Poppycock! He used terror to maintain his reign of terror. Yes, over the last decade he delegated the horrors to his sons. In his prime, though, he murdered his political enemies and their friends and relatives. If that's not terrorism, I don't know what is. Surely it is different because he had a seat of power and an army at his behest, but it is still terror and though different from bin Laden's brand of terror it is terror nonetheless.
a reign of terror does not make someone a terrorist. With the original reign of terror in France the leaders weren't called terrorists. They were probably closer to terrorists though than Saddam was, they definitely were murderers, and inhumane. I agree that Saddam is guilty of all the deeds that you mentioned. But as the head of a sovereign nation, he is a dictator, and not a terrorist. I'm not willing to bastardize the language in order to fit into a tidy category that somehow makes this war alright. The language has words to describe people like Saddam. It doesn't need to be perverted.
It is the War on Terror not the War Against Terrorists... So you want the US to change policy because you think they chose the wrong name for the event?
No I want them to change policy because they started a war against a nation that was not a threat to use or our allies, they've tarnished the name and reputation of the U.S, sacrificed our values, and freedoms. I would rather policy changed to uphold what America stands for. I would happily support them putting additional support and pressure in Afghanistan, go after actual terrorist groups, and nations that harbor them if need be. I would support and have supported such action wholeheartedly.
Saddam's Iraq was a state sponsor of terror. He gave money to the families of suicide bombers. As such, he is a terrorist in the same sense that the Taliban was, and was a threat to our ally Israel in the same sense that the Taliban was a threat to the US.
You expose yourself in the same breath. I don’t see anyone “gleefully reciting the setbacks in Iraq.” This is just your excuse for trying to silence those who are exposing the crimes and the misdeeds. At best it’s your opinion, but your opinion isn’t the only one that counts. In a free and democratic society people have the right to speak and express their opinion, even if it differs from yours. Indeed they should and have to so the public can hear all sides and judge for themselves. The attempt to silence criticism is an attack on democracy itself. Again, at best this is your opinion. Mine is that given that this is an illegal war based on a lie, a war that has been incompetently managed and has cost the lives of thousands from all sides with no clear positive end sight, the reporters shouldn’t be doing a lot of feel good stories. To disproportionately do so would be to misrepresent what is happening and that could skew public opinion in such a way that it would encourage Bush to continue thus costing the lives of more innocents on all sides, including American soldiers, instead of doing the right thing and arranging to hand this situation off to the UN.
You don’t understand what’s happening here. What does Bin Laden want? He doesn’t give a rat’s *** about New York, DC or Houston. He wants to influence the ME. That’s his homeland. That’s his mission. The 9/11 attacks were highly symbolic attacks on the financial, military, and governmental pillars of America. He wasn’t landing an invasion force on the beaches. He was making a statement … for a specific purpose. What is that purpose? Think about it. I mean that. Really think about it. If you don’t understand what he’s doing you become a patsy in his game. In his mind he was throwing sand in the eyes of a bully, and he was counting on Bush to lose control and react stupidly and thereby provoke more hatred toward the US. Again, what does Bin Laden want? He wants to radicalize the ME. He wants them to rise up and throw out the westerners and to create Islamic states or a perhaps a single state of Arabia. To do this he wants to unify the people and their purpose by focusing their hate on America. This is a standard technique that the US itself has used many times, with the “axis of evil” being one of the most recent attempts. And Bush is accommodating him like a trained seal barking on command. He put the US in a position where it was guaranteed to provoke and almost guaranteed to lose. He ran this war in perhaps the only way possible for the US to lose, and he did it in such a way that it became an almost certainty. Literally, a first year project management student could have run this war better than Bush has. Literally it would be very hard to have run it worse. We on this board foresaw most of the major problems that have arisen. They weren’t hard to see if you were genuinely trying to understand the situation. If you were working your own agenda without humbling yourself to try to understand what the other side and the other major stakeholders’ interests and possessions are, then you were a dead man walking leading a doomed project. This is absolutely basic project management theory, first year stuff. What is success? Unless you understand what is going on here you won’t even be able to answer as seemingly simple a question as that. This is a war for the hearts and minds of the average Iraqi and Middle Easterner. That’s what this war is about. That’s the bottom line. That is what will either decrease or increase the level of terrorism in the world today. Whether or not you kill the insurgents or terrorists of today is a secondary point. As was admitted recently, “for every one we kill 3 more take his place.” What is more important, the one or the three? What good is killing the one if you do it in such a way that you create 3 more? Bush does not understand what’s happening, and that’s why he’s getting used and abused the way he is. His ignorance and self-righteousness have made him blind (along with his ruling group) and his blindness is leading him, them, and America, off a cliff. I wouldn’t be surprised a bit if Bin Laden has been watching all of this, from 9/11 on, from a luxury apartment in Riyadh. He may be a homicidal fanatic, but he’s not stupid. Bush and his ruling group, OTOH, are ignorant, some are stupid, and all but Powel were self-righteous, and that is a deadly combination. And it may well be a combination that Bin Laden knew about and counted on.
I want to change the name because the current one is misleading. It suggests that this war may be doing something to limit or stop terrorism. In fact it is increasing terrorism. It is breeding terrorists. A more accurate name for it would be the War that is Promoting Terrorism.
Iraq was not a state sponsor of terrorism. Saddam said that to try to buy favour in the ME. It didn’t work. He didn’t even have enough friends in terrorist groups or anywhere else to even get himself out of Iraq. Saddam was a self-serving infidel in their eyes. They wouldn’t have had anything to do with him, and clearly they didn’t.
Then why did so many of them come to Iraq and die? They could have continued perpetrating terroristic acts around the globe and instead chose to come to defend Iraq...
Not really. Saddam did give money to families of suicide bombers. The only reason those families get the money is because they are considered martyrs for some twisted reason. There has never been any proof shown that it increased suicide bombings which went on both before and after Saddam did that. Further more the fund that money came from went to martyrs in the conflict against Israel. Only a tiny portion of it ever went to the suicide bomber's families, and the vast majority of it went to families of innocent victims killed in the conflict. It is a real stretch to say that Saddam was a state sponsor of terrorism the same way that the Taliban was. But the intention of the money was not to encourage suicide bombings, nor did about 95% of the money go towards bomber's families.
They still are perpetrating terrorist acts around the globe. Many came to Iraq, and many more were created by Iraq. Giddy, there are not a finite number of terrorists and once they are all dead the war will be over. Let us say that right now at this very moment there 10k terrorists. If tomorrow we killed 5k terrorists. There won't be just 5k terrorists left for us to finish off. We will have created another 10k while we killed the first 5k. We kill 5k and end up with 15k. They will keep multiplying.
Just because you also give money to others, that does not mean that you are not a sponsor of terrorists. If I give a thousand dollars to al Queda and 19 thousand to the Red Cross, then I am not just a philanthropist, I am a sponser of terror. Saddam also gave more money on a per martyr basis to suicide bombers than to those killed by Israel. Whether his donations made him more popular or not, he was, by definition, a sponser of terror, and as a dictator, a state sponser of terror. Oh and there are a limited number of terrorists. All terrorists are human beings. There are between 6 and 7 billion human beings in the world. Eventually, if you keep killing the terrorists, the supply runs out. That doesn't even take into account the fact that not everyone is a terrorist waiting to happen. No matter how many are killed in Iraq, I am not going to become a terrorist. In this conflict the insurgents and terrorists are overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab. How many Arab Muslims are there? How many of them are going to go to war against the US? So there is a limited pool to draw from. There aren't 3 more created for every one killed, more like 3 more activated. Eventually, you can kill off all of the potential terrorists, even if that means millions of people.
I guess that I would just challenge your assumption that more terrorists will perpetually be created. I admitted that in the short run there will be an increase, but this cause is so evil (23 more dead today in a Baghdad cafe) that I don't think young Muslims will just line up to give over their own life in the pursuit of killing innocents. The "romance" will wear off.
IT could wear off, but only if we are seen as doing the right thing. As long as we are seen as torturing, bullying, and not doing much to stop the abuse, it will never wear off but just harden. The U.S. soldiers are doing some good things in Iraq. That is all the more reason to stomp out policies and cultures where torture and abuse is tolerated so that it doesn't overshadow the good deeds. You don't win hearts and minds by policies that allow people to be held indefinitely without a trial, or a chance to defend themselves. You don't win hearts and mind by appointing unrepetent authors of memos justifying torture to Attorney General. There is a way to help that kind of romance wear off, but this administration is doing little to implement it.
ran across this quote of lincoln's online and it seems particularly relevant to Durbin's comments: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."
I don't see how these are relevant to Durbin's comments since Durbin didn't comment on the U.S. military.
that's your story and you're sticking to it i guess; too bad it's counter factual. btw, it'd be fun to see durbin actually censored,as gingrich has suggested, and for senators to have to go on the record defending durbin's remarks... more condemnation from the chicago sun times: http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn19.html -- Durbin slanders his own country June 19, 2005 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how "nobody has a right to question my patriotism!" Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject, I hasten to add that in what follows I am not questioning Dick Durbin's patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I'll begin by questioning his sanity. Last Tuesday, Senator Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, quoted a report of U.S. "atrocities" at Guantanamo and then added: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings." Er, well, your average low-wattage senator might. But I wouldn't. The "atrocities" he enumerated -- "Not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room" -- are not characteristic of the Nazis, the Soviets or Pol Pot, and, at the end, the body count in Gitmo was a lot lower. That's to say, it was zero, which would have been counted a poor day's work in Auschwitz or Siberia or the killing fields of Cambodia. But give Durbin credit. Every third-rate hack on every European newspaper can do the Americans-are-Nazis schtick. Amnesty International has already declared Guantanamo the "gulag of our times." But I do believe the senator is the first to compare the U.S. armed forces with the blood-drenched thugs of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Way to go, senator! If you had a dime for every crackpot Web site that takes up your thoughtful historical comparison, you'd be able to retire to the Caribbean and spend the rest of your days torturing yourself with hot weather and loud music, as well as inappropriately provocative women and insufficient choice of hors d'oeuvres and all the other shameful atrocities committed at Guantanamo. Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged, and deeply insulting not just to the U.S. military but to the millions of relatives of those dead Russians, Jews and Cambodians, who, unlike Durbin, know what real atrocities are. Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out. One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause? Now let us turn to the ranking Democrat, the big cheese on the committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Leahy thinks Gitmo needs to be closed down and argues as follows: "America was once very rightly viewed as a leader in human rights and the rule of law, but Guantanamo has drained our leadership, our credibility, and the world's good will for America at alarming rates." So, until Guantanamo, America was "viewed as a leader in human rights"? Not in 2004, when Abu Ghraib was the atrocity du jour. Not in 2003, when every humanitarian organization on the planet was predicting the deaths of millions of Iraqis from cholera, dysentery and other diseases caused by America's "war for oil." Not in 2002, when the "human rights" lobby filled the streets of Vancouver and London and Rome and Sydney to protest the Bu****ler's plans to end the benign reign of good King Saddam. Not the weekend before 9/11 when the human rights grandees of the U.N. "anti-racism" conference met in South Africa to demand America pay reparations for the Rwandan genocide and to cheer Robert Mugabe to the rafters for calling on Britain and America to "apologize unreservedly for their crimes against humanity." If you close Gitmo tomorrow, the world's anti-Americans will look around and within 48 hours alight on something else for Gulag of the Week. And this is where it's time to question Durbin's patriotism. As Leahy implicitly acknowledges, Guantanamo is about "image" and "perception" -- about how others see America. If this one small camp of a few hundred people has "drained the world's good will," whose fault is that? The senator from Illinois' comparisons are as tired as they're grotesque. They add nothing useful to the debate. But around the planet, folks naturally figure that, if only 100 people out of nearly 300 million get to be senators, the position must be a big deal. Hence, headlines in the Arab world like "U.S. Senator Stands By Nazi Remark." That's al-Jazeera, where the senator from al-Inois is now a big hero -- for slandering his own country, for confirming the lurid propaganda of his country's enemies. Yes, folks, American soldiers are Nazis and American prison camps are gulags: don't take our word for it, Senator Bigshot says so. This isn't a Republican vs Democrat thing; it's about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they've signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe. It would be heartening to think that Durbin will himself now be subjected to some serious torture. Not real torture, of course; I don't mean using Pol Pot techniques and playing the Celine Dion Christmas album really loud to him. But he should at least be made a little uncomfortable over what he's done -- in a time of war, make an inflammatory libel against his country's military that has no value whatsoever except to America's enemies. Shame on him, and shame on those fellow senators and Democrats who by their refusal to condemn him endorse his slander.
