President Bush is going to start!!

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LuvRPgrl said:
You arent making any sense.
"if it were tried and successful, there would be no more need for sanctions"
Ok, two possibilities, they already are successful, (which they werent), or you want to continue them, which you deny.

You then state, if they dont work, then go to war.

You cant claim: the sanctions havent worked, if they dont work we should go to war, I dont want the sanctions to continue AND say we shouldnt have gone to war yet.
I'll tell you what, since I'm a nice guy, I'll go ahead and give you the background on this discussion that you missed.

RWA believes that it is impossible to be against the war, but support the ousting of Saddam Hussein. I said that not only is it not impossible, but it's actually the position most of the anti-war take.

RWA believes that there were only ever two options -- full-scale war, or do nothing. I countered that it is conceivable that he could have been removed from power in a number of other ways without having to commit hundreds of thousands of our soldiers to war. He asked me for some examples of ways that might be done.

Just tossing out ideas (I'm not a military strategist, and clearly neither is RWA), I said that it is conceivable that he could have been taken out by covert assassination, or other small-scale military activities.

The other idea I tossed out is the one which you caught only part of. It was this -- the sanctions we already have in place have fomented an atmosphere of unrest and dispair among the Iraqi people. That atmosphere makes the conditions right for an uprising against Saddam Hussein, if the public opinion is tweaked in the right way, and we were to arm them, supply them, and support them, and nudge things the right way to set off that pressure cooker and encourage the Iraqis to rise against their dictator and overthrow him themselves. That opinion was based on the fact that so many successful uprisings in other countries have arisen from similar conditions.

RWA then decided to make a strawman, claiming that I was suggesting continuing sanctions until the Iraqis just got fed up on their own and rose up. Anybody with the ability to read can see that no such suggestion was ever made. Then he asked me if I would be for continuing sanctions.

My answer was that if it was tried (it, being manipulating public opinion and instigating an uprising, not simply sitting back and letting things continue as they were, as RWA wants you to believe) and worked, then there wouldn't be a need for continued sanctions, because Saddam would be gone. And if it didn't work, then war might an option.

It was this last point that you came in on and mistakenly identified it as the whole argument. Thus I suggest you make sure you have seen the whole argument before you jump in next time.
 
Nightwish said:
No, you weren't summarizing my argument with slightly different words. You were creating a strawman, assigning me a completely different argument that the one I made.

Let me give you an example, see if you can understand it.

My argument: I am hungry, and I want some pizza. I've got a jar full of coins, and so I'm going to take those coins to the bank, cash them in, and buy a pizza.

Your strawman: Nightwish has a jar, he wants to start saving up coins, and when he has enough, he'll cash them in and buy a pizza.

Do you see the difference? My argument is that I've already got the coins, I can go buy that pizza now. Your strawman is that I only want to start saving the coins now, then buy the pizza later (a few weeks, a couple months?) Replace the theme with the one in our debate, and the first one is what I'm saying, and the second one is what you're incorrectly saying I said.

Did the prescription for your anti-psychotic medication run out?
 
Nightwish said:
I'll tell you what, since I'm a nice guy, I'll go ahead and give you the background on this discussion that you missed.

RWA believes that it is impossible to be against the war, but support the ousting of Saddam Hussein. I said that not only is it not impossible, but it's actually the position most of the anti-war take.
It's possible to hold that position. It's just not a rational position.
RWA believes that there were only ever two options -- full-scale war, or do nothing. I countered that it is conceivable that he could have been removed from power in a number of other ways without having to commit hundreds of thousands of our soldiers to war. He asked me for some examples of ways that might be done.

Just tossing out ideas (I'm not a military strategist, and clearly neither is RWA), I said that it is conceivable that he could have been taken out by covert assassination, or other small-scale military activities.

The other idea I tossed out is the one which you caught only part of. It was this -- the sanctions we already have in place have fomented an atmosphere of unrest and dispair among the Iraqi people. That atmosphere makes the conditions right for an uprising against Saddam Hussein, if the public opinion is tweaked in the right way, and we were to arm them, supply them, and support them, and nudge things the right way to set off that pressure cooker and encourage the Iraqis to rise against their dictator and overthrow him themselves. That opinion was based on the fact that so many successful uprisings in other countries have arisen from similar conditions.
Yeah. You wanted to leave the sanctions in place and hope the people would rise up. That's stupid and cruel. Oh after a tweak of course. What does your tweak consist of? An encouraging pamphlet, airdropped from above?
RWA then decided to make a strawman, claiming that I was suggesting continuing sanctions until the Iraqis just got fed up on their own and rose up. Anybody with the ability to read can see that no such suggestion was ever made. Then he asked me if I would be for continuing sanctions.
Did you want to remove the sanctions?
My answer was that if it was tried (it, being manipulating public opinion and instigating an uprising, not simply sitting back and letting things continue as they were, as RWA wants you to believe) and worked, then there wouldn't be a need for continued sanctions, because Saddam would be gone. And if it didn't work, then war might an option.
So you would remove sanctions AFTER saddam was out of power. So you'd leave them in place until that point? And do a tweak, right?
It was this last point that you came in on and mistakenly identified it as the whole argument. Thus I suggest you make sure you have seen the whole argument before you jump in next time.

You're a blithering dipnad.
 
Nightwish said:
I'll tell you what, since I'm a nice guy, I'll go ahead and give you the background on this discussion that you missed.

RWA believes that it is impossible to be against the war, but support the ousting of Saddam Hussein. I said that not only is it not impossible, but it's actually the position most of the anti-war take.

RWA believes that there were only ever two options -- full-scale war, or do nothing. I countered that it is conceivable that he could have been removed from power in a number of other ways without having to commit hundreds of thousands of our soldiers to war. He asked me for some examples of ways that might be done.

Just tossing out ideas (I'm not a military strategist, and clearly neither is RWA), I said that it is conceivable that he could have been taken out by covert assassination, or other small-scale military activities.

The other idea I tossed out is the one which you caught only part of. It was this -- the sanctions we already have in place have fomented an atmosphere of unrest and dispair among the Iraqi people. That atmosphere makes the conditions right for an uprising against Saddam Hussein, if the public opinion is tweaked in the right way, and we were to arm them, supply them, and support them, and nudge things the right way to set off that pressure cooker and encourage the Iraqis to rise against their dictator and overthrow him themselves. That opinion was based on the fact that so many successful uprisings in other countries have arisen from similar conditions.

RWA then decided to make a strawman, claiming that I was suggesting continuing sanctions until the Iraqis just got fed up on their own and rose up. Anybody with the ability to read can see that no such suggestion was ever made. Then he asked me if I would be for continuing sanctions.

My answer was that if it was tried (it, being manipulating public opinion and instigating an uprising, not simply sitting back and letting things continue as they were, as RWA wants you to believe) and worked, then there wouldn't be a need for continued sanctions, because Saddam would be gone. And if it didn't work, then war might an option.

It was this last point that you came in on and mistakenly identified it as the whole argument. Thus I suggest you make sure you have seen the whole argument before you jump in next time.

Just to point out the obvious flaws in your "tossed out" plan ..... one, it is illegal to assassinate foreign heads of state no matter how worthless they are. Had that been done, you lefties would be screaming for Bush's head on a platter, and you know it.

Second, taking out Saddam Hussein alone would accomplish exactly WHAT? So one of his diabolical welps could assume control? OR is there some other "Abraham Lincoln" waiting in the wings you have in mind?

As far as sanctions go, the only despair and unrest fomented was toward us, not Saddam. Saddam controlled every media outlet in Iraq and continually villified us and blamed the plight of the Iraqi people on us.
 
You were having trouble understanding NightWish's "nuanced" position, as you put it.

Since I share the position (that Saddam was a brutal dictator and we're better off without him, but that this does not mean we supported the war), I'll try to explain it.

Let's say a mother of a child killed by a U.S. bomb in Iraq said, "You, RightWing, you intended to kill my child!"

You would answer, "No, it was a side effect of my intention to remove Saddam via war."

When you say that anti-war people wanted Saddam to stay in power, it's the same fallacy as if the mother said you intended to kill her child.

There were plenty of other ways to get rid of Saddam or render him ineffective, the best of which might have been to continue the sanctions, which were working, and to end the oil-for-food program, which he was abusing.

This week's New Yorker contains the stunning revelation by the the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (the highest ranking Muslim in our government), that one could have made the argument to go to war when Bush did... or one might not have made that argument. In other words he, an avowed neoCon hawk, didn't feel war was the only or necessary answer at that time.

Everyone here seems to conveniently forget that Saddam's major crimes occurred not in the past 5-10 years, but during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, which looked the other way. Everyone here seems to forget that Dick Cheney made Halliburton rich via his business dealings with Saddam Hussein, and that Saddam was Reagan's ally in the Iran-Iraq war.

As for Al Qaeda connections with Saddam, you forget that the administration has now admitted about WMDs, quote, "we were wrong." Sure Al Qaeda had contact with middle east governments--all of them, and Iraq's less than any other, as has been clearly documented. It's time to stop pretending that Saddam supported Al Qaeda or had anything to do with 9/11. This was Bush's way to convince us to support invading Iraq. He then flip-flopped and changed it to humanitarian, nation-building reasons when no WMDs were found and when his supposed "secret evidence" was shown to be false, false, false. He refuses to let the investigation into his use of intelligence continue--presumably because it's obvious that he distorted the intelligence to push the war.

Invading Iraq incited Muslims to hate us around the world, and therefore likely raises the risk of terrorism against us. Bush has even tacitly agreed that Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before the invasion, when he said in his Naval Academy speech that one reason to stay in Iraq is to prevent it from "turning into" a base for Al Qaeda. 9/11 led to a tremendous outpouring of support for the U.S. from many moderate Muslim countries. Invading Iraq reversed that support. Indonesia, for example, went from 76% approval of the U.S. to under 20%. Thanks, Bush, nice work.

Mariner.
 
It's just stupid that they're against the way his ACTUAL REMOVAL was achieved, yet claim to be for his removal. They can also offer no reasonable way of achieve regime change without war. Your NUANCED position is idiotic.
 
Mariner neg repped me in this thread, for being reasonable I guess. Let's show him what neg rep really feels like!
 
rtwngAvngr said:
Mariner neg repped me in this thread, for being reasonable I guess. Let's show him what neg rep really feels like!
My bet is that you got neg repped for being a smarmy ass.
 
rtwngAvngr said:
Go lick a rock. A dirty one.
crack2.jpg
?
 
You guys must stop the name calling. Too many threads are having to be closed. Other people have rights too and you are beginning to infringe upon them.

Thread closed.
 
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