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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 5:26 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| What do you mean by not a threat to the US? |
I've already said there is no ambiguity in this statement. It is a true fact of history which even the officials in the govt who said otherwise in the months priot to the war haveadmitted, and quite long ago I might add. Yet you still try to assert there was a reason to attack this country that in some way included considerations of national security for the US.
They said there were WMDs and that the "smoking gun" we were waiting for could turn out to be a "mushroom cloud." It was not the case at all.
They said there were ties between Saddam and Al Queda that would be discovered after the war was successful that would justify the risk and loss of life. Again, it was simply not the case.
Saddam was a bad actor and I'm happy he is where he is now, but trying to say this whole thing had anything to do with efforts against Al Queda or trying to make America safer is just, again, simply not the case. In fact, it has made the cause of extremists stronger, and we are certainly not less safe, if the London bombings are any guide.
As I said before, my previous statements were not the least bit ambiguous. You know all these things, as I and others have pointed them out to you many times. If you come back with "What do you mean by ..." I can only respond with :
"What do you MEAN by 'what do you mean by'?"
Last edited by The Bobster on Thu Aug 18, 2005 8:09 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 5:43 am Post subject: |
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| I've already said there is no ambiguity in this statement. It is a true fact of histroy which even the officials in the govt who said otherwise in the months priot to the war have not admitted, and quite long ago I might add. Yet you still try to assert there was a reason to attack this country that in some way included considerations of national security for the US |
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what do you mean by not a threat?
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| They said there were WMDs and that the "smoking gun" we were waiting for could turn out to be a "mushroom cloud." It was not the case at all. |
Well Saddam was contained but only cause of the US and it was very costly to the US. Saddam had tried to get nuclear weapons before and their is nothing to show that he had changed.
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| They said there were ties between Saddam and Al Queda that would be discovered after the war was successful that would justify the risk and loss of life. Again, it was simply not the case. |
but there were ties between Iraq and Al Qadia.
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| [Saddam was a bad actor and I'm happy he is where he is now, but trying to say this whole thing had anything to do with efforst against Al Queda or trying to make America safer is just, again, simply not the case. In fact, it has mader the cause of extremists stronger, and we are certainly not less safew, if the London bombings are any guide. |
Iraq was a strategic prize in the war against Al Qaida.
9-11 Came before Iraq. 70,000 trained in Al Qaida camps during the 1990s. It was so bad already. There was not really any worse.
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| As I said before, my previous statements were not the least bit ambiguous. You know all these things, as I and others have pointed them out to you many times. If you come back with "What do you mean by ..." I can only respond with : |
I still want to know by not a threat? He did support terror, He did try to kill a US president. He did target US planes. And than that his regime taught hate and incited violence. That is a threat.
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| "What do you MEAN by 'what do you mean by'?"[ |
I mean that since Saddam was engaged in hostile acts against the US it is not true to say that he wasn't a threat. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:55 pm Post subject: |
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| The Bobster wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
The US was under threat. |
The US was never under threat from Saddam or any faction in Iraq. This is a true fact of history. |
Necessary Illusion. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:57 pm Post subject: |
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The mideast was a threat to the US.
Of course Jeff Rense is a 9-11 conspriacy theorists as well as being a holocaust denier. |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 2:21 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| I mean that since Saddam was engaged in hostile acts against the US it is not true to say that he wasn't a threat. |
Might be case of competing dictionaries. Mine says that a 'threat" is something that is a source of danger
Fact, again : Iraq was not a source of danger to the US at the time we attacked and that had been true for a long while.
Facts are so annoying ... one more of them is that we are in somewhat greater peril at the moment from terrors squads converging on Iraq and using it as a training ground for learning how to fight American soldiers.
Therefore the facts : Iraq posed no source of danger to the US before the war and occupation. It does now. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 3:30 am Post subject: |
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| Fact, again : Iraq was not a source of danger to the US at the time we attacked and that had been true for a long while. |
Lets see it was a source of danger to Americans. It was a threat to US interests since Saddam never gave up his agenda. And since his regime taught hate and incited violence it was a threat to the US
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| Facts are so annoying ... one more of them is that we are in somewhat greater peril at the moment from terrors squads converging on Iraq and using it as a training ground for learning how to fight American soldiers. |
that is true, however the way the mideast was was a threat to the US. If that didn't change then the US would always be in danger.
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| Therefore the facts : Iraq posed no source of danger to the US before the war and occupation. It does now |
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Lets see it was a source of danger to Americans. It was a threat to US interests since Saddam never gave up his agenda. And since his regime taught hate and incited violence it was a threat to the US |
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Teufelswacht
Joined: 06 Sep 2004
Location: Land Of The Not Quite Right
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 6:06 am Post subject: |
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For me the definition of a "threat" is not nearly as important as the second part of the phrase - "vital interests." This strikes me as a very nebulous phrase that can be morphed to include virtually anything.
Looking around I found an article from a while ago that may be of interest. It is rather long so I am quoting only the first couple of paragraphs here. If these have already been seen, my apologies for the duplication.
The first is from the Guardian Feb. 6, 1999:
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The Western nightmare: Saddam and Bin Laden versus the world
Iraq's half-built chemical arsenal, and the planet's most prolific terrorist - Julian Borger and Ian Black on a marriage made in hell
Saturday February 6, 1999
The Guardian
It must have been a bitterly cold and uncomfortable journey. In the last days of December, a group of Iraqi officials crossed the Hindu Kush border from Pakistan to Afghanistan on their way to keep an appointment deep in the remote eastern mountains.
At the head of the group was a man by the name of Farouk Hijazi, President Saddam Hussein's new ambassador to Turkey and one of Iraq's most senior intelligence officers. He had been sent on one of the most important assignments of his career - to recruit Osama bin Laden.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,798270,00.html
Here is a 1996 editorial from the Jerusalem Post. The link has expired so I am putting the whole piece up. I have highlighted a piece of prophecy and an example of probable missed opportunities.
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OPINION: A DEPRAVED AND DANGEROUS FOE
by Patrick Goodenough
A BBC ASSIGNMENT programme aired last month exposed once again the unpalatable face of Saddam Hussein - his campaign of terror abroad, cruelty against opponents and minorities at home, and, most ominously, his advanced plans to wage non-conventional warfare.
The most grisly footage in the feature SADDAM'S REVENGE showed members of the elite Saddam Fedayeen brigade ripping to pieces live wolves and devouring their still-warm flesh in a bloody orgy worthy of Stephen King. But more shocking even than that was the revelation that Saddam had fooled UN inspectors and successfully hidden from the outside world the alarming growth of his gas and germ warfare programme since the Gulf War.
Anthrax, botulism and the lethal nerve gas, VX, are on Saddam's menu. (Exposure to the skin of a tiny quantity of VX, as Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai warned recently, can kill within seconds. Syria is developing the same unlovely substance, with the help of Russian scientists, according to Mordechai. The manufacture, stockpiling and use of chemical and biological weapons are outlawed by international convention.)
When Arab foreign ministers met in Cairo on September 15, "moving forward the peace process in the face of the Israeli obstinacy" topped the agenda. Despite the heightened tensions in the Gulf at the time - the US had launched missile strikes on Iraqi targets just a fortnight earlier - Saddam's brutality was neither discussed, nor condemned. On the contrary, a communiqué issued afterwards criticised "the interference of others in Iraq's internal affairs". Countries such as Egypt are upgrading their diplomatic relations with Baghdad to full ambassadorial level for the first time since the Gulf War.
Middle Eastern regimes' reluctance to tackle dictators within the Arab family no longer surprises us. But with Saddam's crimes against humanity arguably outdoing any since those perpetrated by Stalin, the West's unwillingness to take concrete steps against him is harder to swallow.
A CIA plot to sponsor a dissident force based in the Kurdish safe haven was blown out the water by Iraqi intelligence infiltration, and the subsequent military invasion of the region. As the American agents scattered, the rebels left behind, along with other alleged anti-Saddam conspirators, faced his wrath.
"Ruthlessly the Iraqi dictator arrested dozens of these plotters," ran one report, "tortured them and massacred those who survived brutalities such as being forced to rape each other. Those no longer able to obey were slowly mutilated before dying."
Aside from the CIA's abortive efforts, two attempts by the US armed forces to punish him for aggression, in 1990 and 1996, also failed miserably. It is generally accepted today that Saddam is stronger than ever.
WRITING in NEWSWEEK in September, former US national-security advisor Brent Scowcroft defended the Bush administration's decision not to destroy Saddam's regime when it had the chance. Doing so would have left the US with the choice of either occupying Iraq, or "creating a gaping power vacuum in the Persian Gulf for Iran to fill".
But has the alternative policy - "dual containment" - worked? Have US attempts to curb Iraq and Iran militarily succeeded in the aim of convincing both - and other would-be Middle East belligerents - that they no longer have a war option? Iraq, judging from the BBC programme, is more dangerous than ever. If evidence before the Iranian dissident murder trial in Berlin, and November's highly critical UN Human Rights Commission report on Iran (see page 2) are anything to go by, it appears Iran too continues to perpetrate terrorism abroad and abuse human rights at home. And other despots in the region, like those in Damascus and Gaza, do not appear to have abandoned the idea of playing the violence card.
Scowcroft goes on to predict that future policy on Iraq "is likely to share the same objectives as the one we have followed since the end of the Gulf War: relegating Saddam to the category of a nuisance and preventing him from re-emerging as a threat to his neighbours or our vital interests".
But with his improved chemical weapons capacity and delivery systems, Saddam without doubt has already re-emerged as "a threat to his neighbours" and to America's "vital interests". If Washington indeed regards him as "a nuisance", rather than as an depraved and dangerous enemy, then this more than anything else highlights the flaws in US Gulf policy.
If Bill Clinton truly wants to be remembered as a president who acted to curb the aggression he so often rails against, a serious reassessment of his handling of Iraq is required. Relieving the pressure on Saddam is not sending the right message.
Unfortunately, it seems as though easing up on Iraq is precisely what Clinton has in mind, if a reported, secret meeting between senior US diplomat Robert Pelletreau and Saddam's son Qusay in Ankara, Turkey on September 18 is anything to go by. According to European diplomatic sources quoted by the Paris-based newspaper AL-WATAN AL-ARABI (October 4), the two discussed stepping up US-Iraqi cooperation. Pelletreau allegedly offered improved relations, on condition Iraq allowed the US at least two military bases on its territory, and collaborated in containing and isolating Iran.
Qusay reportedly said Iraq would expect in return that Washington agree to strengthen the Baghdad regime rather than seek to topple it. Whether a deal was in fact made is unclear, but it is noteworthy that this bartering was taking place just two weeks after US missile strikes against Iraqi targets.
Granted, leaving Saddam in power may hold the advantage of preventing an unknown - and possibly more perilous - situation developing in the Gulf. But in the process, both justice and the innocent suffer.
The man known as the Butcher of Baghdad deserves nothing less than to be overthrown, and put on trial before an international tribunal for his crimes against mankind - not least of all the attempted genocide by poisoning of the Marsh Arabs, the use of gas warfare on Iranians and Kurds, and the amputation of body parts of suspected dissidents in the Iraqi military.
The Bosnian killers wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague simply aren't in the same league.
"Now that the petro-dollars are about to flow again into Saddam's coffers, there will no doubt be new stirrings among those eager to do business with him at any price, like France, Germany and some British companies. No-one begrudges the Iraqi people a little relief from their misery - if they get it - but neither should anyone be surprised if Saddam finds some way to divert the flood of dollars back to the ... mass-destruction industry."
Editorial, The Jerusalem Post, December 12
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I have read in other sources about this meeting that took place in Ankara between the U.S. and Iraqi officials. I cannot find a story where U.S. officials officially denied the reports. Maybe they did and I can't find it. But I guess the deal was never struck.
Anyways, I found these two articles interesting. Especially with the power of 20/20 hindsight. |
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death from above
Joined: 31 Jul 2005
Location: in your head
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 7:18 am Post subject: |
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iraq was not an imminent threat, iraq was a potential threat.
but, then again, your grandmother is potentially a threat to me.. just not a bloody likely one.. anyone is potentially a threat to anyone else.
the war in iraq was sold as an imminent threat. huge difference.. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 7:21 am Post subject: |
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bu your grandmother didn't kill 300,000.
Saddam had a long history. |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 7:52 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Lets see it was a source of danger to Americans. |
The more I look, the more I gotta keep saying this - becuase it is a true fact of history.
Iraq was never a threat to the US.
I can't recall a single American who was killed because of Iraq - I just don't see the source of danger you speak of.
We were TOLD much more, of course, but what we were told turned out not to be true, even admitted as such by those who told us. But it was not not true.
One more time about how the middle east was : however it was it is still that way now, and in most ways it is worse. Therefore the war was wrong. We need to get oiut ... if we love our country
Last edited by The Bobster on Thu Aug 18, 2005 8:14 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 8:04 am Post subject: |
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| The Bobster wrote: |
| One more time about how the middle east was : however it was, it is still that way now, and in most ways it is worse. Therefore the war was wrong. |
I agree.
Is the country, the region, America, and the rest of world better off now than with a declawed and contained Hussein?
No, I don't think so.
On the face of it US/UK/Spanish/Australian etc. action in Iraq was at best misguided and has made things worse.
Perhaps time will tell and in the long run it will be seen as having been the right decision, but I strongly doubt it.
Nevertheless, what's infinitely worse than having gone in and messing up the country is simply pulling up stakes and leaving- the US needs to stay and at least attempt a handover to an Iraqi civilian govt. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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The more I look, the more I gotta keep saying this - becuase it is a true fact of history.
Iraq was never a threat to the US.
I can't recall a single American who was killed because of Iraq - I just don't see the source of danger you speak of. |
Someone has been listening to Micheal Moore
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| That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.) |
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
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| We were TOLD much more, of course, but what we were told turned out not to be true, even admitted as such by those who told us. But it was not not true. |
Don't you mean that Michael Moore said stuff that isn't true?
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| One more time about how the middle east was : however it was it is still that way now, and in most ways it is worse. Therefore the war was wrong. We need to get oiut ... if we love our country |
How could it get worse ?
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Al-Qaeda camps 'trained 70,000'
Thousands are said to have joined al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan
Some 70,000 people received weapons training and religious instruction in al-Qaeda camps, German police say |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4146969.stm
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Biden and another top U.S. lawmaker, Republican Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) of Arizona, said it's premature for the United States to begin plans for withdrawing troops from Iraq.
"The day that I can land at the airport in Baghdad and ride in an unarmed car down the highway to the Green Zone is the day that I'll start considering withdrawals from Iraq," said McCain, referring to the heavily fortified area where U.S. and Iraqi government headquarters are located.
"We not only don't need to withdraw, we need more troops there," he said on Fox News Sunday. |
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050814/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iraq
I guess these guys don't love the US.  |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:44 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Of course Jeff Rense is a 9-11 conspriacy theorists as well as being a holocaust denier. |
Whatever Rense truly "IS" one thing we can confidentally say is that, unlike yourself, he ain't no perpetual anti-conspiracy fanatic or politically correct holocaust industry shill.
Oh yah, based on what he writes he's obviously a much better speller as well ...  |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
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The more I look, the more I gotta keep saying this - becuase it is a true fact of history.
Iraq was never a threat to the US.
I can't recall a single American who was killed because of Iraq - I just don't see the source of danger you speak of. |
Someone has been listening to Micheal Moore |
Michael mMoore is okay with me. He's got an opinion and so do I. And so do you. In America, we can listen to opinions and decide for ourselves what is good and what is not.
I'm okay with Michael Moore, but YOU are VERY okay with pulling his name out of no place at all, thinking you can put mud on my face with just that and nothing more. Just as you recently did the same toward the mother of a dead Amercan soldier by comparing one or two statements she made with some VERY racist statements perpetuallu made by a prominent Klansman.
You want people to think I believe everything Michael Moore say, the fact is I just think he has the right to say it and ask people to think about it. You want people to think Michael Moore does not love America, and therefore anyone who agrees with part of what he says does not her as well ... and you have no hesitation to do the same thing by smearing a woman in the midst of grief that will never end by associating her with an avowed racist.
Yes, you did that. And you have no remorse.
Bulsajo said :
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Is the country, the region, America, and the rest of world better off now than with a declawed and contained Hussein?
No, I don't think so. |
The voice of reason. Truer words are seldom spoken ... |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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Don't worry Joo, I've got this one.
(Ahem)
70000 trained in Al-Qaeda camps in the 90s
Hussein never gave up his war.
He thought you could fight the US and live to fight another day.
Hussein often had dreams about possessing big weapons like he used to.
Again and again
After 9-11 we had to change that
Done! |
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