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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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Can someone tell me why Iraq refuses to be a launching pad or support any kind of military action against Iran when .. well, we are told everything we are so far about Iran?
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/08/iraq.iran/index.html
It doesn't make sense to me. From what shrub /fattrad tell us, Iraq should be the first ones to volunteer to be a home base to attacking Iran - because they are so grateful for the saviors of terrorism for freeing them from their bondage, and would want to do the same for their Iranian neighbors under the same oppression.
Iranians fuel the war in Iraq with weapons, training, de-stabilization of the area, combatants, the two have never been friends, etc.
Why the about-face on Iraq's part now?
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 8, 2008 - 03:58pm PT
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So, tooth, are you sayin' we (Iraq) should attack Iran?
Edit: Victor Davis Hansen is usually spot on. Maybe it's because he has a firm grasp on history and what happend to older Greek/Roman empires. Listen to him, or be condemned to repeat history.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 8, 2008 - 04:11pm PT
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Skipt, I know that. You get the impression from his writings.
For that reason he's considered a right-wing hack, much like I am considered here. Oh well.....somebody's gotta be the voice of reason/opposition.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 8, 2008 - 04:38pm PT
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Yep. It's actually kind of ironic that most people associate incompassion with Republicans (which I distance myself from). I suppose with this administation it may be be true, but this administation has brought shame and regret to 'right-wingers'.
I am truly ashamed to be called a Republican, but I still hold certain values that'll get you killed if you try to take from me.
Fu-k Bush, Fu-k Obama, McCain...i just don't know.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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I'm not saying Iran should be attacked.
Earlier, Iran's state-run news agency IRNA quoted the Iraqi leader as saying that "Baghdad would not allow its soil to be used as a base to damage the security of the neighboring countries, including Iran."
If the 'all-knowing' US intelligence has determined that Iran should be bombed, how is it that Iraq is posturing and saying they will not have anything to do with it? They have the biggest US presence in the ME besides Saudi Arabia, of course the US will use it as a staging ground for an attack on Iran.
I do not understand the point of the article. We know that 6 months after Saddam quit selling oil in US dollars that his nation was occupied. Given that premise, I say that Iran has 6 months after Feb 2008 before getting bombed, if they are following the same plan, and if the US still wants to keep their current-style global empire alive and get the message out there that there to other nations in OPEC especially that will be none of this monkey business.
All the nuclear BS disgusts me. There are so many more big threats around the world, with nuclear capabilities, and/or with no military might to worry about, that the US could get the job done, the threat neutralized in all these other hot spots and take out 10 problems before they got finished with these 2 countries. My premise is, these other problems aren't selling oil in non-US currency so they get no attention.
skipt and bluering, do the two of you honestly only believe what the media is telling you about why Iran is a bad guy, even though they have less military might than Canada in actually getting an attack to US soil? You could see those guys coming from a month away, before they floated close enough to launch a plane to launch a missile that could land in the US's missile defense shield.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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The argument for Iran is that they will have a bomb that they can use with one of their missles that they are testing that reach a few hundred miles.
9/11 were not a president of a country and his military. It was a group of pissed-off people from a country with a large US military base who didn't like it. They were from Saudi. 16 of them. Nothing you can do to fight anger like that except not do things to anger people in the first place. If you have to do that, you have to live with the consequences, or at least deal with the situation where it came from, not go and make things worse like has been done. There are more terrorists now, and they are the same type because what made them mad at first is just being done now.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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Bombing Iran is exactly like Iraq and is in no way going to affect the situation that caused 9/11 besides make it worse.
Consider yourself one of the hijackers. Sitting at home in Saudi. What caused you to fly all the way to America and do that? It certainly wasn't the Saudi government working on weapons. Does the fact that your government have nuclear weapnons cause you to fly to Dubai and blow something up? I didn't think so.
The arguments you guys come up with are unbelievably detached from the real world.
edit:
No intelligent Bush-supporter has ever even replied about this to me. If they reply, it is double-speak and they don't even acknowledge where the hijackers came from.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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OK skip
Before we run off to further, and vaild concerns, I want to address terrorism. The first issue, before the effects of countries going nuclear.
Terrorism.
What prompted anger and action in 9/11 by a bunch of guys sitting in Saudi Arabia?
Then, if we are going to tackle terrorism, what can we do about what was the straw that broke the camel's back for these guys.
Let's start discussion there first so we don't get ahead of ourselves.
PS.
remind me about the de-stabilization of the ME and historical US involvement later.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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skip,
how do you stop random people in random countries from doing anger-related terrorist acts if you don't find out what they were angry about?
They said what they were angry about.
I don't believe that terrorism war is a war that can be won because you can't make all the people happy all the time.
But, when you ignore reason and blindly swing away at monsters, you create the situation that the US has on their hands right now.
It isn't about being 'one' with a mind of a terrorist, but understanding that he attacks are not random, prompted by nothing. It is not what you compare it to, rape etc. Rape is an individual's impulse, 9/11 was the best-planned feat the world has ever seen. No one could have even hoped even after the hundreds of examples to the contrary that even one plane could have flown around for hours off course, and then into restricted airspace and crashed. But they hoped, and succeeded. It wasn't a case of impulsive rape by one guy. So whatever motivated these guys, had to have been a reason understood by more than one person in more than one country.
I'm not giving anyone a pass. Don't start accusing junk in the argument, it takes us nowhere.
And I'm not advocating giving up safeguards. We should shoot down planes that don't go where they should and especially if there are multiple at once. Nuclear weapons should be banned, and in a logical and complete manner.
However, logic begs that cause and effect and reason are used in war, and clumping all national interests under 'war on terror' doesn't make sense.
Tell me, how was I not giving bush a pass, and giving up safeguards in that argument?
I really don't know where to go from here if you refuse to think there is a cause-effect relationship causing anger in terrorists, and are content to play pinata with the bees nest.
I guess the real problem I see with your rapist argument is that you have treated terrorists exactly like you treat rapists, and the outcome is exactly the same. There are more of them now, and more incidences,
March 2002 Israel,
Oct 12, Bali
Oct 23 Moscow
May 12 Riyadh
May 16 2003 Cassablanca
Nov 20 Istanbul
March 11 2004 Madrid
Sept. 1-3 Russia
Anthrax attacks in US
London bombings
19 attacks thwarted in the US by non-Iraq-related means/ways.
http://www.heritage.org/research/HomelandDefense/bg2085.cfm
So they haven't gone away, they just haven't gotten away with anything as big as 9/11 on US soil lately, thank God.
I believe the only thing to do now is realize what factors will make it worse, and minimizing those will significantly reduce the workload for the war on terror.
To continue the discussion, I have no problem with stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. I do have a problem with the arguments for war that are being used though, and since so many countries will be affected if it were true, why is it that the 51 states are the only ones calling for it?
History repeats itself too often, and everyone is afraid that the US will pull one over everyone's eyes like it did with iraq, so we are cautious. We know that we are more powerful than they will ever be, and like the old John Wayne movies, we can be quiet, calm, cool, collect and not trigger happy, but when the time comes, we don't miss because we made an intelligent decision. That is what the US could be, but hasn't been perceived with Iraq.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 8, 2008 - 06:01pm PT
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tooth, I'm soory but I didn't bother to read your last (or skipts) posts. However, it's an age old (60 years) arguement.
Remember Chamberlain and Hitler
I'm reluctant to bring this sh#t up, but you guys keep forgetting that if you appease fascists, they will screw you every time. And we're talking burning flesh and gas chambers for the 'infidels'. Nationalized socialism is coming back, if you don't see that, well....you're probably a NAZI.
It won't wear a swastika this time, probably a Greenpeace logo or some sh#t.
I'm not trying to 'convert' you, I'm just saying that we should beware and look onto history for guidance to the future.
Edit: Oh, all the Christian Fundamenatlists that say Catholics will rot in hell ain't doing anybody any favors either.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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there is no appeasing facists going on here.
But if you want to talk about something else, socialism. I from Canada, can't see how some can be so against Obama for wanting to socialize 1 more program when there are already 10-20 programs socialized in the US. Why is 19 OK, but not 20?
I personally believe that socialized medicine in the US is a HUGE step in the wrong direction.
1. you have 2 things that we don't have in Canada, HUGE health insurance companies and drug companies, and more illegal immigrants than Canada has Canadians. Those two factors alone will drain all the money out of your system before you ever got a bandaid.
2. I wouldn't want to work in your system as a health-care provider where someone else dictates the tx that I went to school for so many years to learn how to do.
3. The system hardly works in Canada with our much-better background for that kind of thing. We have higher taxes too. The only way for you to make it work is raise taxes way above Canada's, which isn't going to fly.
As far as skip's arguments about not wanting to know cause-effect, I hope his health-care providers don't have the same attitude as his government does if he or his wife need their help. He will get given the whole gammut of antibiotics, pain pills, costs will soar out of control, he will have to borrow to pay for it, more side-effects will crop up than problems in the first place, etc... you can see where this logic goes.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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I guess the appeasing fascists thing comes from the fact that I don't think the US military bases in Saudi Arabia are worth the anger they cause to many people in the world. Removing them isn't appeasing anyone, but do you know why they are there?
Other than that, I don't know why you think you have to use the crazy term appeaser.
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WandaFuca
Gym climber
San Fernando Lamas
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This appeasement argument keeps coming up. Buchanan (not my favorite person) can help us keep our facts straight.
How Britain lost its empire
Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
When President Bush, before the Knesset, used the word "appeasement" to label those who would negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he invoked the most powerful analogy in any debate over war and peace. No man wishes to be regarded as an "appeaser."
But, as this writer has discovered since my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World" was launched Memorial Day, there is a deep well of ignorance about what happened that September, 70 years ago.
Why did Neville Chamberlain go to Munich? How did Munich lead to World War II?
The seeds of the crisis were planted at the Paris peace conference of 1919. There, the victorious Allies carved the new nation of Czechoslovakia out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
But instead of following their principle of self-determination, the Allies placed under the rule of 7 million Czechs some 3 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 150,000 Poles and 500,000 Ruthenians. These foolish decisions spat upon President Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, under the terms of which the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians had laid down their arms.
By 1938, Germany had arisen, re-armed and was demanding the right of self-determination now be granted to the 3 million Germans in Czechoslovakia, who were clamoring to be free of Prague. Britain had no alliance with, and no obligation to fight for, the Czechs. But France did. And Great Britain feared that if Adolf Hitler used force to bring the Sudeten Germans back to German rule, France might fight. And if France declared war, Britain would be drawn in, and a second bloodbath would ensue as it had in 1914.
Chamberlain went to Munich because he did not believe that keeping 3 million Germans inside a nation to which they had been consigned against their will was worth a world war.
Moreover, Britain was unprepared for war. She had no draft, no Spitfires, no divisions ready to be sent to France. Why should the British Empire commit suicide by declaring war on Germany, to support a Paris peace agreement that he, Chamberlain, believed had been unjustly and dishonorably imposed on a defeated Germany?
Chamberlain believed not - and, after three trips to Germany that September, he effected the transfer of the Sudeten Germans to Berlin's rule, where they wished to be. He came home in triumph to be hailed as the greatest peacemaker of all time.
Why, then, are "Munich" and "appeasement" terms of obloquy?
The answer lies in what happened next.
Chamberlain returned from Munich to a rapturous reception, and declared: "For the second time in 60 years, a British prime minister has returned from Germany with peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time."
This was palpable nonsense. Hitler had already turned to the next item on his menu, Danzig, a city of 350,000 Germans, detached from the German empire at Versailles and made a Free City to give the new Poland an outlet to the sea. Hitler did not want war with Poland. He wanted the kind of alliance with Poland he had with Italy.
Here, too, the British government agreed: Danzig should be returned. For of all the amputations of German lands and peoples at Versailles, European statesmen, even Winston Churchill, regarded Danzig and the Polish Corridor that sliced Germany in two as the most outrageous. The problem was the Poles, who refused to discuss Danzig.
Then, in March, Czechoslovakia suddenly began to fall apart. The Sudetenland had been annexed by Germany. Hungary had taken back its lost lands, and Poland had annexed the disputed region of Teschen. Slovakia and Ruthenia now moved to declare independence, and Prague began to march on the provinces.
Hitler intervened to guarantee the independence of Slovakia, and gave Hungary a green light to reannex Ruthenia. Czech President Hacha then asked to see Hitler, who bullied him into signing away Czech sovereignty.
Chamberlain, now humiliated, mocked by Tory backbenchers, panicking over wild false rumors of German attacks on Romania and Poland, made the greatest blunder in British history. Unasked, he issued a war guarantee to Poland, empowering a Polish dictatorship of colonels that had joined Hitler in dismembering Czechoslovakia to drag the British Empire into war with Germany over a city, Danzig, the British thought should be returned to Germany.
It was not Munich. It was the war guarantee that guaranteed the war that brought down the Empire, and gave us the Holocaust, 50 million dead and the Stalinization of half of Europe.
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WandaFuca
Gym climber
San Fernando Lamas
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It is not by trying to understand our enemies or talking to them or making deals or compromising with them, and only destroying them after all other options have been weighed, that we will be ruined; it is by blindly being locked into the idea that we must defend Israel and fight those that disagree with us no matter what it costs us; what if by winning we lose everything?
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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In the war on terrorism, you are fighting individuals, angry individuals spread all over the world.
The only way to get every last one of them is to bomb everybody, and the only way to defend against any attack is to secure your boarders, keep them all out, and defend yourself.
Spreading out everywhere makes them madder, but if the definition of appeasing is doing anything that doesn't make them madder (which from what I gather it is), you will never forever make enemies faster than you can kill them.
APPEASEMENT: doing anything that doesn't make terrorists even madder.
The litmus test for appeasement: will your suggestion increase the anger of the terrorists? No? Then you are appeasing.
One question: if you don't care about the mind of the enemy, how do you so deftly perform this litmus test and come to your conclusions, skip? Somehow I think you are being two-faced about this whole thing.
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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I agree skip, thanks. I enjoy bouncing ideas around here, I left most of my friends behind a long time ago in our politics/world affairs discussions - not very many people are genuinely interested in it or care about it enough to form their own ideas. We all just climb now and talk about the next weekend's trip.
I agree with a lot of what you have to say, especially if I only take into account what you present. I think however, that there are a lot more factors in play as far as US macroeconomics and leveraged power that do not get discussed at all in the media.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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You are completely wrong in your asertion that there are now more terroists, Sure there was a period where more were exposed. Even on the initial invasion of Iraq it was common to find bodies of twentysomethings in Polo shirts pockets full of Franklins and passports with Syrian stamps that translated "reason for entry, Jihad"
Iraq sucked them up like a huge sponge and even though there were great miscalculations and incompetent leadership (Brenner and Sanchez in particular)we in the end along with the Iraqis chewed them up and spit them out.
World wide terrorist incidents are now down by 40% and Al Quida has been totaly discredited.
Osama can't even muster high single digit approval ratings in Pakistan any more.
South Africa is once again the country with the highest murder rate.
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Doug Buchanan
Mountain climber
Fairbanks Alaska
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The solution to terrorism, war, AND ALL CONTRADICTIONS, because they are merely contradictions, is amusingly easy.
The process is that for which the human mind was designed.
Merely use the mind for its designed purpose.
Identify and resolve each contradiction, methodically.
That describes the process of asking and answering questions, writing them to keep track of them so you do not repeat them so often without using each contradiction resolution as data for each next contradiction resolution process.
For complex contradictions, it is useful to learn what controlling concepts and controlling contradictions are, then identify them, to thus resolve arrays of contradictions that you would otherwise spend hours to resolve.
It is not possible to resolve a contradiction with a contradiction and not be left with both unresolved, plus the contradiction of their combination. Therefore, for example, do not start a war (source of contradictions) in an attempt to resolve the contradiction of the other guy attacking you.
Identify and resolve the contradiction he perceived, which he foolishly attempted to resolve by attacking you.
No form of force or deception can ever achieve a sustainable goal, since they are contradictions. The human mind was designed to resolve contradictions, not create or sustain them. It is only the alteration of perceptions effected by the damage done to the brain's electro-chemical process by the acquisition of the perception of institutional power that effects the brain's attempt to create contradictions.
Facing a frustration, a power-damaged mind will hastily attempt to use force or deception to resolve the related contradiction. Faced with a frustration, a non power-damaged mind will instead be curious and ask questions until the related contradiction is therefore resolved.
The process to flawlessly resolve complex human-caused contradictions can require several days or weeks. How much time has passed, and how many human hours have been consumed by the Iraq war and the citizens arguing over it, rather than merely setting out to identify the resolution by asking and answering the related questions (intellectual technology)?
Notice how many statements are made in comparison to the number of questions asked. When I set out to resolve a contradiction, more than half the resulting sentences are questions, by design.
The human mind learns new knowledge by forming words into questions, not statements.
So enjoy the humans. The countless foolish ones among them will continue to ask no effective questions or their own actions, therefore not resolve their own contradictions, leaving them in place to flaw all subsequent data synthesis, and attempt to force or deceive the other guy into manifesting actions that are illogical for the knowledge held by the other guy's mind.
The humans were designed for the entertainment of the observers.
Let me know if any organization or institution genuinely wants to resolve any contradictions. World peace is too easy. The process is merely knowledge. No government could escape. The design of the human mind cannot escape itself, and can be utilized with remarkable efficiency if you merely learn the knowledge of it.
You do not have to pay $200 to climb Denali, if you learn the related knowledge. You do not have to attack other countries to defeat what is currently referenced as terrorism, if you learn the related knowledge.
DougBuchanan.com
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tooth
Mountain climber
B.C.
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AMEN!
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