MosMom
<font color=deeppink>Damn you, you wretched clown!
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2000
- Messages
- 10,405
I am pretty proud of the little bugger 
I am a bit on the fence about war and not sure where I stand but I thought I'd pass it on to those who would like a good read. He works for a company that does technology security for the government and goes to school part time for a BS in History.
------
We've got solid-state technology and tapes on the floor
I've gotten into some pretty involved conversations about the concept of a war with Iraq in the last couple of weeks at school. It goes without saying, of course, that everyone at my job thinks it's a pretty good idea. It seems to me they are simply interested because they are republicans, and that's the party line? Noone has ever echoed a real belief in a cause as a reason to go to war.
Neither, however, have any of the people I have run into at school who are against a war. I'm sorry, folks, but "War is bad!!" is not a good answer. Whenever you get into it with someone and ask them, straight up, why are you against this, they can't really ever give a good reason. The closest thing I have heard to a good reason is "To not kill innocent civilians" or "No war for oil!". I haven't really gone into very much detail about my own personal beliefs on this issue, but I would like to now. First I will discuss some of the practical applications of war and indeed of war on Iraq. Then I will talk a little about why I think it's a good idea.
Oil - I suppose quite a bit of all the fuss is indeed about oil. But why? Hmm. Okay. The United States is in much less of a dire need for Arabian oil these days due to the 70's oil embargo and our willingness to avoid a complete collapse of the economy. However, the USA buys tremendous amounts of Arabian oil and resells it to european nations at a loss. Why do we do this? To continue stimulating economic growth. So, if the USA is not dependent on Arabian oil, but europe and Japan are, why does europe offer such protest to our cause? We will discuss that a bit later. Anyways, oil.
It is true that a free and america-friendly Iraq will bring oil prices down. It's more likely than not that this new Iraq will not be a member of OPEC, and at that point a large percentage of the world's capacity (when you count the US and the new fields discovered in the Gulf Of Mexico, Russia, and Norway) will not be under the control of despotic sheiks and dictators. And perhaps if oil hits, say, ten dollars a barrel, they will begin to sweat a little. It's cold, hard cash that keeps the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Libya and the UAE in charge.
So the possibility of a "domino effect" discussed in the sixties and seventies as countries falling to communism could in turn convert countries from authoritarianism to democracy. It is also possible that these countries, or at least one of them, when losing their abrasive governments, will become lawless remnants of nation states and hosts of terror. Fortunately, American forces are already in most of the OPEC countries protecting their security. And would make handy peacekeeping troops. I think this is a recognized risk and cost of going into this war, and that the administration is aware of it and accepts it. Also, putting market forces instead of a cartel in charge of the world's oil supply will be beneficial in the long run, as when supplies begin to get squeezed, people will have to dump their SUVs and stop wasting gas. Four dollars a gallon for 87 octane is NOT a bad thing.
The French and The Russians and The Chinese - I have never been accused of being a fan of the French. In the sixties, the french withdrew their military forces from NATO and refused to adopt any equipment standards that NATO created to make the resupply of forces in the face of a Soviet invasion less difficult. And so France grew and prospered under the umbrella of NATO and American protection, all the while not paying dues to the organization or submitting forces for the mutual defense of europe. The French also built a Nuclear reactor in Iraq in the late seventies capable of creating Plutonium as a by-product. Saddam Hussein was progressing a nuclear weapons program and weeks away from refining plutonium when an Israeli air raid destroyed the facility. France is also the biggest illegal trading partner Iraq has, and has been guaranteed billions of dollars worth of contracts with the Iraqi government when sanctions are over. An Iraqi government friendly to America will be most likely to give such contracts to American oil companies. The french are active in commercial espionage, and steal secrets from a multitude of american and asian corporations on behalf of corporations that are French owned.
Russia is in much the same basket as France, with billions of dollars in tanks and airplanes and oil contracts being assured if this current crisis is averted and sanctions are ended.
China recently completed a fiber optic communications grid throughout Iraq designed to re-establish an air defense network. This activity was completely illegal, yet avoided complaint by America and other security council organizations.
And so I must ask myself, "Why do these nations so oppose an american war on Iraq?"
Inspections - A quick note for the "Let Inspections Continue!" crowd. Iraq is currently in breach of 12 United Nations resolutions. There are two resolutions pending that the Security Council has not decided whether the country is in breach or not. Twelve. Inspections were ongoing for six years before they were ordered to leave the country in 1998. Since then, noone has been monitoring Iraqi activity until inspectors returned in late 2002. Keep in mind that while inspections continue, so do sanctions, and the suffering of the Iraqi people, and the continued dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. And so, by declaring that inspections are a peaceful way to solve a crisis, peace loving people in Europe and America commit to the starving of thousands of Iraqis.
Tyranny - Vietnam. A war we didn't really need to be fighting. Where no interests were involved. No oil, no nothing. A backwater defended only to keep the rest of the nations in South East Asia from turning to the communist bloc. Where a large portion of the countryside wanted to be with their brothers in the north. We fought this war, and fifty-six thousand american soldiers died, for nothing, really. If the stated aims of that war had been to preserve and defend the freedom of others, and no restrictions had been made on the waging of that war, things perhaps would have turned out differently, but I doubt it. Another great power had decided to give all the materiel and financial support required to kill as many americans as possible. We of course did the same thing in Afghanistan ten years later. But Cold War brinksmanship is over. In Vietnam, most of the "Atrocities" observed were either by the South Vietnamese against their own citizens or by America against everyone in the region.
Anti-war personalities liken the antiwar movement against Iraq to Vietnam, but I sincerely beg to differ. The differences lie in the leader and type of government. North Vietnam was truly a peasants revolution. Ho Chi Minh was a schoolteacher. Saddam Hussein has, in the past and present:
o Invaded two of his neighbors
o Killed millions of his neighbors in the subsequent wars
o Tortured and murdered men, women and children
o Tested Biological and Chemical weapons on political prisoners
o Used Chemical weapons on entire cities in the north of Iraq, killing thousands, and leaving their bodies in the streets (Ironically, a French television crew witnessed this event.)
o Continued to hold an American Prisoner of War ten years after the Gulf War
o Sponsored terrorism and terrorists
o Killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians in SCUD missile attacks. Israel was not even participating in the coalition against him.
This is all documented. I'm not making it up.
Civillians - The death toll of Iraqis under the rule of Saddam Hussein goes into the millions. Ottomans, Nazi Germans, Soviets under Stalin, Pol Pot, Angola. These are the fabled houses of death of the twentieth century, and Iraq is right up there. So anti-war protesters complain about the risk of civilian casualty in a war with Iraq, and this is truly a problem. When you go to war, innocents will die. Something like forty eight million non-combatants died in the Second World War. About a thousand in the First Gulf War. About two hundred in the Afghani war. Do you see where I'm going with this? Our reliance on accurate and increasingly smaller bombs and explosives has resulted in both fewer civilian casualties and less collateral damage. You no longer have to destroy a building to kill a tank sitting next to it. The biggest civilian casualty incident of the First Gulf War was when a command and control bunker in Baghdad was hit by a Laser Guided Bomb. Something like five hundred people died. What people tend to leave out is that they were told to go there on purpose by the Iraqi government, which, of course, made no attempt to notify the opposite side of who was in that bunker. The object was to kill their own people at the hands of americans.
At the end of the First Gulf War, the entire Republican Guard, elite divisions of troops, were trapped on the wrong side of the Euphrates river south of Basra. Americans, having just decimated the force of retreating Iraqi army regulars on what came to be known as the "Highway of Death" had an opportunity to once and for all crush and destroy the remainder of the Iraqi army. But we did not. Because we felt that it would be inhumane to slaughter defenseless troops. This was a combatant force, previously assigned to killing as many americans as possible, and we did not harm it because it would be a bloodbath. Do people who accuse america of cruelty know that fact?
Consequences - We could be there forever. We could be terribly defeated. We shouldn't be involved in other nations affairs. These lines were used in World War One, World War Two, Korea, of our involvement in The Yom Kippur War, and the First Gulf War. And of course, the Second Gulf War. Indeed, we did end up being in most of these nations for an indefinite period of time, but what was, for the most part the result? Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Japan, Portugal, Israel, South Korea and Kuwait are all economically successful democracies (Kuwait for the most part) that greatly benefited from our intervention. The use of American Power has for the most part been used in the last century only when whole people's are at risk, we have been directly attacked, and to create liberty where none has previously existed. In fact, we protected a MUSLIM majority from extermination in Kosovo in 1998. Why does noone remember this? Serbia and Kosovo had no natural resources we coveted, nothing of the sort. Yet we spent billions to go to war, capture a tyrant, and put him in jail. To protect the lives and freedoms of others.
Hegemony - America is now the only great power left in the world. In fact, America has become the dominant military, economic, and cultural power on the globe. Our power and influence reaches to all stretches of the planet. Foreigners praise our music and movies, trade in our dollars, and fear our bombs. A B-2 bomber loaded with eighty 500LB GPS guided munitions can take off from Whiteman Air Force Base and in twenty-two hours or less flatten 80 city blocks in any capitol city on any part of the globe. But we don't. Because we cherish our freedom and liberty and seek to pass it on to others. Why does this offend people? Primarily it offends those who have a unopposed rule over their peoples, such as China or Saudi Arabia. The recently released doctrine on the use of american power primarily states that our power will be used to foster liberty and democracy on the globe in the belief that allowing peoples to choose their own leaders and trade in goods freely and without restriction or fear of vengeance from the state will result in a safer world. And indeed it will. Terrorism spawns from poverty and unhappiness and an innate sense of injustice in despotic, tyrannical governments. By fostering both economic growth and the cause of liberty, the scourge of terrorism will be rooted up from the earth.
And so America uses its' power to free other peoples. This was not the cause of the other invading and conquering armies of the past. Caesar did not intend to bring the Gauls Roman Freedom when he came to Gaul, he intended to give them the sword. Hitler did not intend to free France or Poland or Russia. The common goal of the army of the past has been to loot, enslave, and capture as many resources, people, and territory as was possible. America represents a shift in the use of military force in history, in that we have used our power in major warfare to slay the evil and protect and free the innocent. That is not to say we have not made mistakes, Vietnam, the Central Intelligence Agencies involvement with South American dictators and our sponsorship of Saudi Arabia being the chief examples. But by and whole we choose to protect rather than to slay.
Freedom - This is my personal reason for a desire of war in Iraq. To remove a tyrant from power and free a people. Why do people hate this idea so? We had a choice about going to war in Europe in World War Two. Of course, we had no choice but to destroy Japan, but we could most definitely allowed europe to settle itself, despite Hitler's declaration of war. Instead, 260,000 american soldiers died freeing France and the rest of western europe. And we then spent fifty billion dollars in 1945 money on the Marshall Plan, funding completely the reconstruction of Japan and western europe. Out of our own pockets. We had no money for it of course, but we took on the debt, just as we took on the debt when we had to build over one hundred aircraft carriers or seventy thousand aircraft. And we did the same thing with South Korea after the Korean War. And these countries grew and prospered because of the generosity of the american people. And now the French and Germans and South Koreans burn our flags and detest us as a country. And that's fine with me. Because all of my grandfather's friends died to give them the right to choose to hate us after we saved them.
It's interesting to note that the Eastern European nations stand steadfastly with us in our cause for the liberation of Iraq. Keep in mind that those nations were so recently under the boot of a dictatorship, and understand wholly the value of their freedoms. It is truly a shame that their western neighbors take it so for granted. Because America spent three trillion dollars to defeat the Soviet Union and so free those enslaved peoples.
I hope in the coming weeks the Bush Administration makes a little more emphasis on freeing an enslaved people, rather than complaining about missing biological weapons and violated UN mandates. The Iraqi people want us to come save them. Let's get on with it.
I am a bit on the fence about war and not sure where I stand but I thought I'd pass it on to those who would like a good read. He works for a company that does technology security for the government and goes to school part time for a BS in History.------
We've got solid-state technology and tapes on the floor
I've gotten into some pretty involved conversations about the concept of a war with Iraq in the last couple of weeks at school. It goes without saying, of course, that everyone at my job thinks it's a pretty good idea. It seems to me they are simply interested because they are republicans, and that's the party line? Noone has ever echoed a real belief in a cause as a reason to go to war.
Neither, however, have any of the people I have run into at school who are against a war. I'm sorry, folks, but "War is bad!!" is not a good answer. Whenever you get into it with someone and ask them, straight up, why are you against this, they can't really ever give a good reason. The closest thing I have heard to a good reason is "To not kill innocent civilians" or "No war for oil!". I haven't really gone into very much detail about my own personal beliefs on this issue, but I would like to now. First I will discuss some of the practical applications of war and indeed of war on Iraq. Then I will talk a little about why I think it's a good idea.
Oil - I suppose quite a bit of all the fuss is indeed about oil. But why? Hmm. Okay. The United States is in much less of a dire need for Arabian oil these days due to the 70's oil embargo and our willingness to avoid a complete collapse of the economy. However, the USA buys tremendous amounts of Arabian oil and resells it to european nations at a loss. Why do we do this? To continue stimulating economic growth. So, if the USA is not dependent on Arabian oil, but europe and Japan are, why does europe offer such protest to our cause? We will discuss that a bit later. Anyways, oil.
It is true that a free and america-friendly Iraq will bring oil prices down. It's more likely than not that this new Iraq will not be a member of OPEC, and at that point a large percentage of the world's capacity (when you count the US and the new fields discovered in the Gulf Of Mexico, Russia, and Norway) will not be under the control of despotic sheiks and dictators. And perhaps if oil hits, say, ten dollars a barrel, they will begin to sweat a little. It's cold, hard cash that keeps the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Libya and the UAE in charge.
So the possibility of a "domino effect" discussed in the sixties and seventies as countries falling to communism could in turn convert countries from authoritarianism to democracy. It is also possible that these countries, or at least one of them, when losing their abrasive governments, will become lawless remnants of nation states and hosts of terror. Fortunately, American forces are already in most of the OPEC countries protecting their security. And would make handy peacekeeping troops. I think this is a recognized risk and cost of going into this war, and that the administration is aware of it and accepts it. Also, putting market forces instead of a cartel in charge of the world's oil supply will be beneficial in the long run, as when supplies begin to get squeezed, people will have to dump their SUVs and stop wasting gas. Four dollars a gallon for 87 octane is NOT a bad thing.
The French and The Russians and The Chinese - I have never been accused of being a fan of the French. In the sixties, the french withdrew their military forces from NATO and refused to adopt any equipment standards that NATO created to make the resupply of forces in the face of a Soviet invasion less difficult. And so France grew and prospered under the umbrella of NATO and American protection, all the while not paying dues to the organization or submitting forces for the mutual defense of europe. The French also built a Nuclear reactor in Iraq in the late seventies capable of creating Plutonium as a by-product. Saddam Hussein was progressing a nuclear weapons program and weeks away from refining plutonium when an Israeli air raid destroyed the facility. France is also the biggest illegal trading partner Iraq has, and has been guaranteed billions of dollars worth of contracts with the Iraqi government when sanctions are over. An Iraqi government friendly to America will be most likely to give such contracts to American oil companies. The french are active in commercial espionage, and steal secrets from a multitude of american and asian corporations on behalf of corporations that are French owned.
Russia is in much the same basket as France, with billions of dollars in tanks and airplanes and oil contracts being assured if this current crisis is averted and sanctions are ended.
China recently completed a fiber optic communications grid throughout Iraq designed to re-establish an air defense network. This activity was completely illegal, yet avoided complaint by America and other security council organizations.
And so I must ask myself, "Why do these nations so oppose an american war on Iraq?"
Inspections - A quick note for the "Let Inspections Continue!" crowd. Iraq is currently in breach of 12 United Nations resolutions. There are two resolutions pending that the Security Council has not decided whether the country is in breach or not. Twelve. Inspections were ongoing for six years before they were ordered to leave the country in 1998. Since then, noone has been monitoring Iraqi activity until inspectors returned in late 2002. Keep in mind that while inspections continue, so do sanctions, and the suffering of the Iraqi people, and the continued dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. And so, by declaring that inspections are a peaceful way to solve a crisis, peace loving people in Europe and America commit to the starving of thousands of Iraqis.
Tyranny - Vietnam. A war we didn't really need to be fighting. Where no interests were involved. No oil, no nothing. A backwater defended only to keep the rest of the nations in South East Asia from turning to the communist bloc. Where a large portion of the countryside wanted to be with their brothers in the north. We fought this war, and fifty-six thousand american soldiers died, for nothing, really. If the stated aims of that war had been to preserve and defend the freedom of others, and no restrictions had been made on the waging of that war, things perhaps would have turned out differently, but I doubt it. Another great power had decided to give all the materiel and financial support required to kill as many americans as possible. We of course did the same thing in Afghanistan ten years later. But Cold War brinksmanship is over. In Vietnam, most of the "Atrocities" observed were either by the South Vietnamese against their own citizens or by America against everyone in the region.
Anti-war personalities liken the antiwar movement against Iraq to Vietnam, but I sincerely beg to differ. The differences lie in the leader and type of government. North Vietnam was truly a peasants revolution. Ho Chi Minh was a schoolteacher. Saddam Hussein has, in the past and present:
o Invaded two of his neighbors
o Killed millions of his neighbors in the subsequent wars
o Tortured and murdered men, women and children
o Tested Biological and Chemical weapons on political prisoners
o Used Chemical weapons on entire cities in the north of Iraq, killing thousands, and leaving their bodies in the streets (Ironically, a French television crew witnessed this event.)
o Continued to hold an American Prisoner of War ten years after the Gulf War
o Sponsored terrorism and terrorists
o Killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians in SCUD missile attacks. Israel was not even participating in the coalition against him.
This is all documented. I'm not making it up.
Civillians - The death toll of Iraqis under the rule of Saddam Hussein goes into the millions. Ottomans, Nazi Germans, Soviets under Stalin, Pol Pot, Angola. These are the fabled houses of death of the twentieth century, and Iraq is right up there. So anti-war protesters complain about the risk of civilian casualty in a war with Iraq, and this is truly a problem. When you go to war, innocents will die. Something like forty eight million non-combatants died in the Second World War. About a thousand in the First Gulf War. About two hundred in the Afghani war. Do you see where I'm going with this? Our reliance on accurate and increasingly smaller bombs and explosives has resulted in both fewer civilian casualties and less collateral damage. You no longer have to destroy a building to kill a tank sitting next to it. The biggest civilian casualty incident of the First Gulf War was when a command and control bunker in Baghdad was hit by a Laser Guided Bomb. Something like five hundred people died. What people tend to leave out is that they were told to go there on purpose by the Iraqi government, which, of course, made no attempt to notify the opposite side of who was in that bunker. The object was to kill their own people at the hands of americans.
At the end of the First Gulf War, the entire Republican Guard, elite divisions of troops, were trapped on the wrong side of the Euphrates river south of Basra. Americans, having just decimated the force of retreating Iraqi army regulars on what came to be known as the "Highway of Death" had an opportunity to once and for all crush and destroy the remainder of the Iraqi army. But we did not. Because we felt that it would be inhumane to slaughter defenseless troops. This was a combatant force, previously assigned to killing as many americans as possible, and we did not harm it because it would be a bloodbath. Do people who accuse america of cruelty know that fact?
Consequences - We could be there forever. We could be terribly defeated. We shouldn't be involved in other nations affairs. These lines were used in World War One, World War Two, Korea, of our involvement in The Yom Kippur War, and the First Gulf War. And of course, the Second Gulf War. Indeed, we did end up being in most of these nations for an indefinite period of time, but what was, for the most part the result? Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Japan, Portugal, Israel, South Korea and Kuwait are all economically successful democracies (Kuwait for the most part) that greatly benefited from our intervention. The use of American Power has for the most part been used in the last century only when whole people's are at risk, we have been directly attacked, and to create liberty where none has previously existed. In fact, we protected a MUSLIM majority from extermination in Kosovo in 1998. Why does noone remember this? Serbia and Kosovo had no natural resources we coveted, nothing of the sort. Yet we spent billions to go to war, capture a tyrant, and put him in jail. To protect the lives and freedoms of others.
Hegemony - America is now the only great power left in the world. In fact, America has become the dominant military, economic, and cultural power on the globe. Our power and influence reaches to all stretches of the planet. Foreigners praise our music and movies, trade in our dollars, and fear our bombs. A B-2 bomber loaded with eighty 500LB GPS guided munitions can take off from Whiteman Air Force Base and in twenty-two hours or less flatten 80 city blocks in any capitol city on any part of the globe. But we don't. Because we cherish our freedom and liberty and seek to pass it on to others. Why does this offend people? Primarily it offends those who have a unopposed rule over their peoples, such as China or Saudi Arabia. The recently released doctrine on the use of american power primarily states that our power will be used to foster liberty and democracy on the globe in the belief that allowing peoples to choose their own leaders and trade in goods freely and without restriction or fear of vengeance from the state will result in a safer world. And indeed it will. Terrorism spawns from poverty and unhappiness and an innate sense of injustice in despotic, tyrannical governments. By fostering both economic growth and the cause of liberty, the scourge of terrorism will be rooted up from the earth.
And so America uses its' power to free other peoples. This was not the cause of the other invading and conquering armies of the past. Caesar did not intend to bring the Gauls Roman Freedom when he came to Gaul, he intended to give them the sword. Hitler did not intend to free France or Poland or Russia. The common goal of the army of the past has been to loot, enslave, and capture as many resources, people, and territory as was possible. America represents a shift in the use of military force in history, in that we have used our power in major warfare to slay the evil and protect and free the innocent. That is not to say we have not made mistakes, Vietnam, the Central Intelligence Agencies involvement with South American dictators and our sponsorship of Saudi Arabia being the chief examples. But by and whole we choose to protect rather than to slay.
Freedom - This is my personal reason for a desire of war in Iraq. To remove a tyrant from power and free a people. Why do people hate this idea so? We had a choice about going to war in Europe in World War Two. Of course, we had no choice but to destroy Japan, but we could most definitely allowed europe to settle itself, despite Hitler's declaration of war. Instead, 260,000 american soldiers died freeing France and the rest of western europe. And we then spent fifty billion dollars in 1945 money on the Marshall Plan, funding completely the reconstruction of Japan and western europe. Out of our own pockets. We had no money for it of course, but we took on the debt, just as we took on the debt when we had to build over one hundred aircraft carriers or seventy thousand aircraft. And we did the same thing with South Korea after the Korean War. And these countries grew and prospered because of the generosity of the american people. And now the French and Germans and South Koreans burn our flags and detest us as a country. And that's fine with me. Because all of my grandfather's friends died to give them the right to choose to hate us after we saved them.
It's interesting to note that the Eastern European nations stand steadfastly with us in our cause for the liberation of Iraq. Keep in mind that those nations were so recently under the boot of a dictatorship, and understand wholly the value of their freedoms. It is truly a shame that their western neighbors take it so for granted. Because America spent three trillion dollars to defeat the Soviet Union and so free those enslaved peoples.
I hope in the coming weeks the Bush Administration makes a little more emphasis on freeing an enslaved people, rather than complaining about missing biological weapons and violated UN mandates. The Iraqi people want us to come save them. Let's get on with it.
