"There were 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January. In the fair city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the month of January. That's just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq."
That's comparing apples and hedgehogs. Either compare the combat deaths in Iraq with the combat deaths in Detroit (I'm guessing the number is somewhat less than one), or compare all killings in Iraq with all killings in Detroit (I expect the number in Iraq will be significantly higher than 35).
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quote:JOHN GLENN (ON THE SENATE FLOOR) Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:13
There is one string of numbers that isn't accurate considering that this occured not on the Senate floor and happened more than thirty years ago and has approximately ZERO to do with the string of jingoistic comparisons by which it is preceded.
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JOHN GLENN (not ON THE SENATE FLOOR) ~30 years before Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:13
Some people still don't understand why military personnel do what they do for a living. ....
What about you?"
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
And how many suicide car bombings where there in Detroit? How many roads in detroit have makeshift bombs planted in them?
-------------------- joH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh (some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning) The Woozle!
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JOHN GLENN (not ON THE SENATE FLOOR) ~30 years before Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:13
Well, actually it was May, 3, 1974. I mean if one was even remotely concerned about accurately reflecting the facts.
quote:Originally posted by Ritten: Okay Some people still don't understand why military personnel do what they do for a living. ....
What about you?"
And so this whole thing is a straw man fallacy. I ask you what is the relevancy of one remarkably foolhardy statement made by a senatorial candidate in a Democratic Primary in Ohio 30 years ago? (As an aside does knowing that Glenn was running as a Democrat in a Democratic Primary in any way affect your opinion of the story? Should it?)
Don't get me wrong, it's a very persuasively written and stirring speech, invoking thoughts of service and sacrifice for liberty and land. It's just that precisely the problem that so many of us have with this conflict is that we DO understand and appreciate the lives of our professional military personnel. My grandfather had half his intestines shot out in the Ardennes by a 14-year-old Czechoslovokian Nazi recruit. He survived to have my father and remarkably remains alive today thanks in no small part to the medical care he received after the war and his participation in various VFW (also he's a stubborn old bastard who still splits his own firewood at 82). My uncle is a veteran of this very Iraqi war. I am very proud of their service, and also intensely conscious of how valuable their lives and that service has been.
And so my problem with this conflict is not that I don't respect the military, rather that I do. And I'd hate to have the implicit trust for their leadership that these brave men and women who put their lives on the line be misplaced. And in the views of both my grandfather and my uncle, it has been. Both have been active (my uncle VERY active) in veterans groups since their service, and what they are seeing is an utter lack of respect for our service people when they return.
I was going to go into the fallacies in the other 'arguments', but I don't actually have that much time and others are doing a capable job. I just wanted to call attention to the fact that Metzenbaum's question, a) does not reflect my views, nor the views of any democrats that I know of, and b) has been distorted and misassociated with the deliberate intent of manipulating well-intentioned right-leaning folks into thinking that left-leaning folks do not honor or respect our veterans. Which we do. Again: we do. Like veterans. And professional military.
So, do you still imagine that Metzenbaum's (foolish albeit misconstrued and taken-out-of-context) statements of 30 years ago in some way reflect the opinion of some majority of leftist thinking here, today in 2005? Because I'm here to tell you that they do not. And I'm here to tell you that John Glenn is an American hero. And that the lives of such heros should never be squandered.
posted
And this whole John Glenn thing does not even take into account the cabal of Neoconservatives who had been pushing for the removal of Saddam for quite a while, and apparently found a willing and purposefully uninformed president in Mr. Bush.
See if any of these names from a letter sent to Mr. Clinton in 1998. sound familiar:
quote:January 26, 1998
The Honorable William J. Clinton President of the United States Washington, DC
Dear Mr. President:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein�s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
The policy of �containment� of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq�s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam�s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.
Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world�s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.
Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.
We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.
Sincerely,
Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick
Oh, hey, more names from the June 3, 1997 Statement of Principles
quote:Elliott Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Jeb Bush Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel Paul Wolfowitz
[ November 10, 2005, 09:33 AM: Message edited by: Jay the Obscure ]
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
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WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
So what SHOULD the U.S. have done? Sat and mourned the dead of 9/11 and yelled "Shame, shame on you" at Al-Qaeda and bin Laden? What was the socially acceptable response? Economic sanctions? Does anyone REALLY believe those work? Wasn't France & Germany supplying Saddam with tech, equipment, and cash during the LAST attempt to impose sanctions? Someone is always available to be bought. Sanctions only cause discomfort to the little man, not the maniacal brutal dictators that keep them down anyway.
Bush the first stopped short of removing Saddam from power because all the geniuses warned that it could inflame the Arab world against the U.S. Bush the second decided to correct that first mistake with an even BIGGER mistake.
The real question is where do you go from here? Just pull out and let them fight it out amongst themselves till the next Saddam rises to power? Stick it out and try to make things better at the cost of the lives of our own troops? Turn everything over to the Saudis to handle? What is the best option? How do you bring peace to a region that hasn't known peace since Isaac and Ishmael?
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by WizArtist II: So what SHOULD the U.S. have done? Sat and mourned the dead of 9/11 and yelled "Shame, shame on you" at Al-Qaeda and bin Laden?
Clearly Mr. Bush should have attacked Eritrea...who had as much to to with 9/11 as Iraq.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
So, how's that getting Bin Laden thing going?
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Say what you want about FDR, TRuman, Johnson, Clinton, you can't call them purposefully generally uninformed.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by WizArtist II: [QB] So what SHOULD the U.S. have done? Sat and mourned the dead of 9/11 and yelled "Shame, shame on you" at Al-Qaeda and bin Laden?
Does the country Afghanistan ring a bell? You know, Southwestern Asian country ruled by the Taliban that was sheltering Osama bin Laden after the September 11, 2001, attacks and refused to hand him over? You know, the country that we had a legitimate claim to attack because it was harboring a wanted terrorist mastermind? It's the other country that's still a quagmire because we got bored with it and decided to mess with Iraq like a drunken frat guy who sees a brother passed out on the couch.
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
It's always fun to read back what those lying scumbags were saying before the war and then to compare it with what they said afterwards, especially re: the "humanitarian" concerns that the invasion was supposedly motivated by. You know, when you want to remind yourself of the kind of hypocrisy this administration deals in.
"How do you bring peace to a region that hasn't known peace since Isaac and Ishmael?"
I'll tell you how you don't, by invading part of that region under false premises pretending to be an advocate of democracy and human rights while really having absolutely no interest in any of its affairs and lacking even the most basic plan or desire for long-term commitment. I guess those "geniuses" were just wrong on all counts, eh?
Registered: Nov 1999
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Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
posted
" the Americans will do the right thing, after they have exhausted every other alternative."
Well it's nice to know you yanks will get around to doing the right thing... eventually.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
What would the situation be in Iraq if Bush I had continued on to Bagdad with all the little coalition behind him and taken Saddam out during Gulf War I? Would it have stopped 9/11?
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
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Perhaps we'll just have to deal with reality as it exists.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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