 |
|  Themissinglint Registered Member
 Date Joined Apr 2003 Total Posts : 2 | Posted 4/8/2003 9:13 PM (GMT -6) |   | Looking through the forums here, I was struck by the absence of any arguments opposed to the war. I find this perplexing, as I, personally, can find no justification, or even a valid reason for US presence in Iraq.
So I figured I might speak out, and try to get a debate going. I'll be back daily (hopefully) to respond, hopefully there will be some in-depth arguments on either side.
Here are some quick points, if you need something to work off of, but feel free to post any argument for or against the war.
-The war has already killed 877-1050 Iraqi civilians unjustifiably. -According to the CIA, the war on Iraq will increase, terrorism in the US. -The war has strained our relations with the international community. -The war is unlikely to produce any improvement for the Iraqi people -"Liberation" of Iraq serves as an excuse to position more troops in the Middle East, endangering the liberty and autonomy of nearby states. -The war is being used as an excuse for new acts limiting our civil liberties and as a diversion to the failing economy and deflating budget. -The war is causing American casualties. -The war does not meet the conditions of the "Powell Doctrine." -The war does not meet St. Augustine's conditions for a just war.
I'll try to provide credible evidence and deeper analysis for any these points upon request. Also, if you use articles or other evidence, please explain what points you are using it to make or refute.
I'm also very willing to defend my patriotism, if anyone finds it questionable.
Isaac §. | | Back to Top | | |
 |  honorman Registered Member
 Date Joined Oct 2002 Total Posts : 1137 | Posted 4/9/2003 6:03 AM (GMT -6) |   | Where have you been? While I don't agree with the arguments, it is disingenuious of you to make such a statement. There have been many on this site who have attempted to give arguments as to why they oppose the war. It is quite possible that you are mistaking the weakness of the overall opposition of the war with the posting of the argument itself. Regardless you really need to take a look around this site a little better...
| | Back to Top | | |
 |  gregw Registered Member
 Date Joined Jun 2001 Total Posts : 47 | Posted 4/10/2003 3:54 AM (GMT -6) |   | I started a reply and then stopped. Now I am back, I just have to say something in reply to Themissinglint's comment that there is no justification for the war. I sat this morning with tears welling up in my eyes at the sight of the joy of the people of Bagdad. They are free from the tyrannical and sadistic presence of Saddam and his sons. There is freedom from the fear of torture if they breathed wrong in the presence of one of his henchmen. There is freedom from poverty even as SH lived in oppulance. Beyond all of this, there seems to be truth to the idea that this war is only finishing the war that was left undone 12 years ago. After a complete rout of his forces, we wrested control of Kuwait back from SH, but unfortunately we left the ruthless dictator in control. He has thumbed his arrogant nose at the international community and has violated every one of the agreements that he agreed to.
Regarding some of your points: -Civilian casualties are an unfortunate byproduct of war. Fortunately our troops are a humane bunch and there have been thousands of enemy combatants killed rather than civilians. -There has been no increase in terrorism here in the U.S. -We have long needed to stand up to the international community. So what if "relations have been strained."
I do not have time to respond to your other points, hopefully someone else will.
Victory is almost at hand and may we all be thankful that there has been a low number of casualties among our forces.
Greg Woodard http://www.usfamily.net/web/gv.woodard | | Back to Top | | |
 |  honorman Registered Member
 Date Joined Oct 2002 Total Posts : 1137 | Posted 4/10/2003 8:13 AM (GMT -6) |   | GregW: I agree. So what is relations are strained. Sometimes one has to do what is right, regardless of what others think. And when has France been at the forefront of doing what is right?
| | Back to Top | | |
 |  SeanG Registered Member
 Date Joined Dec 2002 Total Posts : 278 | Posted 4/10/2003 8:55 PM (GMT -6) |   | The war has already killed 877-1050 Iraqi civilians unjustifiably. The U. N. said 500,000 were going to die. Not only that, but we are not targeting civilians, unlike Saddam’s regime, or soon to be ex-regime. The above figure is very good considering that they were accidental… the war for Normandy was calculated to kill 14,000 innocent civilians. My question for you is where have you been before this? I was for regime change the first go-around… were you? Why have you not been protesting Saddam's jail for children or the fact that he tortures children in front of their parents in order to keep control of his empire? All accounts agree that if Saddam were to die a natural death with the sanctions still in place and inspectors running around, his two sons would take over, and we know they are more dangerous and violent than their father is. How long do Iraqi Women and Children have to suffer from the intentional torture and rape that Saddam sanctions?According to the CIA, the war on Iraq will increase, terrorism in the US. Just a few excerpts from Osama’s letter to the United States on why he (and others) are attacking us… if you want a clear case for the war on Iraq, read Kenneth Pollack’s book The Threatening Storm. He is a former CIA analyst and National Security Council Adviser, and is probably more familiar with the inner-workings of Iraq than anyone else.quote: “…You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator….”
“…the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense…”
…[t]he religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them - peace be upon them all. It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions…”
“…that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention….”
“…[t]he freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only…”
“…[w]e also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines…”
Spain made a connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq about a month ago. And, in a training camp found a few days ago, not only Al-Qaeda connections, but also Palestinian terrorist groups, as well as others. Keep in mind, Al-Qaeda is not responsible for other people, or holding a government together. It is not a nation-state. It is a group of troublemakers who have the freedom to be completely unaccountable to anyone. This makes them a far greater threat and a group unable to be bargained with. We have no leverage. We can only destroy them. After reading the above and believing that there is a peaceable way out for America in this day and age, you are self-deluded. As Machiavelli once wrote: “It's easy to be a pacifist when you are not responsible for anyone's life.” George Bush is responsible for 280 million lives. Nothing we could do would pacify these psychopaths.The war has strained our relations with the international community. Who is this? We have more nations backing us in this action than the first Gulf War? The French? The Germans? Russia? I wouldn’t want to be close to these virulently anti-American nations that are more concerned about their ideologue (Iraq) than helping the people caught in the socialist web of controlling the masses. Do you know that almost all the countries that were in the grips of the U.S.S.R. have sided with us, because they understand what it is like to be under such a brutal regime, and they thank Reagan every day for not listening to those millions of pacifist European anti-war protestors and went ahead and placed those Pershing II missiles all along the iron curtain. Gorbachev mentioned that this was one of the biggest actions by America that brought the wall down.The war is unlikely to produce any improvement for the Iraqi people It already has? You know those reports about water and power not working in the major cities, or dysentery and the like. Except for Baghdad, almost all the major cities have been like that for years. It is only now that our Army engineers are getting into those cities and starting to get everything back on. I hope you really don’t mean what you just said!? Man.
The war is being used as an excuse for new acts limiting our civil liberties and as a diversion to the failing economy and deflating budget. Boss man, the economy was in a spiral all the way down long before Bush took office. This is just plain fact. I would love for you to push this point, please. Also, I am one who believes the stock market, much like dot-coms, is way over inflated.The war is causing American casualties. If that plane had hit that building 20 minutes later, we would have had almost 50,000 dead Americans. Would you be for rooting out these terrorist networks then? Doubtful.quote: the idea advanced by some "Western elites" that Arabs are not capable of responsible self-government is surely not proven by an experiment in imported Fascism/Communism from Europe. This point doesn't seem to make it into the light of day often enough. In fact, since many of the world's famous Communist leaders have been educated in Paris, and brought their evil French Communism Boutique ideas back to their home countries, and just about all of them are now dead or deposed, one could make the point that much of the blame for exporting evil rests squarely at the feet of the French elites. Because ideas surely do, in actual fact, have consequences. I wonder just how many millions have suffered around the world due to a bunch of radical eggheads sitting in French coffee houses in, say, the 1920s?
I would blame the French before our boys in Iraq right now. Remember, the French didn’t ask for the U.N.’s or worlds opinion before putting troops into the Ivory Coast? Are they demanding something different for them than us? Or is it because France, Germany, and Russian were selling military parts and weapons to the Iraqis just weeks prior to us going into Iraq – against the United Nations decree mind you. or is it also that Iraq owes millions and millions in loans to these countries for just that? I think so.

| | Back to Top | | |
 |  gregw Registered Member
 Date Joined Jun 2001 Total Posts : 47 | Posted 4/11/2003 10:05 AM (GMT -6) |   | I don't know if this quote really fits here, but here is a quote cited by http://www.instapundit.com:
THE 'PEACE MOVEMENT' didn't get the oceans of civilian blood it wanted, and William Saletan notes that this poses a dilemma:
Some argued that war was always immoral; others argued that this war was hasty or unjust. All agreed that the immorality of war was based on the immorality of killing. Now that Baghdad has fallen, here’s my question to peaceniks: Are you against killing, or are you against war? Because what happened in Iraq suggests you may have to choose.
Greg Woodard http://www.usfamily.net/web/gv.woodard
Edited by - gregw on 04/14/2003 2:58:29 PM | | Back to Top | | |
 |  SeanG Registered Member
 Date Joined Dec 2002 Total Posts : 278 | Posted 4/11/2003 2:17 PM (GMT -6) |   | Good quote GregW
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html?ei=5062&en=ea21e8c88feae21c&ex=1050638400&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=top
quote:
ATLANTA — Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

| | Back to Top | | |
 |  gregw Registered Member
 Date Joined Jun 2001 Total Posts : 47 | Posted 4/14/2003 6:55 AM (GMT -6) |   | | | |
 |  SeanG Registered Member
 Date Joined Dec 2002 Total Posts : 278 | Posted 4/14/2003 7:52 AM (GMT -6) |   | Hey Everyone,
I am going on a ten-day/eleven-night cruise (my wife works for Princess Cruises) with my wife and kids as of Tuesday. So I am packing now and will respond to your queries after we get back from our trip and I get caught up on laundry, shopping, and un-packing (I am a house husband). I am going to print out your current responses now and meditate on them over the trip. I hope all your days are going to go as well as mine. Anti-Americanism is on the rise in Mexico, and some European countries, so I look forward to some lively debates on the ship and on shore excursions about our policy with Iraq. The three books I am bringing on the trip to read are:The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission. The authors are usually rivals in the political world, as one is the editor of a liberal political magazine, The New Republic, the other an editor of the conservative political magazine, The Weekly Standard. I am almost done with this book.
The second book, Fast Facts on Defending Your Faith, is a quick read with the Christian apologist in mind. Your basic issues involved with the Christian worldview vs. the world, like: How do I know that Jesus is the Son of God? Does it matter if Jesus was resurrected from the dead? What about all the other world religions – don’t they offer a way to God? Does it matter what I believe, as long as I am sincere? What proof is there that the Bible is divinely inspired? Etc.
The third book, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists. This book traces the materialist and intelligent design argument throughout history… tracing materialism all the way to Epicurus. I won’t finish this book, as it is a heavy read. But I will get a chunk out of the way while I am sipping on margaritas on a white sand beaches in Mexico. Also, most Westerners disappear in Mazatlan, one of our stops. I have heard of some streets (beyond the main tourist streets) that have 1,000’s of missing and wanted posters hung and stapled all over the place. I am going to leave the family at one of the beaches and travel up to this area – not recommended – and take some photos. I will have a copy of the Communist Manifesto on me just in case I get harassed by the many Marxist Revolutionaries that hang out in Mazatlan, as I am very well read in this subject (and very capable of handling myself – I have a very rough background), so I can B.S. my way out of most situations, even geo-political ones.
I look forward to picking up the convo when I get back ladies and gents! SeanG

Edited by - SeanG on 04/14/2003 12:54:01 PM | | Back to Top | | |
 |  DLW Registered Member
 Date Joined Apr 2003 Total Posts : 2457 | Posted 4/15/2003 6:15 AM (GMT -6) |   | Dear Isaac(Themissinglint),
Some of your facts posted at the beginning are very dubious and much subject to debate since they rest on future contingencies that we could not know about.
For example, I told my students(I teach in MX, Economics) that whether or not the war could be justified depended on its length/death-toll and how the post-war situation is set up and that there was a fair amount of uncertainty at the beginning regarding both of these. This is still true for the post-war situation. Now the removal of the Baath regime in Iraq may open up opportunities for Christianity to make inroads in the middle-east, but it is far from a fore-gone conclusion and that should be the ultimate goal that we have.
As such, I think it is of paramount importance that we make sure the Bush Administration does right by Iraq, like we did with Germany and Japan after WWII, instead of turning inward now that the war is over. I would also say that we could likewise do a much better job ensuring the long-run stability of Afghanistan.
But my major point is that it will only be through showing a willingness to suffer on behalf of the well-being of muslims, that Christians will have the opportunity to share about their faith with Muslims.
dlw
Prayer from Kenya
From the Arrogance that dare not face new truth, From the Laziness that is contented with half-truth, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Lord Deliver Me. | | Back to Top | | |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 4:24 PM (GMT -6) There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads. In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3 dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|