- #246
JohnDubYa
- 468
- 1
What did they train him do? How do you know this? Be specific.
Why not? They trained Osama Bin Laden.
JohnDubYa said:Adam, I am going to ask you a loaded question... loaded with truth. I suppose this question will be painful and frustrating for you because of your personal sense of order relies on clinging to falsehoods.
Are you ready? Here goes...
Why are you stupid?
Dont go insulting people just because they have a different opinion than yourself, that comment says more about you than him.
The CIA trained osama and fellow terrorists to fight the soviets in the 70s
JohnDubYa said:Adam, I am going to ask you a loaded question... loaded with truth. I suppose this question will be painful and frustrating for you because of your personal sense of order relies on clinging to falsehoods.
Are you ready? Here goes...
Why are you stupid?
JohnDubYa said:What did they train him do? How do you know this? Be specific.
JohnDubYa said:You missed the point completely --- that loaded questions cannot be answered and should not be answered. The fact that Adam would look upon such a question as an insult displays the inherent fallacy of a loaded question. After all, I was just asking a question, right? After all, he should be able to just answer the question, right? What's the harm in just merely asking a question?
Smurf said:And WTF is a 'loaded' question anyhow?
So which part was good?
* The thousands of corpses?
* The destruction of Iraq's infrastructure?
* The theft of Iraqi oil?
* The massive profits for Bush, Cheney, and their friends?
* The dead US troops?
* The complete loss of international trust of the US administration?
* The global impression that the US administration has turned governing a nation, going to war, and killing thousands of people into nothing more than a business opportunity?
So which part was good?
* The thousands of corpses?
* The destruction of Iraq's infrastructure?
* The theft of Iraqi oil?
* The massive profits for Bush, Cheney, and their friends?
* The dead US troops?
* The complete loss of international trust of the US administration?
* The global impression that the US administration has turned governing a nation, going to war, and killing thousands of people into nothing more than a business opportunity?
First, thanks for finally attempting to answer the first question.JohnDubYa said:Good things coming from this war:
Saddam will face justice.
Saddam will no longer kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Thousands of Iraqi families now know what happened to their relatives that previously disappeared.
Shi'ite Muslims can now worship freely.
There is a good chance the Kurds will finally be able to live in peace.
Democracy has a chance of taking root in an Arabic country. (How good of a chance is anyone's guess, but the chance is undeniable.)
The Iraqi people have a chance to be truly free.
Saddam's sons are dead.
We no longer need to wonder about Saddam's capability of using WMDs. (We didn't know for sure before, now we do.)
If they allow those who have lost relatives and spouses to his rule the honour of executing him, sure. I hope they do.Saddam will face justice.
Has there yet been any reliable estimate for the numbers he killed?Saddam will no longer kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
I hope so. I hope the effort is made.Thousands of Iraqi families now know what happened to their relatives that previously disappeared.
They always did. Iraq under Saddam was a secular state, meaning the state itself was not governed by a religious group, or the state did not espouse anyone religion over others. However, they allowed people to worship in different ways. This is why the country has such a huge unmber of Shi'ites. If Saddam, who apparently killed people by the hundreds of thousands, wanted to oppress any form of worship, he would have killed them. This is one of the common misconceptions about Iraq under Saddam. He didn't give a damn about how people worshipped. They had all sorts. People had free education all the way through to university and post-grad studies. You just couldn't say anything bad about Saddam or the state, or they'd cane your feet.Shi'ite Muslims can now worship freely.
Are you aware that the Kurds were attacked more by Turkey than by Saddam?There is a good chance the Kurds will finally be able to live in peace.
It has been established in many Arabic countries for a very long time.Democracy has a chance of taking root in an Arabic country. (How good of a chance is anyone's guess, but the chance is undeniable.)
The survivors?The Iraqi people have a chance to be truly free.
They were complete bastiches, yes. However, I will never approve of people cheering and celebrating deaths, nor of the parading of corpses on TV for PR value.Saddam's sons are dead.
Yep. Go kill some innocent man, then say "On the good side, we'll never have to worry about that guy's plans to steal my car, whether he had such plans or not!" No, I'm not saying Saddam was a nice guy. It's an analogy. Look it up.We no longer need to wonder about Saddam's capability of using WMDs. (We didn't know for sure before, now we do.)
No. Too easy.We now have the best trained and experienced troops in the world. (Can't buy that kind of training for any amount of money.)
Yes it has. You're right.Our military weaponry has been tested in extreme conditions.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.We have managed to filter out those in our military who have no stomach for fighting.
Very true.We have learned a great deal about logistic support.
Very bigoted and insane.We now know what we could face in the future in terms of Islamic fundamentalist fighting tactics.
studentx said:Can you imagine an Iraqi who lost his family to Saddam, or is the best you can do an Iraqi which is killed by American bombs? I can tell you for a fact, there are several hundred thousand less of the latter. I think that about defeats any arguments against this war.
JohnDubYa said:Right, studentx. Those who oppose the war simply do not fathom how nasty Saddam's regime really was. What Saddam did to hundreds of thousands of people was unspeakably cruel.
Do you mean Halabja?Smurf said:I've always told people that Saddam's attack on Khabul (i think) was much worse than 9/11. 5000 people died emediatly, and twice that in the aftermath of chemical and biological weapons. Theres no doubt Saddam was a bad man.
A War Crime or an Act of War?
It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent � that is, a cyanide-based gas � which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.
We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.
Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.
Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades � not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.
All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition � thanks to United Nations sanctions � Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.
Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.
Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?
(Stephen C. Pelletiere, The New York Times, January 31, 2003)
Stephen C. Pelletiere is author of "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf."
Adam said:They were complete bastiches, yes. However, I will never approve of people cheering and celebrating deaths, nor of the parading of corpses on TV for PR value.
Smurf said:Where I live channel 7 is ESPN.. please elaborate
Smurf said:Where I live channel 7 is ESPN.. please elaborate
They always did. Iraq under Saddam was a secular state, meaning the state itself was not governed by a religious group, or the state did not espouse anyone religion over others. However, they allowed people to worship in different ways. This is why the country has such a huge unmber of Shi'ites. If Saddam, who apparently killed people by the hundreds of thousands, wanted to oppress any form of worship, he would have killed them. This is one of the common misconceptions about Iraq under Saddam. He didn't give a damn about how people worshipped. They had all sorts. People had free education all the way through to university and post-grad studies. You just couldn't say anything bad about Saddam or the state, or they'd cane your feet.