Brandon9000 wrote:I am telling you that the situation has an existence apart from what people say about it. My analysis of the situation doesn't really depend on how other people characterize it.
Which situation in Iraq? The current situation? Or the situation before the US started the war?
old europe wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:I am telling you that the situation has an existence apart from what people say about it. My analysis of the situation doesn't really depend on how other people characterize it.
Which situation in Iraq? The current situation? Or the situation before the US started the war?
The probability that Hussein was still hiding WMD and development programs, the likely costs and consequences of invasion, the likelihood that if, indeed, Hussein were still hiding WMD and we let him continue, some awful use would be made of the WMD someday, all of these things have an existence independent of the way Bush or anyone else described them. I had an opinion about invasion before I heard of Bush Jr., and I would have had an opinion about it if he had never been born. Even if Bush lied, which I don't believe, but am not discussing today, that doesn't mean that invasion wasn't the smart thing to do based on what was known at the moment of invasion. My analogy with exploratory surgery has meaning regardless of anything Bush did or failed to do. The situation has an existence independent of what anyone says or said about it.
And your opinion about invasion before you heard of Bush Jr. was...?
I have believed since I was a teenager that during the latter portion of my life, there would be a monumental threat to man's existence on Earth, when nukes became very accessible to relatively unsophisticated entities like tiny dictatorships and well financed private organizations, just simply as a consequence of the advance of technology. I failed to anticipate the part about bioweapons, but the same principle applies for those too. Iraq is not unique. In the near future other small dictatorships, some with ties to terror, will undertake acquisition of these weapons, lie about it, and our knowledge of exactly what stage they are at will be incomplete and imperfect. I saw and now see the Iraq experience as an early example of this phenomenon, and once it became clear that Hussein was being deceptive to the UN inspectors, and that the passage of time was not bringing much illumination to the situation, I became convinced that we needed to go in and determine the truth while there was still time. That is, before his development program reached the point where he could either announce that he had them and would continue to develop more whether we liked it or not, as, say, North Korea now has, or even smuggle one or two into the US and give us bigger things to worry about like a nuclear or biological 9/11 (while insisting he was not behind it). I think it highly likely that if we had not kept making noises about invasion, he would still have WMD development programs, and might have a very dangerous arsenal by now, at least of bioweapons.
I think we were extremely fortunate that there were no WMDs in Iraq, seeing as how there was no securing of any of the multitude of weapons arsenals during the invasion. Our troops are still suffering from car bombs made from weapons and ammunition looted AFTER we invaded.
There are things to be concerned about, and one of them is the fire that has been lit beneath the butts of islamic radicals because of our invasion. Pakistan is a fine example of a fragile dictatorship in posession of nucular weapons, and it is loaded with islamic fundamentalists.
Speaking about bioweapons: any news on who sent those anthrax letters after 9/11?
old europe wrote:Speaking about bioweapons: any news on who sent those anthrax letters after 9/11?
None that I know of. This is why I say that Hussein or his agents could detonate WMD in western cities and then claim non-involvement. Because this type of asymetric threat can be anonymous, deterrence is much less effective than during the Cold War.
I do not recall where investigations into this matter finally led: wasn't there reason to believe that the anthrax attacks actually came from within the US, i.e. no foreign power/network/group was involved?
mesquite wrote:There are things to be concerned about, and one of them is the fire that has been lit beneath the butts of islamic radicals because of our invasion.
They didn't really need a lot of encouragement, as witness the two attacks on the World Trade Center, the American embassies in Africa, the Cole, etc. There is a lot to be concerned about just because the onward march of technology has put WMD within the hands of relatively small and unsophisticated entities, and will continue to do so more and more. I just can't wait for someone to discover how to synthesize macroscopic quantities of antimatter. That will really be fun someday.
mesquite wrote:Pakistan is a fine example of a fragile dictatorship in posession of nucular weapons, and it is loaded with islamic fundamentalists.
And we may have to force them to give those weapons up, but the dynamics is quite different, e.g. their leader is nominally at least on our side of the argument, and they are in a standoff with their own neighbor. At least Musharraf isn't annexing his neighbors and paying suicide bombers' families.
old europe wrote:I do not recall where investigations into this matter finally led: wasn't there reason to believe that the anthrax attacks actually came from within the US, i.e. no foreign power/network/group was involved?
The FBI had a suspect in this country, but were never able to develop enough evidence against him. They did receive some letters, ostensibly from the perpetrator, and they seem to have been written by someone for whom English is a second language.
Brandon9000 wrote:old europe wrote:I do not recall where investigations into this matter finally led: wasn't there reason to believe that the anthrax attacks actually came from within the US, i.e. no foreign power/network/group was involved?
The FBI had a suspect in this country, but were never able to develop enough evidence against him. They did receive some letters, ostensibly from the perpetrator, and they seem to have been written by someone for whom English is a second language.
But weren't the anthrax spores produced from strains of bacteria
originally produced in a US facility?
The link is really interesting, too...
Amerithrax Links Page, by the FBI
Yes, but they could never find enough to charge him. Really, they still don't know much. That is another thing about these weapons that makes them so dangerous. They can be used anonymously by small countries seeking to compenate for the conventional military superiority of the West. The Soviets and the US were locked in stasis for decades by Mutual Assured Destruction. However, with this sort of anonymous asymmetric threat, the prospect of reprisals by us is not much deterrence.
Not only by small countries. Even by individuals, it seems.
Brandon, did you read the
Linguistic/Behavorial Analysis?
I knew that they had done a lot of profiling. I didn't spend much time with it.
I found this on the FBI website:
Quote: Investigators are emphasizing the importance of keeping the American public focused on the investigation.
Wonder why people didn't care about it more... given that those actually were acts of bioterrorism perpetrated on US soil!
old europe wrote:I found this on the FBI website:
Quote: Investigators are emphasizing the importance of keeping the American public focused on the investigation.
Wonder why people didn't care about it more... given that those actually were acts of bioterrorism perpetrated on US soil!
People cared a lot. It was all over the news for a long time. But the investigation made no progress, the attacks stopped, and, tragic though it was, it was not a large scale attack leaving a million bodies rotting in the streets.
Quote:Brandon9000 wrote:old europe wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:You make the same mistake over and over, and appear to be incapable of understanding the situation. Here is an analogy. Let's suppose that your doctor tells you that you may have a certain disease. The only way to really know for sure is to do exploratory surgery.
Wrong analogy, Branny. It should be "Let's suppose that your doctor tells you that
he knows for a fact that you have a certain disease."
Would you sue him afterwards, when it turns out you didn't have the disease at all?
You're obsessed with what Bush said. The scenario I gave is present just in the events in the newspaper. Do you base all of your beliefs and thoughts on what other people tell you? The case I made is apparent just from the recent history of Iraq - some probability Hussein still had WMD and/or development programs, some consequences for invasion, some consequences of no invasion if he did have them. You don't have the guts to face the analogy head on. I await your next evasion.
Talk about evasion, you can't answer a question regarding the medical anology. If the doctor had to remove your testicles due to testicular cancer, and then you found out you never had it, what would be you response? I honestly believe that you cannot answer that, and it is EXACTLY anologous to Bush's myriad lies regarding this illegal war.
old europe wrote:Would you sue him afterwards, when it turns out you didn't have the disease at all?
That's kind of the whole point of the analogy. If you do the sugery based on the odds, you have done the right thing, even if you find that you don't have the disease.
But how would you FEEL, Brandon? Are you also an ardent supporter of tort reform as well? Would you really not care at all if the doctor and/or hospital totally screwed up?
