I don't have the time to go through all of these posts since I've entered so late. So I'll just pick a few choice quotes to respond to.
@Mouse
"The right stands for a small government and rights of the people; the left stands for a large, 'parent' government that takes care of everything."
I was going to make a thread that specifically deals with this issue later. I think you might be interested in what I have to say.
"To be blunt, the war is not terribly important. more Americans are murdered in Chicago every year than have died so far in the war"
More Americans die every year from car accidents then they do from terrorist attacks. Does that make 9/11 irrelevant?
"IMO, it shouldn't have anything to do with it. Seperation of church and state is crucial for the integrity of both institutions; the joint power would end up corrupting both, as it always has in the past."
I couldn't agree more.
" It's Clinton who repeatedly slashed our defense systems' budget and ignored reports of a growing threat from Al Queda"
No he didn't. I suggest reading the 9/11 commission report if you believe otherwise.
I'd probably get into this thread more, but I'm working on starting up another thread that I'm sure you'll find interesting.
But to sum up:
@Gay Marriage
In a free society we ought to have a reason for something to be illegal. We shouldn't need a reason for something to be legal as I believe that freedom is the default state. Having said that I can't really think of a good reason why Gay Marriage should be illegal. I've heard arguments that stated that somehow Gay Marriage was redefining the concept of marriage or something similar, but I just don't get why that should be important. Up until 1967, the definition of marriage was that it could only be between two people of the same race. Maybe changing the defination of marriage wasn't such in intrisically bad thing after all.
@Tax Cuts
I think they were a huge mistake and fisically irresponsible.
Quote: "The government has to borrow an average of more than $1.1 billion a day to pay its bills, and it spends more on interest payments on the federal debt each year -- about $159 billion -- than it does on education, homeland security, justice and law enforcement, veterans, international aid, and space exploration combined."
Quote: " The consequences are just coming into view. The White House has ordered draft budgets for 2006 that would cut spending on homeland security, veterans affairs and education, according to White House documents. Some economists -- although by no means most -- see a reckoning on the horizon, when foreign lenders reject U.S. debt, interest rates rise, and the value of the dollar crashes.
"The [deficit] pressures going forward are too great to allow us to borrow these kinds of moneys on the international market on a sustained basis," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former White House economist who heads the Congressional Budget Office."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16134-2004Oct7.html
I can't begin to describe how screwed up these economic policies are but I'll address that in another thread.
@The issue of Bias
This whole thing really annoys me. Bias for the most part should be irrelevant in evalutating whether something is true or not. To label something "Biased" and ignore it is commiting an Ad Hominem fallacy. It seems that people these days just dismiss something that they don't agree with them as "Biased" and then proceed to stick there head in the ground. What grates me even further is that bias isn't really a bad thing at least by the standard that most people define it as. If one side makes ten mistakes while the otherside makes two reporting those 10 mistakes and the other 2 makes you biased against one side. But is that really a bad thing? Should we try to be "balanced" and only report 2 mistakes for one side and 2 mistakes for the other? I think one should be as biased as hell when it comes to evalutating people's mistakes. If one side screws up more than they other call them on it and don't let them worm their way out of it by whining about how "unfairly" you are treating them. We shouldn't sacrifice the truth to preserve "balance".
*whew*
Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.
@The Iraq War
My thoughts on this issue are probably well known by now. To sum up:
There are really only three causes you could give for supporting the Iraq War.
1. WMD
At this point it is painfully clear that the intell on Iraq's WMD was overly exageratted or completely bogus. Saddam had no WMD nor did he have a nuclear program. He could cause us no harm nor would he.
2. Terrorism
This actually hurts the case for the war. According to the 9/11 commission report, Iraq had no operational collaborations with Al Qaeda and there was no evidence to suggest that Iraq in any way was involved in any attacks on America. Indeed, if terrorism is a concern then I think people should be
opposed to the Iraq war. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies there are
18,000 new terrorist as a
direct result of the Iraq War. And this is considered a
conservative estimate.
To make matters worse we've now caused a country that previously wasn't harboring Al Qaeda to become infested with them. Al Zaraqi(sp?) moved into Iraq after our Iraq war and is actively recruiting from the local dissidents.
3. The Iraqi People
Finally, we have the last justifaction that the administration has fallen back to. The welfare of the Iraqi people. But even this is not a good reason for invading Iraq. There are dozens of countries out there that are ruled by repressive dicators. Even one of our so-called allies of the coalation of the willing, Uzbekistan, is a repressive dictatorship that uses torture to quell dissidents.
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/06/24/uzbeki8959.htm
The Iraqi people aren't even better off now then they were before when Saddam was in power. Frankly, that is
pathethic and disgusting. The murder rate in Baghdad is exponentially higher now then it was in July 2002. From an May 22 The Wichita Eagle press release:
Quote: "
In a month of operation since the war ended, morgue officials recorded 191 deaths from gunfire, compared with 10 to 15 per month before the war. … In three of the 191 bodies that came to the morgue, medical examiners found smaller-caliber bullets that appeared to have come from weapons used by U.S. soldiers, Obaidi said. But, by far, most of the bullets found in the dead came from AK-47’s, which U.S. troops don’t normally use
"
To make matters worse recent figuares on the death toll in Iraq are insanely high:
Quote: "A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war."
Quote: "“Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children,” they said."
Quote: "Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s."
Quote: "Even with Fallujah factored out, the survey “indicates that the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is more likely than not about 100,000 people, and may be much higher,” the report said."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6354133/
Though I harbor doubts about how accurate that report is, even if it were double the amount of actual deaths that is still an enourmous toll put upon that country. The kind of carnage that has ensued from the invasion is hard to justify.
The only way you could excuse this is if you thought that in the long-term the Iraqis would be better off. That is looking increasingly like a fantasy. The whole reason we didn't topple Saddam in Gulf War 1 was that although Saddam was an evil murdering SOB he was secular. He provided a foil to use against the Iranians who hate us dearly. That's why we funded him during the 8 year war in the 80s even though this was when he gassed his own people(the famed "gassing of the kurds" occured in March of 1988 when we were still supporting him). He kept the mullahs at bay. However bad Saddam was he would pale in comparison to a theocratic Iraq.
The major problem I had with this war in the beginning was how exactly you would prevent a theocracy from froming. Iraq can be divided into 3 major ethnic groups: The Shiites, The Sunnis, and The Kurds. The Shiites are the same ethnic group as the Iranians(the ones who practically coined the term 'The Great Satan'). Giving them power could be diastarous as it would probably lead to a theocracy. The Kurds are not much better since they don't want to be a part of Iraq. They aspire to independence and if allowed would vote themselves a new state. This could cause problems with Turkey as their is a large Kurdish population in southern Turkey that wants independence too and the could start a civil war if a new Kurdistan was formed. That is why Turkey would only support us if we promised there would be no independent Kurdish state. Lastly, we are left with the Sunnis the favored party of Saddam. I doubted that they would be all that happy with Saddam leaving power since the Shiite's outnumber them and they were an ethnic minority that was abused by Saddam.
Either way you slice it, democracy in Iraq would probably lead to either a civil war, a theocracy, or an anti-American government. I really didn't see any good coming out of that region in 2003. I don't see any good coming out of it now.
According to recent intelligence reports my pessimisstic predictions are seeming all the more accurate. The best case senario is "tenuous stability" with the worst case being civil war. I don't think even war supporters will argue that civil war is better than Saddam.
Theocracy also seems to be on the march. There are reports of christians fleeing Iraq and Iraqi women afraid to walk the streets of Baghdad without wearing the veil for fear of Islamist thugs gang raping them. Al Sadr and Al Sistani and their associated thugs have siezed power in parts of Iraq and are trying to instill there own little theocracy.
Looking over these excuses for the war in Iraq I can see some glaring hypocrocies. But first, to all of the war supporters out there let me ask you this:
Say Country A is known to have WMD.
Country A is also known to have operational ties to Al Qaeda.
Country A also knowningly harbored some of the 9/11 hijackers.
Country A has kicked out all of the UN IEAE inspectors.
Country A is openly pursuing nuclear weaponry.
Country A has threatened to invade us with a "pre-emptive strike".
Would you support the invasion of Country A? (And no, I'm not referring to the U.S.A.).
