username wrote:Brandon, the US has thousands of nuclear weapons, the world's most deadly WMDs. The US is the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons against people. The US still has tons of chemical weapons. The US has also used conventional weapons in such numbers that they produce conflagrations essentially equivalent to the effects of WMDs (the firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, amongst others in WWII). The US has a documented history of invading Muslim countries, not to mention a documented history of subverting their governments (Iran 1954). The Wolfowitz-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Perle cabal, who set the direction for the DOD had consistently railed for years before Bush was elected, and after he was elected, that we must take out Iraq and force Muslim countries to change to our wishes.
USING PRECISELY THE SAME ARGUMENTS YOU USE TO JUSTIFY OUR INVADING IRAQ, this means Osama binLaden was justified in attacking us, a move he thought would destabilize the US, deter us from attacking Muslim countires, and bring the West crashing down. He was wrong, as it turns out, BUT BY YOUR JUSTIFICATION FOR PREEMPTIVE STRIKES, he was justified. BY YOUR LOGIC, just because he was wrong doesn't mean he wasn't justified in doing it.
If you grant one country or people the right to preemptively try to destroy another country they perceive, however wrongly, as a threat, then you have to grant everybody that right. Unless you say, as some people here do, that no-one but the US has the right, and the US can do whatever it damn well wants. Say that, and you have no international law whatsoever. Either everybody hasthe right or no one does.
I think, and most of the rest of the world, except for a few sycophantic governments (and not their people) thinks, no one has that right. Osama didn't, and we were wrong to invade Iraq, particularly with the specious tie to the war on terror.
And since you say, once again, that war was justified as providing a definitive answer to the question of whether Iraq had WMDs, then I invite you once again to tell me that you DON'T feel the concomitant costs, the 2400+ plus American dead, the 10,000+ American wounded (most of whom, by all accounts, will bear horrible disabilities for life), the 30,000+ Iraqi deaths--the "collateral damage" civilian oopsies, the costs to the US economy financed by international borrowing since Bush refuses to raise taxes to pay for them--which in the past has screwed the economy for years after the wars ended, the international disrepute, and perhaps worst the finishing school provided in Iraq for the creation of a whole new generation of terrorists and to go along with that the strengthening of existent terrorist groups and the forging of closer links of commmunication between them, brought about by what is perceived, as Osama said, as the crusade of America against the Muslim world.
That is what has happened in Iraq. Do you think the costs REALLY are worth answering your inane question? Most of the country has reasonably concluded the whole thing was a cockup. And those numbers show only an upward trend.
Tell me please, what would the cost have been had the alternate probability been true and Iraq had been allowed to develop a working nuke, smuggle it into NY in pieces, and detonate it? Estimate that cost for me please. Indeed, insuring that that didn't happen was worth going to war for.
You can argue that the right of the police to arrest criminals proves that criminals have the right to arrest police, but it doesn't really follow. By the way, I am not saying that we are the police, merely that interchanging the US and Al Qaeda in my argument is not valid. We can call bin Laden, Hitler, Pol Pot bad, and they can call us bad, but the opinions are not equally valid. We did indeed have the right to act with force to prevent an evil madman from obtaining and stockpiling doomsday weapons. Although there is a terrible risk as long as anyone has WMD, the US, France, China, etc. are less of a risk than Saddam Hussein would have been. Must we sit back and watch as the most evil dictators in the world arm to the teeth with WMD? I think not.
