Question for the antiwar protesters

For whatever polls and opinion surveys are worth, nimh, I think you've just explained the increased rate of approval that someone has noted in the US.

Re: Question for the antiwar protesters


US troops must leave Iraq. And the UN inspections have to be reinstalled.

This was is not about Saddam. Like i stated before, all the countries in the Gulf are non-democratic. Why pick on Saddam and leave the other despots alone? If the people of Iraq really want Saddam out of office, they will do it. The iron curtain also fell down without a war or without a US intervention. Why do the US have the right to get rid of a leader they dont like. Who is next? Fox in Mexico for fighting against the Zapatists? Howard for stealing the land of the aborignals. Chirac for fighting against this war? Poetin for the Chechnya war? the leaders of China? Aznar for fighting against the ETA and for forbid political parties that oppose him?

Protesters should have opposed to the Vietnamese invasion to Cambodia (the opposition conformed to the Chinese stand point).

Re: Question for the antiwar protesters


You must mean Vietnamese troops shoud have left Cambodia in 1970's.

China sent a punitive force against Vietnam for its invasion to Cambodia, in 1979.

Cambodia had suffered from Khmer Rouge before the invasion by Vietnam.

The clasical argument. So because we dont protest against the IRA or the ETA we have no right to protest against this war? Because we dont protest against the War in the Great lakes region in Central Africa we have no right to be against this war?

frolic..
The situation is thus complicated. You can also be a tiny portion of the situation.

frolic




Really? This response belongs in the jokes category or possibly listed under fantasy.

Too many people seem to be telling anti-war folks: 'It's underway, so just relax and enjoy the spectacle along with the rest of us.' But if it was wrong before it started it remains wrong.

dyslexia said:

if one (as i do) think this administration is acting the outlaw, i see no alternative to continued resistence to current policy.


This is the best-stated answer I see.
From where I sit, a great number of school age up to thirties population,
are reacting JUST as the media persuasion compels them to respond.
[ And any of those who do not BELIEVE our citizens are brain-washed (to some extent) by daily television- then you just ASK my gramma!!]

While dissenting citizens of our country diplomatically await a proper forum for rejecting the current administration- it seems proper to me to continue voicing the dissent. At least, those opposed to war with Iraq are TALKING (albeit loud)- not bombing.

It sure is. So many seem to have the attitude: if it's successful, who cares if it's wrong!

See, that's the problem with comparisons - they go in all directions.

Saddam can obviously not be compared to Fox, Howard or even Putin - to do so would be to dangerously belittle the terror of his regime. It almost sounds like a bad joke, in fact (no offense). And there is a serious risk in the comparison, too: if you say everybody's bad, up to Aznar (and I'd have a bone to pick with you on the Basque thing, frolic), then all you can do is throw your hands up and say: nothing we can do. But of course there are things we can do, as states, too, and what the course of action should be should depend on the qualitative differences that can be made between degrees of evil/danger.

Cambodia comes much closer to Saddam's Iraq by ways of comparison, it's true. But, sick though it might seem to make distinctions between very evil and extremely evil (or however you want to put it): Pol Pots regime in Cambodia was executing a full-blown genocide in which some two million people were killed within half a decade - over a third of the population. Only the Holocaust and the genocide on the Armenians by Turkey have outdone that, percentage-wise. Saddam, no matter how evil he tried to be, could never even get close. The closest he got was in his specific campaign against the Kurdish minority in the far north-east of the country, in which 10% of Kurds perished over fifteen years. And that was fifteen years ago - before the previous Gulf War. For the past decade, the Kurds have lived in relative safety in their own "liberated" zone.

Ergo, where the Vietnamese invasion against Cambodia could be defended as the immediate intervention against an ongoing genocide against the entire population, nothing remotely similar can be argued for the current war on Iraq. The dirty truth is that Saddam's is as brutal and total a dictatorship as Assad's in Syria, Karimov's and Turkmenbashi's in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Khadafi's in Lybia, and I think we can easily compare Algeria's regime there, too - and that's just the Arab world.

What are we to do with these dictatorships? Never support any of them again, should be the stern warning to the Bush family and other assorted American and French presidents and German businessmen. Do everything one can to speed up their decline. But full frontal war? Because of what acute danger? I mean, I would gladly have our soldiers liberate each and every of those countries - if it wouldnt cost 100,000s of lives and it could be done in such a way that it wouldnt boost anti-Westernism all through the region and tear apart the UN and other institutions of international order and justice.

Go back to Cambodia. The Vietnamese may have liberated the Khmers from Pol Pot, but, having occupied the country without any international authorisation and depending on no one's approval (well, the Soviet's), they could then do whatever they wanted. They did, installing a dictatorship of their own that lasted for some fifteen-twenty years and cost quite a number of dissidents' lives itself.

Say that, at the time, the international community hadnt been so blind. Say the West hadnt seen Pol Pot as a useful frontline against Soviet-sponsored communism, that it hadnt seen a Cold War opportunity in the competition between Chinese- and Soviet-sponsored communisms. Say there hadnt been a Cold War at all, laming the UN as a decision-making institution. Say the UN had in fact had the powers to enforce inspection regimes inside Cambodia, to implement a gradual disarmament of the Khmer Rouge - backed up with a consensual military-diplomatic pressure from US, France and the Soviet Union.

Would there then still have been a legitimisation for the unilateral invasion by Vietnam?

Frolic's points stands: of course you want evil regimes out, but we can not allow ourselves to live in a world where "the US have the right to get rid of a[ny] leader they dont like". Because it's not right, replacing the goal of international justice with that of one-country hegemony - and because ultimately, it will prove countreproductive - he who sows wind will reap storm [?] and all that - our children would face the most massive and virulent anti-Americanism possible.

We had an alternative here. The choice wasn't anymore between leaving a dictator free to commit whatever genocide and terrorism he felt like, and illegal invasion. The choice was one between containing a broken-winged dictator who could no longer even touch "his" Kurds, of whom no links to the terrorists who attacked America could ever be proven, in a process of continuous, gradual disaramament - and an illegal invasion.

Nihm, i understand what u want to say and i agree. Let me be clear. Saddam is evil, Beezlebub on earth. but the point is that the anti-protesters always ask the same question. 'Why didn't you protest against this or against that in the past'

There are over a million things you could protest against.(and i named a few) Why this war? The answer is, The violation of international law is so flagrant it is easy(easier) to get people out on the streets and protest against it. The war in central africa, it is much harder because nobody understands the situation there.

COMMENT:

If it is as certain as you suppose that they can't do it -- then our doing it for them is purely stop-gap. Merely a pause while waiting for the despot who replaces Saddam to come to power.

What makes you think we can impose democracy?

This situation could not possibly have been handled more ineptly.

I want to think that some good will come from every difficulty, but I see so much bad coming from this that we might better have simply stayed on the sidelines.

And please, don't give me that "What if we had stopped Hitler"
nonsense, because nobody really knows what would have been the result of "stopping Hitler."

Germany could have gotten stronger -- could have developed jet aircraft and nuclear weapons -- and then started their war.

Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to the planet was to let Hitler start his war back when war was still manageable.

We really don't know.

But my guess about the outcome of this present situation is that more bad will come of it than good. Probably for decades to come.

I don't believe the Iraqi people really wanted Saddam for a leader and I don't believe they were in a position to dethrone him. But we have worked at countries such as China for incremental change and it may be working in that country. Why we couldn't do the same with Iraq, particularly after we had them in a position of containment, I can't see. All men like Saddam are evil - However the comparison to Cambodia is a bit extreme.

In the case of china it is the ecnonomic change not political that is going on, and the political situation cannot be said dictatorial.

See what happened in 1989 with the Iron Curtain, see what happened in Greece, Spain, Portugal. When the people are really fed up with a leader they get rid of him.

I think the Iraqi dont see this war as a war of the US taking out Saddam. they see this as a violation of their sovereignity and an attack by a imperialistic army. They will do everything within their power to stop the US army. The only group not loyal to Iraq are the Kurds. But that is because they feel Kurds and not Iraqi.

I really think Saddam is supported by a lot of Iraqi. And i also think they prefer the known(Saddam) instead of the unknown(a US puppet regime?) Do you really think the US wants to install democracy? The biggest group in Iraq are the Sji'iets. They are stronly related with Iran! Democracy would mean they have a great deal in the future leadership of Iraq. Do you think the US wants to bring them into power in Iraq? Dream on!

It took a long time to get to Russia. China will slowly come around.

Oh yes, it can. Ask the many thousands in the camps in Xinjiang and elsewhere. That on an aside.

It is clear why the US is not pushing for regime change there, anyway: of China we do know for sure they got WMD, nukes among them - it is way too powerful to challenge. Anyway, I don't like to play the if-not-them-then-not-those-either game. Any one dictatorship taken out is one more, and considering the sheer amount of them there's really no consistent way of going about it.

More worrying I find that US policy actually isn't all too concerned about dictatorships, in themselves. They are only too happy to prop them up if they choose the right side. The whole concept of "Iraqi Freedom" as tagline for this war is extremely new - until last week, we were meant to believe this was about the War on Terror, or the Danger of WMD. The freedom of the Iraqi's never been remotely relevant to US foreign policy, as was shown when the Shi'ites heeded the American call to rebel back when the Gulf War'd just finished, and the Allied forces passively watched while they were bombed into submission again.

Now in principle I dont care much about the intentions either - every people freed is one more, regardless of what the intentions of the liberators were. But it does weigh in onto the balancing of what benefits and what costs can be expected. The costs of this war seem like they will be enormous, politically and otherwise. The benefits are a lot smaller than you'd expect them to be if there isn't really an underlying commitment to guaranteeing a continued freedom, democracy, respect of human rights for the Iraqis in US policy. The state Afghanistan is in right now doesn't seem to set a wholly reassuring precedence, to put it mildly.

Anyway, satt, what'd you think of my comments on your cambodia parallel?