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Originally Posted by Paq
And the whole encounter made me realize that the divide between the right and center and left in the country is just..extremely huge and seemingly insurmountable. Neither side of the argument will even consider the other side's and both sides end up more convinced that they are right....
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Yep. It's why I've been way WAY less active in Tilted Politics lately. My attempts to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with me fall on deaf ears, as do their attempts to convince me. So why bother?
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Originally Posted by Paq
Anyway, sorry for rambling, but i am curious, what is the prevailing argument for the war again? I honestly thought bush and co had retracted the WMD argument and was on the "Sadaam was a bad man" defense....
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Well, it depends when you're talking about. WMDs were the initial rationale. Colin Powell has said that he went to the UN and did a whole song-and-dance over the bogus intel on WMDs. He called it "the lowest point of my career". And you're right--if there was even a hint of them, it would have been all over the news. At that point the major media were running scared of the administration, and would have parroted anything they said. There was no "liberal media" then, there was a 24/7 talking point regurgitation machine.
Right around when it was getting clear there were no WMDs, we caught Saddam, and that turned out to have been the real reason to go in there in the first place. Then when that didn't stop insurgent activity, the rationale shifted to "Regime change" and "spreading Freedom and Democracy". The thing to notice is that when one thing didn't work out, our leaders didn't regroup and rethink. Instead they got more ambitous.
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Originally Posted by Paq
BTW, this is the only one of a few soldiers i have spoken to who agreed 100000% with the war. most others have the "we're over there now, so we should finish it' outlook. This one also said, "my son will serve in the military and i can only pray he will go to war"...
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Yeah. EVERY soldier I've personally talked to has very mixed feelings about the war. They're proud to serve, but skeptical that they're making any lasting improvement in Iraq. They're actually pretty concerned about what will happen when the US presence finally disappears and Iraq is left on its own.