Does the fact that we still have crime mean that our present approach to crime and punishment is defective? In the interest of preventing further strawmen of Noam Chomskys positions, here is an interview that lays it all out. Feel free to disagree, but disagree with what he's actually said, not some opponents distortion.
Al Qaeda, among others. Who else? Where have you been for the past decade? When they give up, or we do. Or maybe it will never be over. Since when does such an ending requirement disqualify something from being a war? The overwhelming majority of wars in history have been like that. This whole post-Westphalian approach of "I beat your army, you surrender, I get the Rhineland, war over" is the exception, and one that was already showing its age before the events in question here. Sure. Why wouldn't it? Good thing we didn't do that, either, then. You may recall that this is new territory that doesn't fit into existing paradigms. Hence all of the difficult and problematic considerations about how to proceed. Again, what planet have you been on for the past 10 years? Except that they were very explicit about what their expectations were, and this wasn't it. Although, they are the types to make a lot of inconsistent claims about their expectations, so as to always be in a position to claim that everything is going as expected. To which: the way you guage whether you're winning a war is not by measuring the extent to which enemy expectations are being met. You guage that by actual material war progress. Doing the exact opposite of what we think Al Qaeda wants us to do, binds us to their desires just as strongly and perversely. Defeating an enemy is not about simply defying their expectations. By typing sentences doing just that. You're going to have to advance an actual argument that the comparison was invalid, or otherwise failed to make the point in question, if you want to impress anyone. As it is, you're clearly just covering for the fact that you have no response and don't wish to admit it.
Not a valid analogy. If we had a situation where crime was growing in severity and scope more quickly than we could apprehend and try criminals then, yes, that would likewise indicate a serious problem in our approach to crime and punishment.
But I would maintain that there will always be terrorist attacks, no matter what our response to them. And I certainly don't believe that invading Iraq has made us safer from terror attacks.
And there will always be crime, no matter what our response to that. All of which just goes to the obvious point that the responses aren't predicated only permanently, totally eradicating the problem in question. They're ways of managing such to keep them from getting out of hand. And to that, let's note the absence of large, effective terrorist attacks in the USA since the USA pursued an explicit strategy of using military power to degrade and destroy the capabilities of said terrorist groups to stage large, effective attacks in the USA. It isn't exactly rocket science to note that if Al Qaeda is spending most of its time and resources evading US pressure, then they'll have a difficult time staging attacks that require extensive planning and logistics (such as Sept. 11). Or, to take the cheap, object-lesson road: I would maintain that there will always be war, no matter what our response to such. So why should you bother complaining about it, and why should anyone care? Did someone here argue that it did? I certainly didn't. Why are you addressing this tangent to me? Or, again, to take the reciprocal cheap road: I certainly don't believe that eating babies for breakfast is morally acceptable.
You have to admit that could easily be a post hoc fallacy (rock, tiger, "Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock."). One thing we have learned is that the next terrorist attack will be different than the last. IMO (which may matter to no one but me), our best security would come from co-operating with the international community, adhering to international law, and treating criminal matters in a criminal fashion. I don't believe that the attackers "hated us for our freedom", and addressing some of the justified grievances that other people around the world have towards the US would go a long way in reducing the likelihood of major terrorist attacks. Treating others around the world in a fair and even handed manner would very probably erode support for terrorist attacks. I'm certainly glad (just to give a couple of examples) that Nicaraguans and Vietnamese don't seem to be holding any grudges against us. Has there ever been an open and honest discussion in this country about why we were attacked, and what we might realistically do to reduce the motives in the future (is it even possible to have this discussion)? To give credit where credit is due, I was pleasantly surprised that the Bush administration removed almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia in 2003. I was trying to steer this discussion back towards Iraq.
Not really - or not taken in appropriate context, anyway. We have indeed seen various attacks attempted or learned of plans for such, and so can infer much about the capabilities and strategy of the enemy, and how that has been affected by the military situation, from that. Not to mention the various other intelligence sources. And that is exactly the point - to deny enemies the safe haven they need to conduct planning- and logistics-intensive spectacular attacks on the other side of the world. To have these guys spending their time setting off car bombs in Pakistan instead, is exactly the point. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were undertaken with strong, near-unanimous support and cooperation from the international community, and clearly approved under the relevant international laws. You must be thinking of something else. However: whence the insistence that Al Qaeda is necessarily a criminal - and not paramilitary or politico-military - organization? To insist on treating criminal matters purely as an issue of law enforcement and jurisprudence begs the question of what is a criminal matter, and what is a political matter, etc. And, interestingly, none of the proponents of such an approach here ever seem to present any analysis of that question; they just start from a naked insistence that Sept. 11 was a purely criminal - not military or geopolitical - action, and proceed from there. So, how about it? What differentiates a simple criminal act from an act of war? How do we recognize the difference, and why does Sept. 11 in particular fall on the one side of that line? Meanwhile: you realize the Bush is no longer president, right? That Obama is all about working with the international community and so on? Why do you keep addressing the situation as if it's 2004 or something? Did I say somewhere that I did? If you want to have a debate with George W. Bush, I suggest that you try contacting him. I'm only answerable to assertions that I've actually made. But let's stop for a second and note that said attackers most certainly hate certain of our freedoms: freedom of religion, equality between the sexes, gay rights, etc. are all things that they openly, venomously despise. They have made this very clear, repeatedly. I reject the implication that terrorist attacks are justified by whatever grievances, and that said terrorists are somehow legitimate representatives of normal people with legitimate grievances. Terrorists are using said grievances as a pretense, and thereby doing them a disservice. Legitimate grievances from reasonable people can and should be addressed - but this has little to do with terrorism, since reasonable people don't seek redress of their grievances in that manner. Terrorism is all about illegitimate grievances from unreasonable people. Nobody reasonable supports terrorist attacks in the first place, and the point of the policy response is not to address said "support," but to materially impede the attacks themselves. So that the reasonable people can have a chance to deal reasonably with one another. Notice that they never pursued terrorism against the USA, even in the midst of open warfare over said issues. This illustrates, again, the lack of connection between legitimate political grievance and terrorism. Many people there do indeed hold grudges against the USA. They just aren't terrorist shitheads, and so don't think that entitles them to blow up random people. Sure. And let's note that the hard-left insistence on making that discussion all about self-flagellation is just as corrosive to meaningful analysis as the hard-right insistence on making it all about chest-thumping. Just as "they hate our freedoms" is an inadequate explanation, so is "we deserved it and they're basically right." ... by moving them into Iraq, thereby playing out exactly the grievance against said troops' presence in the first place (that they were using Saudi Arabia as a base to invade and occupy other Arab lands). Not something I'd applaud, if I were you. What for? Because it's easier ground for your chosen rhetorical posture? How about we debate something actually pertinent, instead of endlessly relitigating actions that are almost a decade old, undertaken by an administration already out of office? You realize that I opposed invading Iraq as much as anyone back in 2003, right? What is the fucking point? Just to advertize what a special moral snowflake you are, or what?
I'm not sure that applies to war. It might be unreasonable to apply the same standards of evidence. As far as I'm concerned, if a person expresses jihadist sentiments, they should be killed. Bin Laden deserved death for his videos alone.
You know, destabilizing Pakistan, with the risk of nuclear weapons ending up in the worst possible hands seems like a very risky proposition. No matter what happens, we aren't going to repeal the law of unintended consequences. Perhaps it's hidebound thinking on my part, but I think of wars as disputes between states. I see the difference between what happened in Oklahoma City in 1995, and the WTC attacks as that of scale, not of kind. But I didn't see those who tried to understand the motives of Timothy McVeigh get attacked as terrorist sympathizers (and FFS, I'm not accusing you of doing that, but you know it happened). I think the actors of both atrocities had terrible motives, and terminally flawed world views. This thread began as a discussion of whether or not Bush 43 is a war criminal, and moved on to whether or not various Sciforums members felt the invasion was the correct thing to do. Reasonable people can become unreasonable due to circumstances. I don't think the millions around the world who admire members of Al Queada are sub human. I think they are misguided, and some of them have let legitimate grievances drive them to either support, or engage in, terrorist activities. Our terrorism is their asymmetric warfare. Otherizing them as terrorist shitheads helps nothing. Some of them are no doubt beyond all reason. I can imagine, had I been born in the right place at the right time, I might have become a terrorist. I can certainly imagine feeling so angry and helpless that a suicide attack might seem justified. Millions of Muslims world over viewed the presence of infidels soldiers in Saudi Arabia as an affront. Though I think their religion is dogmatic nonsense, needlessly instigating them is a terrible idea. As far as our propping up the house of Saud goes... I think we're in for a rough ride. Because that was the original intent of the thread. As far as the point goes, what is the point of any discussion on a Pointless Internet Argument Forum? Isn't it to try and understand opposing viewpoints, and test the strengths of your arguments? I don't give a shit what you, or anyone else reading this thinks of me. I've had to examine my notions of what constitutes war as a result of this discussion. And, as I'm always ready to admit, I could be wrong about everything I've said. So what? Check your ego at the door, along with your coat.
Spidergoat, seriously, what? There are thousands of Muslim kids on jihadi forums that express those kinds of sentiments. I wouldn't mind giving them a punch in the face for their admiration of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (or whoever), or for posting videos of IED attacks on convoys, but execution? There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Muslims who do believe this is a war against Islam. And events like this aren't helping. You and I know that the people at that rally are narrow minded shitheads that don't represent more than a tiny minority of Americans, but many people around the world aren't going to know that.
ah some one who gets it. the concept that people do things for reasons not always good ones or reasonable ones but reasons none the less. and understanding those reasons is the keys to stopping or helping certain events from happening.
congrats you on the same moral level as bin laden you both think its ok to kill people for their beliefs. if bin laden deserves to die for his ideas well yours are the same as his when do you die? oh that's right you don't because your hate and bigotry unlike his is righteous and ok and but you really are better than them.
I accept their wrath, they just can't share the planet with me. They are the ones talking all apocalyptic, with their cozy heavens to look forward to. I would encourage those not within our jurisdiction to just take their own lives, it saves us a lot of trouble and expense.
The implication that Pakistan could be fairly described as "stable" absent this intervention, needs a lot of justification. There is, in fact, a very real possibility that Pakistan would be a lot less stable, absent the billions we've been pumping in every year to prop them up. It's suggested that such has been the only thing staving off military and economic (and so, social and political) collapse there. There are lots of downsides and risks to every plan of action, or inaction. Yet, Pakistan is still standing, and guarding its nukes, a decade later. It isn't like the policy-makers in question are unaware of this issue, or doing nothing to address said risks. Frankly, the status quo ante wherein Pakistan was waging wars with India and openly allied to the Taliban amounted to their nukes being closer to being in the wrong hands, than they are now. But the fact of the matter is that Pakistan is likely to implode eventually regardless of what the USA does or doesn't do. It's a fundamentally unstable state, to begin with. It would be a mistake to subsume all strategic decisions to some overwhelming fear of Pakistani nuclear blackmail. Best everyone just hide under their beds and cower in fear of the unforeseen, then. There is no such restriction in the definition of war. Except that in one case you have a couple of kooks blowing up a building, and in the other you have an organized paramilitary with a recognized command structure publicly declaring war on the USA and then recruiting, training and deploying multiple attack teams along with international logistics. To argue it another way: you could as well argue that Oklahoma City 1995 differed from the 2003 invasion of Iraq only in scale, and not in kind. It's all just people killing other people over politics, right? If you aren't accusing me of that, then what is the relevance to our discussion here? But I haven't seen people sympathize with McVeigh's motivations the way I've seen people sympathize with those of Al Qaeda (or various Palestinian terror groups, etc.). People have this tendency to project a lot onto Al Qaeda ("This validates what I've always said about Israel/oil politics/neoliberalism/globalization/development/Islam/etc.!"). I haven't seen people get attacked for merely understanding the motives of the groups - people make successful book careers out of that pursuit. There's a real issue of people doing the former, and calling it the latter when criticized for it. But unless you have some actual concrete examples, there's little to address here. Your own generic ideation of who got what criticism and why is not something I'm answerable to. McVeigh's motives don't strike me as particularly terrible. Nor do the basic parts of Al Qaeda's (the fuck-off-foreigners part, short of the whole fundamentalist state they espouse, that is). The problem in both cases is that they grant themselves license to blow up random people over their causes. And by the time they reach that point, they have left the confines of reason and legitimacy, and are rightly combatted with force. It's no different than a personal dispute that escalates into violence. Once the other guy is punching you in the face, the time for calm intellectualism is over. Maybe you can get back there, but not without engaging physically first. That's not to say you have to beat him into submission, but you do have to defeat his attempt to impose his will on you by force, before you can get into a situation where issues are resolved without force. Note that, in both cases, the resort to violence is deplorable exactly because it closes off the option of peaceful, reasoned resolution to the other party. Horseshit. Terrorism is the employment of terror for political ends. Using IEDs to blow up US military vehicles in Iraq: that's asymmetrical warfare. Crashing planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians: that's terrorism under any sensible definition. Sure it does. In the first place, it's accurate. In the second place, said terrorists don't represent any issues that aren't elsewhere represented more legitimately by reasonable people. Except for the terrorist shithead issue, of course - but that's something correctly responded to with force. Except the suicide attackers in Sept. 11 weren't desperate or repressed. They were upper-middle-class educated types, with stable, safe homes, good marriage prospects, etc. They did not look out of place jetting around the world to study at expensive universities in Europe, etc. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and the other leaders are all upper-class privileged types from well-to-do, politically connected families. Revolutionary terrorism is a bourgeoise pursuit, and always has been. Poor repressed people are typically too busy taking care of their families to do asinine things like blow up random Americans over some navel-gazing beef about the world order. The self-flagellating liberal conceit that terrorists must represent an outlet for a poor underclass is just that: these guys are the neo-Nazis and KKK reactionaries of their respective societies, not some kind of armed civil rights movement. Then they should have taken that up with the government of Saudi Arabia which explicitly approved and supported said presence. And maybe stopped to ask themselves what right they have to dictate such political matters in countries thousands of miles away, to begin with. At some point, unrealistic expectations are just that. To establish positions in a social power hierarchy. No. I don't believe that.
I was off sick yesterday, but this is too much like work. I'll leave the carpal tunnel to you and Tiassa. You win Quad - PM me your address, and I'll send you a cookie. It'll just be in an envelope, so it'll probably be nothing but crumbs by the time you get it.
I did want to reply to this bit though: To establish positions in a social power hierarchy. Perhaps for you, but not for me. I don't know anyone IRL that I can regularly talk about politics or religion with, so I come online. My position in any social hierarchy here is irrelevant. I don't expect my opinions to matter to anyone, and I expect that they don't.
Nonsense, the regional balance of power was kept in check by Iran and other local considerations. There is no evidence for an Iranian nuke program, yet the Western mainstream media hypes this up as if it were fact. As were Saddam`s WMD during the sexing up phase. Crippling sanctions had emasculated Iraq by early 2003. Of course. However this can be limited via the lessons of history and the pursuance of civilization. Are you stating that non military avenues of dialogue & diplomacy are risible? IMO, whats risible are the countless and pointless Iraqi civilian casualties. I have no doubt that in the fullness of time, the historic record on Bush, Blair & Co. will stand as the the war criminals they are. Spare me. Of course one would have to seriously consider the implication - that this foreign intervention, supported and armed said dictator before swapping sides. You mean the AU, Russia, China, etc who spoke out against a military resolution? Or do you mean the regular client state despots? Do you see any other country marketing and exporting war and mayhem on a even remotely similar industrial scale? The facts speak for themselves. I am far from alone in identifying an evil. Nonsense, one needs to separate the chaff from the wheat. There is plenty wrong with the world today, sadly IMO the source to a considerable portion thereof can be easily identified. :m:
Only 1 reason: The Saudis. The Kuwaiti royal family are cousins to the Saudi Royal family. Imagine what it would be like if Sadam invaded California, ran around raping and torturing people for days on end, and then an international force repelled him, and America had to just let it go because he surrendered. That's what Desert Shield was like to them. The Saudis owned GW. They funded his whole campaign through shell companies (sometimes being very obvious about it). He owed them their vengeance. Actually, he can unilaterally start a war. He's got 60 days to get approval after he launches the attack, but all he has to do is lose a few soldiers in that time and the approval is pretty much guaranteed. Few congressman would vote to withdraw after an American soldier has given his/her life for the cause already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution That's only because he was already dead. Pretty much every other major member of the Nazi party they could find was indicted.
