10 Lessons the US should learn from Iraq defeat

That's what we're told-and they tell us that rubbish with a straight face; a feat in itself.

 

The majority disagreed with you. Sorry.

Even in hindsight I dont regret it. I think the world is a better place than if we had done nothing. I think we are safer now than if we had done nothing.

All Saddam had to do was cooperate to achieve that goal. We were correct not to simply take his word for it.

Thats how democracies work. The majority get the final say. Sorry.

The fact that the majority does not agree with your opinion is not evidence that you are not permitted to voice an opinion. I dont think you actually understand what the term "free speech" actually means.

The fact that other people do not agree with you does not mean you do not have free speech.

LOL! So what?

You made the claim that they would not attack us unless we attacked them first. This example shows you are clearly WRONG heh heh.

Oh, so now the "strategic" qualifier comes into play. I wonder what other exceptions you will come up with. I think we might actually be able to turn you to the dark side yet.

I guess we will find out when you finally tell me something I didnt already know or have not heard before.

 

LOL! Do you even read what you are responding to? Read the underlined portion again genius.

 

1) Venezuela is still a democracy.

2) There is no evidence that they are manufacturing weapons for terrorists or have any intention of doing so.

If one of those items changes, we can discuss bombing them. The fact that their leader has a juvenile hatred of us is not reason enough to bomb them. Contrary to popular belief, the US does not bomb people out of boredom.

Pre-emptive doctrine reduces the possibility of a future attack, and makes it likely that such an attack will be far less damaging should it occur. Your enemy is far less likely to beat you with a stick if he cannot find a stick in the first place.

WW2 was an example of what happens when you ignore the threat until it is too late. We learned from our mistake, even if our allies did not.

So what? That means you should not attempt to reduce it at all?

I completely disagree. If you exterminate your enemy, the chances of him attaching you become zero.

Naturally, we cannot do this. We do have morals, and because of this, there are some things we cant do. But there are still many things we can do.

Invading Iraq permanently removed a potential threat to us while simultaneously embedding another democracy in the Middle East. The proliferation of democracies always contributes to our security.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory

 

There is no such thing as a sovereign non-democracy. The US, UN and even the EU have demonstrated this many times. We pay lip service to the idea of non-democracies being sovereign, but our actions make it clear that we do not really consider them sovereign.

We invaded a supposedly sovereign government, dissolved it and deposed its leader, and...nothing happened to us. The EU and UN just rolled over and took it. Do you think that would have happened had we invaded Australia or Canada?

Yes, there is a double standard. Non-democracies are not really considered sovereign.

LOL! That pisses off foreigners more than anything else about us. I personally find it hilarious. They just cant understand why we are indifferent to their opinion of us.

 

That opinion is fine until travel. And many americans abroad apologise for their country and goverments actions.

 

The trouble is that those are the civilized ones: the teabags stay at home and hunt witches.

 

There was no threat to America from Iraq, unless you can name one.

 

Why would we need to travel? We have the internet now.

Also, Americans have been getting around that easily for generations...we just tell foreigners we are Canadian. They buy it every time.

I did not have the same faith in Saddam that you seem to have. I did not trust him NOT to cooperate with our enemies by providing them weapons of money.

 

You mean you joined in in spreading obvious lies to justify the war-crime? Many did, but for most of us there was nothing in it except disgrace, so we let the lower types do it.

 

What lies did I join in? Can you be specific?

What war crime was committed?

 

'I did not trust him NOT to cooperate with our enemies by providing them weapons of money.' Therefore you are pretending he had weapons, and everyone knew he didn't have either weapons or money, or you wouldn't have invaded, obviously.

As with the nazi leaders, as you know, your government committed the crime of making war, which you apparently supported.

 

The majority agreed with the war after being fed a load of bull. There is a difference.

We had no credible evidence that he was building WMD. There was a group who wanted the war and they used WMD as an excuse.

A democracy does not work by demonizing people who question the actions of the White House. People could choose between supporting the war or be called traitors.

If it results in being accused of hating America it is not real free speech.

I never made a claim that Japan would not attack us unless we attacked them first. Are you interested in an intelligent discussion at all?
and try not to gloat when you think you got me. It gives the impression you don't want to engage in an intelligent discussion.

I have never dismissed strategic threats as a reason to go to war. Try not to put words in my mouth.

You obviously didn’t know about Germany’s reason for declaring war on us.

Let me know when you are interested in engage in an adult discussion and I will gladly debate things with you. Until then you are a waste of time.

 

Bush's re-election only proves 2 things:

1) Kerry was a weak candidate.

2) Incumbents are hard to defeat.

It's not often that incumbents lose re-election. Look throughout our history, and you'll see that, most of the time, incumbent presidents win re-election.

A lot of people that join the military aren't doing it for patriotism or interventionism. They're doing it for economic opportunity.

The presidential candidate that gets more military donations than any other is a serious isolationist (Ron Paul).

Of course, but a lot of people who are the most vocal about war have never served and probably have no interest in doing so.

Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but that's not exclusive to the left. The right does plenty of whining with hypocrisy as well. Look at how they fight regulations but then turn around and complain about how we should have had more regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The only reason they got through our security was because our intelligence agencies weren't properly working together.

Nuke or no nuke, it's actually quite difficult to sneak past our surveillance.

We left Vietnam after the paranoia wore off. Korea was more of a legitimate conflict, but that's for another thread.

Some Americans are paranoid, but again, it's not something innate to us as a culture. Just because you're a hawk doesn't mean most of us are.

Most Americans don't even care what goes on overseas.

I think you're confusing the paranoia of our government as the paranoia of the public.

 

He would probably claim he did it order to get the upper hand. In my opinion it was already too late.

 

I have never claimed it would.

 

I assume he was guilty by default. Correct.

That is not a lie. That is an assumption. Are you familiar with the difference?

Um...how did everyone "know" that? That sounds like an assumption.

"Making war" is a war crime? LOL

According to who exactly?

 

I think a moral crime other than that

It wood bee in the UN the ohh so benevolent dictates they issue

Wnich no nation with a brain obeys

 

So you are saying your opinion should supersede everyone else's because everyone else is stupider than you. Ok.

At what point should Americans be permitted to have valid opinions of their own? I mean, is agreeing with you the only criteria for that?

We suspected it, therefore he was guilty by default. It was his job to prove otherwise. Dictators have no rights.

...and were apparently the majority.

Um...how exactly would anyone know the difference in the voting booth? Is someone standing over their shoulder looking at how they vote?

LOL!

I gotta be me. I'm a neocon. Its what we do.

No one is forcing you to respond to any post on here if you think it is a waste of your time.

 

So you are saying that people were not against the war ENOUGH to vote for someone other than Bush.

Well then, at best, the war must not have pissed off Americans that bad.

As I recall, Bush's father got spanked after his first term. And we did not have two wars back then. If this war really pissed off so many people, why wasn't Bush out? At the very least, why didn't we elected an anti-war congressional majority?

The American People did not actually vote in a way that suggests that they were really against the war.

Are you saying they are unaware of the possibility of being involved in a war they don't agree with?

Well, this is a consequence of their decision then. Just like it is when you choose to be a firefighter or cop or prison guard.

Either way, they are still volunteering. They are placing THEMSELVES in this situation. They chose this.

Well, if Ron Paul wins, I guess that would prove Americans are non-interventionist. Right?

(btw...was Ron Paul not running before now? How come Americans did not vote for him during the Iraq war?)

Are you trying to say you don't think anyone is entitled to an opinion on foreign policy unless they have been in the military?

So what? How does that change what I just said?

Paranoia is not a new thing. This has been intrinsic to our culture for a very long time. Longer than I have been alive. It is not something introduced by Bush Jr.

The fact that Bush was elected twice is evidence most of us are. Why exactly was he elected twice if not because of the war? His economic policy? His social policies? You tell me.

The first is placed into power by the second. Therefore they are the same thing in this context.

 

According to the Nuremburg Tribunal, of which you country was a participant. If you know no history, go and learn some.

 

The public is fickle. As silly as it sounds, gay marriage (of all things) actually stole some of the public's attention back in 2004.

What the public gets riled up about is highly dependent on the media.

What I said earlier is not that the public is necessarily isolationist. I'm saying that the public is only temporarily interventionist -- usually after something happens like 9/11, or the media goes on a campaign to encourage invasion somewhere.

It's not because we're innately aggressive. We're innately sheep, but that's true of humanity in general, not just us.

Bush's father got spanked because of Perot. That is the only reason he lost. Without Perot, Clinton would have lost.

Again, I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying.

I'm saying a lot of people are desperate enough to enlist because they have few other opportunities.

If the difference between enlisting and not enlisting is gaining access to decent pay and help for college, a lot of people -- hawkish or otherwise -- will sign up.

It's also a matter of soldiers getting tired of being overseas. A lot of soldiers aren't particularly political, but many of them do grow tired of being called into some random Third World country on the other side of the planet. So, in response, many of them gravitate toward less interventionist candidates.

Obviously, some go the opposite way as well.

Of course they did. I've never said otherwise. All I was saying is that they will often develop concerns that result in favoring less interventionist policies.

Paul routinely gets more military donations than most other candidates with each election he runs in.

That's different from saying that the general public prefers Paul.

No, but I am saying that having a personal connection to the military often gives people a more balanced perspective of what interventionism entails.

It doesn't have to involve you enlisting yourself -- it could be something as simple as having a lot of friends or relatives in the armed forces.

It's periodic and more conditional than "innate." We weren't very paranoid in the 90s, for example.

The Cold War encouraged a sense of paranoia, but even then, we went through different phases. The Red Scare was probably the height of our paranoia before 9/11. Whereas the 90s were a low point for it.

Because of the "lesser of two evils." More often than not, we vote for who we hate less rather than who we like more.

Kerry was an unknown as president. We knew what we'd get with Bush, so we were more willing to go with him, even if we didn't like him much.

The same principle will likely benefit Obama.

There's some truth to this, but I would still draw a line between the two.

A good example is this whole "bomb Iran" thing. Our government seems very convinced that Iran is a threat. Most people I talk to, liberal or conservative, aren't as convinced and seem more likely to want us to get less involved.

 

Please post your evidence that "the Nuremburg Tribunal" declared that engaging in any war is a crime.

Oh the irony.

 

What war was this stupid mother (*)(*)(*)(*)er watching because the U.S. won the war in Iraq.

 

That's 'cos Jesus loves you, yes I know!