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Originally posted by caltour:
Saddam had multiple opportunities to avoid the war. He was an idiot, apparently, in addition to all of his other bad qualities. But please realize that Saddams failure to avail himself of opportunites to avoid war does not in any way change the morality (or legality) of Bush's decision to go to war. Saddam had an opportunity to avoid the bullet, but Bush pulled the trigger.
Let's see if I can come up with a caltour analogy....
IF somebody had a baseball bat and was swinging it at your head, if you pull the trigger & kill him, you're at fault for killing him. After all, he had not made impact or done any harm to you. You just shot him for no reason...
How's that?? 
Must be that jumbly-wumbly thing happening again.
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Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Originally posted by caltour:
Saddam had multiple opportunities to avoid the war. He was an idiot, apparently, in addition to all of his other bad qualities. But please realize that Saddams failure to avail himself of opportunites to avoid war does not in any way change the morality (or legality) of Bush's decision to go to war. Saddam had an opportunity to avoid the bullet, but Bush pulled the trigger.
Let's see if I can come up with a caltour analogy....
IF somebody had a baseball bat and was swinging it at your head, if you pull the trigger & kill him, you're at fault for killing him. After all, he had not made impact or done any harm to you. You just shot him for no reason...
How's that??
Your analogy would more apt if you changed "baseball bat" to "yellow plastic whiffle bat."
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No, more like he threatened to hit you with a baseball bat but all he has is a yellow plastic whiffle bat mobile production unit somewhere out of town and the morons running it can't get it to work.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -George Santayana
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Originally posted by caltour:
I perceive the logical and factual support for my argument to be weaker
i am glad you admit this finally.
00 black/tan svt, #2052 of 2150, born 2/1/00
formerly known as my csvt
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Originally posted by caltour:
Saddam had multiple opportunities to avoid the war. He was an idiot, apparently, in addition to all of his other bad qualities. But please realize that Saddams failure to avail himself of opportunites to avoid war does not in any way change the morality (or legality) of Bush's decision to go to war. Saddam had an opportunity to avoid the bullet, but Bush pulled the trigger.
Congress authorized the use of force. That is all the authority Bush required to legally invade Iraq.
Morality is a matter of personal opinion and belief. You can argue that all day without any thing definitive showing up.
Brad "Diva": 2004 Mazda 6s 5-door, Volcanic Red
Rex: 1988 Mazda RX-7 Vert, Harbor Blue.
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Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Originally posted by caltour:
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Iraq was viewed as a rogue nation in the ME. Remember the Quaiti invasion? After the first gulf war, in light of 9/11, Iraq were viewed as a potential bio-chem weapon source for the terrorists.
Yes, I think we all understand that. We all understand that it was possible that Saddam might give terrorists some chemical weapons. And it was possible that those terrorist might then use those chemical weapons on us.
Now we get to the real issue: is that speculative possibility a sufficient basis for going to war? I say no. There are dozens of irresponsible or "rogue" regimes. Those regimes have access to uncountable tons of weapons. If would be insame for us to launch a war every time one of them refuses to account for all of its weapons. Unless we have REALLY GOOD intelligence (and UN support), such an attack would make US a rogue nation.
Show me some that are under UN restrictions, have shown hostility toward their neighbors & also possess these weapons, and I say they are also subject to some action.
I notice you said "some action," and not "war." Does that mean you now think that the circumstances might not have warranted an invasion? (At a cost of tens of thousands of lives and over $200 billion).
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
AGAIN I take you by the hand and walk you over to the Iraqi declarations to the UN of what WMD material, programs, & weapons they IN FACT had by their own admission.
Do you really take the Iraqi declarations about WMDs to be the factual truth? First of all, nobody has ever really believed anything Saddam said. Secondly, he had extremely good reasons for claiming to have weapons he may not have actually had. The perception of invincible power was all that stood between him and death. Any sign of weakness and he would have been killed or exiled. If Saddam had told the truth (i.e. that most of the chemical and bio programs were dismantled or sold off soon after the first Gulf War), he would probably have been dead meat.
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
I will grant you that the possibility of a terrorist organiztion gaining access to such things was, at the time, a conjecture, however a very real posibility - Espcially given the non-compliance with UN resolutions, and open hostility & contempt toward the US. Further, given the declarations by the Iraqis, where do YOU suppose those materials, and weapons have gone?
1. Most were probably dismantled (in anticipation of UN inspections), or allowed to degrade into uselessness due to lack of maintenance.
2. Some may have been hidden or sold (but we have absolutely no proof of that).
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Will it take a mustard or sarrin gas attack on a major city to convince you that they were real?
We all agree that Saddam's WMDs were real at some point. Just ask the Kurds and Iranians, many of whom died in gas attacks. The question is whether they existed when we invaded. Apparently, they did not.
We had a moral and legal obligation to invade only if there were good, solid grounds for believing that the WMDs still existed AND that there was a plan afoot to use them against us (or to transfer them to one of our self-declared enemies like Al Quaeda, which would potentially use them against us). By those standards, Bush acted like a rogue.
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
As for the aluminum tubes & such, I really don't know much about that, I've never used that info as a debate item.
I commend you for not using the aluminum tubes and African uraniam as a debating point in favor of the war. You resisted the urge to use the most lurid, tabloid-quality "evidence" because you didn't feel it was solid enough, right? Don't you feel a little uneasy that the Bushmen didn't apply the same scruples you did? How can you support a president and vice president who disregard your values regarding honesty?
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
After a dozen resolutions & ample opportunities to come into compliance by allowing inspections, justification established IMHO.
Originally posted by caltour:
Are you guys just going to continue to ignore the fact that the UN mandated inspections were based solely on the authority of the UN? The U.S. is not the UN, it is a separate entity. It has no authority to claim UN resolutions as justifications for its actions, absent the approval of . . . YES THAT'S RIGHT! THE UN!
WE HAVE NO LEGAL OR MORAL RIGHT TO CLAIM THE UN RESOLUTIONS AS JUSTIFICATION FOR THE WAR, WHEN THE UN ITSELF SAID THE RESOLUTIONS DID NOT AUTHORIZE THE WAR.
Nothing wrong with the argument when the UN was shown to be in Iraqs back pocket.
Wow, you really missed my point. Or you just decided to ignore it. I don't know which.
Won't you please address my point about how Bush claims the UN resolutions as a justification for war, but on the other hand felt free to ignore the UN's final decision regarding the resolutions? Bush can't have it both ways: he wants to use UN authority for cover, but at the same time wants to be free to disregard UN authority. If he wants to use actions by the UN as a basis for the war, he also has to abide by UN rules forbidding unauthorized invasions, and the UN's collective decision that an invasion of Iraq was not yet justified.
Originally posted by TourDeForce:
Finally, I as an American, am glad that we don't put our national security solely in the hands of paper pushers like those in the UN. They've been proven to be ineffective, weak, spineless, and worst of all, despite their glorious proclaimations that they're lovers of world peace and wish good will toward all men, they're corrupt. The UN is nothing but a debate society & a money mill for spending US tax dollars.
The FACT of the matter is, we pushed for action by the UN and found some unexpected resistance after 12 years of broken promises & a regime that continued to refuse cooperation with mandated inspections. Digging deeper, the money trail in the form of oil contracts was leading to the sources of the resistance, particularly, but not solely, France. At that point, with the French having been paid for their veto power, the US was effectively blocked from gaining any assistance from the UN. If the WMD in the ME were to be secured, it would HAVE to be done without the help of the UN.
I understand your point about the sleazy French and German and Russian involvement in all this. I agree that we should not trust their judgement as to when it is right to go to war in Iraq, because they were probably corrupted (or at least influenced) by oil money and other considerations.
And I agree that the UN (as a whole) is not always the best arbiter of right and wrong.
But here's the real point: we made our own moral decision. We were not "forced" into it by the French, the UN, or anyone else. We had NO good reason to believe there was an imminent threat to the U.S., so we were not forced into anything. We had time to think.
As the British memo tells us, the Brits knew early on that Bush was dead set on going to war. Likewise, the French, Germans and Russians could see that Bush wasn't really interested in building concensus. They could see Bush was going to war for the reasons I outlined earlier (re-election, corporate profits, access to oil, revenge). As soon as the French (and Germans and Russians, etc.) understood that, they were essentially set free to pursue their own self-interested policies. Bush's self-serving decision to go to war left them with one sensible option: protect their own selfish interests as well as possible. And so they did.
I understand that you think the corruption of the French (and the UN in general) was good reason for disregarding the UN and going it alone. But your logic is faulty: just because a person is corrupt and self-interested doesn't mean he is not giving you excellent advice in a particular instance. Logically, avoiding war could well be in the best interests of the French AND the U.S. The corruption of the UN was reason for us to keep our wits about us and to avoid relying on them, but logically it was not a reason for us to disagree with their conclusions about the war. In the end, we found out they were probably corrupt and self-interested. But they were correct about whether it was right to invade Iraq.
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Originally posted by Zoom Zoom Diva:
Originally posted by caltour:
Saddam had multiple opportunities to avoid the war. He was an idiot, apparently, in addition to all of his other bad qualities. But please realize that Saddams failure to avail himself of opportunites to avoid war does not in any way change the morality (or legality) of Bush's decision to go to war. Saddam had an opportunity to avoid the bullet, but Bush pulled the trigger.
Congress authorized the use of force. That is all the authority Bush required to legally invade Iraq.
That's correct, in part. Congress' authorization made Bush's war legal under American law (at least if you ignore the issues re: fraud and deceit).
But international law is a different matter entirely. It generally forbids pre-emptive attacks on other nations. Many argue that Bush's war is illegal under international law. See the links I posted earlier about that.
Originally posted by Zoom Zoom Diva:
Morality is a matter of personal opinion and belief.
True, but there are some widely accepted standards of right and wrong. Civilization is what happens when people generally abide by widely accepted standards of right and wrong. Anarchy is what happens when they don't. The world holds us in contempt right now because many people think we violated some of the most widely held standards of right and wrong.
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Originally posted by caltour:
It looks like I've struck a chord with you.
Struck a chord? Hardly. The only chord you might have struck is the one that people who are so blinded by their hatred of Bush that they will latch on to ANY perceived wrong doings by him.
Quote:
Every country was saying their was good cause for the war? How can you keep parroting this conclusion without even examining the basis for it? I said earlier in this thread that no country had intel that genuinely provided "good cause" for the war, and you never provided any proof (or any reasoned argument) to the contrary.
Try again hotshot. Every county who provides us with intel which in the past has been reliable (England, Russia, etc.) were all saying that Iraq had or was developing WMDs. These are the same countries that were against us going in there. Quit trying to use big words in an effort to make yourself look to have a backing to your argument. Just because "you said" that no county had evidence doesn't mean it's true. You show me what evidence from other countries you have beef with.
Quote:
I was referring to the attempted assassination of Bush Sr. in Kuwait in the early 90's (after Gulf War I). If you need more info about it, maybe someone will dig up an old news article about it.
Again, talking down to me like somehow you have a clue what you are talking about does nothing to further your argument. I know quite well about the plans to assasinate Bush Sr. And as much as you and your liberal buddies want to say that Bush Jr. started this war for that and oil, you are like you accused other people, grasping for straws...
"Moore has also accused the American people of being the stupidest, most naive people on the face of the Earth. And after last weekend, he's got the box office numbers to prove it!"
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Originally posted by caltour:
But international law is a different matter entirely. It generally forbids pre-emptive attacks on other nations. Many argue that Bush's war is illegal under international law. See the links I posted earlier about that.
That opens up a whole issue of whether or not international law has any right to exist at all, and what powers it has over sovereign nations (if any).
I look at our Constitution as the supreme law of our land, and it in no way provides for the existence or power of any form of international law. Therefore, Bush had the legal authority to invade Iraq by the highest legal authority having power over him.
Brad "Diva": 2004 Mazda 6s 5-door, Volcanic Red
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Originally posted by 99blacksesport:
It's clear that the ONLY person brainwashed is caltour. By the Kalifornia media, and by what I am sure are liberal family and friends. He makes liberal talking point after liberal talking point, and expects the rest of us (people with some intelligence) to believe the crap.
Lol! I can't belive you are serious about that. Aren't all of you conservatives spewing your conservative crap as well? I guess it only counts as crap if it is the other side. But I guess you can just resort to name calling.
Originally posted by 99blacksesport:
Here caltour, here's your argument in a summary:
Bush started this war for oil (yet we still pay over $2 for gas and oil's pushing $60 a barrel)
Bush lied to the Americans about his reasons for going to war (Even though EVERYONE giving him intel both inside this country and abroad was saying there was good cause and that the other info was probably right)
Bush did it to avenge his daddy not getting Saddam the first time (Even though Bush Sr. STATED that he was NOT going to roll into Baghdad and that his ONLY mission was to liberate Kuwait)
So yeah, if we ignore all the stuff I put in between the ( ), caltour makes a great point!
The Bush family is run on oil. Of course he is going to fight for it. He would be stupid not to. But to say this war doesn't have something to do w/ oil is retarded. Bush's intel is going to be warped just like a politcal argument. I guess you believe whatever a Bush family member says is the truth, and they would never lie about anything.
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