Mini D: Miko... do you believe active/agressive actions by the UN have been better of worse historically?
Even without bothering to recall any significant actions by UN, I would not trust that entity to do any good.
BTW... picking and chosing points to make your point... bad form.
Picking and choosing arguments to prove one's position and then willing to listen to the counter-arguments is what's expected from a participant in a discussion. What's bad form is to ignore the opponent's arguments, not care to cite any of your own but start berating him for moral deficiencies.
john9001: i don't think the USA should have made war on hitler, the war costs too much and innocent people died, hitler was no threat to USA
The majority of americans were of that opinion even after Dec 7, 41.
Incidentally, if USA haven't made war on Germany in WWI and then helped/allowed to starve innocent german people, there wouldn't have been any need to fight Hitler.
Hangtime: Sitting tight defensively crumbled the soviet empire?? LOL! Competeing economicly created drastic changes in China?
That's not what I said. I said that while US practiced containment rather than aggression, the Soviet empire crumbled by itself. With time chinese sociery also advanced towards freedom.
Man, you have some pretty wiz-bang history and economics professors..
I've been there. Don't remember any invading US troops when Gorbachev set the Union loose.
AKIron: How about WWI, WWII,
I was thinking about the last half a century - after WWII. WWII was a different case.
WWI was a mistake to get into. One side was no better than the other there to warrant US intervention - germens did not really bayonet the belgian infants andy more than iraqi did. Since you've moved the starting point, why didn't you begin with US annexation/genocide of Phillipines and banana republic wars?
yes, the military might of the US was no small factor in winning the cold war
Certainly - while it was not used actively/aggresively against soviets. You do not have to parrot my points for me.
OIO: With that in mind, a stand by and wait policy is not really something you can use against hussein.
Surely, OIO - it is possible that invasion into Iraq is really warranted. I may be mistaken, not having all the information. But as you've admitted I have some reasons to believe that US government may be making a mistake since it made plenty in the past.
The main point of this discussion is that not all people opposing this invasion are motivated by irrational anti-americanism.
miko2d: Every time US sat tight and defencively...
Saurdaukar: Kinda like our posture during that whole September 11th thing right?
Exactly. We placed our troops in the Saudi Arabia to the support of the opressive feudal regime against it's population and to the sacrilege of muslims and our best friend Ossama Bin Laden turned on us.
lazs2: If I were living in iraq I would be wishing with all my might for an invasion of my country so as to be able to get out from under the rule of this stalinist type despot.
You are entitled to that opinion, of course. But I lived in the Soviet Union and no people there would have wanted to suffer a war and invasion so that the survivors were rid of the soviet oppression amidst of total devastation. Especially if they knew, as we know now, that such regimes tend to crumble by themselves. (Do not bother to search my old posts - I did say that US should have nuked Stalin before he acquired nuclear weapons and posed real threat to US - which he did, had he not died shortly after. But not to "liberate" the oppressed population.)
And Iraqi "oppression" is not nearly as severe as was the one in the former Soviet Union - one can own land and run a private business there and leave the country, unlike in USSR, own gold - which was illegal for US citisens untill 70s. One can freely buy automatic weapons and handguns there - which tells one something about how oppressive that regime really is.
Of course there are ethnic groups that always opposed Iraqi govenment - Kurds, southern Shia - both of which took side of the enemy during the last war. If we want to liberate those, we should just declare their territories independent states. Baghdad does not control kurdistan anyway and both places are in the no-fly zones. Hussein wouldn't be able to do a thing about it.
Would we want to do that? Like hell we would. The shia would join Iran and our ally Turkey would never tolerate an independent Kurdistan, so liberating them was never in our plans.
miko
