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liberalogic said:Just to make it clear-- I DO NOT think we should "cut and run" from Iraq...I think the entire war was unjustified and has been terribly mishandled, but cutting and running would be counterproductive and make us come across as weak, just as you imply...I couldn't agree with you more.
And also it is true that they hate us because we were born, but our invasion of an Islamic country certainly doesn't make us appear to be better. If it did, why are we still being attacked by insurgents in Iraq? They're attacking us because we are there-- the same would happen in Iran.
If military action does take place, it would be nice to have international support for this cause-- I would hope that we can agree on that.
dilloduck said:http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html
Check out the chart of the percentage of damage to the 67 napalmed cites.
LuvRPgrl said:What is most interesting is they didnt surrender after that.
Although I have a difficult time with bombing civilians, I would rather their civilians die than our soldiers.
Fact is, after the initial bombings by Americans, the responsability lays squarely with the japs leadership. They simply should have surrenedered.
Consider even after all that firebombing, they didnt surrender. Imagine if we had to invade on land, the casualties.
Even further still, something I rarely, if ever hear.
EVEN AFTER THE ATOMIC BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA, they didnt SURRENDER!!!!!
It took nagasaki to get them to their senses.
dilloduck said:Aren't there several ways to stop him or are nukes the only answer?
Bonnie said:Sure but Im not confidant that the UN is going to do anything consructive. Don't know how sanctions would work if imposed. Iran doesn't seem to care much about what the world is asking and what the world is threatening, so Im not convinced anything much will work other than taking out their reactors. What can we hang over their heads to get a positive result?
If you are suggesting an orchestrated coup, maybe, but I hope if that's in the works it happens soon.
The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented
By Niall Ferguson
(Filed: 15/01/2006)
Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East:
With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.
The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.
A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure.
This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.
This not only gave Islamic societies a youthful energy that contrasted markedly with the slothful senescence of Europe. It also signified a profound shift in the balance of world population. In 1950, there had three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995, the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain and was forecast to be 50 per cent higher by 2050.
Yet people in the West struggled to grasp the implications of this shift. Subliminally, they still thought of the Middle East as a region they could lord it over, as they had in the mid-20th century.
The third and perhaps most important precondition for war was cultural. Since 1979, not just Iran but the greater part of the Muslim world had been swept by a wave of religious fervour, the very opposite of the process of secularisation that was emptying Europe's churches.
Although few countries followed Iran down the road to full-blown theocracy, there was a transformation in politics everywhere. From Morocco to Pakistan, the feudal dynasties or military strongmen who had dominated Islamic politics since the 1950s came under intense pressure from religious radicals.
The ideological cocktail that produced 'Islamism' was as potent as either of the extreme ideologies the West had produced in the previous century, communism and fascism. Islamism was anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic. A seminal moment was the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intemperate attack on Israel in December 2005, when he called the Holocaust a 'myth'. The state of Israel was a 'disgraceful blot', he had previously declared, to be wiped 'off the map'.
Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America's closest regional ally.
Under different circumstances, it would not have been difficult to thwart Ahmadinejad's ambitions. The Israelis had shown themselves capable of pre-emptive air strikes against Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981. Similar strikes against Iran's were urged on President Bush by neo-conservative commentators throughout 2006. The United States, they argued, was perfectly placed to carry out such strikes. It had the bases in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It had the intelligence proving Iran's contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been discredited by the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had supposedly possessed and by the failure of the US-led coalition to quell a bloody insurgency.
Americans did not want to increase their military commitments overseas; they wanted to reduce them. Europeans did not want to hear that Iran was about to build its own WMD. Even if Ahmad-inejad had broadcast a nuclear test live on CNN, liberals would have said it was a CIA con-trick.
So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China's veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals.
Only one man might have stiffened President Bush's resolve in the crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet he had been struck down by a stroke as the Iranian crisis came to a head. With Israel leaderless, Ahmadinejad had a free hand.
As in the 1930s, too, the West fell back on wishful thinking. Perhaps, some said, Ahmadinejad was only sabre-rattling because his domestic position was so weak. Perhaps his political rivals in the Iranian clergy were on the point of getting rid of him. In that case, the last thing the West should do was to take a tough line; that would only bolster Ahmadinejad by inflaming Iranian popular feeling. So in Washington and in London people crossed their fingers, hoping for the deus ex machina of a home-grown regime change in Teheran.
This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran.
The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself in the Middle East. Both sides would threaten war - and then both sides would blink. That was Secretary Rice's hope - indeed, her prayer - as she shuttled between the capitals. But it was not to be.
The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.
Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org
A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure.
Bonnie said:This one in particular is chilling to me. Would support the argument that Democracy in the Middle East is to our advantage.
LuvRPgrl said:some good points.
However, the terrorists are not attacking us because we are there.
They attacked us when we were here, 9/11. They have bombed Bali, london, Spain and recently Jordan. Kinda blows up that theory.
Bush was brilliant in taking the war to their soil instead of here. Hence no terrorist attacks since 9/11.
liberalogic said:I see what you're saying, but at the same time the insurgents that I'm specifically referring to are attacking in Iraq. The insurgents are attacking us in Iraq because we are in Iraq.
We can probably debate about the Iraq war, but that would probably go on forever. I'll say this though: I would feel a lot more comfortable if we found Bin Laden first before going into Iraq. With or without Saddam's WMDs, I see Bin Laden as a much bigger threat to our safety.
And I think it's a bit too soon to say that we haven't been attacked again on our soil. True, it's been a few years, but remember, Bin Laden bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and destroyed it in 2001. I wouldn't feel secure writing anything off yet.
manu1959 said:everyone should be allowed to own a gun......you will never be able to decide a test for appropriatness......iran has promissed to wipe israel off the map when the develope nukes....maybe you should apply your appropriateness test to nukes and not let iran have them......the kuwait war was a different animal than the iraq invasion....virtually the same coalition each time....US and Brits did all the fighting both times......your non-sequiter attack on common sense is droll
Any criticism for Democrats ace? How about the assinine last couple of weeks? How about Ted Kennedy, have you spoke out in criticism of him? Ruth Bader Ginsberg? Hillary "the doormat" Clinton Rodham? How about that stellar statesman Robert"KKK" Byrd? ALgore? Bill Clinton?Mariner said:about Democrats and Republicans seem to be more image than substance.
Democrats somehow can't shake the image that they're soft on defense. Even when a Republican (Donald Rumsfeld) argues for reducing the size of the military (prior to 9/11), or a Republican Congress cuts weapons programs.
On the other side, Republicans somehow hang onto their image as being fiscal conservatives, even as a Republican Congress has in the past 10 years (1995-2005) been responsible for the largest expansion of government in world history, aided by a Republican president who has never vetoed a single spending bill, and is too lazy to do what Clinton did so well, combing the budget for items to recommend excising. In that time the federal budget has gone from 1.5 trillion to 2.55 trillion dollars, and you can't blame Democrats for much of it.
The majority of Democrats supported the intervention in Afghanistan because the Taliban were clearly aiding and abetting Al Qaeda. We're not idiots. We know when we're truly threatened, and are perfectly willing to defend ourselves. It's the Bush response of chasing Saddam instead Osama that has us puzzled and dismayed. And over the past year, in case any of you calling the anti-war among us idiots haven't noticed, nearly everything we previously said about Bush twisting intelligence has turned out to be true. Not a single shred of his original "evidence" has held up, and it's become perfectly clear to the majority of Americans--although not to the majority of rabid Bush supporters here--that we were duped into an unnecessary, expensive, and distracting war which may have made us less safe, by creating large numbers of new terrorist organizations (over 100 in Iraq now) who oppose our presence there.
Call me an idiot now, but I think if you asked most people whether they would have suppported the war in Iraq, knowing what they know now about the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Niger, the supposed intel from "Curveball," and Ahmed Chalabi's real reasons for urging us to invade, they'd say no.
It's also a strange time to be calling Democrats idiots, when we've just watched Bush taken down by Katrina, and we're seeing major Republican leaders falling as a result of the Abramoff scandal. Ney, the "Freedom Fry" guy, who led the fight against McCain-Feingold, left his position this week.
As for me hating America--are you kidding? I love this place, which is why I'm willing to criticize leaders and ideas that I believe do it harm. How come people here are so sure their opinions are the only possible right ones? Democracy is all about coming to your own conclusions, and trying to persuade others you're right.
Mariner.
