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Five Years of Occupation -- What a Disaster!

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Wotan

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As I said, morally, it would be within my rights if I wanted to. Unforunately me personally toppling North Korea or Iran is not a realistic undertaking.

Since the ideal government is funded by each individual donor making the decision to give, what would happen if every possible donor said, "Me personally overthrowing my country's enemy is not a realistic undertaking"?

That's why we need leadership, SkyTrooper: one or a few valiant souls who blaze a trail and touch the masses with their suffering and inspire them with their bravery.

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I’ve never asked you to prove Saddam’s evil intentions. Re-read the thread. My request was for some proof that Saddam “threatened the West.”

If your standard of proof is a quote where Saddam says: "Hey, you in the West, I threaten you," I dont think anyone is going to be able to meet it. I think you are trying to argue that since Saddam didnt explicitly threaten the West, that the West should not have implicitly viewed him as a threat. I think you are mistaken.

Clearly, fate has laid vast quantities of oil at the feet of dictators, that is bad enough. But when you have a dictator whose intentions are evil, who seeks the military conquest of his neighbors, the domination of the Middle East, and control of the worlds most vital commodity--oil--it is in the interest of the US if not the whole world, to stop him. Unless, of course, you think it would have been better to allow him to keep Kuwait, consolidate his power, then move on Saudi Arabia. Is there "proof that Saddam wanted to sell the world less oil than any other petro-dictator?" No. Was it a risk worth taking? No, not if you view the free flow of oil as being in the national interest.

The gassing of Halabja, horrible as it was, didn’t make a dent in my ability to conduct my business or live my life.

How wonderful for you. Too bad the 12,000 who died there cant rejoice with you. Needless to say, Saddam was not overthrown because he gassed the kurds. But it was just this type of barbarism, combined with his militarism in a vital part of the world that made him a threat to US interests whether you recognize it or not.

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I’ve never asked you to prove Saddam’s evil intentions. Re-read the thread. My request was for some proof that Saddam “threatened the West.” All sorts of grisly murders are committed around the globe a thousand times a day without disrupting the lives of average Americans. The gassing of Halabja, horrible as it was, didn’t make a dent in my ability to conduct my business or live my life.

I think you need to re-read my posts. You are dropping context again, which is why it is impossible to settle anything with you.

I brought up Saddam's 1991 invasion of Kuwait as evidence that he posed, at a minimum, a threat to our economic interests -- I did not claim that this proved he posed a physical threat to us; in fact, I made it clear that we weren’t certain about the latter. And now that I've listed a portion of his actions that demonstrate his irrationality -- in response to your demand that I prove he posed a threat to our economic interests -- NOW, you wish to switch back to the issue of whether or not he posed a physical threat to "the west".

If you can offer no proof that Saddam wanted to sell the world less oil than any other petro-dictator, then you’re not very convincing.

Well, as I said in my last post, if you can look at Saddam's record and not see the risks inherent in letting someone that irrational gain control of a significant part of the world's oil supply, then you are beyond convincing. Essentially, you are demanding omniscience on our part in evaluating the intentions of our sworn enemies.

First of all, Rumsfeld didn’t say, “We don’t know for sure where Saddam’s WMDs are.” He said, “We know where [iraq's WMD] are.” Secondly, if we don’t know for sure that X is a threat to the West, then we have no business claiming, “X is a threat to the West.”

Nonsense. If a man points a gun at your head, and cocks the hammer, then you may properly claim that he is a threat and act upon that conclusion -- even though the fact that you “don’t know for sure” that the gun is actually loaded means that, strictly speaking, you cannot be completely certain he is a threat.

Again, the standard you demand requires one of two things: either we be omniscient mind-readers -- or , we wait until an enemy stages a physical attack and kills some of us.

What threat?

Once again, you drop context. Which is it? Are you really unable to grasp the distinction between talking about a principle -- which is what I was doing when I stated that if we are faced with a threatening regime, the proper response is to destroy that regime, NOT adopt a civlian-friendly policy of acting as that nation's police force -- versus the debate about whether or not a particular regime? Or do you just keep switching subjects and dropping context as a means of evasion? I'm inclined to think its the latter -- but either way, the futility of responding to you is becoming quite obvious.

Okay, then why shouldn’t the U.S. come home now that Saddam is dead? What difference does it make whether he was shot by U.S. soldiers at his hiding place or hanged by Iraq’s finest at Camp Justice?

I haven't argued against bringing our soldiers home. You need to read more carefully.

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