousands of innocent people.

Well, baloney. However, since I am not really allowed to address that statement in this thread, I will just say that the really mysterious part of this for me is that you seem to care so much about crumbling infrastructure, debt, lack of health insurance, and yet to all appearances blithely show no concern whatever for a factor which could easily make all of these things infinitely worse for a generation.

You complain that Bush is expending resources on the war, yet will not consider for a moment that his stated motive was to prevent a calamity which could make the concerns you have listed indescribably worse. You are worried about health insurance? Try even finding a doctor, much less insurance, if a hundred thousand people are exterminated.

The vibes I pick up from your posts make me feel as though you believe that since this kind of calamity has never occurred before, it is all in the realm of fantasy.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

You could ask me, and I would say the same as above:

I dislike the falseness of some firms, factories, corporations and even governmental agencies, when they say "we created xxxx jobs", but forget that they closed down x-times as much the years before.

And I could give you x-examples from not only Germany, but my state, my county, my town!

Well I agree with that. The truth is that governments don't create or destroy jobs. They do have the ability to influence the conditions under which others do this - that's all. So it is just as false to say that the Bush Administration lost XXX jobs as it is to say they created XX jobs. Similarly the boasts of the Democrats who preceeded Bush that they "created" jobs and a budget surplus are equally false. Moreover in their case it was the paralysis between a Democrat president and a Republican Congress that prevented additional government action that really contributed to the surplus. The Democrats merely took credit for the rising of the sun.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Attacking a sovereign country without justification is a crime. All the intel our country used was wrong and full of errors and omissions. Mistakes do not absolve us. "Fear" is not reason enough to preemptively attack a nation and kill thousands of innocent people.

But we did have "justification".. Evidently you don't think it was sufficient, but that is not the issue here. A "crime" under what or whose law????

Some of the intel was wrong, not all of it.

Reasonable fear is indeed justification for actions in self defense.

Would you prefer that Saddam Hussein was still the ruler of Iraq? How many people would he have killed in his added two years? Would the prospects for progress and modern development in the Moslem world have been better or worse than today if he were still in power?

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I don't have the energy to deal with the whole of your failure to understand the world right now, so I will just deal with a few pieces.

Dookiestix wrote:

Wouldn't you think that the police would make absolutely sure before shooting what the situation was?

Since the hypothetical danger involved the extermination of a huge number of Americans - perhaps even hundreds or thousands or a million - it would have been insanity to wait for certainty. How serious is, say, even a 10% chance of a million Americans being exterminated? Very serious, I'd say.

Dookiestix wrote:

It is Bush's "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to foreign policy that is a dismal failure here...

It seems to me that we asked questions for a dozen years before finally acting. Had Hussein been developing the weapons and merely stalling us, there would have been a finite time window of opportunity.

Dookiestix wrote:

... There are plenty of WMDs in the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, India and Pakistan.

I almost can't stand the stupidity. One of many simple answers to this is that all of the countries on your list are already nuclear and cannot be attacked without risking the immediate death of millions.

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Dopystick's ignorance is oceanic: hard to drain.

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Justification IS the issue; no country can willy-nilly attack another country without good cause. Fear and wrong intel does not justify any country to attack another.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Justification IS the issue; no country can willy-nilly attack another country without good cause. Fear and wrong intel does not justify any country to attack another.

Grave fear of millions of casualties is sufficient cause to attack a hideously evil dictator who agreed to provide clear verification of disarmament many years earlier.

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If your thesis is correct, why aren't we attacking North Korea, China, and Iran?

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cicerone imposter wrote:

If your thesis is correct, why aren't we attacking North Korea, China, and Iran?

NK is already nuclear and would have the option of killing a million people in the first hour of the war. We missed the bus with NK. Now all we can do is sit by and impotently whine at them to play nice. We invaded Iraq to prevent Hussein from achieving this near invulnerability. China is so nuclear that invading would result in Armageddon, and, even on a conventional level, would be much, much more difficult. Iran may have its turn coming, but the dynamics are different. We haven't been trying to negotiate with them on this for a dozen years, and the people there, unlike the government, are somewhat sympathetic to us and have some chance of attaining true democracy, which might ameliorate the weapon problem. With Iran, there is enough hope present to try negotiation a bit longer.

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Understanding America and the Bush administration

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