Ticomaya wrote:Yes, criminals do not expect to be apprehended. That's why they commit crimes. We agree on that point.
What I'm saying -- and what you are incomprehensibly denying -- is that effective and active law enforcement is a disincentive to crime.
That you are unable to comprehend the conceit of the penal industry does not surprise me. There is no evidence that either the roll of punishments threatened, nor allegations of the effectiveness of police methods deter crime. You have attempted to provide no such evidence, you simply continue to assert that it is so. I've simply continued to point out that the concept of deterence is based upon assumptions without foundation, and that the bedrock assumption of deterence is negated by the criminal conviction that they will not be caught.
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Howver, you are simply distracting the discussion, and putting a false characterization on the point i first made in alluding to burglars. O'Bill several times has asserted that whatever else one might say, Hussein will never use weapons of mass destruction because of the invasion.
This is a meaningless statement for a variety of reasons. The most glaring of them is that no womd were found after the invasion, confirming Hussein's protestations before the invasion and the reports of weapons inspectors.
But beyond that, that simple-minded statement seemed to suggest that, invasion having occured and Hussein having been toppled from power, problem solved, case closed. I responded to that with the burglar analoy to point out that Hussein personally is not the potential problem--rather, any demagoguery which relies upon the use of or the threat of the use of womd would have the means available there. Therefore, the invasion, even if it had found and scooped up truckloads of womd (which, of course, it didn't), would not have represented a definitive solution to the problem of threats of womd. So long as any nation has sufficient financial resource (and North Korea is an extreme example showing that a sufficiently effective totalitarian state can even starve its own population to secure the wherewithal), which petroleum-producing states can do in a walk, and sufficient expertise (of which almost no nation in the world today lacks the resource), then womd are possible. So that an invasion which does not lead to permanent military occupation can only be at best a postponement of the problem.
Therefore, i consider that O'Bill constantly talking about Hussein being in no position to threaten us with womd because of an effective military response is idiotic. Both because the evidence is that he was never in the position to have so threatened us (and he certainly did not publicly do so), and because such a statement ignores the future potential threat. I therefore reject O'Bill's example as a justification for military action against the Persians. Not only will the Persians be a tougher nut to crack than the Iraqis were, but the Iraq experience provides no evidence that such action will definitively remove the potential threat.
) :wink:
