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Originally Posted by moosenose
So what you're saying is that we're screwed either way, right? If we play "World Cop" by smacking bad people down, people will hate us, but if we don't play "World Cop" to smack down bad people, people will hate us.
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I'm not sure how you got that idea from what I said. The US loves to stick its nose where it doesn't belong. Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Afghanistan (let's not forget, we trained and armed bin Laden to fight the Russians) Iraq (we trained and armed Saddam to fight Iran), Bosnia, and the list goes on.
We have a great time shoving countries around telling them how they should be, act, and do, and it's not our affair. If during the 80's Russia had come over here and started telling us to convert to communism, and started arming separatist groups who supported that notion, do you seriously think we'd have put up with it? The nukes would have been flying within an hour.
We invaded Afghanistan and I had no problem with that. They were sheltering the guy that attacked us. We told them to hand him over, they wouldn't, that's their problem.
Iraq is a very different story. He wasn't harboring bin Laden, he didn't launch the 9/11 attacks, he didn't have the capability of using those mythical WMD's against us even if he had actually possessed them - his best missile flew about 120 miles on a good day and then more than half the time it didn't hit what it was aiming at, which didn't matter because it didn't explode either.
The invasion of Iraq was wrong, it was justified with a network of lies and deceptions, and it's frankly no wonder that people around the world, including the terrorists, would be mad at us.
It's wrong for someone in an American city to kill me, but that doesn't mean I should go find the worst neighborhood, determine what the predominant race is, and then go walking around after dark shouting racial epithets. When they kill me it's still wrong, but it's my stupid behavior that brought the killing on.
And it's the same with the terrorists. When they strike it's definitely wrong, but if we didn't do stupid shit that provoked them, they'd go looking for other targets.
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Saddam committed many acts which qualified as casus belli. We literally could take our pick. These include documented cases of Saddam sheltering terrorists who had killed US citizens, cases of Saddam subsidizxing suicide bomber attacks on a US ally, Saddam shooting at US planes flying in the "no fly zone", and many more.
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And Iran, Pakistan, and many others have done similar things. Why haven't we invaded them too? The answer is simple - Bush wanted to destroy Iraq to finish what his daddy didn't.
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You say we shouldn't have invaded Iraq. Does that mean we should have invaded Pakistan? That is, after all, where most people think Bin Laden is hiding out, right?
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If we can get concrete evidence that he's there, and that Pakistan knows he's there and won't turn him over to us, then yes, we should.
And if Pakistan really doesn't like him as they claim, they should have no problem with letting our forces wander the hills looking for him.
Pakistan is not the wonderful friend Bush makes it out to be.
From my perspective, we've made one big foreign policy mistake over the past 60 years. We've tried to be friends with everybody, instead of making them try to be friends with us.[/QUOTE]