From: Joe Dees (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 14:21:48 MDT
> Juuko:
>
> My sources are global. Their perspectives trend from conservative to
> liberal to libertarian. And if you think that simply being an American
> disqualifies a person from having a valid perspective, than that says
> more about you than it does Americans. Existentialism lesson: NO sources
> are objective, since they are authored by subjects, not objects.
Then we agree. All sources and articles are inherently subjective,
even though some strive to be objective.
> However, intersubjective consensus may be reached to various degrees of
> confidence. I am 48 and thus will not be drafted, but I am a military
> vet (visions of Jei crouching in fear and slowly backing away whilst
> making the sign of the cross and reaching for the garlic).
My my, whatever for? Hehehe.
Good for you, I hope. Let's hope you grow up some day.
(joe) This exhortation contains embedded within it that implicit and erroneous assumption that your perspective is mature.
> Americans did NOT do what Hitler did. What terminally relativistic
> moral equivocation! To even assert such a thing is to reveal yourself
> to be suffering severe reality disconnection difficulties, probably
> brought on by a severe infestation of the Bush = Hitler meme. Believe
> you me - from what we know of European history, Adolph was not invading
> all those countries in order to topple despots and nurture
> constitutional democracies, then leave.
Oh, is that why the Americans did it now?
(Joe) There are many reasons.
1) WMD's. The plans, raw materials and technology for quick production were in place, and existing ones were, on Russian advice, dumped in the Tigris and Euphrates or transshipped to Syria (from which a truck was recently intercepted headed to Jordan's embassy row with about 20,000 lbs of chemical agents).
2) A debt of honor. At the end of Gulf War I, instead of finishing the job, the US bowed to UN pressure and did not invade Iraq and topple Saddam; instead we allowed the trapped Republican Guards to drive their tanks back into Iraq. We had called upon the people of Iraq to throw off the yoke of saddam's dictatorial rule, and they had answered, but we did not help them, and actually released weapons with which Saddam violently crushed the revolt, killing hunderds of thousands of Kurds and Shi'ites in the process. We betrayed those people (which is why they were slow to trust us this time), and we owed them their freedom.
3) The credibility of UN resolutions. Saddam had bought at least two veto votes on the UN Security Council (France and Germany) with sweetheart oil contracts, as well as bribing many top UN officials with petrodollars, and had arranged for kickbacks in the oil-for-food program that netted him billions during the sanctions - money that he spent building fifty palaces (complete with Olympic-sized pools), pursuing WMD's and coddling his army, while his people died for lack of food, water and medicine which he could have easily purchased (that was, for Saddam, a propaganda bonus, as he could blame it on the sanctions). Member countries were also being bribed into violating the very sanctions that the UN itself had imposed. If the UN's sanctions were not enforced, they became just another impotent League of Nations. Since that corrupter-by-bribes body was unable to enforce its own sanctions, the US did so for them (the only nation capable of doing so).
4) A Democratic model in the Middle East. A successful constitutional democracy in the heart of the Muslim Crescent will serve as a strong model to the citizens of the troubled totalitarianisms that surround it (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia). They are already experiencing unrest from their own citizenry, and in the future could be toppled by them, or at least pressured by them into some reforms.
5) Economics. The Coalition no-fly-zones created to prevent Saddam from further slaughtering Shi'ites and Kurds had been attacked close to a thousand times by anti-aircraft fire in a 12 year period. Maintaining it was costing billions a year, but ending it would result in Saddam resuming his genocidal carnages.
If so, what happened to the WMD reason?
(Joe) See #1 above.
Why the Torture camps and 25,000 prisoners?
(Joe) No torture camps exist. SIX people have so far been found to have hazed prisoners with abuses that would have been regarded as wimpy by Saddam's thugs. The prisoners are those fighters who chose to surrender rather than die.
Oh, sorry. You must mean American Democracy, where these
things like 2 million 33 000 prisoners is considered normal.
(Joe) That is largely a result of the Drug War, of which I heartily disapprove.
I keep mixing this concept with the European Democracy
where not such amounts of people need to be locked up
and tortured.
(Joe) People are not subjected to institutionalized torture in US prisons. Occasionally incidents happen, but when they are discovered, their perpetrators are dismissed and punished.
> Show me the US concentration
> camps and gas ovens; then we'll talk. The overwhelming majority of
> Iraqis killed by US forces have been armed non-Iraqi militants or
> members and former members of Saddam's army, the army that massacred
> hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites and Kurds at Saddam's bidding (we're
> still discovering mass graves). All told, Saddam has been responsible
> for two million Iraqi and foreign deaths, ranking him even with Pol Pot
> and behind only Hitler, Stalin and Mao in the mass murderer sweepstakes.
Let's see your sources on that last figure, thank you. Otherwise you're
talking bullshit, or referring to the said starvation victims of UN
sanctions.
(Joe) Those were Saddam's victims (see #3 above). He killed them for the benefit of people like you, to persuade you to think as you do.
I merely call things as I see them, and I see Bush acting and doing
things very much the same way Hitler did in his time. - For all purposes
he can claim to be Jesus Christ and you Americans can believe him all
you like. His deeds are what matter, not his words. And they ring and
sound very much like those of Hitler.
(Joe) If that is the way that you see things, you need to contract the services of a good optometrist. He is running a political campaign for re-election (something Hitler never had to do), and even if he wins, he only gets four more years. I myself disapprove of his reactionary domestic social policies and his borrow-and-spend fiscal irresponsibility (Democratic tax-and-spend is no better; the only president to have imposed fiscal discipline in modern times was Bill Clinton, whom I voted for twice), but he is the candidate out there who 'gets it' concerning the global war on terror. Lieberman did on the Democratic side, but he's no longer in the running.
And there's plenty of more wars for "Democracy" to come, if Bush's Team
has his way, and as the famous PNAC states their goals to be.
(Joe) I would shed no tears if Syria was liberated from its Baathist regime and Iran was relieved of its totalitarian mullahcracy. A lot of Syrians and Iranians would be happy about it, too.
> And OF COURSE the US has troops there; they were required inorder to
> topple Saddam, and they are required to provide security for the genesis
> of a constitutional democracy in Iraq that the totalitarian despots in
> neighboring Iran and Syria dearly desire to strangle at birth. The US
> will stay until the Iraqis can civilly and non-chaotically handle their
> own affairs; then they'll most gladly relinquish power and draw down the
> troops - just like in Germany and Japan.
US troops are still in Germany and Japan. When will they be leaving?
(Joe) Any time those governments ask us to leave (same goes for South Korea). They actually lobby us to stay because it means they have to provide less for their own national defence, and can direct more funds to social spending.
I haven't seen US giving up it's bases much anywhere willingly, the
last place I heard they were leaving was Saudi Arabia, and that's probably
because that's the last stated target of the PNAC team for "democracy".
When the Phillipines asked us to get out, we did; when Panama wanted the Canal (which we built), we handed it over.
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